The person who uses our product every day is not the person who pays for it. Which one is the ICP?
The short answer
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 owns the budget that pain sits in. If you only sell to users you collect a lot of affection and very few purchase orders. If you only sell to buyers you win a deal nobody adopts and lose it quietly at renewal. So write the ICP as the account profile, then write the user's pain in the buyer's language, which is almost always time, money, risk or headcount.
Go deeper, your way
4 hand-picked resources, 1 India-specific, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
🎧 Podcast
✓ Link checkedIndiaFreeIntermediate
Why we picked it
Makhija takes apart the received wisdom that Indian customers will not pay, using real Unicommerce numbers, and is specific about who inside an Indian SMB or enterprise actually approves spend. It is the antidote to defining your ICP as everyone except India.
Why we picked it
The clearest explanation of what changes when you deliberately sell to the user and route around the economic buyer, and what it costs you later. Useful because it treats user-led and buyer-led as two different businesses, not two words for the same customer.
Why we picked it
Names the roles precisely (end user, champion, economic buyer, influencer, veto power, procurement) so you stop calling everyone a decision maker. It is the one page to keep open while you map an account.
Why we picked it
Dunford's rule that you build for the champion rather than for every persona in the account settles the buyer versus user argument faster than any framework. It also stops teams building four sets of messaging they will never maintain.
