ICPs vs. Buyer Personas

Let’s say your company sells widgets.

And technically, you can sell those widgets to a wide range of industries: Retailers, manufacturers, construction companies, and even schools. You’ve got use cases across the board, and your sales team has closed deals in all of them at some point.

But here’s where things can become disjointed.

When it comes time to launch a new marketing campaign or build out targeting criteria in your ad platform, someone inevitably says:

“Let’s focus on Engineering Eddy. He’s our key persona.”

Great. But… where does Engineering Eddy work? What kind and size of company is he at? Is that company a good fit for your business? Have you sold to them before? What resources are required to service their business? What’s your track record with keeping them long term? And how do you even know if there are more like him?

Cue the awkward silence.

ICP: the Strategy Anchor Most Teams Skip

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn’t just a fancy name for a dream client. It’s a strategic document that outlines the companies or accounts your go-to-market teams should focus on. Think firmographics like annual revenue, employee count, geography, industry verticals, and even maturity level. Reviewing past sales data to further enrich your understanding of how these different accounts perform when it comes to deals is key. 

This all helps to answer the business-level question:
“Which companies have proven the best fit for our offering and are most likely to drive sustainable revenue growth?”

It also helps answer the vital question:
“Which companies are not a good fit for us?”

An ICP gives your sales and marketing teams a shared target to rally around. It provides actual filters you can use in platforms like LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, and your CRM to build prospect lists, understand your total relevant market, and prioritize outreach.

It’s a map. It’s actionable. And it should come before you worry about how you’ll talk to individual buying group members.

Revisiting our example, you may find out through reviewing CRM data, conversations with sales, and customer interviews that technology manufacturing companies between $100M and $1B in annual revenue, located in the USA, offer the most favourable outcomes through the lens of average contract value, close rate, sales cycle length, margin, retention, and subsequently, customer lifetime value. Provided you haven’t reached saturation with this audience and feel nothing is barring you from pursuing this audience further, this is your ICP.  

Buyer Personas: Still Useful, but Not the Foundation

Personas are great for messaging, content planning, sales enablement, and creative development. They help humanize your approach and capture the job titles, goals, fears, KPIs, and objections of the individuals within your ICP accounts.

But here’s the catch: if you start with personas and skip the ICP, as in the example above, you’re welcoming a whole host of “spill” when it comes to your marketing budget. Spill in the sense that you’ll be actively spreading your budget thin across a broader audience, most of whom work at companies that, flat out, don’t mix with your offering.

In B2C, this persona-first approach can work. Where someone works likely has no bearing on whether or not they will find value in your offering. However, in B2B, this context is crucial. Hoping your spread-thin efforts reach the companies that matter isn’t a strategy. It’s guesswork.

Returning to our widget example, starting persona-first would have you marketing to all the Engineering Eddys across all the companies within the potential industry segments. Regardless of how likely they are to become customers, how expensive they are as customers, or how long they provide revenue as customers. Starting to see the problem with this?

Real Talk: Total Addressable Market ≠ Total Relevant Market

To reiterate, just because you can sell to five different industries doesn’t mean you should pursue all five with equal intensity. After all, budgets are finite, time is short, and your sales cycles are long. You only have a limited time to prove the value of your marketing program. And with unit economics taking center stage, you also want to be as efficient as possible.

A mature marketing strategy makes deliberate trade-offs. It zeroes in on the segments where you win most often, fastest, with the least friction, and, ideally, with the highest deal values and retention.

So, if you’ve noticed that small-to-medium-sized retailers in the Midwest close faster, expand more frequently, and cost less to service, that could be your ICP talking to you.

Document it. Test it. Validate it. Prioritize around it.

To summarize, your ICP is the lens that focuses your go-to-market efforts.

Your buyer personas are the language you use once you’re looking through that lens.

You need both, but in the right order.

So the next time someone questions the effectiveness of marketing and asks, “Should we update our personas?” maybe pause and ask:

“Maybe. But, have we defined our ICP yet?”