Speaker 0: Oh, thanks for joining us today. I’m Pam Carey at Sercante, and I’ll be your session moderator. Leading us through today’s topic of identifying ideal customers and better serving them in part are Jaime Lopez and Adele Kirki of Avien. So we’ll also do our best to have a few minutes of q and a at the end. So go ahead and please use the q and a tab in the right side of your screen to post your questions and, of course, participate in the chat. Take it away, Jaime and Adele.

Speaker 1: Thank you very much, Pam. Uh, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, my dreamers. My name is Jaime Lopez. And today, uh, with my fellow colleague, Adele, we’re going to talk to you about how to identify ideal customers and how to tune Pardot or Marketing Cloud account engagement to better serve these ideal customers. I work as a senior director for content and marketing operations at a company called Aiven. You’ll see a nice cute crab. It’s a managed cloud data platform where Adele also works. And I’ll let her introduce herself.

Speaker 2: Yep. Thank you for for a short story, Jaime. So, indeed, I’m leading the MarTech team there in Ivan. So meaning that all the MarTech, um, specialists, automation, and marketing technology, uh, managers are in my team. And, yeah, two times support certified trade trade trade head major in strong background within marketing operations, especially in b two b sector, which might be visible also here in the presentations and masters in marketing and business. Good to have you here. Thank you

Speaker 1: very much. So now that we know who we are, what we do, what we’re gonna talk about, it’s time to say thank you and to be grateful for the sponsors of My Dreaming, uh, all those companies that you see on this slide now who contribute and make this possible. Without them, we really wouldn’t be able to be here talking to you today about ideal customers. So today, we’re going to walk you through three main points. The first one is what I call not real, but the ideal deal. How to create an ICP, an ideal customer profile, and why you should definitely have one. Then I’m gonna move towards how to use it for real. How do you set this up? And example use cases of profiling for an ICP in Pardot or MacKay. Last but not least, we’ll also talk through some conclusions and, hopefully, some key takeaways for you to keep in mind. In getting started, I’m going to go straight into what is an ideal customer profile, how to create it, and why you should definitely have one. You might have heard about ICP ideal customer profile, particularly if you’ve worked in a software as a service company. But, um, I have to tell you my own experience, also having worked in in industrial b two b. This wasn’t always the case, and this isn’t how every company is set up. So I feel duty of care to tell you, um, what it is and how you should build one. So down to basics. An ICP is profiling of an imaginary buyer who’s most likely to become a high value customer for your company, high value customer for your product or your service. Thinking in this way is a method to target your marketing resources and your sales resources towards the most valuable accounts and most valuable prospects depending if you’re in b two b or b two c. One point to that worth mentioning is that one single ideal customer profile can have several buyer personas and almost always will have several buyer personas. This has implications in your technical setup that we will cover later. And it’s also crucial to understand that, uh, crucial that the understanding of the ICP and buyer persona are the same across the business. This doesn’t really work if the customers I am trying to sell from marketing are radically different than the customers at sales is trying to sell to. So you need to collaborate, you need to align, and you need to make sure that everybody understands your ICP the same way. And why is this important? Well, first of all, obviously, this helps you align your company strategy, your marketing strategy, your sales strategy because you all understand the customer the same way. Once you know who is the ideal customer, you’ll have an easier time directing your marketing efforts, and you’ll be able to target better. That also means that you can optimize your content. You can optimize your conversion points for those ideal customers and make sure that those ideal customers convert at higher rates. In the end, if you do this well, you will see a faster sales cycle because you are you have less noise going around and you’re targeting customers who fit in your ideal. And you’ll also see a higher customer lifetime value over time because those customers who are ideal are the ones that you’re focusing on you’re bringing into the pipeline. Some things to consider about an ideal customer profile. So what is exactly in detail it is? So it’s a it’s a very precise demographic, firmographic definition of this ideal buyer we just talked about. If you work, um, in b two b, you will see things like revenue, purchasing um, sorry, company size, budget, location. Also in b two c, you often see purchasing power, age, and gender. Um, the ICP isn’t anybody or everybody who can buy your product, but your ideal customers. There on the right of the slide, you can see that whereas the total addressable market, which is what you build your company structure for, is pretty large, the ideal customers are a small subset of those. And the key thought here is that by doing very well with the ideal customers, we are good enough and charming enough to capture many people who are not ideal but within addressable market. And, uh, a valid point to make also is that who are your ideal customers really depends on your business targets, and this might change over time. We’re gonna see an example in the next slide. It really depends on what is your company after. Are you trying to grow your revenues? Are you trying to become profitable? You might have very different customers in that respect. Think about Netflix. If you if they’re after top line growth, they want to capture anybody who can pay for a subscription. If they’re after profit, they might want people who can pay for the pricier subscriptions. Are you about larger market share, due expansion, or other? So make sure you understand what your company is after and build your ICP based on that. To show you an example, a company that probably most of you is are familiar with. We know that a large part of the audience of this event is based in The Americas or in other locations where there’s a wonderful Italian restaurant called Olive Garden. Uh, I’m based in Finland. Adel is based in Finland as well. We don’t have Olive Garden here. But, uh, luckily, we understand their their sales numbers, their strategy well enough to to use them as an example. And we hope that all of you can relate to this. So Olive Garden, nowadays, a known a known commodity, very household brand. Uh, from the decades between 2001 and 2012, their main target was geographical expansion. They were opening roughly a restaurant every week or every other week, um, and massive growth in in markets. The ICP they were targeting at that time were likely loyalists, people who could sustain that growth and become the first customers of the new locations, Broad middle class in terms of socioeconomical positioning, people who would be budget conscious, who would be looking for slightly fancier than their average dinner, and who would come often. What does this mean marketing wise and sales wise? This meant for them a whole lot of email promotions, a whole lot of discounts, targeted geographical promotions, and a longer menu. Now if you fast forward to the next decade, between 2012 and 2019, which is the last year where we can find data on them, their ICP changes completely. They turn the strategy on their hand. They said, okay. We have enough growth. Now it’s time to become profitable. They stop building new restaurants, and they say, okay. Instead of these likely loyalists that help be the first customers of the new locations, now we want people who will spend more money. And we are going to turn our ICP into wealthy occasional diners, people who are in the upper middle class, couples, groups, not necessarily families, who are conscious for quality and for whom this is an average meal. They’re not particularly looking for something fancy and who will come less often but will spend more money per visit. How does this turn, um, or how does this translate into their marketing strategy? Um, they have cut their email promotions by over 50%. Their discounts are way smaller. They have no or very little deal targeted promotions. They have a shorter menu, which is pricier on average. So just when you’re building your ICP, think about this, like how your company strategy affects your ICP very radically and how it can change and evolve over time, should change and evolve over time. And with this, now I’ll hand it over to Adele for her to walk us through some use cases.

Speaker 2: Thank you. Thanks for such a good intro. So now we’re going to the real deal. So we are first looking for the setup and then we are going through three different kind of use cases. Um, let’s move on straight away. So what do you need to set up in order to make this efficient? So first task after, uh, sitting with your directors and managers to define, uh, what ICP means in your particular company and your case, uh, start putting that into attributes with corresponding values. So make a visualization. What is required and how are you going to cover it? For a secondly, that said, make sure that you have the corresponding data available that you want to have to support your model. Where where is the data available? When is it available And what is the original source of it? Evaluate the data sources, make a prioritization. What first party do you need to get started? Do you need to start gathering? And what can you feel with third party’s data? For instance, for practical reasons, please apply your creating and at least the default scoring category to use. It is rather important to have the basic setup, and I encourage you to take advantage of these powerful assets by using scoring and making for self profiles. And finally, uh, the rewarding part is saying that your your organization is committed. So after, of course, aligning it with your organization, confirm once more that you’re aligned. How are you in practice trying to use it throughout your activations and determine how are, how is SAP profile activities considered in the sales funnel. And if there are any specific, specific notifications needed, like alarms, notifications, active assignments, campaign based reporting. You guys know this. So when we are thinking about the implementation part of, for instance, um, the field, so let’s move one, one slide forwards. Yep. To the field. So this is one of the things to consider. Um, as a disclaimer, there are multiple crate sessions regarding detailed field scoring, creating implementation. So I’m talking piece through the ICP things and very, very high level. So consider that. Uh, first of all, you have to understand again the relation of these fields and data sources and what is the result that this particular field is showing, especially if you have several integrations from different tools, um, either in part of or in um, either in part of or in CRM. Um, so a few learning points here in this slides. Uh, first of all, you have that visualization that you made in the first place that you have your attributes and your corresponding values. Now start mapping data sources based on the visualization. Make sure that you have considered if that level of detail is in account contact or lead level or all of those and what kind of implement implications you have if you don’t consider that type your CR team with you on this. Um, as it is also very good to check that these fields that you have chosen are also actively used and you are aware what’s the life cycle of those fields. Um, this leads to another point. If you have multiple similar kind of fields, um, make sure that you’re familiar for both, uh, what is your business target, but also what is the target of the field? So anyone, um, have you played within the country or region fields? So be aware. Are you using HQ country? Are you using a billing location? Are you using a region, sales region or, um, individual address, for instance? Let’s move to the create and score. So what we’re thinking about ICP, we are, of course, touching the topic of intent and fit. And in part of instance, that means that, uh, fit is usually, um, done within a crate and then, uh, the intent is done within the score. So, um, this requires action points, especially, um, when you’re considering buying profiles and when you’re discussing ICP. Review your creating and ensure that you have necessary buying profiles identified. When thinking of an ICP, it might be a good idea that you take that buying profile, uh, attribution back to the table. So despite you have already a nice set of crate, uh, creating profiles in place, have a review. What are, um, what are your attributions? What are the things that you are looking for and how have you set the prioritization of those matches? So remember that in creating we have a great value from a to f and we have increments of minus and plus. So go back there to the metrics. The second factor in this ICP formula is the score. So the intent uh, for the ICP project started by checking your default scoring category, which is hopefully already in place. If not, this is a good time to start make an audit of the content based on your target audience with profile, um, that has engaged in your score and use that to support your modeling. So make an example, investigate what what is before and what is not from the ICP profile. As such, there are a few ways how you can build this. So of course you can use scoring and grading and combine a formula out of there. But you can do also additional assets so you can combine the best fit and create with an account details on ICP score field value. And even if you want, you can make it as a score. So from one to five based on your organization, how does it work? What is what is closest to your ICP? You can also make a true false tag often, uh, ICP profile or an account which you can be, uh, you can connect to CRM entity. So for instance, if a sales is working within an account that is immediately a good example of your ICP, She he can type it inside the CRM and that information flows for your use in a product entity. This also helps, uh, learning of course yourself to validate your ICP, but also if you have any AI tooling using these kind of fields, let’s go to the use cases. Those are usually the most important ones and the most interesting ones. Of course, I said, there are various ways how you can build this up. I give you just a few examples for your inspirations. Um, here I present just quickly what happens if you have just a normal customer experience when creating the normal experience, you might have slightly longer pass in time and less activation with your, um, than within your ICT. You might also want to stop the engagement sooner for those inactive prospects that are not engaging with your content or they are not, uh, maybe the best fit for your use case. Um, also when we are looking for the next one, you might want to use different scoring if possible. So here on your right hand side, you can see also the ICP side of things, how you can utilize and play around. But looking at these lates, uh, the most obvious change is the ICP score trigger. I’m just after the first email was sent. So these are both in the same nurturing by the way. Um, so after the first trigger, um, you have already the email open activity in different ways So you can make the engagement, um, flow totally different already based if open email was open or not. My choice of the trigger was very simple because, uh, and it’s very intuitive to have the ICP on the field name. And this is a good consideration if you are either a sole marketer or you are working in centralized marketing and you have a lot of people to to teach. Um, so this is very self explanatory from the ICP ICP part. I have also implemented here a shorter timeline of email. So short track, so to say, as an additional custom redirects to those emails. The custom redirects are something you could also add here in the nursing basis of your optimization. The reason why I have used custom redirects is that they give a great availability to use automation based on the links click separately or if you want to use this later to activate to a certain campaigns or other parts of the engagement. Finally, in this nursing, we can also see an assignment rule to a global queue of your specific SDR groups following and prioritizing this group of prospects. And we can also work quite nicely within the follow-up analytics with the SDRs as they are in one what group. Let’s look for the second use use case of the level of service. This use case is very workable in the early example also naturally and should be considered as as any content if you’re if you’re asking for me. Of course this is now to display. This can be done in, um, in dynamic content or even in nesting dynamic content, depending what kind of fields personalization would you like to use in action. What is happening here? We’re providing slightly better service or different service for our ICP profile in our mailing by providing them an earlier contact points and slightly easier contact point from very early on compared to other prospects. On the other hand, we are supporting the other prospects to activate themselves, try out, provide them slightly more material to self exploration. Uh, needless to say, this kind of message might have again multiple dynamic contents or if you’re a favor of using any other personalization methods. Um, yeah, functionalities used here is for dynamic content, but here you can also like use the same trigger based personalization if you have that one field or even a score field. Um, and you can also activate prospects, uh, to SDR level. So for instance, if you want to send different regional messages or assign them to a different regional SDRs, let’s look the third experience. This is now slightly out of the part of interface. So this is some inspiration for you I wanted to provide. So we’re in a couple of weeks time publishing a sense and marketing check to our domain that is fully connected to part of the sales force. This allows us to respect the same setup we had in part of regarding those ICP scores, ICP craze, ICP fields and tags and we can personalize the journey based on the same attributes here in the chat experience. Uh, the chat visibility for instance is different from those in ICP. So in this light you can see that there are a lot more activities and those are again something that we are supporting prospect themselves to explore, see different opportunities. But on the contrary, if you’re looking in the next slide where we have slightly smaller, um, smaller experience. So on the top of this slide, you can see that actually when an ICP comes to your account or an our domain, they actually have a straight access to discuss and they are encouraged to discuss with our SDRs. Now the funny part here is that because we have the same structure that we have imported, we are able to use the same ruling inside, um, here for SDR. So they are also aligned what is happening inside marketing. So, for instance, when they got ICP profile is on your site, it goes their priority line and they’re able to act on in the same way in the same priority as if it was inside the ICP or if it was in another environment like in marketing automation. This implementation of course requires interaction with the part of the CRM. But with that, um, you need suitable fields. You have trust in the profiles and scores as well as fields and tags, um, to move on to two key takeaways. So of course there was now a lot of different thoughts to consider. But four main things we really want you to to go out with is that first make it extremely clear that when you’re starting this project, you know what you’re supposed to make the visualization, knows the attributes and map the technicalities to support those. Secondly, uh, align throughout your organization that you’re talking the same language on what is the target? How, um, how do you differentiate? How do you personalize the journey and how do you follow-up the matches profiles? Third, prioritize what you’re doing and start implementing, uh, when the decision has been made. So keep consistent that what you are doing is, um, uh, is going well and that is coherent throughout the process and communications. And finally, learn from the early implementations and start adjusting. So this is a continuous process. And as Ahima also pointed out, it might the ICP is changing over the years. So then just, uh, remember to apply to your technical setup. Yeah. I thank you from I think from both, uh, both of us, and I think it would be great time to jump to the discussion part.

Speaker 1: Thank you very much, Adele. Let’s see whether there are any questions.

Speaker 0: Yeah. The the q and a is very quiet. And, uh, if anybody has any any questions, please go ahead and pop them into chat or the q and a.

Speaker 1: And at any point, if you have questions after the session, feel free to reach to any one of us, to both of us through LinkedIn. We are easy to find, and we’re always happy to help and give back to the community.

Speaker 2: Yes. Definitely. And I think, um, if you change your final slide, you can just copy our our emails also if that is a favor, uh, favor of your channels or just copy your names and feel free to be in touch. We’re super happy to take comments also offline.

Speaker 0: Thank you so much, Jaime and Adele. Um, and just for everybody watching, um, keep an eye on your email post event. You’ll receive an a message when, um, when the recordings and and decks are are ready for for on demand viewing. Um, oh, and, uh, Joanna is asking if there’s a way to have a better screenshot of the engagement studio from Pardot. I don’t know if you can go back to that slide.

Speaker 2: Definitely. I will be sending you something over.

Speaker 0: Awesome. Thank you. Um, yeah. So so we’re we’re just about at time, and thank you everybody for joining. And, um, the next session in this track is, uh, a road map from Salesforce Marketing Cloud product team. So hope to see you all there. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much.