Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile In The Licensed Cannabis Industry

A strong sales and marketing strategy begins with an Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP, to guide outreach, communications, and engagement tactics. For established industries where vast amounts of data and resources already exist, defining your ICP can be relatively easy. For emerging industries, like the licensed cannabis industry, getting your arms around the market and its players can be much more difficult. Resources and information are limited, and data is disparate. 

With a business intelligence tool like Emerald Intel, one of the few data providers solely focused on the licensed cannabis industry, you can gain a complete picture of the marketplace, define your ICP with confidence, and drive pipeline more effectively.

So, where do you start? Read on and we’ll tell you! However, before we jump into the ‘how’, let’s take a step back to explore the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of defining your ICP for the licensed cannabis industry.

What is an Ideal Customer Profile?
An Ideal Customer Profile defines what your ideal buyer looks like and is made up of numerous geographic, firmographic, and demographic datapoints. Your company may have one or multiple ICPs based on your offerings and they can evolve over time as the company grows or decides to take the business in new directions. 

An ICP isn’t something you necessarily ‘set and forget’—although it happens more often than not. While your ICP won’t change month to month, it could shift based on external factors, for example: health of the economy, emerging competition, saturation of the marketplace, regulatory changes, and supply chain challenges, to name a few. These types of macro situations can have an impact on who—and how—your market-facing teams identify potential business—which should be reflected in your ICP. Consider revisiting your ICP when you begin planning for the next calendar year so you can adjust well ahead of committing budget and resources. 

Why is an Ideal Customer Profile Important?
It should go without saying, but understanding your buyer is the key to business success. Your sales and marketing teams need a clear picture of who they should target with their outreach and campaigns, otherwise time, money, and resources are being wasted. Without an ICP, reaching your growth goals will be challenging and the health of your pipeline will be in constant jeopardy. A clearly defined ICP provides healthy opportunities, shortened sales cycles, and faster implementation and adoption when the right people are buying your product or service. 

Who Should Be Involved In Defining An ICP? 
First and foremost, don’t do this in a silo! It’s critical that stakeholders from across the business are involved throughout the ICP exercise. Many business leaders believe the marketing team should define and own the ICP. While marketing likely holds a good deal of the information needed to define the profile, sales, product, and client services all have valuable information and intel to provide, which will ultimately make the result that much clearer. 

And as much as this exercise will help you define what your ICP is, it will equally help you define what it is not. To your surprise, you may find that at the start of this process, departments have a slightly different opinion of the company’s target market. That’s a pretty common starting point, so if that ends up being the case, don’t let that derail you. By working on the ICP together, you level-set as one team and ensure everyone is moving forward in the same direction. The last thing you want is for your marketing team to drive leads your sales team doesn’t believe are the right fit, or for your product team to develop a new feature the marketplace won’t find valuable. Working through the differing opinions may be challenging at first, but the result will be worth it. 

Where Do I Start? 
A rich business intelligence platform like Emerald Intel can help you define and refine your ICP in no time. Data is the crux of your sales and marketing outreach and without it, your sales and marketing team will struggle to connect with your ICP, no matter how well defined it is. The following are two ways to use data to define and support ICP creation.

For companies with an existing licensed cannabis client base
If you already have an established client base, historical data is a great place to start.

  • Where are your clients located?
  • How big are they (e.g. number of employees, revenue, etc.)?
  • What industries are they in?
  • What department are you selling into?
  • What business titles and/or roles do your clients hold?
  • What’s the average cost they’re paying for your product or service?
  • How many years have they been a client?

Your current clientele can tell you a lot about what your ideal fit looks like. Of course, data cleanliness is important, so you may need to do a bit of work establishing consistency across data points before you can analyze it. One area many organizations struggle in is industry classification. Instead of trying to create one from scratch, use a trusted source like Emerald Intel to define your industry verticals and sub-types, then apply those to your current dataset.

Once consistency has been established across your data, use a tool like Emerald Intel to search for similar companies that match your ICP and curate a target list you have confidence in converting. For tips on how to expedite market research on your target list, click here.

For companies looking to establish a licensed cannabis client base
Assuming you have evaluated the need within the licensed cannabis marketplace and understand the challenges your product or solution can help resolve, use the following questions to help build your ICP:

  • Where are your ideal customers located? Country, states, cities?
  • What sub-vertical(s) of the cannabis industry are a good fit for your product?
  • Does license type matter? If so, which one(s)?
    • Does the number of licenses matter? If so, how many?
    • Does license status matter? If so, which one(s)
  • How big are they (e.g. number of employees, revenue, etc.)? Does this matter?
  • What department are you selling into?
  • What roles and seniorities should your target contact(s) hold?
  • What business titles should you target?
Once you have a rough outline, use a tool like Emerald Intel to research and validate your ICP. Are there enough organizations that fit your ICP? Should you consider starting a bit broader? Are there additional data points to consider, or a data point that is more important than the rest?

For example, if license status matters most because you want to target organizations in the application stage, sub-vertical and size may not matter to you, so remove them from your ICP to avoid confusion. A tool like Emerald Intel can give you a thorough understanding of what your Total Addressable Market (TAM) looks like and help refine your ICP, removing any potential ambiguity. In addition, you’d have access to a dynamic source of intel as new applications are submitted and licenses expire, ensuring a reliable, up-to-date target list, which you can—and should—refresh frequently.

By using a business intelligence tool, you’ve saved yourself days—maybe even weeks— of painstaking research and have a target list of companies and contacts your sales and marketing team can begin to work immediately!

What’s Next?
Memorialize and socialize your ICP with the entire company. Stress the importance of the ICP as a collective leadership team and demonstrate you are all aligned in its definition. This will help mitigate any rogue employees who may be slow to adopt the ICP. Create a PowerPoint deck or one pager and save it somewhere everyone can easily access it and encourage your external facing teams to print a copy and have it at their desks. To be successful, they need to live by the ICP.

Finally, revisit your ICP as planning begins for the next calendar year. Does the ICP you defined match the clients you landed over the last 12 months? If they don’t, why not? Are there macro factors the team needs to consider as they head into the next year that may alter the ICP? Get your same group of stakeholders together and discuss it, so you can move forward in lock-step. 

A clear ICP will drive focus and alignment across your organization, support your growth goals and ensure time, money, and resources are well spent. 

To learn more about Emerald Intel’s business intelligence solution, schedule time with us here.