Unlocking Greater Marketing Potential: Operationalizing Your ICP
Justin Anovick, Former CPO/CMO at Syndigo, gives us a masterclass in operationalizing your ICP.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faze on CEO of Cast Me in Studios.
And today I am joined by a very special guest, Justin.
How are you?
>> I am doing great.
Thanks for having me, Onion.
>> Excited to chat today.
It's going to be a little bit of a different type of an episode
because you're not sitting in the sea right now.
You've just left the proverbial seat
and there's some new exciting things on the horizon.
So we're getting Justin in between the two worlds of marketing
and whatever's next, which is always a fun time to think about
all the stuff that you've done previously in your marketing roles.
>> Yeah, usually it's just in time.
I guess it's just in between, but there's no real phrase for that.
So we'll just move on.
>> Indeed.
So you were recently dual-headed as a chief product and marketing officer.
You spent a lot of time in product specifically with stints in and out of
product marketing and marketing and all that stuff.
So we wanted to dive in today about product marketing as it fits in,
marketing broadly, and specifically about one point about the ICP,
which we'll get into here a bunch.
So why did you want to talk about ICPs?
>> Yeah, so before I got into the seat as a CMO,
I had spent time running product marketing in addition to product,
some organizations had product in marketing or in product,
but I spent the last 10 years running product organizations.
And until I actually got into the CMO seat,
it was a struggle to understand the inability to focus,
the inability to actually take ideal customer profile and
do something with it beyond just marketing.
And until I was able to see kind of the entire life cycle of what was needed,
it was a head scratcher for me.
And then the moment that I really got in CMO where you're starting to
operationalize it, there was an aha moment, and
it's really just that lack of alignment in most people in the organization feel
it's a pure marketing exercise.
So yeah, I think that that is one of the biggest struggles that I see a lot
of organizations who I speak with, if you have the data to be able to put
together
your ICP, what do you actually do with it next?
And it's more than just a target addressable market, there's more to it than
that.
>> I think understanding your ICP is one of the most important things that
marketers
often don't fully have a good concept or understanding of.
Like if you were to sit down and take 10 marketers and
two of them are by far and away the best, like top performers,
I guarantee you that they know their ICP is the absolute best.
They know their market the best, they know the triggers that make people buy
the best.
And they know all those things.
I would bet my whole podcast on that.
And yet we kind of don't.
And I'm curious like, why do you think that is,
like why do you think that so many people struggle to understand the ICP and
then we'll get into operationalizing it here in a second?
>> Yeah, so from myself personally, what I've seen,
I've gone through the exercise of helping to define the ICP three times in the
last
four years for really two different businesses.
And it's the inability to actually access and secure the data you need in order
to
make those decisions.
And then two is actually the ability to narrow down and
make the decision and stick to it.
And certainly the data that you,
if you had the luxury of having historical data and customers,
then that's great.
If you don't, there's something different.
But if you have that, just being able to go and understand the sick codes,
the market, the size, the company, what your revenue is.
And in a lot of organizations, it's in disparate locations.
And each of the times it took maybe three, four months working to finance,
very deliberately to access that data.
So I think that a lot of organizations I see,
they just haven't put the time, effort, money, manpower behind it in order to
actually define and understand the ICP.
And so certainly each of those three times,
one of the hardest things to operationalize it was to explain to the
organization
starting with marketing what actually ICP meant,
what targeted adjustable market meant, but what service obtainable market meant
and what we needed to do.
And it was eye opening to realize how to your point,
most even marketers didn't really, they understood the concept,
but they hadn't actually operationalize it or used it before.
Okay, so Zuma now, why do marketers need to do this in the first place?
Why do companies need to do this in the first place?
Everybody has a limited budget and you have to need to figure out what to do
with that budget.
And you can be a generalized organization where you can go after anybody.
Basically, you wait for it, you're reactive, they contact you,
and then you use your budget to contact them.
Or for most businesses, you need to be proactive.
So where do you spend your capital?
Folks understand ABM, account-based marketing,
but really without the ability for the ICP part and then the other pieces
that we'll get into, you're spending a considerable amount of budget.
Your click-through rates need to be higher, you need to spend less per lead
essentially or higher quality leads.
You need to convert more, you definitely see a lot of organizations,
just the ones that I've been at, lower win rates because you're basically
contacting everybody, even though they might not sit into your ICP.
So it's really, how do you effectively spend the budget that you have access to
In a much more concerted way.
And I guess we should define, what do you define as an ICP?
Yeah, so I always look at the four terms, ICP,
so your ideal customer profile.
So that could be the accounts, the size, region, market, size of business,
revenue, or employees.
A variety of factors that basically say, this is how you define your ideal
customer profile.
So if you're a FinTech, you're obviously going to focus on FinTech.
If you're higher ed, you're going to focus on higher ed.
Well, that's a little bit more complicated for non-vertically oriented B2B's.
And so it's saying we have a greater chance of success in these two areas or
seven areas.
So that ICP is the first part to identify where you've had success historically
Where you get into the TAM target addressable market is the totality of those
businesses.
How many are there in the universe, in those markets, and so on and so forth,
service addressable market is you say you want to be in a certain region or
certain market,
service obtainable market is really who has budget now, who's buying, who is in
a replacement
cycle. And so those four terms, if you will, define what you're looking for.
And so starting out this process, what's the first step?
One, getting alignment at the ELT, the executive team, and to the board.
It was funny, when I first really went into it on my own, I was at a board
meeting.
I knew that we needed to go through a process. Who's our customer?
Where do we have success? That's what the board kept asking.
I went through a process where I was literally going through and manually
notating our entire customer list of like 8,000 customers, what category, what
market,
all of that. And the board's like, hey, we can give you some help. I'm like, oh
, that's great,
you know, because otherwise I need more Saturdays and Sundays in order to do
this.
And so it was really to answer, hey, we have this budget and our win rates
matter, retention matters,
all of that matters. We need to say who we are. And that's really the first
true intro that I had
was that occurred beyond marketing. Who do our partners? Who do we need to
partner with to implement?
What does product need to actually build? Which is somewhat logical, but it's
usually the other
way around where product is dictating based on n number of customers that we
have versus the
opportunity in the market. And so it was really, you know, for myself
personally getting deeply
ingrained in it was about five years ago when I was running a product team
where the chairman
of insight partners just kept asking me, who's our customer? Who's our customer
? Who's our customer?
And had to go through the research project to really look at it in a way that
removed anecdotes
and emotions and all that using the data that we have. Next step was, you know,
there's the view of
the past, but then how do you have a portal into the future? You can't
necessarily decide your
ICP or the SAM, let's say based off of entirely what you did in the past, right
? There are factors
that made you successful, maybe in a certain market, a certain size, certain
area. Let's say
your mid market, selling mainly mid market, but you know you now have the
ability to go into enterprise
or vice versa. And so there also needs to be that portal into the future. So
the first one really is
to agree as an ELT and even a board to say, these are the markets, this is the
size, this is the ideal
customer profile that we're going to go after. Here's the pros and cons of it.
And most importantly,
here's what we can expect. If we, you know, generated 100 leads instead of, you
know, winning, you know,
22% of them, we can expect to win 34%. Here's how we can spend less for, you
know, achieve more
with the same amount of budget. And so it's really ELT board level agreement to
say, this is what
we're doing. The next step is educating the entire business as to what it means
for them. What does
it mean for marketing, SDRs, sales, product, partners, customer service, all of
the different
groups and what it means for them? Because ultimately at some point in the 18
to 24 month project of
implementing something, somebody, everybody's going to be impacted. They might
not be impacted at the
moment, but really at some point they're going to be impacted. So it's really
agreement. And then,
you know, starting to communicate and educate folks on basically barely what it
is and what it could
mean for them. So then it's like, okay, cool. And then most of the time, if it
's, if it, you know,
failures occur when communication or educating different teams is like, you don
't come back to
them to say, okay, this is what you need to do. So it's really a roadmap of the
different elements
that have to occur. What do you actually have to do to align accounts? Do we
need to actually buy
new software in order to help address the Psalm and to address the
organizations that you want to go
after? You know, a lot of it does start in marketing. But if SDRs or VDRs and
sales aren't aligned in
the first pass, we could get a great opportunity, pass it, you know, to SDRs,
and they have no idea
what's going on because they weren't educated or sales gets it, and they don't
treat it with even
more respect. And so like that first pass of marketing, you know, really
focusing, creating assets,
developing the approach, and then aligning with SDRs and sales is really a key
thing. Because the
worst thing is that you could get great reaction and, you know, folks down the
line didn't get
educated or weren't involved. And so they don't really, you know, they let it
pass because they
didn't see anything interesting about it, let's say. Yeah. And I want to get
back to the board
here for a second. So years ago, I didn't exercise like this, not as
sophisticated as you just,
and I won't say I won't. But part of my rudimentary calculations were such that
it took so much longer
to close a certain demographic. In this case, it was, it was like a higher ed
type
organization that had like ridiculously long sales cycles and then ridiculously
low
ACVs. And my proposition to the leadership team was like, we shouldn't we
should just not go after
this. We should just like completely bail on this because our sales reps spend,
you know,
whatever 20 calls to try to close this, you got to close it. It's like with the
state or whoever,
which is super complex. And, and like, there's not really like a lane and
expand thing here,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. My question here is like, in your experience,
and talking with your peers and stuff like that about talking to boards, is
this something that
they want to be doing or interested in doing? Do they care about this stuff? Do
they fight over
who these things are? Like, how should marketing leaders position this
information to the board
to get, you know, buy in based off of this? Or should it be more collaborative
and say like,
hey, I'm chucking this all to you as well to say like, what should we do? Or
should we should the
marketer be more prescriptive? I would say that depending on what stage the
investment is from
the board or, you know, the investors, maybe they're done a high level analysis
on their own. If it
was a recent investment, or, you know, have done some work on their own, I
think where the struggle
gets is or where struggle occurs is that operationalization of it. And so like
my second day in my last
role, it was a board meeting. And the very first question of the chairman's
mouth was, when are we
going to see the ICP? And that's what kind of started me on the process to say,
oh, cool, like,
there's an opportunity here to do something. So, you know, came back in full of
months later,
reported on the progress. But I would say that, you know, looking at the, who
does the
MARTEC landscape, but like there's limited, there's so much noise and there's
limited ability to
get through that there has to be some targeting for more mature businesses,
right, for sure,
when you have that opportunity to use the data from the past. So I would say
that either the
board expects it, either, or they'd be unbelievably welcome to hear that there
is a project going on.
And not to say that I've used the board as the reason that we're doing it
because it should be
beyond that. Like there's usually what I've seen in talking to other, you know,
CPOs, CMOs,
is that there's usually an expectation and understanding. It's how deep do you
go into it and what is
the allocation of the budget that then becomes the conversation versus starting
there and identifying
what it is. Is this something that the CMO should own? Should the CPO own it?
Should it be joint?
Should it be owned by the CEO? You know, it's so funny. I've kind of gone back
and forth and then
I mentioned you've gone back and forth. That's why. Right, exactly. Yeah. I
just keep chasing
who's supposed to own the ICP and I'm like, let's do both. And so I was just
reading product operations
by Melissa Perry and Denise Tillis earlier and came across the page where they
're saying, you know,
the product research and product operations team needs to be the one
responsible. Oh, that's white
out. But it needs to be the one responsible for helping to address this. And I
'm like,
I don't really know who should do it. There should be a research team, finance
needs to be involved.
It usually impacts the CMO, you know, the marketing team way more on the front
end for businesses that
I've been a part of because the product is a longer tail. But I would say that
it's really
whoever has the passion and the ability to get it across the line. I think if
the CMO doesn't own
it, there is a struggle of it not getting adopted. And then it's pointless. If
the CPO owns it and
doesn't get it adopted, our CMO owns it, maybe the CPO doesn't adopt it. I
think that there might
be a little less risk there because that's, you know, a longer tail. You're not
necessarily going
in and building a bunch of new product capabilities up front. You're working
with customers. So there's
a little bit longer time. So I think it's like the, you know, wherever that
emotional attachment
needs to occur, I feel it's stronger on this, on the marketing side, you know,
than it is initially
on the product side. But again, like I do feel that the entire organization
needs to get behind it.
And every ELT member needs to, you know, promote it and push it as much as
possible. But marketing
usually starts with the most amount of activities, I would say. Do you find
that there's a lot of
times where people will do a positioning exercise? And before they've done an I
CP or they have an
outdated ICP or something like that, because I find that sometimes when you,
you talk to folks who
have done a recent positioning exercise, but they, what they part of what they
find is that they
don't necessarily have the most accurate ICP either. I have been a part of
multiple
iterations where that happens where hey, let's do a positioning exercise. What
's the unique
selling propositions? What's the, you know, our new messaging? We need to
differentiate. And then,
you know, when I was in pre sales for my first half of my career, I was always
for it because I
always felt like, hey, I knew what was happening. And let's go through that.
And then, you know,
recently, I just basically say, I don't know what I'm supposed to build. I don
't know what I'm supposed
to market. I don't know how we're supposed to answer some of these questions as
to what we're
doing with our budget. If we can't answer that fundamental question, it's all
guesses. It's all
anecdotes. It's all emotion at that point. So if we want to be data driven,
there's only one way in
my brain to do it, which is to do the ICP. Then once you know that, to me, then
the positioning
exercise becomes infinitely easier, because you're, you know, who are your
constituents,
your personas, the ideal customer, and who isn't. And so that's Peter for your
messaging and that
positioning towards that, that ICP. But I've been a part of it so many times
where it's the opposite.
And in the end, it feels like it was a good exercise, but it would never last
as long as it
needed to last. And we redid it every nine 12 months, I felt, when we didn't
have the clear ICP.
Well, and I think that part of it is that you, you kind of should be revisiting
it every night
at 12 months, it just shouldn't foundationally change like massive amount,
which is part of the
problem that I think it should be, it should be revisited for sure, but like a
completely
good to your point, a completely new foundation. And all of those exercises
were based off of the
last five, 10 big deals that we want. So that's where the emotional anecdotes
come in in some ways,
is it's purely based off of just whatever happened last week or last month or
last quarter.
And that's removing the rationale is the win rates, retention rates, all of
those other things,
if you're just purely basing it off of the interest we got in the market and
the new deals.
I kind of touched on this earlier with my little anecdote. A question that
often can come up is like,
well, what about blank that with 21% of our businesses, these people, and are
you saying we
should just ignore them, we should have no marketing for them, and we have no
whatever, like what about
when you come across something like that, where you have that fringe use case,
like our product is
for marketing and product people that are at this size company, as far as the,
and then for some
reason, we got a bunch of lawyers that also buy it, you know, like something
like that, where you're
like, oh, and then there's this out of left field sort of customer.
Yeah, so the way that I operated that, you know, purely from a marketing
perspective of where you
allocate your budget is ultimately, you want to get into 80% you spend on ICP,
but it takes a little
bit of time to evolve there. So there is like, you know, as long as there's an
idea communicated as to
what the process looks like, it basically comes down to, you know, there's a
proceed at your own
risk, and you're not going to get the same air cover that you would if it's ICP
, until we have the
opportunity to replace all of those lawyer opportunities with the ones that fit
into our ICP,
proceed at your own risk, might do one off things to help support if there's
multiple deals.
It's really, you know, elite scoring should be different. The view of the
forecasting and
pipeline should be different, but at the same time, we also need to make our
quarterly numbers,
so there has to be some effort. But as long as on the upfront to answer that
question exactly,
what if it occurs outside of the ICP, what are you guys doing? And it's, hey,
we're not going to
provide the same air cover, or we'll never get to be able to focus on the true
ICP. I think that I
have a little bit of credibility just because of my pre-sales background and
like, I know I
can't replace those opportunities yet, right? Like early in the process, like,
we have a bunch of
those lawyer opportunities that we're working, are you saying I should, you
know, you know,
do away with those and say, no, just be prepared that we're going to win 21%
like he said versus 32
or whatever the numbers end up being. And we need to just understand the impact
to the business
by chasing those, but I can't replace those just yet because the full machine
isn't working. And I
think that it's a little different being a salesperson and you only have one
opportunity,
you're working maybe, and that's that lawyer opportunity that doesn't fit into
the ICP and
then you get frustrated and angry, but at least being communicated to resolve
some of the issues
that you know, know you're not going to be, you know, pounding on a door. You
got an answer, you
might not like the answer, but at least you can understand what's happening.
Yeah, and to your
point earlier that if those lawyer opportunities only close at a 21%, but their
average deal size is,
you know, three times more, then there's problem that that would have been that
would have been
taken into account when you did the ICP original. Exactly. So it's like, hey,
we've already done
all the math on this stuff. And if that person's like, well, but this deal
could be three times
bigger, it's like, yeah, by all means, go close it is a way to say like, of
course, go close the deal,
but just know that this is not a well that is going to be easily, you know,
coming back to or
like you said, you don't have the air cover, you don't have marketing support,
you don't have,
you know, all the case studies and all the other things that the rest of our
company is building,
because we can only do 100 case studies a year and none of those are going to
be the lawyer or
exactly. And exceptions to every rule for sure. I mean, suddenly, if you see
there's four and pipe and,
you know, but the TAM or SOM is so small. Yeah, but to your point, like, all of
that should have
been answered, you can only go a certain extent, right? Like, hey, you're the
six, seven that we're
going to focus on, we're not going to focus all those at once. There were some
that were borderline,
we're just choosing that, hey, look, those just don't have a big TAM or, you
know, or they're not
in market at the moment. So we're going to leave those to the side. We'll
revisit again every year,
but like, from a reps perspective, they have an opportunity now, they don't
care, they want to
close it. That's all they have that they're working. How do we provide support
as an organization? And I
think the worst thing a leader could do is be like, sorry, sucks for you, dude.
Right? Like,
it's like, hey, we'll help support as best we can. We could do this, this, and
this, but like,
it's just not the same level of effort that we're going to get with something
that's in a different
market that does fall into our ICP. So you mentioned the different, you know,
deal sizes and percent
to close and all those things of having like sort of different dashboards,
different pipelines,
different things like that. I feel like for most CROs that they're not looking
at things in sort
of like those different ways, but I feel like a lot of CROs are just going to
kind of shove it
all into one pipeline and not do that stuff. What do you think about like how
much within the
different personas within that ICP and all that, like how different, how
different should those
pipelines be looking and how much should we be like putting credence into that?
I mean, I think massively in order to drive to forecast and to hit numbers,
like you have to
have all the data points. And just because it's a confidence level of the rep
or you hit, you know,
five of the six medic elements that it's, you know, it's categorized as 80%
chance of closing,
that's not taking everything into account. So I've advocated, pushed, developed
the lead scoring
to help make sure that it's adjusted as a part of the forecasting and without
it. So something
with an ICP should get, you know, if it's squarely into the ICP, you should get
score of 100, let's say,
right, if it's outside of ICP, it should start off with next score of 50 or
whatever the numbers are,
but then there's nuances to it, right? So you could say financial services
industry check,
you could say revenue size of organization check, but you could say digital
maturity
X, meaning they don't fit our digital maturity. Well, that should be adjusted
in the scoring,
and that should be left up to the analysis and investigation of the SDRs and
the reps to determine
if they are an actual fit. But all of that should be adjusted into the forecast
. I mean,
I've been a part of many organizations where you, you know, hit or miss and,
you know, you don't
entirely know why you're not entirely looking at the full picture of what is in
pipeline. And,
you know, it should be, it has to be in order for it to function appropriately
in my opinion.
Back to operationalizing the ICP. What do you see people doing right? What do
you see people doing
wrong? I've had the luxury of being able to talk to the different portfolio
companies of the
different investors to really get an understanding. And the number one thing
was measuring success
too early or measuring success too late. And what I mean by that is that like
you have to commit to,
you know, 20 steps to be able to operationalize, you know, before you can get
to the point of
measuring success. And then what are the first steps of measuring success? Is
it click-through
rates? Is it, you know, leads converted, you know, the SQ, the MQLs to SQLs, is
it deals closed? And
so having that agreement up front. And so when I went through it this last time
, you know, put
together a whole flow diagram and basically said, these are the points that we
're measuring
success. Let's talk about that because we're going to have to commit a lot of
effort and resources
before we get to that point of actually knowing if this is working or not. And
I think that the
expectation is, of course, if you're thinking of agile development, well, you
can check along the
way to see your progress. Well, that is the case here. But that first true
measurement
is a little bit further than most execs or sometimes boards want to know. So it
's hard to go in,
you know, a month after operationalizing it in marketing and getting all the
assets,
the programs, the campaigns, everything set up appropriately and all the
different applications
and say we have success yet. It's kind of like, hey, this is the progress that
we've made. We'll
use that as success. But that's the number one thing is the arguments
discussions around when
you measure success. And it's usually a little later than what most folks
inherently feel they want.
Where does attribution fit into that? So initially, that's one of the points of
measurement of,
you know, what are the different campaigns, assets, different programs, whether
it's,
you know, sales events, whether it's webinars, whether it's trade shows,
how are we looking at that? And we just never had the applications to be able
to support
multi-level attribution. So it became a little bit more complicated to look at
it. But we said,
we were going to measure, we were going to start looking at every step that
that asset or program
or campaign or event was touching and basically doing an experiment, an A/B
test. We did something
generalized. We did something for ICP and we can closely relate those. But the
attribution has
always been a difficult thing. And I've read so many things and talked to so
many people that say,
do it, don't do it, that, you know, my head goes, you know, spins a little bit.
But really,
we agree that we said, hey, every everything that we're creating, we want to
try to figure out how
to measure. I mean, the best example is we launched a campaign, what was the
click-through rate,
right? Like that's attribution, but it hasn't converted into an MQL or even SQL
at that point.
And then we know that there's going to be multiple other steps along the way.
And some of that is just noise at a certain point.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you put, you know, two ads with people on bikinis
and swim trunks
on there, like you're probably going to have a higher click rate, you know what
I mean? So it's
like obviously- Right, like if they were us, right? That's how you're saying?
That's what I'm saying. You and I are in bikinis and trunks.
But no, I- Hopefully nobody was into this over lunch or dinner.
Yeah, no, right. Or has Google readily available?
But I think that part of the problem is that you get into this entire ICP
initiative, then you do your positioning exercise and you're like, all right,
this is our key
differentiator. Our competitors have this, this and this, and we have this and
they don't, and we're
going to position around this. And you go to mark with that and you do all that
stuff. And then
your attribution is horrible. Like, so you're like, yeah, we did all this work.
And you're like,
does it work? And you're like, I don't know. And like, I, you know, we see this
a lot with, uh,
when we're making a video series or a podcast series with someone because we'll
sit down and
be like, all right, who's your ice peep? Who are we going after? They're like,
all right,
it's this, this, this, this, and this. You're like, okay, well, who's the, who
's the most
important one that we like, we can only make a show for one person who should
be first. Yeah.
And they're like, I don't know. You're like, okay, not a great start, but like,
we'll, we'll
pick one and then we pick one, we do, you know, all this other stuff. And they
're like, all right,
well, as we got to tie this whole thing back to pipeline, how do you do
attribution? They're like,
we do first touch. Really. I will never going to win with this initiative. You
're doing first
touch, you know, or whatever. I'm just saying that. But like, you're like, okay
, well, we did
all this work to get to the point where at the most important point of like,
what turns
people saying, hey, you know, I never heard of this company before to, oh, I
know who you are
to, hey, if I'm going to buy this solution, they should be on the slide to, hey
, they're,
they're on the slide and they're, they're the preferred option. Like, if you're
not measuring,
what are the things that are driving those, those, like light bulb moments,
then why do you do all
the other stuff in the first place other than just like pounding people's heads
in with the
sales materials? Yeah, I mean, like, when we would put the ROI together of a
program that says we're,
you know, go after ICP, don't go after ICP. I mean, there's a litany of those,
I mean, from
click through rates to general activities to, you know, certainly NQLs to SQLs
to win rates to
close deals to ASP and ultimately at the end of the day, the equation is
absolutely, you know,
win more, a higher percentage of opportunities at a higher ASP. But as we know,
I mean, a lot of
businesses, I mean, a lot of that, that I've been a part of the nine to 12 to
15 month sales
cycles, right? So you need some of those interim measurements. And I think that
the, you know,
that's where the data becomes a little bit of a struggle is that we don't have
this historical
level of data of the things that we want to look at, right? Like, you have
everything from
website activity to search results to click through rates, all of those
different things. And so,
you know, there does have to be some, you know, hippo or gut decisions that say
, hey, you know,
this is an important thing. But this is where the port codes of these other,
you know, investors,
you know, the investors of the business that I've been a part of, you know,
learning from them,
certainly learning from the group, and then understanding the appetite of the
investors
to, you know, and where they've had success and where the pitfalls. I mean,
those are where the
best board meetings and conversations with the board and direction really occur
is that that's
where those guesses in a way have to occur or opinions, because you're missing
some of those
inherent mid level data points before it actually gets interesting.
Are you having conversations like, you know, like, we have to be focused on the
direct, like,
director level engineers at this size company. And the other person's like, it
should be CIOs.
And you're like, no, it needs to be director level. And like, things like that.
And they're like,
but CIOs sign the dotted line. But directors are the ones who are going to, you
know,
primarily do all the work, you know, stuff like that. I mean, are you getting
that granular in the
ICP conversations? Or is that stuff that is a little bit further down?
I want to love the different voices that you're doing. And it's like, my kids,
like, use it
my voice like, but yeah, so like the persona, which I didn't mention plays a
critical role. And so
we ended up separating into buyer budget user personas. And so if we're
actually able to be
between some of those, right? So at the end of the day, you know, the budget
holder, of course,
you need to accommodate them at certain point, but they're usually not the ones
who were,
you know, looking at the campaigns, but we need something a little further down
in the sales cycle.
But the buyer and the user are, you know, to your point, like, that's where
those, you know,
puppet shows usually occur. And, you know, how do you address both of those? Or
that's where you
start doing the A/B testing and earlier in the cycle, which one res, which one
are you resonating
more? We can start gauging who's actually, you know, looking at these things by
targeting them,
we ended up acquiring six cents and use that to really help us identify and use
the persona
differences in the campaigns. And it makes a huge difference. And each market
ended up being different
is the problem. So it can't just be a blanket, hey, it's CIO for everything. It
's CIO in this
market, but it's a CDO in this market. But it's actually a director and an
enterprise because
this is usually not a line item based on the size that's actually, they don't
even care any higher
up. So it like differentiates based off of that ICP sometimes. Actually,
yeah, we, yeah, we, I mean, we've seen that with our, with our shows where you
have like our show
rise of rev ops that we do, you have rev ops leaders that are like literally
the head of revenue
operations, single person I see. And you have someone who's head of revenue
operations, 25%
team, right? And it's like totally different, you know, thing. And I mean,
obviously, we all know
that stuff. But but then once you see it in the information, and you're like,
Oh, actually,
you know, who is buying it and all that in titles, I think we get very caught
up in titles,
especially C level titles, where it's like, you know, the CIO. I mean, and
there's just huge
fluctuations like the CIO of we did this show named driving a lot of shows. But
but we did this,
but it's interesting because I think it's all this persona stuff. We do the
show cruising altitude,
partner with first step, shout out to the good people first step. And the first
two seasons,
we did only companies that were, I think 30,000 or more employees, like that,
that those are the
only people that the types of companies we were talking about. Because as we
did all this discovery,
was basically like, if you're in a company of 30,000 or more people, you kind
of don't even
see yourself as like, like you would never take notes from a 2000 person
company. You're like,
yeah, I mean, I'd eat a 2000 person company for lunch and not even install a
room for dessert.
And so, and then you'd have like, oh, like the CIO of a 250,000 person company.
And they're like,
they don't even see themselves in any way like a 20,000 person company. So they
're only looking
for like behemoth type companies. And those are just those little differences
that make all the
difference when you're creating a marketing initiative. We're like, well, we
sell to CMOs. And you're
like, well, that's CMO thinks about your problem with four minutes of their
entire year,
whereas the CMO of the 400 person company thinks about it like four hours a
week, you know,
yeah, absolutely. That persona makes a massive difference based off of that,
you know, size,
of business, revenue, all that stuff. We also started really focusing on the
digital maturity.
So, and we like, there's no formula, no easy way to really do a digital
maturity. But we basically
said, are they buying products that are equivalent to ours, cost wise, are they
using free ones,
or are they somewhere in the middle? And you're able to research that with
built with or zoom in
out of, or, you know, any of those tools. And so we basically said, okay, that
's kind of the tie
breaker. We know that we're, you know, a higher digitally mature required
solution,
let's say, and so kind of weed out some of those other ones to your point. They
're not even like
higher mature customers, or at like step three out of five, whereas low mature,
at like step zero,
they don't even know how to get off the ground. And so the conversation is
completely different
instead of why you need this thing, or why you should care, and identifying
reasons that,
you know, maybe precede even to the point of acquiring software. And so that
digital maturity
becomes that extra layer after that persona. So yeah, any other things that are
pitfalls,
or things people are doing right or wrong, or things that y'all did right or
wrong?
I mean, I think of the scars that I have are really about, you know, the
organizational alignment.
I've seen it where everybody seems to agree, but then doesn't operate with it.
And then you
basically wasted all of the time and effort. And it's really, you know, it is
about cross-organization.
It isn't just about marketing. It may start there. But if the whole, let's say
ELT
is aware, they need to be aligned, right? But I would ask almost weekly, are we
still aligned?
Are we still doing this? Do you still buy into it personally? And I think that
I got to a point,
and I get to a point of I got to get that emotional attachment. Like, what does
this mean for them,
right? Because a lot of people are like dealing with their regular jobs. Why
does the CTO really
care about this, let's say? Why does, you know, somebody in customer service
really care about this,
and it's really trying to connect the dots with them and to create that
emotional attachment.
Because one pillar falls, it really can't be adopted fully. And then the next
is really,
you know, forging your way beyond the inadequacy of the data. Like, you just
have to figure out
how to get to a point where you can make a decision. And I've seen a lot of
projects and
everybody probably has in general. You get to a point and you just can't,
nobody just
makes a decision and you move on to the next thing. But I feel so strongly that
every business needs
to have some type of ICP and identifying the sum because it helps with the
entire organization
mentality. You need to get to a point of a decision. And who makes that
decision? If the
CTO and the board are not an agreement, really, CTO is in an agreement, it's a
struggle.
Yeah, I think I just acutely see this problem where we work with teams where
so often they don't know their ICP. If you're like, what's your ICP? And like a
marketer that's
sitting somewhere in the marketing organization, wherever they are, as just
like, I mean, it's
this and this. And like, okay, what are the personas within that? It's like,
well, it's this and this.
Like, and it's not just like, here is the book, you know, here is, it is cod
ified. This is what we're
doing. This is what we're going after. Because to your point, like all of your
marketing spend,
all of your organizational effort, things like your podcast and your webinars
and your events
and all those things start layering onto that. It's like, hey, should we go to
Saster this year?
Well, does our ICP include SaaS founders? No, then we shouldn't. Or yes, then
we should, you know,
it's just like those sort of things that I think allow you to focus your effort
and energy and
layer in depth. You know, Chandar, the amazing team of Koopa, who just stepped
down and is an
advisor to cast me in a long time guest on the show, is notaries for saying
paint the sky Koopa
blue. And like, you can't paint the sky. So like every single place that they
look, you want your
key personas to look, they see you, right? And like, you can't do that if you
're spread super
in. And it seems like so many marketers sitting down there in content world or
demand or wherever.
And they're like, I just have 50 different personas that I'm trying to sell to.
And I do like,
two things a year for each of them. And like, I don't know where to put my
money. And it's just
kind of too hard. Absolutely. And then yeah, imagine downstream the product
being built, you know,
where you know, I've spent a lot of my career like, how do you really know the
investment? Because
that's like, that's a huge investment that you're going to then build features
for that specific
thing or the partners all the way downstream. Like it's, yeah, I can't, if the
data, if there's some
history, I can't imagine a more important strategic exercise for any company to
go through than to
really get ICP and forget about the TAM, but really to the service addressable
market or
obtain obtainable, if you can get to that data, like really, truly defining
what's successful. And
then just being so diligent about measuring against that to your point, like, I
assume that of the
seven that we selected, we're going to be wrong on two of them. And then how do
you then go and
revisit and what does success look like? And it takes a little bit of time. But
like, you know,
you're going to be wrong and like how on some of them, and how do you go and
you measure and you
adjust, but it needs to use that same base framework of data. I think that the
naysayers usually say,
well, that's historical, that's not painting the future. I definitely believe
that you're going to
have success based off of what you did previously. But you do also have to take
a chance at saying,
hey, we don't have a huge amount of opportunities historically in these two
markets. But these
have massive Psalms or Sam's less invest in those. What is your best advice for
first time CMO who's
trying to figure out their ICP? Seeing if you have the support of the board of
the ELT in explaining
the value of it. I think that the initial alignment is critical. Second is just
continual communication, just understanding that a lot of people in the
organization
have never gone through this. They don't know the value and you have to be okay
, communicating
and sharing and educating on what it means for them. Justin, so great chatting
today. Any final
thoughts? Anything to plug? No, I appreciate the time though. Yeah, it's been
wonderful. I mean,
I feel like we did a pretty good job of laying it all out. But boy, is there a
lot more to unpack?
So, we'll have to have you back. Awesome having you on the show and take care.
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