How to Build Your Top 10 ICP List

Helping elevate the people and profession of Sales by sharing authentic conversations, practical tips, expert advice, relevant tech and real-world lessons from my experience selling every day. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday. 

Happy Memorial Day weekend to everyone here in the States! 

I’m guessing the open rate of this email is going to take a bit of a hit since I know a lot of people are headed out for the weekend, including myself.

I’ll be flying down to Florida with my wife, daughter and niece to pick up our RV and drive it back home to Boston. It’s definitely going to be an adventure so feel free to follow along on IG if you want to join the fun.

This week’s newsletter is all about levelling up. 

Straight goods…We don’t have a choice anymore. 

Let’s go! 

SALES FROM THE STREETS: THOUGHTFUL Personalization

TACTICAL TIPS: Redefining Your ICP (includes template) 

SALES TECH/TOOLS: AI Sales Agent 

SALES FROM THE STREETS 

Thoughtful Personalization 

Fake personalization is worse than no personalization at all.  

Thoughtful personalization stands out more than ever though.

I interviewed Alex Lieberman on my podcast this week and he reminded me of this when he told me that the package I sent him before the podcast was so thoughtful, it made it almost impossible for him not to come on the show.  

If you missed the newsletter where I explained the details of how I got him on my podcast you can check it out here: Personalization for the Win!

During our conversation, we talked about the relationship between Sales and Marketing.   

One of the points we agreed on was that Marketing scales while Sales does not (at least it shouldn’t in the B2B space).

With AI getting better every day at “personalization at scale,” it’s getting harder to figure out where Sales fits in, specifically at the front end of the funnel.

I saw a few posts on LinkedIn this week saying that outbound prospecting is dead.  

I agree with them as it relates to straight COLD outbound. Specifically, if you still think you’re going to make a cold call and get someone who isn’t in-market for your solution to change their priorities and jump directly into a sales cycle with you. 

I also agree that it’s dead related to the volume game of sending out hundreds of cadences with generic messaging.

So where does that leave us from an outbound standpoint?

Thoughtful personalization and hyper-targeting clients who fit our exact ICP and show some signals they may be in need of our solution.

I’m going to talk about refining your ICP in the next section but let’s assume we have a clear picture of what our Tier1 ICP looks like. 

In the past, each rep on my team had to create their own list of 25 Tier1 target accounts based on the details of their ICP characteristics.

Before they could start reaching out to these accounts I made the reps go back and find something about each one of those companies that they connected with personally. 

Why did they personally want to work with that client? 

Was it their leadership? Values? Product? Culture? 

When you can make a real connection to why you personally want to work with a client and believe you can make a difference for them, the messaging is a lot easier to come up with because it’s genuine and authentic.

I call it the “give-a-shit” factor.  

If you treat that next email or call as just another activity and you don’t care or think of the PERSON (not persona) you’re reaching out to, your results are just going to get worse.

If you can make a genuine connection and be thoughtful with your outreach you’d be surprised how much that stands out these days. 

AI might be able to scale personalization but it’s not thoughtful enough (yet) and fundamentally can’t “care” like we can as humans.

Make sure you give-a-shit.  

TACTICAL TIPS  

Refining Your ICP 

I said in the previous section - “let’s assume we have a clear picture of what our Tier1 ICP looks like.”

I’ve realized that’s a terrible assumption these days because most reps and companies don’t. 

Most companies and reps use very basic demographic information to segment their lists.

It’s usually based on things like industry size, number of employees, revenue, location(s) and maybe one or two more. 

There is so much more to consider when it comes to refining your ICP, especially with how fast things are moving right now which is why we ALL need to revisit them.   

A company or industry that was a good fit for our services last year might not be this year. 

Here’s your Tactical Tip with a process to follow and a template to help:

Step 1: Identify your top 10 existing customers who are doing well in this economy and getting a lot of value from your solution

Step 2: Get your whole GTM team together (Sales, Marketing, CS) and maybe even finance so they can all learn together.

Step 3: Dissect those 10 customers to find as many detailed Tier1 characteristics as you can.  For me, I look for who the existing competition/vendor was, the business stage/round (Series A, B, C, public, etc), their funders, the structure of their internal teams, their tech stack, growth projections, competition, market conditions and much more. 

Step 4: Review your “lists” and saved searches to see if they fit the new characteristics.

Here’s a spreadsheet you can use to do this exercise. Check the second tab for an example of the Tier1 characteristics I use for my Tier1 accounts. (By the way, this along with the advanced version of this file and use case are part of my Filling the Funnel training that you can find in my Membership) 

Extra Tip: Try to get quotes, testimonials, and/or case studies from your top 10 customers. It would be great if you could get a few of those customers to do a remote Q&A session with your team and talk with them about the value they’re getting from your solution and what a day-in-the-life looks like for the exact persona they will be prospecting to. 

Extra Extra Tip: How to get testimonials and referrals will be a topic of my Membership’s upcoming workshops. We’re going to get tactical so you can get more out of your network.

SALES FROM THE STREETS 

AI Sales Agent 

A friend of mine sent me a text and said I had to check this out: https://www.trysela.com/ 

It's a full AI Sales agent that you can talk to and get help with almost anything you need. 

I tried it out and was pretty impressed. 

The applications for this are almost limitless. 

Think of coming to my website looking for information about my membership and having “me” welcome you with my voice and image and answer any question you have before you buy anything.  

How about having an AI Sales agent where you could pick your favorite trainer/influencer to be your coach and you could ask them anything you want about sales? 

This type of stuff continues to make me question where the human factor is still relevant.  

The good news is that for the foreseeable future, the human factor is still relevant because ultimately, most humans still want to engage with other humans.  

However, that’s only if the interaction is enjoyable and valuable.   

It goes back to the give-a-shit factor I spoke about earlier.

AI can give you a better answer than a human can right now but it doesn’t genuinely care about you as a person. 

The more you care, the more you can differentiate and stay relevant.

(P.S. I have zero affiliation with that AI Sales Agent company.  If I’m getting paid by someone to mention their product I’ll always let you know.)  

ADDITIONAL WAYS YOU CAN LEVEL UP YOUR SALES GAME 

• The JB Sales Membership is where you’ll get access to my live training, workshops, AMAs and OnDemand catalog so you can level up your sales skills every day!  2000+ Sales pros have already joined. Are you next?

• The industry-leading Make it Happen Monday Podcast where you’ll get insights and inspiration from some of the most interesting and influential people in the world of Sales and business. (this is where you’ll hear the Guy Kawasaki episode on May XYZ)

• The JB Sales YouTube channel with practical tips that you can apply immediately to drive results along with interviews and content that is guaranteed to get you to think differently. 

That’s it for this week - have an amazing long weekend everyone! I’ll be announcing a new partnership next week, which means more free things for you! Stay tuned.

JB

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