Issue #2: ICPs 🗣

Hey!

Welcome back to Distribution Lab.

Let’s start with the big news: got my first 3 subscribers 🎉 (thank you!)

This past week was still about learning but I managed to take action, so let’s get into it

Throughout all the resources I have checked for the past two weeks about GTM, one term stands out: ICP

“Ideal Customer Profile”

(had to google it to make sure it wasn’t “ideal client profile”)

It’s everywhere you look and it seems to be the starting point, the key piece to everything you do about GTM

Of course, it makes sense, because without it, you don’t really know who you are trying to find and serve with your product or service

I have heard this many times: “If you’re serving everyone, you’re reaching no one”

So, this is how I understand what ICP is: an organization, company, group, team, or person that would benefit the most from your product or service, and therefore would be willing to buy it

The key word is “Customer”; there’s a distinction between Customer and User (someone that use your product or service but don’t buy it, is not ideal for your business, we want customers)

Here’s where I get into trouble: defining your ICP is harder than how it sounds

Defining an ICP is hard, at least for me

There is so much possibilities and options that I don’t know where to start

Should I filter by country or location? Why? We’re in a globalized world. Second point, still don’t speak German after being living in Germany for years, so not an option

Should I filter by industry? What if I’m a very curious person and I find many industries interesting?

Should I filter by company size? Not sure yet how that would be useful exactly, skipped

Should I select the people in my network? They are mostly developers at this point and most developers (included myself) don’t like to “buy software”, because “we can build it ourselves in a weekend” (hahaha…), so no

For moonside (my AI dev agency), I have defined my ICP so far as ”small businesses that are looking to adopt AI, to increase revenue or have more time to focus on their business, but they don’t have the skills or team to do so”

It has worked for the last two years, but I realized is too broad and generic. What’s the implication: leads are not coming in as before and business is declining. Troubles!

There’s another angle about defining an ICP: you take a step back and start with the problem you’re trying to solve, not the people

This sounds good in theory, but then you face similar issues as with ICP: what problems are worth solving? what problems I can realistically solve with my skills?

One thing is clear to me, the craft or skills are not the problem, is the distribution

I know I can help business adopt AI, because I have done it for the last 2 years, I just need to find and connect with the right people and improve how I communicate the work I do

What’s the pending to-do here: I need to define my ICP better

RB2B

I signed up for RB2B and installed it on my website

RB2B as I understand it, allows you to identify the companies and people that visit your site, with actual names, roles, and profile pictures (didn’t know this was possible)

Then, the idea is you find the emails or contact details of those people and reach out to learn why they were visiting your site

Gonna give it a try for the 7 days that last the trial, see how it works, and report the results in next week’s issue

My current traffic is around 10 visits / day, so not a whole lot of traffic to test but I hope some data comes through

Clay

I took the next lesson in the Clay University course: Finding Companies in Clay

This gave me enough courage to give Clay a try, so I was playing around with it and understand what’s possible

This is what I understand how Clay can be used by GTM teams: you find the names of the companies or people that match your ICP outside of Clay (like with RB2B), then you import them to Clay and “enrich” the data using Clay’s tables, meaning you get their emails or phone numbers, but also something unique about their role, team, or company using AI. Lastly, you export them to your CRM or cold email platform and reach out with a personalized message

The other option is to start inside Clay and find your ICP there. Then, the process goes the same, enrich, export, reach out

I’m going to use my 7-days trial credits to find companies and/or people I can reach out to next week (manually)

Conigma

I was checking out the resources from the Conigma Slack community

The Claude ones are very interesting. Lots of things to go through

I’ll try to run some experiments over the weekend

That’s all for this one

Thanks for reading 💪