So What? Does your CRM data match your ICP?

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In this episode of So What? The Trust Insights weekly livestream, you’ll learn how to use AI to analyze your CRM data to understand your current customer profile. Discover how to uncover your customer pain points and motivations by using AI to analyze your CRM notes and data. You’ll also learn practical tips for creating an action plan that bridges the gap between your actual customer profile and your ideal customer profile (ICP), so you can drive better marketing and sales outcomes. Discover the power of AI for optimizing your sales process and driving business growth.

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In this episode you’ll learn:

• Why you need to compare your ICP with CRM data
• Where the differences are between your CRM data and your ICP
• How to build a plan to get you more aligned

Transcript:

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Katie Robbert – 00:32
Well, hey everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to So What?, the marketing, analytics, and insights live show. I am Katie, joined by Chris and John, who are twinning today. Oh, so close this week. We are talking about “Does Your CRM Data Match Your ICP?”. And what we mean by that is, does the data that you have—basically in your online Rolodex, your customer relationship/platform management system—match your ideal customer profile? And ideal customer profile is the customers that you want to—not the customers you have, but your ideal customers. And we talked about a lot of this on a couple of different live streams. So if you want to go back and watch past episodes, you can go to TrustInsights.ai, YouTube, and go to the So What? playlist and you will find all of them there. But this week specifically, we’re curious to know:

Katie Robbert – 01:34
So the information you’re capturing about your prospects and your leads and your customers, all in your CRM system, how aligned is it with your ideal customer profile? So what we’re going to walk through today is why you need to compare the two systems, why it’s important. Wherever the differences are between your CRM data and your ICP—so how do I—how to do the analysis, how to identify those, and how to build a plan to get aligned. Because that’s really the so what is: we can spend all of our time looking at this data, but if we don’t actually do something with it, then we’re wasting our time. We’re wasting your time. So that’s the so what is: what the heck do we do once we know that there is a difference? So, Chris, as always, where would you like to start?

Christopher Penn – 02:26
Well, I think we have to start with a couple of prerequisites. The first is you have to have an ICP. If you don’t have one, then the exercise is moot. However, you can reverse engineer an ICP as well from your CRM data to try and get a sense like, okay, this is who we currently have based on the data we have, and then this is who we would like to have. And so the process—again, like you mentioned at the top of the show—the process for building who we would like to have, we’ve covered many times in the show. To get to who we currently have, there’s a couple different ways you can do that. The easiest way would be to get your data out of your CRM and have a generative model try to understand it, try to analyze it.

Christopher Penn – 03:13
Now, the challenge here is that pretty much every CRM is different. They all make data export difficult. And for today’s show, we actually had to do a bit of a change because we—for good reason—can’t just put our customer data on screen for the public Internet to see. That would not be well received by anyone. So we created some synthetic data. And synthetic data is a way to have a piece of software just make things up in a legitimate manner. So we’ll go ahead and just bring this up, just so you can see it. We wrote a piece of software called the Synthetic CRM and RFM Generator. It uses the R programming language and what it does is it generates essentially fake CRM data that looks real enough. So this is an example what it looks like.

Christopher Penn – 04:04
You get a first name, last name, you get a title, a company, annual revenue, number of employees, date of last contact, where the company is located, the email address, deal size, construction, number of email opens, and then sales notes. Like, “Attended trade show and met with the CFO. They’re exploring options to improve their change management and mention our competitor KPMG. Follow up email sent. Cold call to CFO prospect company confirmed that the decision maker…” and so on and so forth. So we have this. Now, this file is a sample of 500. I actually made it to 5,000, but then realized that was just overkill. But if you would like to grab this software, you can. It is free and open source on GitHub. We will put a link to this in Analytics for Marketers, our free Slack group, that you can download there.

Christopher Penn – 04:53
You do need to know how to use R, but it is free and it comes with absolutely no warranty. So if it lights your computer on fire, you accept the responsibility for that, not us.

Katie Robbert – 05:03
I mean, can you put that in the notes in GitHub, please?

Christopher Penn – 05:08
They actually—it is in the license. The license says, “Provide it as is.” It’s under the new public license. So any consequences are your problem. So John, taking a look at the CRM data on screen, does it—if you were just casually—this, would this pass the sniff test to you?

John Wall – 05:29
The one thing is the formatting of the notes are—I mean, I hate to say this, but I know sales guys and they don’t do the notes that well. Like, the notes would be a lot crappier. But I’m amazed at how good it is because like the names are dead on. There’s nothing that looks bizarre there and you’ve got all the right titles. Yeah, it’s definitely good enough to go with. And yeah, again, I’d be concerned that it’s higher quality than the average CRM install.

Katie Robbert – 05:55
It’s funny, you say that. I was thinking the same thing. I’m like, wow, those are really great notes. Where can I get my team to do that? Actually, no. Our Chief Statistician does actually do really good notes. To your point, Chris, the challenge is getting the data out of the CRM system in a format that looks like this. But that’s for another day. So let’s say we have this, it…

Christopher Penn – 06:23
…is for another day. But I will say if you have some knowledge of how to use Python—not necessarily how to write code, but you have some knowledge of at least how to look at it—you can go to the generative AI system of your choice and say, “Help me build a utility that connects to Salesforce or HubSpot or Zoho,” and it will walk you through the process. There will be a lot of trial and error, but you will eventually end up with a piece of software that can extract this information. So for example, every Monday and Friday we have at Trust Insights, we have a sales catch-up meeting and we see a Google Data Studio dashboard of our pipeline.

Christopher Penn – 07:00
All that data is pulled from a Python script that we wrote to move the data from HubSpot to Google Data Studio because we feel like paying like $599 a month for someone else to do that. So that is something that you can do with generative AI. So we’ve got our data. It is surprisingly in good condition for sales data. Our next step would be to understand the data. So let’s go ahead and go into Gemini here and, again, use the tool of your choice. You could use Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Llama, Mistral, you name it. There’s so much happening, so many tools are out there that can do this stuff. We want to understand: what are the general best practices for building ideal customer profiles and for analyzing sales data? So we’re going to start off with the RACE Framework.

Christopher Penn – 07:53
So, we’ll say, “You are a sales management consultant experienced in sales analysis, sales pipelines, CRM data, and sales management. Your first task is to explain the best practices for analyzing CRM data to understand the health of your sales pipeline.” I’m going to go ahead and hit go and it’s going to come up with your average list of the things to look for. While it’s doing that, I’m going to type the next prompt, which is, “What are the most common mistakes people make when analyzing sales CRM data in this context?” So, we’re going to preload it now with all the stuff that you shouldn’t do. And then while that’s loaded, I’m going to say, “What are some of your tricks of the trade as a sales management expert that we haven’t talked about yet?”

Christopher Penn – 09:08
So this now preloads the last section of our standard PARE Framework. So this is going to grab and load the context window. Our next step is to get the sales CRM data in here. Now, depending on the model you use, you may or may not want to load it in as a spreadsheet. For example, if you do this in ChatGPT, it will try to write code to analyze the data if you load it as a CSV file, which sometimes is good and sometimes is a royal pain in the butt. In this case is a royal pain in the butt because we want it to look at the data overall. But I’m not using ChatGPT so that won’t be a concern. I’ll say, “Great, here are 500 of my sales records from my CRM. Using the best practices we’ve discussed so far, provide me a high-level analysis of my sales pipeline and performance.”

Christopher Penn – 10:07
So that’s 94,000 tokens. That’s 60,000 words of data. So it’s going to have to go through and read all that and understand what’s going on. “Overall pipeline health: 167 records that are active opportunities, 149 leads and prospects, substantial number of suspects, 134, shows continued lead generation efforts but need to focus on qualification engagement. Top heavy funnel: a larger proportion of the deals in early stages compared to the later stages…” which every sales funnel ever should be. Should be positive. “…Close at 24, closed-won deals. Average deal size is all over the place.” So this is a decent analysis of just the sales pipeline. Next, we need to ask it… What?

John Wall – 11:06
Oops.

Christopher Penn – 11:06
Jeez. All right. Great. “What are the components of an ideal customer profile?” We want it—we want to understand, like, what should be in an ideal customer profile, because we’re going to want to infer from the sales data those major components, like needs and pain points, demographics, firmographics, etc. You look puzzled, Katie.

Katie Robbert – 11:39
I have a feeling my question is going to be, you’re skipping ahead. So I’m trying—this is me trying to be patient with the process and just sort of see how this unfolds. That said, it’s interesting to me—and maybe it’s just a matter of how we’re defining the words—is that you’re using the CRM to define your ideal customer profile. But to me—and again, this, I might be jumping ahead. Okay, Chris is nodding his head so I’m just gonna… This is why I need to work on my poker face, but I don’t think that is in the cards for me.

Christopher Penn – 12:25
Okay. So my prompt is, “Based on our sales pipeline data, create a customer profile of our actual customers using the CRM data, understanding that this is not the ideal, but our current state.” So we want to use those components, use all the components of the ICP that you just mentioned. So all the things that we talked about, we want to have in here. I used the term “ICP” because, for the model, we wanted to invoke a specific set of pieces that it needed to know in its memory. And so using that terminology will brought it into the chat effectively. It’s taking a book off the shelf. If you said “actual customer profile,” that’s not something that a model would have seen nearly as much on the Internet when it was being trained.

Christopher Penn – 13:12
So we’re using just that, but we’re telling it, use the real data, don’t—don’t make things up. So, let’s see what it comes up with based on our CRM data. “Customer profile: unveiling your actual customer base. Professional services, real estate, and information. Company size: most of your current customers are mostly mid-to large-sized enterprises with an average annual revenue of significantly above $50 million and number of employees around 2,500. You’ve had success with smaller companies, but they represent a smaller percentage of the wins. Location: your customer base has a strong presence in the USA, Brazil, and South Korea.” Remember, this is all synthetic data, so this is not actual Trust Insights data. Although, I wouldn’t mind going to Brazil.

Christopher Penn – 14:04
“Company stage: difficult to definitively determine. Job title: CFOs and VPs appear to be frequent decision makers, followed by directors and managers. CTOs are also involved. Seniority: while the data doesn’t directly reveal seniority, successful engagements involve high-level executives. Department: you cater to finance, change management, customer experience implementation across departments. Psychographics, pain points: digital transformation, profit margin improvement, operational efficiency, customer experience enhancement, shortage of qualified workers. Goals, objectives: revenue and profitability, adapt to market changes, enhance customer satisfaction. Values and priorities: ROI, expertise and experience, proactive communication. The buying process: multiple stakeholders, formal proposals, competitor comparisons.” So this is now our actual customer profile from our fake customer.

Katie Robbert – 14:49
Okay.

Christopher Penn – 14:51
All right. Any questions so far on this analysis? Understanding that we’re using synthetic data?

Katie Robbert – 15:01
No, it seems pretty solid. I mean, I think, I mean, you already know I’m going to ask that you do this with our actual data when we’re not live streaming because I’m like, yep, this is exactly what I was looking for.

Christopher Penn – 15:15
So I’m seeing now—”I’m going to provide our ideal customer profile. I would like you to compare our ideal customer profile with our actual customer profile. Note what is similar, what is different. Return your analysis in outline format.” So let’s go ahead and connect now to our ICP and our Trust Insights ICP. Load that in. All right. And close that up. Text in the prompt. Let’s go ahead and wait for it to do its thing, and let’s see what we get. “Comparing your ICP to your ACP: Your ICP explicitly states mid-sized, large enterprises. ACP shows annual revenue indicative of larger companies.” So that’s similar. That’s good.

Christopher Penn – 16:26
“Decision-making level: ICP, C-level executive, VP, and directors. Sales notes confirms that’s who’s in there. Value proposition: ICP highlights data-driven decision-making, innovation, and transparency. Sales notes reveal customer emphasis on ROI, expertise, and proactive communication, aligning with the value.” So that part of our overlap—the Venn diagram—is good. “Differences: Industry focus: ICP—marketing, data analytics, digital transformation, PR, and nonprofits. ACP—professional services, real estate, and information.” So that’s different. “ICP: North America and Europe. ACP: Brazil and South Korea. Technographics: ICP uses AI tools. The CRM does not have technographic data.” So we didn’t put that in the synthetics.

Christopher Penn – 17:23
“Pain points: ICP focuses on complex data challenges, predictive analytics needs, membership acquisition. ACP, data analytics, some point—yeah, some pain points are present.” Say that faster, I can’t. “Other, more prominent, including digital transformation, profit margin improvement, and operational efficiency. Behavioral data: assumptions about purchasing patterns and vendor interactions—that data is not available. Key takeaways: there’s an industry alignment gap. Expand your geographic understanding, collect technographic data, reassess your pain point focus, and capture behavioral insights.” So that’s sort of what the model has said. This is where your data gap is.

Katie Robbert – 17:39
Interesting. How—how is the large language model determining pain points from our CRM data?

Christopher Penn – 17:58
That’s coming from the sales notes.

Katie Robbert – 18:00
Okay, that makes sense. But so that sort of, to step backwards a little bit, to understand that kind of qualitative information about your customers, you need to actually be filling in the notes with something useful. Sort of the same thing of when developers check in their code, they’re supposed to be making notes about what changed. And so it’s sort of like, “document as you go.” So that sort of goes back to the data governance, which we didn’t touch upon at the start of the episode, but it always comes down to: how good is your data? So to do analysis like this, if you don’t have good quality data, if you just have, the quantitative information…

Katie Robbert – 18:49
…yeah, like, “Gave a call, talked to Bob,” or, “no response,” like, that doesn’t really tell you. If you want to get into things like what are the pain points, what are they struggling with, why did they reach out, that needs to be in there. So, John, as our Chief Statistician, our Business Development Guru, and all around swell guy, how cumbersome is it for salespeople to put in regular notes? Like, why does it or does not happen?

John Wall – 19:18
For the most part? No, it doesn’t happen. I mean, there’s usually—the sales team will use it enough to be a trigger for them to remember what’s going on right there. Really, in most organizations, there is zero incentive for them to contribute to institutional knowledge. But the thing with this is I’m actually thrilled at seeing this because we do have enough with our process, because HubSpot is capturing all the relevant emails. So we have all the direct communication from the prospects, so we have that. And then the other thing that we do are internal notes for every call and discussion—like, anytime anything moves. So, by uploading the stuff that’s in the CRM, including those emails and all the internal notes—and just for fun, you could throw in all the scopes, too—that’s a lot of pain point data.

John Wall – 20:06
The only thing that you could do better would be transcripts of the calls, which we also do record the calls. So that’s a real thing also. But yeah, I’m psyched that we have a lot of data and this stuff would be pretty solid. Yeah, you hit a classic point of if companies just think that they can depend on the notes, then they’re going to be hurt and you need to have these other systems, like call transcripts and checkpoints. Like, you can’t do a scope until you have the internal notes that covers what’s going on. Those kinds of things will make things work better and give you more actionable data. Yeah, that’s like classic CRM pain point that upper management complains about, yet they never kind of get on the clue train and do what needs to be done to fix that.

Christopher Penn – 20:58
Yep. One of the things that—again, this is a basic thing with generative AI that people could do if they wanted to improve the quality of their sales CRM is—have sales folks pull out their phone, open up any AI transcription software, and say, “Hey, after the meeting, just leave us a three-minute message,” about, you know, what happened. That way you don’t have to type up anything that gets back to the office. Then you have a sales ops person in the office who just gets the data into the CRM, literally just copy-pasting. Or, if you’re fancy, you have an API that does it. But this would then get all those notes into the CRM with minimal overhead for the salesperson.

Christopher Penn – 21:38
So that way you get the data, and just that sales ops person, they know that’s their thing is, let’s get it all in one spot. Okay. So, Katie, you said we need a so what, we need an action plan. Let’s go ahead and ask. “This is good. Next, we need an action plan. We need to know what steps to take to improve our close rates, increase our pipeline and deal value, and move from our ACP to our ICP, based on everything we’ve discussed so far. Create a step-by-step action plan in outline format, prioritizing those action items. Which will—” what’s more important, closing deals faster or increasing the size of the pipeline?

Katie Robbert – 22:42
Increasing the pipeline.

Christopher Penn – 22:43
Okay. “…Which will increase the pipeline value and volume fastest. Present items in descending order by priority.” So we’re going to have the tool go through now and look at the differences, look at all the conversations. “This action plan: shifting from ACP to ICP. High-priority actions: immediate impact. A. Refine lead qualification criteria: Analyze closed-won deals to analysts to identify common firmographic, demographic traits. Review sales notes. Develop stricter qualification criteria.” So like, stop letting every salesperson in, train sales reps on new criteria.

Christopher Penn – 23:44
“Implement scoring systems in CRM. Rationale: focusing on high probability leads increases to deal value while reducing wasted efforts. B. Enhance value proposition messaging: review your current marketing materials, identify gaps between your current messaging and the prominent pain points and goals of the ICP. Fix your marketing and fix your marketing. Make it more appealing to the target market to increase the amount of pipeline, building a stronger connection. Medium priority: leverage your existing customer base. Request testimonials and referrals to tap into their networks. Upsell and cross-sell to your current base: happy customers are your best advocates, can rapidly expand your pipeline. Optimize content and SEO.” That’s kind of a no-brainer.

Christopher Penn – 24:38
“Long-term actions to sustain growth: Expand technographic data collection. Integrate your CRM with marketing automation, capture data on customer technologies. This enables highly targeted campaigns, personalized messaging. Explore targeted paid advertising: can accelerate pipeline growth if you’re targeting the right people. Develop strategic partnerships and continuously monitor your data.” So there’s the action plan. How does it feel?

Katie Robbert – 24:38
It still feels like just a bunch of words, if that makes sense. So I don’t know. I feel like this is sort of the challenge, and we’re talking about this on the podcast earlier this week, which, if you want to catch any past episodes, you can go to TrustInsights.ai/tipodcast. Chris, I believe the clip that you took of me was me saying like, “The way we present information—marketers and analysts have been presenting information as piles of data and slides, like, why can’t we do better?” And when I look at this, to me it’s still very much that. Like, I don’t feel like this is enough of an action plan that I could be like, “Okay John, go do the thing,” because it’s still kind of vague. Like, “analyze closed one…” Okay.

Christopher Penn – 25:38
That’s—no, that’s perfectly fine because that’s what—that’s how you use these tools. So we would now say, “This seems a little vague…”

Katie Robbert – 25:48
Yeah.

Christopher Penn – 25:49
“…Can you build a tactical list of operations for step one: analyze?” So now, instead of just saying, “Hey, that’s the thing,” help me break this down even more. It says, “Let’s make step one more actionable. Here’s a tactical list of operations to analyze closed won.” Number one, extract your data. And so now it’s going to build essentially a recipe for each step in this outline. If we asked a tutor and say, “Okay, tell me how to do this step by step,” and if this isn’t clear enough, you would repeat the process again, saying, “Okay, explain just this for me. How do I do this?”

Katie Robbert – 26:26
And I think that’s often what’s missing when, the collective, all of us, the royal we, make action plans is we’re like, “Okay, do these five things,” and it’s really still kind of vague. And I think what the—what we can be doing now with these kinds of tools is we can actually dig into the step by step. Because we’re going to get asked, let’s say we had a much larger team, and John had a lot of junior salespeople on the team that he was working with. He would have to outline, step by step, what it is he wants them to do, what those expectations are. And that’s what this is doing, because John can say, “Okay, go analyze the data,” and they’re going to be like, “What am I looking for? What is it supposed to look like?”

Katie Robbert – 27:24
“What format do you want it in?” So there’s more questions than answers. And the place where I would like to get to with these action plans is crystal clear expectations. Yes, you’re allowed to ask questions, but we’ve given you so much information that you have very few.

Christopher Penn – 27:42
Yep. So to your point, I asked, “I need more details. Tell me how to identify key trends.” Like, I don’t know how to do it. Tell me how to do it. Says, “Okay, go into your industries. Identify the top three to five industries as the highest number of closed-won deals. Calculate the percentage of total wins. Ask, are these industries aligned with your ICP?” and so on and so forth. So now this—we’re—the tool is now breaking this down to such a granular level that you could probably hand this—literally hand this off to the intern. And there’s step-by-step instructions for each of these things. And again, if you had to keep drilling down and down and down, but this gets you, literally, to “Do this step by step. Here’s step two. Do this. Here’s step three. Do this.”

Katie Robbert – 28:21
What do you think, John? Is—is this the kind of action plan that you would find helpful or are you okay with just the high-level steps of things that you should be doing?

John Wall – 28:33
Well, the big thing with this is it always comes down to: at what point does it touch back to the sales or marketing activity so you can go and find all the gaps as far as industries? Once you find out, okay, there’s two or three industries that aren’t matched here, what’s going to be the takeaway from that? Where are you going to go? Are you going to start advertising in a new space or are you going to start doing, events and promotion, or, on the sales side? Or are you going to go and change your product messaging and, collateral so that it meets that new group?

John Wall – 29:07
So, unless you’re going to retool the sales and marketing process as part of that, it’s good to answer questions and figure out where things are broken. But it does come back to like, okay, so what’s the—what’s going to be the final impact? I mean, when—because if you had 500 deals from the past three quarters, then this stuff gets really interesting fast because you could say, “Okay, there’s 20 possible opportunities here that have come out of this.” If you’ve got seven to 10 deals a quarter that are closing and you’re still moving on the product, it gets a little bit tougher. You don’t get to actionable analysis; you just still raise a whole bunch more additional questions.

Christopher Penn – 29:54
So I’m asking, “I understand these are all great actions, but I have one full-time sales professional and one sales assistant. Based on this knowledge, how would you revamp our action plans to scale appropriately with the resources I have?” Because, yeah, it would be great to do a large-scale analysis and do all this stuff. But guess what, we just got 1.5 people, right? “Simplified leads qualification: Sales assistant: filter CRM leads based on two to three key ICP credential criteria. Sales pro: review the pre-filtered leads, assess deal size potential and prioritize the top 10 to 20 weekly.” So this is now shrinking down the plan to something that is with—you know, works the resources you have.

Christopher Penn – 30:34
If you said, “I have a part-time, commission-only salesperson named Bob, and Bob is drunk most of the time, how would I…”

Katie Robbert – 30:43
Well, first of all, I would fire Bob.

Christopher Penn – 30:49
But you can see it’s really says, okay, now instead of all that stuff, “Networking target: LinkedIn network. Sales pro: five to 10 target companies within ICP; shared tasks: connect with relevant decision-makers, go comment on their stuff, research prospects…” and so on and so forth. So now it’s gone a big plan down to, “Hey, just do these things. If you can just do these things, we’ll move the ball down the field.”

Katie Robbert – 31:11
So the only other thing that I would be looking for is a measurement plan.

Christopher Penn – 31:19
Right now, for sales, that’s pretty straightforward because you’d say, okay, what was our pipeline and deals closed and all that stuff prior to implementing the new plan? And what has it been since then? It depends on your sales cycle, but you should know pretty quickly like, hey, suddenly we’re getting more leads or more leads or more prospects are becoming leads or more leads are becoming opportunities—or less. And when you see that, you go, “Guys, we need to change course.” Sales, thankfully, is one of the few divisions of a company where measurement is crystal clear.

John Wall – 32:00
It’s interesting because the outbound stuff is just classic, sales. So that comes down to messaging, right? Like you need to be able to—if you’re going to identify 30 prospects and pound them with a message, you’ve got to keep testing the message over and over again.

Christopher Penn – 32:14
Yep.

John Wall – 32:15
But it’s interesting that has content—marketing—as a, angle in there, too, to give you a bunch of options to get more stuff out to try and generate more inbound.

Christopher Penn – 32:25
Yeah, it says, “Hey, post, share valuable industry insights one to two times a week on LinkedIn.” So you should be doing the thing on LinkedIn. “Explore free or low-cost content scheduling tools to manage social media posts.” So this, again, this is a nicely drunken plan for a very small team.

Katie Robbert – 32:48
Great. So when can I expect the one with our data?

Christopher Penn – 32:53
We got to put some time on the calendar to do that. But one of the things that we want to do—that John raised, I think, is a really excellent point, is: we have so much data, it will actually take longer to condense down what we have than it is—than it will be to do the analysis. Because the ICP, we’ve got our ICP pretty well dialed in at this point. It is now getting the ACP decided as to how that’s going to look.

Katie Robbert – 33:26
Well, I mean, I guess the good news is there’s always something to do. We’re not bored.

Christopher Penn – 33:31
This—this is very true. Now, if you can’t—if you cannot get access to this data for one reason or another, the least bad alternative is to sit down with your phone and your voice memos and your sales folks, you just have a conversation, take 20 minutes over lunch, say, “Hey, tell me about the last five customers you talked to. What did it—you know, what were they interested in? How did the conversation go?” And just do that with your sales team and then take that data, transcribe it, and that will at least get you some of the way there. If you just don’t have a CRM, or your CRM data is just complete garbage, you could at least get some of that. Or another great way to get ACP data is, if you…

Christopher Penn – 34:23
…I would advocate this anyway, call five of your customers and say, “Hey, don’t spend 15 minutes’ time, I’ll send you a Starbucks card. Tell me why you hired us.” If you remember, tell me why you hired us. “What was different about us that you said, ‘Yeah, I want to work with them?'” “It was a better price, it was better services…” and talk to—you get their permission to record the call and transcribe it. And that will tell you literally from the mouth of your actual customers who your actual customer profiles are from the needs and pain points and the challenges.

Katie Robbert – 34:52
So you said that was the least bad option. What is the most bad option?

Christopher Penn – 34:58
Just wing it and have the language model make it up for you. That’s the most bad option. Don’t do that.

Katie Robbert – 35:06
I would argue that the most bad option is to do nothing at all. So not even bother trying to understand who you’re selling to and who you want to be selling to. I feel like that kind of hinders your growth.

Christopher Penn – 35:22
That’s tricky, because if you think of it like Google Maps, which is worse, just going nowhere or driving off a cliff because you gave it really bad data and it’s like, “Sure, I’ll take it this way.” Like, drive across the Pacific Ocean. Like, no.

Katie Robbert – 35:38
Well, that escalated quickly.

Christopher Penn – 35:45
But it raises—that’s something that we’ve talked about since the founding of the company, which is: which is worse, bad data or no data? And an action plan based on bad data, or do nothing. I mean, realistically, you can’t do nothing because you will go out of business. It becomes a question of, what can you do with the data that you have?

Katie Robbert – 36:12
What do you think, John?

John Wall – 36:13
Yeah, well, you’re constantly testing, right? I mean, with every time you make a sale is actually a test point, so you have data there. And then you’re constantly moving product, too. You’re trying to figure out where to go next or what to do, so you’re always generating that data, and then it’s just a matter of: can you—better at figuring out what happened through that process so you can replicate it or make it smoother? But yeah, a lot of that work is getting done if you’re trying to close deals and trying to get product alignment, like, you’re already in the middle of this. So the question is, where can you put data to work to make it less painful?

Christopher Penn – 36:51
Makes sense if you have good knowledge of—and clear language about what you sell. Another question that you can go to these models and ask is, okay, well, if I’ve got my ACP and I’ve got my ICP, and I know what I’ve sold and I know what I could be selling, what could I cross-sell? What could I upsell? So, your current state, you’re successfully selling these services with these decision-makers, you want to expand into these areas and these things. Here is your plan for cross-sell and upsell. “So how do I deepen my existing engagements? What else can I sell, folks? Change management, expansion, digital transformation. What else can I—what new industries could I enter? Marketing, analytics, digital transformation for nonprofits…” and so on and so forth.

Christopher Penn – 37:37
So any sales question that you have, like, “How can I sell more of this? How can I get more people to sign for this?” If the data is there, ask the model.

Katie Robbert – 37:49
And it’s interesting because I run a lot of what I do past the custom model that we built that includes our ICP data. I would love to have an ACP as well so that I could do the same exercise. I would love to, in an optimistic world, believe that everybody on our team is using our ICP custom model when they’re testing things, rather than going in blind. So yeah, that’s—I mean, it’s definitely, once you start to find those really practical use cases for these large language models, you’re like, “Well, how did I ever live without it?” You know, I’m not going to go ahead and say it’s going to take over my whole life, but for these specific things—you know, understanding who your customers are, once you have the data—it’s been really useful.

Christopher Penn – 38:44
Yeah. And if you think about it, it really is just saying, “I want to do less guessing and more knowing.”

Christopher Penn – 39:00
That’d be nice, but it’s you—we’ve been saying for years and years, we don’t have a shortage of data; we have a shortage of good data. We don’t have a shortage of data and we have a total shortage of doing something with the data.

Katie Robbert – 39:21
I would agree with that. But we’re starting to make some progress in that. Step by step, for sure.

Christopher Penn – 39:30
Exactly. Any final thoughts other than you’re going to ask me to do this as soon as possible for our…

Katie Robbert – 39:39
Hey, at least I’m predictable.

Christopher Penn – 39:41
This is true. And predictable is just as good as a good substitute for trustworthy. Think about it.

Katie Robbert – 39:51
John, final thoughts?

John Wall – 39:56
Final thoughts: get out there, sell more stuff. That’s it. That cures all ills.

Katie Robbert – 40:01
It’s true.

Christopher Penn – 40:03
All right folks, thanks for tuning in, and we will see you all next time. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at TrustInsights.ai/tipodcast and our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai/newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai/analyticsformarketers See you next time.

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.