Inbound Lead Gen 101 for Vertical Market Software Companies: ICP, Keyword Research, Branding and Marketing Assets

Laying the Foundation for Attracting Inbound Leads

In a previous article, I discussed how we help our companies prioritize their go-to-market efforts: Quadshift's B2B Growth Grid. In this article I'm going to focus on inbound lead generation, which is a higher priority for companies that address a market size and revenue per customer that places them in the top left corner of the growth grid (see below).

One important note before we begin: "inbound" no longer means only Google search. Prospects now discover software through AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and other LLM-based recommendation engines. Everything in this article (your ICP, your keyword research, your brand assets, your online presence) needs to be built with both traditional search and AI-powered discovery in mind. The good news is that most of the fundamentals are the same. Clear, specific, well-structured content wins in both channels.
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What I outline in this article is relevant for all vertical market (industry-focussed) B2B software companies, especially ones where the market you compete in is large, and the revenue per customer is small. It would be less of a priority if the market you serve is small and the revenue per customer is large (bottom right corner of the Growth Grid), but that wouldn't eliminate the value of this exercise. In that case, your first focus would be on developing an effective outbound strategy. We cover "Hunting" or developing outbound strategies in B2B Cold Outreach Sales Process and in The Software CEO's Guide to AI Outbound Sales, where we discuss how to use AI to improve outbound efficiency and scale.

This article is also primarily aimed at companies that are resource and time-constrained, as is the case for most profitable B2B VMS software companies. Companies led by marketing gurus or companies with significant marketing resources may prioritize differently or by more thorough in specific areas. We assume here that like all of our companies at Quadshift, you are bootstrapped and/or want to grow profitably.

Where we will start (and what this article covers) is how to create an ideal customer profile, a keyword list, and the steps in building the marketing assets you will use to accept inbound interest.
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Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Buyer Personas

Ideal Customer Profile

The goal of inbound lead generation is to have customers come to you and easily find you when they are looking to buy what you offer. To do so, first, you need to understand who your customers are. We do so by creating an Ideal Customer Profile, or an ICP.

An ICP represents the types of companies likely to benefit most from your product and services. Start by extracting all the company names, websites, and the following information from your CRM (or wherever else you have your customer information), and document something like this for your ICP:

• Industry: Franchised Auto Dealerships
• Area of Customer's Business: New Vehicle Sales Department
• Dealership size: Auto dealership with 3-10 sales reps
• Annual revenue: Any
• Number of employees: Any
• Location: Rural and Suburban North America

Your ICP also informs how you should describe your company for AI discovery. When a prospect asks an AI tool "what is the best software for [your ICP's industry]," the AI searches for content that matches specific industry, role, and use-case combinations. The more precisely you define your ICP, the more precisely you can write the descriptions that AI tools pull from when making recommendations.
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Buyer Personas

Now we can build a buyer persona, which will help you more precisely target the prospective customers for your business. Your buyer persona can be detailed if you have good data available on your current and prospective customers. You may also have multiple buyer personas.

To obtain some of this data, you can talk to some of your best customers, do a customer survey, or, if you've worked in the industry (which is often the case for VMS founders), this information may be something you've learned personally. Here is an example of a simple one, and some components of a buyer personal you will want to identify:

• Role/Position of Buyer: General Sales Manager, Sales Manager or General Manager
• Demographic: Predominantly Male, 40-55 years old
• Education: University or College Degree usually in an unrelated discipline
• Goals: To become a dealer principal/partner/owner of a dealership
• Challenges: Needs arise immediately and speed to implementation of a solution is critical. Difficulty training, retaining, and motivating great sales staff means the software has to be easy to get up and running for new team members and support has to be strong. Inundated with tech tools and little time to spend searching for better solutions.

With the ICP and buyer persona(s), we identify who we are targeting and their motivations. We will use these personas when building the website and other customer-facing content. It will also inform where we focus our marketing efforts.

Your buyer personas also shape the language AI tools use to recommend products. If your buyer is a "General Sales Manager at a mid-size auto dealership who needs fast implementation and strong support," then your website and product descriptions should use those exact words. AI models match the language of the query to the language on your site. If a prospect asks an AI tool for software recommendations using their own words, your content needs to speak that same language, not yours.
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VMS Keyword Research

During this preparation phase, based on your understanding of your customers (buoyed by the above ICP and buyer personas), you want to build an understanding of what words prospective customers will use when they search for your products and services, both in traditional search engines and in AI-powered tools. The queries people type into Google and the questions they ask ChatGPT are often different. Search queries tend to be short keywords ("seed management software"). AI queries tend to be full questions ("what is the best software for managing seed production inventory and compliance?"). Your keyword research should capture both types. This will inform your marketing copywriting, particularly for your website.

Here's a simple way to do keyword research if you are a company that already has a website with decent traffic. Almost all of our companies are in that situation, so I assume you are too.
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Existing Keywords

• If you don't already have it, set up Google Search Console for your domain. Have at least 30 days of search data.
• Filter for the last 30-90 days (if available)
• Filter out searches for your company name
• Export your keyword data ranked by clicks (or impressions if click counts are low)

Prepare a list of keywords and phrases and keyword groups that are similar. Focus particularly on keywords in positions 1-50. You want to continue to rank for these keywords and leverage them for copywriting.

AI query research: In addition to your Google Search Console data, test how AI tools currently describe your category. Ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity questions like "what is the best [your category] software?" and "what software do [your ICP] use for [your use case]?" Document what comes back. If your company appears, note the language the AI uses to describe you. If it doesn't appear, note the language it uses to describe your competitors. This tells you exactly what vocabulary and content structure you need on your site to get recommended.
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Direct Competitor Keywords

Find your top 2 or 3 competitors, ideally, the ones that have a better online presence than you. Drop their domains in Chat GPT/Claude and ask it to break down the keywords on the website. Even better, you can also use paid tools like Ahrefs or Semrush which can just give you the keywords competitors are ranking for. Based on your understanding of your customers and your products and services, add these relevant keywords to your list.

Take some of the keywords you've added that you think are relevant and see what pages on your competitors' websites are ranking and what kind of content is helping them get to the top of the results. Often, you can get great ideas on how you will outcompete for these keywords by seeing what they are doing and doing it better. Note this down as well.

Do the same exercise in AI tools. Ask "what are the alternatives to [competitor name]?" and "how does [competitor] compare to other [category] software?" The results will show you how AI models currently understand your competitive landscape and where there are gaps in how they describe the market. If your competitor gets recommended and you don't, look at what their site says that yours doesn't: clear product descriptions, specific use cases, FAQ content, third-party reviews. These are the signals AI models use to decide who to recommend.
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Long Tail Keywords

You can also use AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude to generate ideas for other relevant keyword searches for your products and services and your competitors' products and services that might not be the primary ways your prospective customers will search for you, but that still could generate relevant traffic. These are called long tail keywords. Long tail queries are especially important for AI discovery because AI-powered search tools handle natural-language questions well. A prospect who asks an AI tool "what software helps coffee producers track lot purity and germination compliance?" is asking a long tail query. If your site has a page that answers that question clearly, you have a strong chance of being recommended.

You can also do some manual searching with these keywords you identify and some variations of these keywords. When you try these searches often your competitors are not in the search results or the content that is there is not useful to visitors, so it can present a greenfield opportunity for you to capture this traffic, even if it's a low volume of traffic. Effectively using long tail keywords/long tail query that are highly relevant is an effective strategy in a competitive market.

Now you know:

1) what you are currently ranking for,

2) what your competitors are ranking for,

3) a few ideas of unique keywords (long tail keywords/long tail queries) that no one is ranking for, and

4) how AI tools currently describe your category, your competitors, and (hopefully) your product.
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You will leverage this analysis for marketing copywriting everywhere it is required.

Now you are ready to start building the foundation of a high-performance VMS marketing funnel.
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Building the Foundation of a High-Performance VMS Marketing Funnel

It's useful to think about your inbound marketing efforts by visualizing a marketing funnel. We begin at the bottom of the marketing funnel so you can "accept" inbound interest and convert leads who find you.
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Establishing or Updating Your Brand and Brand Assets

Generally, inbound interest will end up on your website, but also through the various online profiles your company has such as online review sites, social media company pages, and the like. Quadshift aims to have our companies looking sharp and consistently present themselves, compellingly, in all locations where they can attract interest. A brand refresh, a review of all customer-facing materials, and generating and creating online profiles and accounts on all relevant online channels are first on the hit list.

This includes:

1. A Comprehensive Brand Guide. Logos, fonts, and colors. A short description, long description, and tagline(s) for the business and its products.
2. Sales and Marketing Collateral: Standardized email signatures, sales materials, presentations, business cards, conference materials, proposal documents, and all other customer-facing materials.
3. Your Website: This is a critical component. Your website is the location where most prospective customers will learn about and contact your business. This deserves a separate discussion, which we outline in a separate article.
4. Social Media Assets: Linkedin, X, Google Business Profile, Facebook, Instagram, TicTok, Snapchat etc. Note that Facebook, Instagram, TicTok, and Snapchat accounts are not as relevant for business buyers so we may opt out of creating them right away, as you will unlikely have the bandwidth to use these accounts initially.
5. Online Business Software Review Sites: Capterra, Software Advice, Get App, Trust Pilot, G2, and Software Suggest. You also may not use these initially, but we do want to create these for future use.
6. Business Listings: Crunchbase, Pitchbook, DNB and BBB (Better Business Bureau). There are other business listing websites and many are industry-specific - we'd want to be there as well. Crunchbase and Pitchbook can often rank well in searches for your business name.‍
7. AI Discovery Readiness: Every asset listed above should be built with AI-powered discovery in mind. Your website, review site profiles, business listings, and social media descriptions should all contain clear, factual, plain-text statements about what your software does, who it serves, what problems it solves, and what category it belongs to. AI models pull from these descriptions when recommending products. Clever taglines and marketing language are fine for humans, but AI tools need specificity. "Seed management software for commercial seed producers that tracks lot purity, germination, origin, and regulatory compliance" is something an AI can recommend. "The smarter way to grow" is not. For a detailed guide on building a website optimized for both search engines and AI discovery, see Inbound Lead Gen 201.
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Where Quadshift Helps

Quadshift can execute this entire process with some feedback from the managers/operators/marketing teams of the business we acquire. We staff each new acquisition to tackle this within the first few months of closing. We do not adopt the marketing functions of the businesses we acquire, we help lay the foundation and work alongside the marketing staff at the specific company we are working with, similar to how an agency would.
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Next Steps: Getting In Front of Customers

Defining your ICP, conducting keyword research, and building strong marketing assets may not feel like “doing marketing”, but it’s some of the most important work you’ll do. If executed well, these foundational steps can significantly increase the volume and quality of inbound leads over time.

Once the foundation is in place, the next step is generating momentum. In Inbound Lead Gen 301: Sparking Inbound Momentum, I walk through the organic and paid strategies that help our companies get in front of the right buyers — from improving visibility on review sites and industry publications to prioritizing paid channels using a simple, high-impact framework.

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