The COVID-19 pandemic has been impacting businesses with overwhelming challenges and CEO’s are maneuvering through unchartered waters. Every move counts and agility will help to stay afloat. Being proactive and attentive towards customers’ need is crucial when you and your customer are sailing on the same boat.
Companies adopting ABM are examining and adapting to the new “normal”. Especially marketers who are on the forefront need to be more empathetic while developing their positioning and messaging for different campaigns. This may even require to rebuild the ideal customer profile and pivot.
Initially, when companies were building their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)s, they must have done an out-and-out research. Since things are changing, companies will have to readjust the knowledge they have about the target customer. There might be customers that are seeing uncertainty and looking to cut costs, also there might be customers who are taking more time to consider purchasing decision. Considering all these factors, companies have been redoing their target account profiles.
So, what’s the next step for rebuilding Ideal Customer Profile?
Data is the new oil
B2B companies have abundant data to leverage. To analyze customer data, companies can sit back with their sales and marketing team to identify which customers are engaging. Customers can be further segmented based on geography, company size, industry they belong to, and similar other types of information. If you cannot rank customers best to worst on revenue potential and propensity to buy, you are missing the mark.
Always stay aware
Some industries are suffering, and there are industries that are thriving. For companies to stay in business, they can always re-evaluate and re-prioritize their target audience. Prioritization is an iterative process for sales team and helps to understand if the previous ICP is still relevant and is there a way you can still sell your services to them.
Think long-term
B2B marketers after doing a thorough check on the target list can see how each target account is impacted by the pandemic. The decisive factor undoubtedly is revenue and industry vertical while settling upon ICP. For instance, earlier hospitality and retail ranked higher whereas, healthcare technology, and supply chain and logistics companies now rank higher.
Once ICP is built, it is time to realign it with a new approach to prospect them. If you are still actively marketing to those accounts that have been negatively impacted, it is better if you divert away from them for a while. And, focus on those who you think are in a better position and have the propensity to make a purchase. This is an apt time to put customers’ needs at the utmost importance. Showing compassion to your ICP is going to be one of the key ways to build and strengthen customer relationships, and help buyers get what they need.