Who you sell to, and why they care
Who you sell to
Picking a customer worth chasing, and knowing early when a deal is not one.
What is an ICP and how is it different from a persona? People use both words for the same thing.
An ICP describes the company you want as a customer: size, industry, what they already use, what has to be true for your product to matter. A perso...
We have about fifteen customers and they are all different. How do I find an ICP out of that?
Do not look at who bought, look at who is happy. Rank the fifteen by usage and by whether they would be annoyed if you disappeared, then take the t...
How do I qualify a deal properly instead of just hoping the enthusiastic person can buy?
Enthusiasm is not authority. Before you invest another hour, you want four things: a named pain the buyer can quantify, the person who controls the...
Half my pipeline is outside our ICP because those are the leads that came in. Do I chase them?
Chase them to learn, close them only if they close fast. Off-ICP deals are seductive because they are there and someone said yes to a meeting, and ...
How do I get the team to actually use the ICP instead of nodding at a slide and then doing what they want?
An ICP that lives in a deck is decoration. Make it operational: turn it into fields in the CRM, into the lead scoring, into the list an SDR is allo...
Should we sell to Indian SMBs, Indian enterprises, or skip India and go straight at US buyers?
Pick on payback and on where your product is genuinely better, not on prestige. Indian SMB gives volume, fast feedback and brutal price sensitivity...
How do the best companies keep their ICP sharp as they grow instead of letting it blur into everyone?
They re-derive it on a schedule from data they already have: which segments renew, which expand, which churn, which cost the most to serve. Then th...
When is it right to move upmarket, and how do the companies that pull it off actually do it?
Move when the demand is systematic, not when two large logos email you. The signal is a pattern of bigger accounts arriving on their own and hittin...