Breaking into GTM

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 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

4 resources, 1 India-specific, 4 link-checked.

✍️ Essay
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

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.

Bottom-up SaaS: A Model for Capital-Efficient Growth

From A.Capital by Ramu Arunachalam 15 min read

  • The median bottom-up company raised 70 million dollars (36 percent) less than the median top-down one, 122 million against 192 million.
  • Median net dollar retention was 135 percent for bottom-up companies versus 119 percent for top-down.
  • Median payback period was 17 months, 28 percent better than top-down peers.
  • Bottom-up companies traded at roughly twice the market cap (about 7 billion dollars against 3.2 billion).
Open acapital.com →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

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.

The Decision-Making Unit: The Who-is-Who of Your B2B Sales Process

From Disciplined Entrepreneurship (MIT) by Martin Giese and Matthias Hilpert 10 min read

  • Bill Aulet's decision-making unit has three primary roles: end user, champion, and primary economic buyer.
  • The champion wants the purchase to happen and may or may not be the person who will use the product.
  • Beyond the three, map influencers, veto powers, and the purchasing department, each of which can stall a deal.
Open d-eship.com →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

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.

A Guide to Positioning with Multiple Products, Segments and Personas

From aprildunford.substack.com by April Dunford 14 min read

  • April Dunford's view: multiple target segments rarely need separate positioning, because the differentiated capabilities are the same.
  • A single-product company does not need distinct company positioning and product positioning.
  • Position for the champion, since the champion is the only person who can make a deal happen while everyone else can kill it.
  • The simpler the positioning, the stronger it is and the easier it is for the team to make it real in the market.
Open aprildunford.substack.com →

Browse all 785 resources →

The same ground, at another level

How who you sell to reads from a different seat.

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 → 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 → 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 →

Terms in this answer

Ideal Customer Profile

People also ask

What is an ICP and how is it different from a persona? People use both words for the same thing. 4 → We have about fifteen customers and they are all different. How do I find an ICP out of that? 4 → How do I qualify a deal properly instead of just hoping the enthusiastic person can buy? 4 → Half my pipeline is outside our ICP because those are the leads that came in. Do I chase them? 5 → How do I get the team to actually use the ICP instead of nodding at a slide and then doing what they want? 4 → Should we sell to Indian SMBs, Indian enterprises, or skip India and go straight at US buyers? 5 →

Also in Starting Up

The same ground, over in Understand your customers, our Starting Up track.

How do I talk to customers without them just telling me what I want to hear? 23 → What is an ideal customer profile and how do I define mine? 24 →
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →