Who you sell to

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... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → 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... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → 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... Doing the work 4 resources → 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 ... Doing the work 5 resources → 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... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → 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... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → 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... How the best do it 4 resources → 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... How the best do it 5 resources → The person who uses our product every day is not the person who pays for it. Which one is the ICP? Neither, on their own. The ICP is the company you want, and inside it you have to name two people: the user who feels the pain and the buyer who ow... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Every deal seems to have five people in it. Who actually signs, and who am I wasting time on? In B2B almost nobody signs alone. You are usually dealing with a champion who wants it, an economic buyer who can release the money, a security or ... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → My list of target accounts is enormous and mostly cold. How do I find the ones that are ready to buy right now? Fit tells you who could buy. Timing tells you who will. The bridge between them is a trigger, some event that just made your problem urgent inside ... Doing the work 4 resources → Our CRM says we lose on price. I do not believe it. How do I find the real reason, and what does it say about who we should be selling to? Price is what a buyer says when they do not want to explain the real reason, and reps write it down because it is not their fault. The fix is ungla... Doing the work 3 resources → We are a marketplace with buyers on one side and sellers on the other. Which side is the ICP? Both eventually, but only one at a time, and it is whichever side is scarce. Pick the constrained side and make it your ICP for now, because the ot... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → We are winning in one segment. When is it right to add a second ICP, and how do I know we are not just bored? The honest signal is not excitement, it is repeatability. You have earned a second ICP when a rep who is not the founder can predictably find, win ... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How do the best companies replace ICP opinion with a scoring model built on their own data? They stop arguing about who the ideal customer should be and go and measure who it turned out to be. Pull your last fifty to a hundred closed won a... How the best do it 4 resources → We are opening a new market, the US or Southeast Asia or the Gulf. Do we carry the same ICP across or start again? Carry the problem, redo the profile. The job your product does usually travels, but company sizes, who owns the budget, what counts as expensive, h... How the best do it 5 resources →