Dusty can catch a scent during one of our walks and become completely committed to following it.
Business question: Is our ideal customer profile still the right target as the market and buyer priorities change?Leadership takeaway: Revisit the ICP with cross-functional evidence so the company focuses on customers it can win and serve well.Framework fit: Gauge. Measure the market, fit, urgency, and economics before choosing where to focus.Related article: This post is the article.
He does not stop to ask whether it is fresh, relevant, or likely to lead anywhere useful. He simply puts his nose down and starts pulling.
Companies do this too.
They define an ideal customer profile, put it into a strategy deck, and continue pursuing the same customers for years. Meanwhile, the product evolves, competitors reposition, budgets move, buyer priorities change, and new technologies alter what customers expect.
The market changes, but the ICP stays frozen in time.
That creates a costly problem. Marketing continues targeting accounts that appear to fit on paper. Sales keeps working opportunities that take too long to close. Product supports use cases that are not central to the company’s future. Customer success inherits customers who were never an ideal fit in the first place.
Subscribe to my SubStack page and get free resources to grow your business.
During Gauge, the first stage of my GROWTH Framework, we examine the market and begin turning a large theoretical market into something measurable and reachable.
During Reframe, we make the harder decision:
Who deserves our attention now?
Your ICP Is a Business Decision, Not a Marketing Exercise
An ideal customer profile should never be treated as a list of firmographic filters created only for campaign targeting.
It is a strategic statement about where your company believes it can create value, compete successfully, and produce healthy economics.
A strong ICP should reflect more than company size, industry, geography, and revenue.
It should account for what happens after an account enters the pipeline.
🐕 Which customers have the highest win rates?
🐕 Which customers move through the sales cycle fastest?
🐕 Which customers implement successfully?
🐕 Which customers adopt more of the product?
🐕 Which customers expand and renew?
🐕 Which customers generate attractive margins?
🐕 Which customers become advocates or strong reference accounts?
The answers may reveal that the customers you have historically targeted are not the customers you should prioritize next.
A segment can look attractive because it is large, recognizable, and easy to identify. But if those accounts take 18 months to close, require extensive customization, and rarely expand, they may not represent the best path to growth.
Conversely, a smaller segment may have a more urgent need, a shorter buying process, better product adoption, and stronger expansion potential.
The largest market is not automatically the best market.
Walk Your ICP Around the Block
This is another situation where I like to walk the dog.
Put the current ICP on a whiteboard. Then walk it around the block with marketing, sales, product, customer success, operations, and finance.
The first block should examine where you are winning.
Look at closed-won accounts and ask what they have in common. Study the problem they were trying to solve, the trigger that caused them to act, the people involved in the decision, and the proof that helped them choose you.
The second block should examine where you are struggling.
Look at lost opportunities, stalled deals, failed implementations, low-adoption customers, and accounts that did not renew. Ask whether the problem was execution or whether the customer was never a strong fit.
The third block should examine what has changed outside the company.
Buyer expectations may have shifted. A new regulation may have created urgency. AI may have changed the speed, intelligence, or automation buyers expect. Competitors may have commoditized a capability that once differentiated you. A use case that was previously secondary may now have the strongest urgency and problem-solution fit.
The fourth block should turn those findings into choices.
Decide which segments to prioritize, which use cases to lead with, which accounts to remove from active pursuit, and what evidence your team needs to prove that you can win.
That is how the dog gets walked. The discussion becomes a decision, and the decision becomes an operating plan.
TAM, TRM, and ICP Are Different
Many growth teams use TAM and ICP as if they describe the same market. They do not.
TAM is who could theoretically buy.
Your total addressable market may include every company that could possibly use your solution. It helps illustrate the size of the broader opportunity, but it does not tell your team where to concentrate its resources.
TRM is who you should realistically pursue right now.
Your total relevant market accounts for your current product, geographic reach, sales capacity, implementation model, brand credibility, integrations, pricing, and ability to support the customer.
TRM introduces reality into the market calculation.
ICP is who you must be able to win.
The ICP represents the customers with the combination of need, urgency, fit, buying ability, and economics that gives your company a credible right to win.
This distinction matters because a company can have a very large TAM, a much smaller relevant market, and an even more focused ideal customer profile.
That is not a weakness. It is focus.
Check out exactly what I mean here.
Positioning Must Change When the ICP Changes
Updating the ICP without revisiting positioning leaves the job half finished.
If the target customer changes, the story must change too.
Generic positioning often develops when a company tries to address too many audiences at once. The message becomes broad enough to apply to everyone, but specific enough to compel no one.
For every priority customer, your positioning should answer five questions:
🐕 What important problem are we uniquely equipped to solve?
🐕 Why does this problem matter to this customer now?
🐕 What alternatives will the buyer consider?
🐕 Where are we meaningfully different?
🐕 What evidence gives the buyer a reason to believe us?
The answer cannot be a list of product features.
A buyer needs to understand the business consequence of the problem, the urgency of acting, and why your solution represents a better choice than the available alternatives.
Your Competition Is Bigger Than Your Competitor List
Companies often build competitive positioning around a handful of vendors that appear in analyst reports or sales opportunities.
Those competitors matter, but they are only part of the picture.
Your buyer may also compare you with:
🐕 An internal process
🐕 A legacy platform
🐕 A collection of point solutions
🐕 A manual workaround
🐕 Another budget priority
🐕 Doing nothing
The status quo is often the most dangerous alternative because it feels familiar and requires no new budget, implementation, or political risk.
Your positioning therefore has two jobs.
First, it must show why your company is a better choice than other vendors.
Second, it must show why maintaining the current approach is no longer acceptable.
If your message only explains what the product does, it may never overcome the buyer’s instinct to wait.
Use Evidence to Earn the Right to Win
Strong positioning requires proof.
If you claim that your solution is faster, show the implementation timeline.
If you claim that it reduces operating costs, quantify the savings.
If you claim that customers expand, show how adoption grows from the first use case into additional teams, products, or workflows.
Useful evidence can include:
🐕 Customer outcomes
🐕 Implementation timelines
🐕 Adoption and expansion patterns
🐕 Renewal performance
🐕 Before-and-after metrics
🐕 Customer stories
🐕 Independent validation
The evidence should match the priority of the buyer.
A technical buyer may need proof of integration, security, or performance. An executive buyer may care more about financial impact, risk reduction, speed to value, or organizational scalability.
Reframe Forces Leadership to Choose
An updated ICP is not a longer list of accounts.
It is a set of choices about where the company will compete and where it will stop spending time.
That means choosing:
🐕 The customers with the strongest need
🐕 The problems with the greatest urgency
🐕 The use cases the product solves particularly well
🐕 The segments where the company has credible differentiation
🐕 The proof that makes the positioning believable
🐕 The accounts and opportunities the company will no longer prioritize
This can be uncomfortable. Every excluded segment can feel like revenue being left behind.
But attempting to target every possible buyer usually spreads marketing investment, sales attention, product resources, and leadership focus too thinly.
Focus does not shrink the opportunity. It increases your ability to capture it.
The goal is not to chase every scent in the market.
The goal is to recognize the right scent, give the entire organization the same signal, and build a coordinated plan for following it.
That is an updated scent profile.
Dog walked.
In the next episode, we will decide which route can get us there: ABM, inbound, product-led growth, partners, lifecycle marketing, sales-led growth, or the right combination of motions.
Watch the video here.
Subscribe to my newsletter and learn more about how to grow your business.
