Ip
ICP & Persona Definition
ICP & Persona Definition
In B2B sales, you're not selling to one single person. You're selling to a committee of six to thirteen.
You likely only have a persona drafted for one type of buyer. Unfortunately, it's not the one who killed your last deal. .
The Problem
Most companies define their ideal customer once, in a slide, and never operationalize it. Sales targets one list, marketing targets another, and the pipeline fills with accounts that were never going to close. Meanwhile the person who actually kills the deal (quality, procurement, finance) was never written down at all.
Every quarter that stays true, you pay for it in wasted outreach, stalled deals, and ineffective marketing nobody believes.
What we will build
- Firmographic ICP with explicit disqualifiers, not just qualifiers
- Buying group map: every role, their veto power, their risk
- Persona set built for group consensus, not individual flattery
- Jobs-to-be-done and trigger events per role
- CRM field structure so the ICP is enforceable, not aspirational
What Changes
- Sales and marketing stop arguing about lead quality, because quality finally has a definition
- Content starts addressing the stakeholder who was quietly blocking you
- Forecast accuracy improves because qualification stops being a vibe
- Outbound lists get smaller and convert harder
Why This Pays
This is the cheapest element to build and the most expensive to skip. Every downstream element (targeting, messaging, content, outbound) inherits its accuracy from this one. Get it wrong and you're scaling waste.