ICP & TAM, IYKYK | Sheryl Hawk | TDSU Ep. 29

(0:00 - 0:25)
What's up, Lifers, and welcome to The Daily Stand-Up, where we're giving you fresh new ideas in the customer success and CS adjacent spaces every single day. I've got my man Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi? What's up, everybody? We've got JP here. 

JP, do you want to say hi? Howdy, folks. And we've got Sheryl. Sheryl, do you want to say hi? Hey, guys.

(0:25 - 2:21)
And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Sheryl, thank you so much for being here.

Do you want to introduce yourself briefly? Sure. Sheryl Haack. I have a very long background in customer success. 

I love all things CS and all things adjacent CS because it impacts us, even if it's not direct. Amen. I love it. 

Sheryl, you know what we're doing here. We want to know what is on your mind when it comes to customer success other than your undying love for it. So why don't you hit us with that? Sure. 

It's really understanding the difference between ICP and persona and why it's so important for CS professionals. Do you want to give us the cliff notes on the difference from your perspective? So ICP really is your ideal customer profile. It is a subset of your team that also often gets confused. 

People think that their ICP is their entire team, but it's a subset, those customers that you should be focusing all of your efforts on. And then persona is usually like a title or department, a title within a department that you should be solving a problem for within your ICP. And I often think about this, about the way in which you need to articulate value differently and with different language based on the persona, whether it's your end user, mid-level manager, decision maker, and executive buyer. 

So I love that you're calling that out. Rob, I want you to jump in here and talk a little bit about how you see this play out in the companies that you work with. Yeah, I think it's a great topic and one that Sheryl and I talked about, I think it was a few weeks ago at this point.

(2:22 - 3:07)
Super important because I think the way that it shows up at a lot of early stage companies, it is where customer success ends up getting put into a lot of unfavorable situations because of either a poorly defined ICP or to your point, Sheryl, the lack of this distinction can also impede our strategy and customer success. So I'm actually, I don't mean to answer a question with a question, but I am curious, Sheryl, I know this is such an important topic to you. What makes this so important for you? So really from all the people I've been talking to recently, when I ask CEOs, founders, what is your ICP? The answer comes back as either a persona or a team.

(3:07 - 6:22)
And then I think about the CS leaders who are being held accountable for retention. And if you don't have a really good handle on the ICP, then you basically, to your point, it just gets very, very messy. And a lot of CS leaders I see kind of respond a little bit more with emotion as opposed to data. 

And then what you want to do is you really want to be then focusing on the data behind the retention of accounts, right? If you understand the ICP or it's really messy or it's way too broad, then be able to respond back with what are the characteristics within, not just like churn and churn reasons, but take that to another level. Like what are the characteristics of the accounts that are churning? As opposed to like, I see a lot of lack of adoption or they went dark or different things like that. But again, your ICP is this, but your product doesn't solve it. 

And then being able to have that conversation with leadership. Yeah, I think that's a great point. I did want to give myself a quick mental check that I should probably, we should probably define for any new folks to customer success what TAM and ICP stand for. 

I think you said ICP already as ideal customer profile and TAM is a much broader set of your total addressable market. So all of the potential market that you can serve as a company. So I sort of see it as like a bit of a Russian nesting doll where you have like the widest doll is the TAM, the middle doll is your ICP, who's your ideal fit customer. 

And then the inside of the TAM, you have your company's inside of that, you have the personas, right? Am I understanding that correctly in terms of how you're thinking about it? Yes, but your typical persona. Yeah, actually your persona could be within that. Yes. 

Then back to Dillon's point, it's the value statement. Like how do you talk to the different personas with your user, your buyer, and your exec sponsor. But one other layer that I think is also important to know is if your persona is across different departments, you could solve a problem for like, say you're part of the RevTech stack, right? So you could be solving a problem for sales and you could be solving a different problem. 

Maybe you're helping top of the funnel, but then you also could be solving a problem for marketing and that's a different persona and understanding the value that you're providing in to each persona. Like maybe on the marketing side, you're helping sell pipeline, right? And sales, you're giving more at bats or helping with follow-up. It's understanding what are each persona's challenges and then being able to then kind of craft your success plans and things like that based on that final nesting doll.

(6:22 - 7:48)
So JP, why don't you jump in? What does this look like for you in the way you work today? Of course. Yeah, I work with customers in the scaled side of things. And there's some challenges that are sort of endemic to the money that they're spending. 

And a lot of times that is what is in consideration, right? How much can I CSM this particular customer really has to depend on ultimately like how much money they're spending. So I always think like the money people spend is almost like the holy of ICP is how much money are you spending with this? And then now I know where the boundaries are and how I can best sort of work with you because the resources are finite. I appreciate it. 

Sheryl, thank you so much for being here. That's our time. I think this is an interesting topic. 

I'll take the last word and that is maybe this more about me than anything else. But if we're going to say that ideal customer profile is often getting confused with TAM and with personas, I take that as an opportunity to say like maybe some of those non-ICP guys shouldn't be counted in my churn numbers, right? And I know we're all dealing with that. So Sheryl, thanks again. 

I really appreciate it. Hope to have you back in the future. Thank you. 

Bye. Thanks, Sheryl. See you soon.

(8:17 - 8:24)
Lifetime value and find us on the socials at lifetime value media. Until next time.