🚀 Who will buy your product anyway?

In the two previous pieces on IH I wrote about sending 1000 personalised videos and how my cold email copy looks like. See the links below:

Sending 1000 personalised videos

My cold email copy

This piece will be dedicated to finding your perfect customer

Bit of background on me: Two years ago, right after university, I co-founded Internative. It’s a service which connects students with cool companies using WhatsApp (Mostly for internship opportunities).

We founded the company directly after university, so I had literally zero experience with sales. I started reading every book, blog and guide there was and tested it all. Now I'm writing on IH what worked for me and what didn't in the past two years.

Lets get in....

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

When determining the your ideal customer profile two aspects are important:

You need to figure out a narrow description of a homogenous group of companies, who benefit the most from your product.
Figure out who the decision maker is, who has buying authority?

I will use our company, Internative, as a use case:

Problem we are trying to solve: Students only get to know a handful of companies during their studies (mostly big corporates), but not every student wants to work at a big corporate. Students are less exposed to interesting SMB's. On the other hand, SMB's are struggling to get in touch with students as well

Solution: We partnered up with universities, so students could sign up to our platform. Companies can advertise specific internship roles. Students who fit a specific internship role, will get notified on WhatsApp to check out the role.

There is a bit more to it.. but lets keep it simple

The purpose of our company is to expose students to interesting opportunities at SMB's. So we assumed that SMB is our ICP... but this is not yet really narrow to say the least...

To find the decision maker, we made some other assumptions as well:

We are dealing with recruitment right, so we assumed recruiters at SMB's would be calling the shots on whether to use our service.

But not every SMB employs a recruiter. So when this is case someone else will be calling the shots. We still assumed someone from HR.

To test our assumptions about our ICP and decision maker, we reached out to 20 SMB's in our network and interviewed them about their hiring process.

The results: We could narrow ICP down big time!

In 80% of the cases the HR department was leading the process and had decision maker authority in order to decide which tools and services they want to use.
Companies with less than 20 employees don’t have an in-house HR manager most of the time.
Companies with less than 50 employees don’t have an in-house recruiter most of the time.
When there is no recruiter, decision making authority lies at the HR manager.
When there is no hr manager, the founder is involved in the hiring process.
Companies with more than 250 employees do not need our services. They have the manpower and employer branding to attract the right students themselves.
Companies in the B2B space have more difficulties attracting talent, because they are lesser known brands than B2C companies.
Companies in innovative or fast-moving sectors such as IT, Fintech and Internet are more open to trying new services like ours, than companies in conservative industries like Real Estate, Corporate Finance and Construction.

So... Our ICP: SMB's, who are operating in the B2B space and have between 10 and 250 employees.

Based on our results we concluded that we should segment our ICP into three categories:

SMB with 10-20 employees. Here we would reach out to founders. (We used 10 employees on the lower boundary, because smaller companies do not have the right credentials to work with interns, according to certain universities….)
SMB with 20-50 employees. Reach out to HR managers.
SMB with 50-250 employees. Reach out to recruiters.

What we did next is reach out to at least 200 companies for each segment using cold email to see which segment was more likely to convert to costumer.

The results indicated that the smallest segment got the most traction. (Most of the time other founders just loved that we were trying to build something from scratch.)

However we found that in the end that companies from the second segment had the highest conversion rate.

So there you have it, our ICP:

HR managers of SMB's B2B companies in fast-moving industries with 20 - 50 employees.

Recap of the steps you should take to find yours:

Make assumptions on your ICP: Who do you think would benefit the most from your product? And which person in that organisation has the authority to buy your product?
Test your assumptions by Interviewing employees from a selection of companies you assume might be interested
Refine your ICP
Reach out to your ICP and see if you get traction

No traction?

Retake the steps with the knowledge you gained from the first time. Narrow it down until you get traction.