Not Like Us

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, not a rock star, but a CMO and trusted advisor, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of marketing street knowledge that I hope will help unlock the rockstar marketer in you.

Hello!

Have you ever thought about who your service, product or maybe the thing you do is not for?

When we are planning our marketing we focus on our ICP, our Ideal Customer Profile, the people we aspire to sell to or work with.

As an aside, these folks are not customers yet, so why don’t we say IPP - Ideal Prospect Profile?

We consider their needs, and we are encouraged to niche, to find our tribe (as Seth Godin would say) and work against our instinct to be something for everyone and address the broadest possible market, but to really focus on being something significant, the very thing that solves the problem of a smaller group of companies and buyers. No one buys a Swiss Army knife for the kitchen.

In short, we need to be very focused on identifying and serving “our” people through our sales and marketing campaigns.

We also know that, assuming we have done a great job of understanding our target market, that time spent wooing folks outside of that is probably a distraction and time wasted.

But, who are these people? These naysayers? The trees we should not be barking up?

That’s the point this week, it’s a good exercise to understand (and document) who is not for you and why.

Let’s call it the Non-ICP, not very creative, I know, but we list the attributes of what makes up a non-deal customer for us.

It does a couple of things; the first and most obvious is that it helps sales leadership qualify the pipeline and weed out the distractions. It also creates a common understanding between sales and marketing and defines what sales mean when they bitch about the leads being weak.

From a planning perspective, it helps test the ICP and buying personas you’ve identified.

If the non-ICP is a very small subset of the mainstream market, or is only differentiated from your ICP by general attributes like “does not have budget” then perhaps your ICP is not focused enough.

It can also lead to some very bold and differentiated messaging and content marketing, which helps a potential buyer quickly decide you are not for them. As they say in sales, if it’s not going to be a yes, a fast no is better than a slow maybe.

We are defining ourselves by the folks who are not like us, which leads me to the tune this week, could only be one for a topic like this “Not Like Us” from Kendrick Lemar.

Cheers!

Ian

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Some things from me, my chums and what inspired me this week.

They not like us, they not like us….