Defining Your 'Ideal Customer Signals'

Hey Friends,

Did I get you fooled last week with my April Fools prank?

It was pretty cool that so many believed that it was possible for a newsletter on GTM Engineering with a relatively small following (close to 4k now) could get acquired for $1M. Anyway, let’s get back to regular programming…

As we know, personalization isn’t enough these days.

Your message needs to be relevant. Timed. Connected to some event that ties back to your product.

Of course, we have Ideal Customer Profiles & Personas defined.

But, something is missing.

Signals.

Every company should have a specific set of signals defined that indicate whether a company is:

1. Ready for your solution

2. Experiencing increasing pain

3. Making an investment into a certain area

4. Transitioning their tech stack

5. And so on…

I’m calling these your Ideal Customer Signals (ICS). ICS is what connects the timing of your sales play to when you target and reach out to specific accounts.

Defining your Signals

Signal definitions should have several components to make them usable and actionable to sales reps:

1. What the signal is

2. Why it matters

3. How to position your solution

4. How to align messaging to your persona

5. Where to find the signal (ideally this is provided to reps)

Below are 2 tables builtout using OpenAI’s DeepResearch.

Ideal Customer Signal Research

Persona Messaging & Case Study Alignment

Prompts and Custom GPT for Premium Subscribers

I thought I knew what my ideal signals were until I developed a couple of prompts.

Premium Subscribers this week gain access to the following:

Prompts:

1. Competitive Research

   • When is it better to sell your services vs. competition?

   • Key product strengths & use cases favoring your company

   • Economic benefits of your services vs. competition

   • Top 3 selling points to displace the target competition

   • Primary weaknesses of target competition

   • Your differentiators & strengths

2. Signal Identification (to generate the table above)

Custom GPT:

Provides 3 outputs:

1. Competitive Research

2. Signal Identification (like the table above)

3. Persona Messaging Development (like the table above)

Check out the output in action:

Subscribe to Premium Guides to read the rest.