Finding your dream customers can be tricky, and knowing which customers aren’t a good fit is important. That’s where customer profiles come in handy. In this episode of Awkward Silences, Andrew Michael, CEO of Avrio, discusses the importance of ideal customer profiles. Andrew draws upon his experience and shares insights on creating customer profiles, customer research methods, and tips on how to get started.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The role of the ideal customer profile (ICP) in an organization
• Using thermographic and demographic properties to create an ICP
• Creating personas and segmenting audiences
• Conducting studies and collecting data about your customers
• How teams get ICPs wrong
• Tips and best practices for developing and using ICPs

Highlights:

• [00:06:03] The benefits of ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and who uses them
• [00:08:15] Andrew discusses the details of how they developed ICPs at Hotjar
• [00:11:34] Anti-ICP: Ruling out a large portion of your audience
• [00:24:08] Andrew details how to discover criteria that reveal insight
• [00:25:40] Tip: Don’t overcomplicate ICP, three or four defining characteristics are enough
• [00:29:19] Anti-ICP: How to communicate with customers that you don’t want
• [00:32:16] An effective ICP contributes to retention, alignment, and customer satisfaction
• [00:35:44] Andrew's final piece of advice: ICPs “needs to be a company-wide initiative”

Sources mentioned in the episode:

• userinterviews.com/awkward
• CHURN.FM Podcast

About our guest

Andrew Michael is the CEO at Avrio – a software development research platform – host of Churn.FM, and Founding Member of Startup Cyprus. Andrew is also a teacher and speaker featured at the How to Web Conference 2022 and Advancing Research 2022. Before joining Avrio, Andrew worked at Hotjar, where he held leadership roles in marketing, management, and experience design.