Most customer interviews stay surface-level. Try as you might, you keep getting polite answers about workflows, tooling preferences, and general frustrations.

You nod along, take notes, and push a little to try and extract something meaningful. But more often than not, you walk away with a wishlist of “nice-to-haves”, or the same vague complaints you already knew.

What you don’t get is the stuff that actually drives decisions.

You don’t hear about the internal tensions and the pressure to prove ROI on a new initiative. You don’t hear about the awkward leadership conversation that made them rethink their priorities, or the missed target that quietly tanked morale.

You don’t get the emotion behind the decision-making; the sense of urgency, frustration, or even fear that pushes someone to act. And without that layer of insight, it’s hard to create messaging and positioning that actually lands.

People don’t search, switch, or buy because of abstract pain points or vague value props. They take action only when something hits a nerve, and
when your story mirrors their experience.

But how are you supposed to get there?

That’s where this question comes in:

“When you’ve had a horrible day and want to throw your laptop out the window, what’s happened?”

It’s one of the most useful questions I’ve come across in customer interviews, and I first heard it from my PMM partner, Alicia Carney.

It seems simple, maybe even a bit fluffy, but the emotional weight it carries makes it a goldmine for real insight.

This question doesn’t ask about budgets or roadmaps or specific product needs. It asks about pressure and friction, the moments that tip people over the edge. It’s those emotional spikes that give you something to anchor your messaging and positioning around.

Alicia shared a brilliant example of this from her time at a climate tech startup. She was speaking to a Group Product Manager at a fintech scaleup. On paper, this was a strong buyer profile: commercially minded, accountable for revenue, working in a growth-stage company.

When Alicia asked whether a climate API would ever make it onto her roadmap, the answer was blunt: “No, this isn’t relevant to us. I only prioritise based on incremental revenue.”

She didn’t just say no, but it was the kind of response that says, “Why are we even having this conversation?” The energy shifted, and the door started to close.

But then Alicia asked the laptop-out-the-window question…

The same PM opened up.

“Some days I feel like I’m working my ass off for this company to get richer. I feel lost and under-appreciated. I love my team and want to stay to support them, but I wish I had more of a sense of meaning and purpose here.”

Same person, but a completely different story.

And that’s the point.

There’s often a huge gap between how someone initially responds to a product question and what’s actually going on underneath.

In this case, the product felt irrelevant in isolation. But when framed through the lens of purpose and emotional impact, it became something else entirely. It became a vehicle to help her champion a new initiative. To push a meaningful project internally. To find more alignment between her personal values and her day-to-day work.

That shift didn’t just change Alicia’s understanding of the buyer, it shaped how she positioned the product. It helped her move from describing a feature (a robust API) to telling a more powerful story: this is your chance to pitch something that aligns with both business growth and personal purpose.

From that insight, she built messaging and enablement that reflected both commercial value and human motivation. She reframed the product around helping customers lead new conversations, pitch bold ideas to leadership, and ultimately make change happen from within.

And all of that started with a question that wasn’t about the product at all.

If your interviews keep circling the same abstract pain points, or you’re struggling to uncover what actually drives urgency, try that question.

Don’t just ask what tools they use or what’s missing. Ask what happens on the days that break them, because that’s where the real story begins… and that’s what you build your message around.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post The customer question that cuts through BS appeared first on Building Momentum.

Me too.

Maybe the sales team is being asked to close 500 deals in a year, but your ICP is so niche that there are barely 600 companies in the world that even qualify.

Maybe leadership is convinced that a new outbound campaign will generate millions in pipeline, but there’s no data to show if there are enough companies in the market to make that possible.

In those moments, having a solid handle on TAM, SAM, and SOM is one of the few ways to bring the conversation back to reality.

These acronyms get thrown around all the time… but if we’re being honest, most people—at every level—don’t fully understand the terms or how to calculate them.

The good news is that these numbers aren’t as complicated as they seem. And once you get a handle on them, you’ll be able to sanity-check your strategy before you waste time, effort, and money chasing something completely unrealistic.

Explaining TAM, SAM, and SOM

• TAM (Total Addressable Market) – The dream scenario. If every single company that could use your product actually did, this is how big the opportunity would be.
• SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market) – Now let’s get real. This is the slice of the TAM you can actually sell to today, based on your product’s capabilities, your go-to-market motion, and other practical constraints.
• SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) – The realistic market. Out of your SAM, this is the subset of companies that are actively looking for a solution and could realistically buy in the next 12 months.

Illustrating with an example

Let’s make this real with an example. We’ll follow Toward, a fake SaaS company that sells an AI-powered marketing website CMS built for tech startups.

Toward has set a goal of $10M in new ARR this year, but no one has checked whether the market can actually support this. (Sound familiar?)

I’ll walk through this example in TAM, SAM, and SOM calculations (and go further to sanity-check the revenue plan) to bring strategy back to reality.

How to go from TAM to SOM

Step 1: Find your universe (TAM)

TAM is your total potential market: every company that could theoretically use your product, regardless of whether you can sell to them today.

It’s easiest to use the firmographics from your ICP to find your TAM.

• Company size – Who benefits most from your product? (e.g., 50-1,000 employees)
• Revenue range – What company scale makes sense? (e.g., $10M+ ARR)
• Geography – Where are your potential customers located? (e.g., North America and Europe)
• Industry – Who actually needs your product? (e.g., tech companies with marketing teams)

How to Calculate TAM:

Pull lists from Apollo.io, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or Crunchbase. These tools let you filter by firmographics like company size, revenue, and industry.

The final count is your TAM—the number of potential customers if every single one of them bought your product.

Example: Toward’s TAM

Toward defines its ICP as tech companies with 50-1,000 employees. They find 40,000 companies globally that fit these parameters. That’s the TAM.

Step 2: Start to incorporate reality (SAM)

If TAM is your theoretical market, SAM is your realistic one—the companies you can actually sell to and support today.

Product Fit:

• Are you a good fit for every company in your TAM?
• Remove companies that don’t use the necessary supporting tech. (e.g., if your product integrates only with Salesforce, remove companies using other CRMs.)
• Remove companies that don’t experience your targeted pain points, or don’t have specific teams or roles in the business

Go-To-Market Fit:

• Do you have the resources to target every segment?
• If you have a high-touch enterprise sales model, remove companies that expect a self-serve experience.
• Exclude segments that don’t have the budget or business need for your solution.

Unfortunately, this kind of data isn’t something you can just filter for in a database.

You’ll need to make informed assumptions and use additional data sources to refine your SAM:

• Your sales team and customer success managers likely have a good sense of which companies are a fit and which aren’t… and importantly, how many
• Platforms like BuiltWith help identify which companies use specific tech stacks.

Combining these approaches will help you determine a best guess of your SAM, even if it’s just a rough percentage.

Example: Toward’s SAM

Toward realizes they can only serve companies using HubSpot or Salesforce as their CRM. After filtering, their TAM of 40,000 drops to 7,500 companies—that’s their SAM.

Step 3: Now it’s time to get real (SOM)

Now it’s time to get real.

Not every company is actively looking to buy. Your Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) needs to represent the companies actually in-market this year.

Most companies aren’t looking to buy or switch to a new tool every year. Try to estimate a percentage of those that might be.

If in doubt, assume that ~20% of your SAM is actively evaluating solutions in a given year.

If your demand gen team is using tools like Bombora, 6sense, or G2 Intent data, you might be able to see who is actively searching for software categories and use that too.

Example: Toward’s SOM

With a SAM of 7,500 companies, Toward estimates that ~1,500 (20%) are actually in-market this year. That’s their SOM.

Working SOM into a revenue plan

Now for the fun part.

Once you have a realistic market size, you need to validate whether your revenue goals align with what’s actually possible.

It’s one thing to say there are enough companies out there; it’s another to ensure your funnel can realistically convert them into customers at a rate that makes sense.

Step 4: Model the funnel

To make sure your revenue targets are grounded in reality, follow these steps:

1. Estimate your win rate

• Look at your historical SQL-to-Closed-Won conversion rate. If you don’t have historical data, use industry benchmarks. For B2B SaaS, 5-10% is typical.
• Assume a 10% win rate for this example.

2. Work back from revenue goals

• Define your ARR goal. Let’s say it’s $10M.
• Determine your ACV (Average Contract Value).
• If your typical deal size is $50K, then you need 200 closed-won deals.

3. Map out your funnel, step-by-step

Each stage of the funnel has a drop-off. You need to work backward to see how many leads you’ll need at the top of the funnel.

• If your SQL to Closed-Won rate is 10%, you need 2,000 SQLs.
• If your MQL to SQL rate is 20%, you need 10,000 MQLs.
• If your Lead to MQL conversion rate is 5%, you need 200,000 leads.
• If your cost per lead is $50, then you need a $10M marketing budget: probably way too high for your current resources. That’s just bad economics.

4. Adjust for Reality

If the numbers don’t add up, something has to change:

• Can you increase ACV? If you raise prices or upsell, you need fewer deals.
• Can you improve conversion rates? If you optimize SQL-to-Closed-Won from 10% to 15%, you need fewer leads.
• Can you lower cost per lead? If you improve targeting, partnerships, or inbound strategy, you might reduce the size of the marketing investment.  

5. Extend even further

Even after adjusting, you can go a level deeper:

• Sales velocity: How long does it actually take to close deals? If deals take 6+ months, can you realistically close 200 in a year?
• Pipeline coverage: Does your pipeline have enough volume at each stage to meet targets? Most companies do a 1:3 ratio… but sometimes you’ll need 1:5 coverage in trying times. 
• Churn & Expansion: Are existing customers churning, or do you need to drive expansion revenue to hit your ARR goal? Understanding the balance between retention, expansion, and net-new acquisition is critical to setting the right revenue strategy.

Recap: Toward’s funnel is not good

Toward’s conversion rates mean they’d need 200,000 leads to hit their revenue target.

Their budget isn’t even close to $10M, so they need to rethink expectations or adjust strategy.

Tip: It’s not about the actual numbers

Understanding these numbers helps prevent wasted time, effort, and budget on chasing opportunities that don’t exist. It gives you a framework to set realistic targets and build sustainable go-to-market strategies.

But the real power of TAM, SAM, and SOM isn’t just about calculating them. It’s about using these to have tangible, reasonable and strategic conversations about your go-to-market strategy. 

If your SOM doesn’t support your revenue goal, it’s a red flag.

You either need to rethink your pricing, your win rates, or your entire approach to customer acquisition. This could mean anything from expanding into new verticals, raising prices, going up-market, or fixing your leaky sales funnel. 

Before you commit to that aggressive growth plan, step back. Run your TAM, SAM, and SOM numbers. See if the math actually works. If it doesn’t, adjust now—before pipeline targets are missed, budgets are wasted, and your boss starts scrambling for answers.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post The startup marketer’s guide to TAM, SAM, and SOM (without the fluff) appeared first on Building Momentum.

One of the toughest lessons I’ve learned in product marketing is that customer research doesn’t matter if no one uses it.

Product marketers love doing research. We geek out over customer interviews, win/loss reports, usage data, surveys, you name it. We spend hours synthesizing insights, finding patterns, and integrating it into our work.

And then?

It sits in a Notion doc. A slide deck. A beautifully crafted report that no one reads. It feels awful, knowing the effort that went into the research execution and detailed analysis… only for the business to just keep making decisions based on gut feel.

Research without action is wasted effort. The research we do as product marketers only drives impact when it’s impossible to ignore. So, here’s how you do that.

Make customer research essential by design

If you want customer research to matter, you need to connect it to real business needs from day one. Here’s how:

Tie every research project to a business decision

Customer insights aren’t useful in isolation. Before you do any research, ask:

• What decision does this research need to influence?
• Who will use this insight, and how?
• What’s the business outcome if we act on this?

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Weak research goal: “Let’s run interviews to learn more about our ICP.”
Strong research goal: “We’re seeing slower sales cycles in mid-market deals. Let’s interview prospects to uncover specific objections and refine our messaging.”

Weak research goal: “Let’s validate our persona assumptions.”
Strong research goal: “Sales is struggling to close deals with finance leaders. Let’s talk to buyers in that role and identify what they need to justify purchasing.”

Research should be a means to an end, not an academic exercise. If you can’t map your research to a critical business challenge, reconsider whether it’s worth doing.

Create demand for your insights

If your research isn’t used, it’s usually because it wasn’t designed to be useful, necessary, and aligned with advancing key business initiatives.

The easiest way to guarantee your work gets ignored is to spring it on stakeholders after the fact.

Instead, make your research process collaborative from the start:

• Talk to your colleagues in sales, product, and success teams before kicking off research. Get specific: What patterns are they seeing? Where do deals get stuck? What objections come up most often?
• Engage product early. Go beyond just asking what behaviors are blocking adoption,work together to identify what research could help inform roadmap decisions, improve retention, or eliminate friction.
• Align with leadership. Don’t just ask what they wish they knew. Identify the strategic decisions they’re struggling with, and structure your research to give them the clarity they need.

This isn’t just about gathering input, it’s about making your research indispensable by directly influencing critical business decisions. When stakeholders help shape the questions, they’re far more likely to use the answers.

Validate assumptions, don’t just explore

Research focused on pure discovery is a distraction. You already have internal assumptions, use those to focus on research that validates what you believe to be true while uncovering what you don’t yet know. This ensures your findings are not only actionable but also drive real decisions that help you move faster and with confidence.

Instead of starting from a blank slate, begin by outlining key hypotheses based on existing data, customer conversations, and team insights. Then structure your research to confirm, refine, or challenge those assumptions, leading to clear next steps.

Discovery and validation shouldn’t be separate; they should work together in every research initiative. Don’t just ask open-ended questions; use the end of an interview to test different messaging options, show a mockup of a webpage, or present alternative value propositions. Ask customers how they perceive them, what resonates, and what feels off. This approach ensures that every insight isn’t just theoretical: it’s immediately tested, refined, and ready to drive action.

Translate research into decisions, not just insights

The fastest way to kill momentum? Deliver a 20-slide research report that no one has time to read.

Instead, make it stupidly easy for decision-makers to take action.

Try structuring your research deliverables like this:

• One-pager format: Summarize key insights, clear takeaways, and the action items that matter.
• Make insights instantly usable: Don’t just document customer pain points, turn them into real, testable assets. Convert research into ready-to-go sales decks, refined pitch scripts, or A/B testable website copy that teams can implement immediately.
• Decision-based recommendations: Clearly outline what should change based on your research, and why. Example:

“Many customers say they are confused by pricing.”
“50% of lost deals cite pricing complexity. We should simplify our structure by moving from per-seat to usage-based pricing.”

People are overwhelmed with information. Your job is to simplify and operationalize it so it actually drives decisions.

Keep insights relevant and embedded in every day use

Customer insights aren’t static,they should evolve with real changes in market dynamics, competitive shifts, or strategic priorities. If research becomes disconnected from business needs, it loses value.

To ensure research remains impactful:

• Create a centralized, living research hub (Notion, Confluence, etc.) where insights are easy to find and updated as needed.
• Refresh research only when necessary. Don’t update just for the sake of it. Refresh when something has materially changed that impacts your understanding of customers.
• Share insights in context. Make them a natural part of sales enablement, product roadmap discussions, and strategy meetings so they directly inform key decisions.
• Use the right research type for the right job. Qualitative research is ideal for discovering new patterns and exploring the customer landscape, while quantitative research helps validate those patterns, segment audiences, and measure impact at scale. Knowing when to use each ensures that insights are both rich and actionable.

Customer research isn’t just a box to check… but only if it’s plugged directly into your company’s biggest challenges and priorities.

Because the best research is the research that gets used.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Your customer research is failing if no one uses it appeared first on Building Momentum.

Time flies when you’re busy – and with the current environment, you’re probably stacked right now. I know, I feel ya.

BUT… please don’t forget sight of why we’re all here, doing our jobs: serving our customers.

If you’ve got new product GTMs to plan, a new deck to deliver, and positioning to polish, it’s very tempting to let your existing customer knowledge and assumptions carry you through.

Of course, the opportunity cost is that the gap between you and your customer gets slightly bigger, every week.

Here are some very light-touch, low-effort ways that you can put into practice this week.

Send a personalized email to a new customer

If you don’t have an automated win/loss interview process set up already, you’re missing out! But if you promise to set one up, you can do this in the meantime.

You hopefully have access to a list of recent won deals and new customer signups, whether that’s in Salesforce, Slack, or Hubspot.

Take a look through, familiarise yourself with the types of customers you’re winning – then select a few customers to email.

Say hi, introduce yourself, and ask three pointed questions:

1. What made you sign up with us?
2. How did we compare to other solutions out there?
3. Is there any initial feedback about our marketing, sales, and product experience that you think we should know?

You’ll get tons of interesting thoughts that will help you build more relevant marketing and sales content, understand your differentiators, and find opportunities to improve the funnel.

Check who’s engaging with your company’s LinkedIn account, and research their profiles

If your company uses LinkedIn as a social channel, you probably get a lot of likes and comments on those posts.

Maybe they’re customers, maybe they’re prospects, maybe they’re just interested in your product.

Desk research through LinkedIn snooping is a great and quick way to conduct a temperature check on what’s happening in your space.

Click through a few profiles and focus on:

• Job titles, types of companies, and how they describe their role
• Any personal intros, interests, and past experience
• Their other activity – comments on other posts, companies they follow, etc

You’ll build a more resilient picture of the people in your market and understand them more as people, not just an amorphous blob.

Create a quick poll on Twitter to gather feedback on a particular product feature or pricing

Similarly if your company has a decent amount of Twitter followers, perhaps there’s a way you can run a quick and dirty social poll that actually helps clarify something of value for you too.

I’m not talking about a ‘Coke or Pepsi?’ question – let’s go a bit deeper.

Maybe it’s something to do with your upcoming roadmap, or the most pressing challenges right now, or whether they expect to spend more on solving the problem or less in the next year.

Check customer reviews on G2 and Capterra and make a quick summary

There’s so much data on G2 that you’re probably not using effectively.

Line up your own profile and those of your top competitors, then start analysing.

Use all of the filters available – company size, user role, industry, region, and review category.

Sort reviews by ‘most helpful’ to see what questions your potential customers, or by ‘most recent’ to dig into current trends.

My tip here is to make your research into a brief summary to share with your product, marketing, and sales teams. Who knows – you might spot some good underserved needs or some good competitive information to help sales set landmines in their next call.

Take a quick look at the customer support tickets to identify common issues and address them

I’ve learnt so much by logging into Zendesk and scrolling through the most recent questions and concerns. Maybe you can make this a regular thing, 15 minutes every couple of days, to help spot trends and see if there are any quick wins that you can help drive.

Once, I was checking out recent support requests and found a customer was having trouble paying by a debit card. I checked with the bizops team who found we hadn’t enabled debit cards in our billing platform. With one click of a button, we’d unlocked it – and instantly nuked a potential blocker for revenue.

Join some customer success account review calls to see what’s on your customers mind

Similar to sales calls, your customers are going to be a great source of insight to help influence your roadmap, positioning, and strategy.

Best practice suggests CSMs should have quarterly reviews with their top customers, where they cover key results, product improvements, and plan for the months ahead.

These can serve as great ways to listen in, get a feel for how customers are successful with your product, and what issues they raise.

Review your website acquisition performance, including the top landing pages and ads

We all know the marketing tactics that we’re actually doing – but do you really know what’s working best?

Understanding your Google Analytics data can help you build a better picture of the buyer journey, how customers are finding you, what messaging they’re seeing and responding to best, and much more.

You can also see the top referrers of traffic, helping you identify potential channels to increase investment in, new partners to approach for co-marketing, and understand what prospects actually do when they come to your website.

Analyze product usage data and see what features customers are (or aren’t) using

This is pretty self-explanatory. If your customers aren’t using features that you’ve recently launched, maybe the message didn’t land – or maybe the feature isn’t fit for purpose.

Maybe there are obscure features they’re finding a ton of value in that can play a bigger part in your differentiation.

And who knows – you might find the data surprising, helping you reprioritise your product marketing efforts to grow awareness and adoption, rather than top-of-funnel engagement.

Ask sales reps to share their thoughts on recent customer trends

Your sales reps are a great conduit for understanding customers – albeit with a pinch of salt.

They’re on the phone, on demos, on meetings every day – learning what works, what doesn’t, and how to optimize the time they have.

So they know what customers respond to, what customers are saying about the market and competitors, and where they’re focusing for most success.

However, be warned – sales reps are inherently affected by recency bias. Their most recent experiences will define their answers.

Join a product demo call and see how the prospect responds to your positioning

This might take more than 10 minutes, but I can guarantee it will be worth your time.

I highly recommend making friends with sales reps, so you have a good constant pipeline of calls to join. You’re always framing these as customer listening calls (rather than reviewing the sales reps performance).

Take a notepad, note timestamps, and listen back to the calls on Gong for interesting snippets you want to refer back to later.

Perhaps you’re paying most attention to the discovery portion of the call, to understand their current situation and problems. Or maybe you want to understand their reaction to the elevator pitch and whether it resonates with them.

Regardless, you’ll learn a ton.

Join an online community to engage with customers

There are probably hundreds of Slack communities, LinkedIn groups, forums, newsletters and more for your particular industry. Sign up, log in, and let the wave of insight wash over you.

Whether you’re just lurking to see what folks are talking about, or getting engaged to provide support, advice and tips, they can be great sources for building relationships for market research calls, testing messaging, and more. Just don’t overtly ‘sell’ – you’re there to learn, not pitch!

Check out comments on competitors’ social media pages to learn their preferences and concerns

Trust me – your competitors are getting complaints on social media. Useful ammunition for your product and sales team.

And, if their social media team is also engaging their audience on more positive topics, maybe there’s something to learn about their customer’s preferences, and how you differ, to help improve your targeting and segmentation.

Build your empathy

These tips are not really tied to specific initiatives that you can run. They should be an inherent part of your product marketing process, a way to build empathy with your customers and act as a pulse check on the market.

That way, your gut can be trusted with more confidence – your internalised pattern-matching is powered by more accurate, recent, relevant information. And that’s how you’ll get more shots on target with your day-to-day work.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post 10+ ways to get closer to your customers this week appeared first on Building Momentum.

Knowledge is power. You can make better decisions, and have more information to inform your execution.

Your go-to-market strategy depends on how well you understand your customers and the market, but most of the time product marketers are just guessing.

It’s so difficult to look for the right stats or validate assumptions, so often we… just don’t.

Luckily there’s a whole host of tools you can use to better understand your market – and help you make better decisions.

Audiense

Audiense is a great tool for social media insights. It’s great for identifying the size of potential customer segments that can be reached on social media, and building a richer picture of their interests, who influences them, and what/when they tweet.

You can search for specific keywords to identify people with specific job titles or interests to create and compare niche segments. Audiense also offers personality insights: an analysis based on the Big Five personality dimensions. This might sound like a nice-to-have, but understanding whether your customer base is rational or logical, empathetic or hard-hearted can really help you improve your messaging and ensure it resonates.

Sparktoro

Along the same lines as Audiense, but honestly more usable and friendly, is Sparktoro. By analysing public data, Sparktoro returns super simple and straightforward reports that include the demographics, behaviors, and interests of your audience.

You can analyze social accounts or websites, or search for general audiences that use certain words, follow certain accounts, or frequently visit specific websites: perfect for sneaky competitive intelligence. Because remember, understanding your audience means understanding your competitor’s audience too.

Sparktoro will also tell you about any press sites, podcasts, and YouTube channels your audience follow – something your performance marketing team will appreciate.

Pollfish

First-hand quantitative data is so important to help validate your assumptions, but it can be so expensive to work with research agencies.

Pollfish is one of a new breed of research platforms, with an integrated panel to give you super fast access to insights you won’t find anywhere else.

Pricing starts at just $145 with two screener questions to help you target the right audience based on almost any questions you want to ask.

The only tip is to that you’ll need to build your survey design skills to avoid leading questions, biasing responses, or capturing unintelligible data. You might need to find a research designer on Upwork or Fiverr to help.

You can ask almost anything: from competitor awareness, to brand perception, to testing messaging and positioning. Their weighting algorithm also averages out the results to give you representative results that you can use in PR.

Apollo

Primarily an outbound sales prospecting tool, Apollo is really useful to help marketers research their Ideal Customer Profile segments, build bottom-up market sizing, and begin to humanize your ICP.

You can create audiences by filtering on a whole host of individual and organisational options including title, locations, seniority, the technologies they’re using, and even the roles a company is hiring for.

Statista

We’ve all seen Statista results show up in Google when we’re trying to find stats, but have you ever actually searched on Statista first?

By amalgamating research reports, government stats, and other sources of data, Statista is a great place to find stats on… almost anything.

The only downside is that you’re likely to find adjacent data that’s close, but probably not exactly what you need. Pricing is pretty good too – $39/month for a year’s worth of access, or just under $2,000 for a month’s worth of indepth reports.

UserTesting / UsabilityHub

I’m adding these UserTesting and UsabilityHub together because they achieve pretty much the same job: an easy way to get real people to look at your stuff and tell you what they think.

This might be a new website homepage design to test the effectiveness of your messaging, or product screenshots to see how users react.

They’re a great way to get real, raw insights from people you don’t know. Highly recommend.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Seven go-to-market research tools to bookmark appeared first on Building Momentum.

“I’m just starting some messaging framework / customer survey and research projects at work so these sessions and assignments (and all of your examples!) have been a GPS essentially – helping me to find the best route forward and navigate the roadblocks too!”

That’s a real quote from one of the students in our course, WTF is Go-To-Market?. We’re planning our second intake for later this year. Find out more and register your interest here.

I’ve written before about how buyer personas are discovered, not created – go read that post now if you haven’t already!

Here are five quick tips to help you build strong personas that are used by your teams.

Don’t name personas (but name them if you need to)

It’s not really best practice to name your personas anymore. No more ‘Marketing Mary’ or ‘Superstar Simon’.

Instead try to name your personas based on a key identifier: something to do with the value they desire, their goals, or their common jobs.

For example:

• Busy Business Owner
• Holistic Head of HR
• ROI-Obsessed Marketer

But in reality you might still need to name your personas to help your wider team to build empathy, as well as creating a shortcut to a shared understanding.

Make personas come alive

Trying to learn about the personas used in a business can be really boring. Walls of text, columns in a spreadsheet, and a dodgy stock photo that still has the watermark overlay on it.

Could you make your personas ‘real’ and provide more texture for those getting up-to-speed?

Perhaps you could:

• Record your research call and create a compilation video, organized into key themes
• Interview your sales reps and share a video of them walking through their experiences with that persona
• Pull together a scrapbook-style resource of quotes, social media profiles, recommended content, and more that allows readers to explore a persona in more depth

Think about the format

Don’t make sales reps and marketing folk read through huge docs to get the gist of a persona.

Think about their use-case for accessing persona information, and build specific formats that give them what they need.

You could try:

• A long-form doc for a deep-dive understanding
• A battlecard with top points to hit on calls
• An easy-to-skim PDF with screenshots and images and content snippets to build empathy

If you’ve already created the base content, don’t let that insight go to waste: multiply your efforts by repurposing quickly into formats your teams will use.

Build a feedback loop

Ideally, you’ll know about every prospect your sales reps come across that doesn’t fit into one of your personas – but not many teams are set up to monitor this.

If you don’t, you’ll soon wonder why your sales teams are losing to specific segments or why your metrics are dropping.

Get ahead of the curve:

• Ask reps to categorise the main persona in your CRM from a dropdown field – with an ‘Other’ option for those that don’t fit
• If that’s too much effort, use your ICP and demographic/firmographic indicators to auto-populate a field, and set up dashboards to monitor anomalies
• Set up a feedback line, whether in Slack or in the CRM.

Your work understanding personas helps marketing to reach the right people, and sales reps to pitch the best way. Publicising this process will help you gain more supportive buy-in and engagement when they know it’s going to help them.

Refresh personas regularly

Don’t just create personas and let them sit there for six months or longer. We’re in tech; things move quickly.

What was true yesterday, might not be true today.

Ensure your persona stay fresh:

• Keep tabs on effectiveness through qualitative feedback from teams, and quantitative (e.g. dashboards)
• Use all interviews you do (whether win-loss, customer interviews, market research) to help assess whether personas are still up-to-date and relevant
• Carry out desk research every so often: what do your target personas say on social media, what do their LinkedIn profiles say about their job, and what skills/responsibilities/challenges are they looking to hire for in their job ads?

Personas are foundational – don’t waste them

They can’t be treated as a one-and-done exercise. They need strengthening, testing, and evaluation to ensure they still fulfil their purpose.

Go back to your personas today: what’s no longer valid? Start the conversation, and kickstart the next stage of growth in your business.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Let’s be honest: if you’re struggling to gain traction, there is no silver bullet that kickstart your growth.

I’ve seen this exact situation play out time and time again. An eager CEO or VP Sales, dismayed at plateauing growth (or worse), pins all hope on ‘the next thing’ to change the game. The next thing comes, and… as predicted, the results aren’t as expected. But never mind; “The next thing will help!”

There’s definitely a lot to say about keeping motivation up, or creating a reality distortion field to eke out extra performance. But a white lie can quickly snowball and create mismatched expectations which leads to ambiguity and inertia.

Traction is tricky to define, but people generally refer to it as top-of-funnel lead generation, sales revenue, and ‘being seen’ – a mixture of qualitative feels and quantitative evidence.

There’s no quick fixes, only work. Here’s some tips to help overcome the challenges you’re facing.

Positioning is strategy in action

The way you describe your product in your customer’s world is a vehicle to define your go-to-market strategy.

• Who is your customer, and what’s going on in their world?
• What value do they desire – and how does your product help them get closer?
• What are the features that matter – and how do you communicate that?
• How are you positioned in the market, against competitors, and priced?

But most of the time, the concept of positioning is relegated to just marketing fluff, ignoring the strategic process that goes into it.

Here’s how you remedy it.

Firstly, get your assumptions out on the table: who do you think your customers are, and what do they value? I recommend doing a customer empathy map to see not just where you and your team are aligned, but where you have low confidence – and where the gaps are.

Positioning (and strategy) is much easier when you are the thing for someone, rather than something for everyone. Focus on niche customer segments: a group of people linked by a common pain that they’ll pay to solve. You can’t please everyone either. Make the hard decisions and say no to certain segments.

The definition of positioning is “to occupy a space in your customer’s mind”. How are you supposed to do that effectively, if you don’t understand their world?

Research is key to that. Don’t just think about your product – look to build empathy with their broader jobs, pains, gains, and triggers.

Then look at how you differentiate. It’s much easier to compete for a customer, rather than compete against a competitor. Know the customer so well that you’re positioned as the best option for them against all others.

Once you’ve understood your customer and what they need, think about how you communicate to them. Elevate away from technical features and simple benefits, and instead focus on communicating the holistic value you customer desires.

Lastly, get creative! Step up your messaging with language and tone-of-voice that drives action. Life is too short to use boring words.

How does your customer buy?

The process that your buyers go through, complete with the questions they have, the touchpoints they interact with, what they need to move to the next stage, and who exactly is involved.

This process will broadly look like:

• Identify a need
• Explore how to solve it
• Evaluate solutions
• Negotiate and purchase
• Adopt
• Expand

At each stage, you can identify and rank opportunities to feed into marketing (like the channels and messages you use), sales (e.g. collateral, narrative, and process), and product (e.g. onboarding flows, product improvements, and so on).

Force progress through product launches

If you’re investing time and energy in building new product features, whether to support existing customers or to help attract new ones – but not planning how you introduce it into the world – then you’re missing out on free energy.

Haphazardly announcing a feature on social media isn’t a launch, and a blog post announcing a feature that nobody reads is a waste of time.

Developing a tiered approach to launching features will help you standardise how you release products out into the world. Think about the five A’s of feature releases: audience, awareness, action, affinity, and accountability.

Don’t just think about launches tactically either. Plan activity from first principles from the perception that you want to convey to your customers, your prospects, and others in the market.

There’s no silver bullet, only work

Traction depends on everyone putting the same step forward at the same time.

Positioning is the embodiment of your business strategy. Your buyers journey is how you meet them in the marketplace. And your product launch strategy is how you build perception, time after time.

Good luck!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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I wrote about this in The Overview #24 – don’t overestimate your customer’s maturity. A lot of people reached out sharing their experiences, so I thought would be good to cover in a bit more detail.

All too often, we imagine our customers to be so experienced and advanced that unless we keep building new bells-and-whistles, they won’t come or stay. But even the tallest, shiniest skyscrapers are built on solid foundations.

Your customer vision is not their reality

I bet that right now your product managers, sales reps, your CEO has a vision in mind of your customer.

In their mind, your customer is a Steve Jobs/Olivia Pope superhuman: revered, with thin-frame glasses that frame steely grey eyes, within which swells a unique outlook on life, the universe, and everything.

They’re smart. Passionate. Powerful. Full of wisdom, a guru in your industry. A savant, brought to earth by the corporate gods to disrupt processes, obliterate workflows, and bring about the second coming. They’re constantly assessing their options, with the power to to smite your company into obscurity at the slightest displeasure, or instill you upon a gold pedestal and bow to your greatness.

In reality, your customer probably cares about your product for… maybe 10 minutes a month? Probably much less.

They’re struggling to summon the energy today, let alone go the extra mile for just a pat on the back. They’ve got a busy family life, working from home isn’t the best setup for them, and while they want to do the best job they can… well, you know how it is. They’ve got a ton of responsibilities, they’re understaffed, and there’s a hundred other problems that they need to solve (or at least, decide to tackle later on).

Overestimating your customers is a big mistake

It’s easy to let your imagination run away from you, and you’ll build, position, market, and sell in ways that just don’t match what your customer wants, needs, or expects.

Overestimating customers starts internally, innocently enough.

Your PMM team pick up on one customer who, admittedly, may be more mature than the rest in your market. A sudden swell of forward-thinking innovation sweeps your product team into envisioning the future. A sales rep thinks they can impress a customer by promising a snazzy feature that doesn’t actually exist yet.

You’re at the intersection of your customer’s problem space and the cutting edge of technology. It’s only natural that you’ll begin to elevate your base, unwillingly.

What damage can it do? A lot.

Building the wrong features, lost sales opportunities, and confusion on customers wants contributes to the enemy of momentum: inertia.

Increased resistance and lack of velocity means things feel harder, stickier, more difficult. Motivations wear down, and a spiral of despair sets in.

Build a solid foundation

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we cannot rely on assumptions about our customers. There’s simply too much at stake – both lack of ROI on work invested, and missed opportunity costs.

We need accurately grok and iterate our understanding of:

• our customer’s jobs, pains, gains, and triggers
• their buyer journey
• their change environment

Your understanding of these should power product strategy, positioning, the sales pitch, and everything else that your business does.

The artifacts you develop should be documented, revisited, questioned, and socialized at every opportunity. And that’s where the challenge lies – getting adequate buy-in on the legitimacy of the research, and ensuring it’s used to provide direction to everyday decisions.

NIHITO

Nothing important happens in the office.

Get out there, understand who your customers are, and what they really need. Come up with clever ideas, but validate them with your market first. Don’t position your product based on assumptions – test as much as you need.

Remember the momentum equation: focus + confidence = momentum.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

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90% of buyer personas are ignored.

Well, I made the number up… but I bet it’s not too far off.

Back in 2012, ‘Marketing Mary’ buyer personas were all the rage. Where did our customers go on holiday? What books do they read? What brand of car do they drive?

Full of creative information… but lacking anything useful.

And here we are, in 2021, and I think most startups are still stuck in the past.

Why does this happen? Why are personas fluffy pictograms of faux customers, when we have tons of data and insight at our fingertips? Why are buyer personas ‘built’ through internal workshops, rather than ‘discovered’ through qualitative interview and quantitative survey research?

Maybe we just don’t know what a good persona explainer should do, let alone what a good persona explainer should look like.

What is the goal of a buyer persona?

Buyer personas are designed to help your internal teams build an understanding of the types of people they will interact with in the market.

They need to do just three things.

1: Represent the stakeholders actually involved in the buying journey

The sales and marketing process is a science as much as it is an art. It’s a process. Every time someone recognizes a need and looks for a solution, they will be following a reasonably well-travelled path within a small number of variances. It’s not rocket science.

So your buyer personas need to cover the people who are actually involved, and understand what role they play.

2: Provide a shortcut to easily recognize and understand the person

Personas need to easily identifiable – ideally on face value or with some simple deduction. The people who will actually use buyer personas (like your sales reps or field marketers) will need to recognize the persona through quick pattern matching: job titles, functions, industries, budget sizes, etc. They won’t have time to address a flowchart just to determine which sub-persona a prospect belongs to.

And then they need information that helps them understand them. Not just enough to know them – like their job title and responsibilities – but to understand what makes them tick. Are they an innovator, power hungry for promotion? Maybe they’re more likely to be risk-averse and prefer stability to change? What scares them, worries them, excites them?

When reviewing buyer personas, I ask myself these three questions to sense check my understanding:

• Who are you?

• What do you do?

• Why do you do it?

If I can answer these and believe in the answers, then I feel close to understanding and empathizing with the customer.

3: Provide information that helps tailor the marketing and sales approach

This doesn’t mean list off all the resources a persona might be interested in. Someone using your persona docs is there for a reason: they want help to tailor their interactions with that persona.

So don’t just leave them high and dry. Give them what they want: how should they adapt the proposition to this persona? What should they call out and highlight… and what should they put to the back-burner?

Key elements of good buyer personas

With these goals in mind, what should a buyer persona that actually fulfills these goals look like?

• Demographics: Location, Title, Function, Reports to, Experience, Role in buying process, Other defining characteristics

• Firmographics: Number of employees, Revenue, Funding, Industry/Vertical, Other defining characteristics

• Psychographics: Adoption tendencies, Introvert/Extrovert, Personality traits (innovator, maintainer, etc)

• Jobs: common responsibilities and activities your customer does as part of their day-to-day

• Gains: their personal, professional, or business goals they want to achieve

• Pains: marks of failure and frustrations the customer must avoid

• Triggers: motivations that encourage them to solve their problem and switch away from their current solution

• Value messaging: using the value nugget framework, detail the features, benefits, and overall value of our product to this persona

How should you research buyer personas?

It’s possible to do buyer personas really quickly – but it’s also easy to spend tons of time and not have anything useful to show for it.

I’d recommend three stages to your persona research process. These steps take your internal knowledge and expertise, validate at a small scale, and then learn about bigger patterns that may exist.

Firstly, jot down your internal thinking. I use a customer empathy map exercise for this:

• Who are these people? What common attributes (job title, team, years of experience, for example), unite them?

• What do they think, hear, see/do, and feel about the world and your problem area?

• What are their goals, and what pains do they have?

If you’re following the process detailed in my post linked above, you’ll go through a round of review that highlights areas of agreement, disagreement, and things you still need to learn.

Next, hold your research interviews. Your internal work will have given you enough insight around the key problem areas you’re solving to frame the conversation.

Use my 19 customer development question template to interview customers across five categories:

1. Segmentation – who they are

2. Problem discovery – what broad challenges do they have?

3. Problem validation – what do they think of the problem we’re solving?

4. Product discovery – what do they think would solve their problems, and how?

5. Product validation – what do they think of our product and would it work for them?

Lastly (if you can) validate your research insights with a quantitative survey. This is useful if cost-effective and if you need to understand the variance of any variables within the persona.

You can do this through survey platforms that offer their own audience panels like Pollfish – just don’t forget to ask rigorous screening questions.

You’ll want to ask specific questions that give you insights into elements that may differ significantly, or are less clear on a small scale. Are your product marketer personas aligned under product orgs or marketing orgs? Is there a patterns that exists with that answer and their key metric goals? Who in their team makes the final buying decision, and are they responsible for the success of the buying function, or not?

Discover personas, don’t create them

I learnt these lessons the hard way.

I’ve written and talked about a product launch where we followed all the best practices, and the launch completely failed. Part of that was a huge oversight in our personas.

We thought there were just two – Sienna, a growth-minded customer experience leader, and Gary, a technical IT support desk manager. We built our experience around these – aspirational messaging that talked to their departmental visions, and pricing that aligned with their needs.

Of course we had done the research interviews and had lots of internal workshops to build them out. Our mistake was creating these personas from wishful thinking. They did exist in the market… but they were were rare unicorns.

After we emerged from the failed launch, we took a step back. We re-evaluated our customer and prospect base. Instead of two, we found five more discrete personas that we could serve in much more detail with the same effort.

We sense-checked with research interviews, making sure we understood what they were looking for and how they could gain value from our product. We ran a quantitative survey that not only let us know what their preferred features (and therefore pains/gains were), but their willingness to pay as well.

After implementing these new five personas across our marketing and sales journey, from content to pricing, we saw conversions rise, revenue increase, and more engagement as a whole.

All we did was discover the personas that already existed in the market, and we built our go-to-market strategy around them.

Simple enough, in hindsight.

Hopefully this post has given you some ideas on how to craft a persona that actually helps, based on research, and support your internal teams with the right information.

The more focus (clarity, as well as attention) you have on your prospects, the more confidence you’ll build. And focus + confidence = momentum.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

If you enjoyed this post, will you share it with your network?

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Try as much as you like, some customers just aren’t going to buy.

You could have the best product, a high-ROI marketing strategy, a spectacular sales process… and they’ll either reject you straight up or you’ll get a ‘no’ at the end.

Why? Not for the reasons you might expect.

There’s one element that will decide whether your product is bought and adopted, or not.

Your customer’s internal change environment will determine your sales outcome

Whether your customer can or will buy your product will depend on their internal change environment.

This is not their attitude to change – more so the entire atmosphere within their business. Is change locked down and admonished, is it expected and encouraged, or does no change happen because everything is burning down?

“The internal environment of an organization refers to events, factors, people, systems, structure, and conditions that… influence organization activities, decisions, and employee behavior and attitudes.”

Source

Generally the more mature the business, the more difficult change is.

It’s not the same as when companies are highly risk-averse. They might be super galvanized and eager, but just can’t summon the energy to make it happen.

It’s extremely annoying to lose an opp because of this. You couldn’t have done anything more; it’s just the way the cookie crumbled. In hindsight, there may have been slight missteps – but it just wasn’t meant to be

What causes a poor change environment?

Organizations with poor change environments won’t often have issues just in one area – when they do, it’s much easier to overcome! It’s more likely that they’ll have a whole catalogue of issues that slow them down, cause them pain, and increases the likelihood of inertia – the enemy of momentum.

These issues are likely to include:

• Strict IT and security concerns that need to be appeased before any software can be piloted, let alone onboarded

• Internal team bandwidth and priorities that limit their scope for investigating new solutions to their problems, let alone the implementation and energy required to state their case

• Entrenched software systems that are owned by centralized teams with their own priorities and restrictions

• Incumbent contracts that are poorly negotiated for long-term ROI with no exit clauses

• Business diktats that ban unnecessary spending, hiring freezes, or limit projects/areas for investment

Some of these will be visible from the start. Some will only become blockers later in the process.

So how do you expect, account, and move forward with prospects with cumulative issues like these?

Build your process around the change environment

Some sales reps will battle through all of the issues as they arise one-by-one, to no result. It just leads to knockback after knockback, diminished motivation and a drop in confidence.

You can try to mitigate these challenges in the sales process with various tactics, but it’s more valuable to recognize the bigger issue and bake it into your GTM, sales, and marketing strategy. For example:

• Understand it within your ICP and personas

  • Especially at ICP level, is there another segment that is more willing and able to work with you than prospects with hard-change environments?

• Extract as much information as possible in discovery and create different sales paths for easy-vs-hard change environments

  • Ask questions to understand the procurement process, ask for examples on the last time they purchased software, make sure you’re extracting potential blockers in the discovery call

  • In early-stage sales, disqualification is much more important and valuable than qualification – be strict on the types of prospects you want

• Track progress made in hard change environments to look for patterns, see what approaches work well, and consciously iterate on your win path

  • Make sure you’re building a NoWL (no, win, loss) program

  • Use a sales framework to record information and plan your deal strategy

• Be realistic with your go-to-market strategy and: is it worth trying to win those customers at all?

  • Could the time you spend on one hard customer be better spent acquiring two easier customers?

The sooner you can recognize and understand the change environment that your buyer operates within, the better systems and processes you can build around it – but make sure you make a conscious decision to acknowledge the challenge and are prepared to overcome, work around, or avoid.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Positioning-by-assumption doesn’t work. When we want to build momentum, supercharge growth, and increase sales, we need real customer insight to build powerful positioning.

Sure, assumptions – the result of our experiences – are useful, a form of internalized pattern matching. But our biases, limited exposure, and and a lack of subject matter expertise often prevent assumptions from being useful in the real world.

Sometimes we can go further. We can determine inferences; conclusions we draw based on our observations. While these may begin in good faith, these (again) can often be biased and pre-determined in nature. What may start as truthful observations can quickly become layered in opinion. There are always three truths: your truth, their truth, and the real truth.

So we should aim to build evidence. Direct from your customer.

But it’s difficult to know where to start. Who do you ask? What do you ask? How do you use that information?

I’m sharing my customer development cheatsheet – 19 high-value questions designed to extract maximum insight from customer research interviews.

Get started

How to use the template

These questions are designed to get information in five areas.

Segmentation

Purpose: understand the lay of the land, and who has responsibility for the problem area

• Who handles [problem area] at your business? Why?

• Tell me about your role at [company]?

• How much time is spent by your team managing [problem area]?

Problem Discovery

Purpose: Understand your customer’s perception of their challenges, their responsibilities, and what they think it’s important. We want to understand what’s going on for them overall.

• What’s the hardest part of your day?

• What activities take up the most time in your day?

• If you had a magic wand, what could be done to improve your experience with [problem area]?

• What’s the hardest part about being a [job title]?

• What are your biggest/most important professional responsibilities and goals?

• What are your biggest/most important personal responsibilities and goals?

Problem Validation

Purpose: Start to dig into their relationship with your problem area, and understand how they would perceive success and failure

• Tell me about your relationship with [problem area] – how much time/effort/energy is spent on it, and why?

• How important is [solving the problem] to you?

• What would winning at this look like?

• What are your biggest obstacles to winning?

• What does losing at this look like?

• How have you attempted to solve this problem so far?

Product Validation

Purpose: After sharing a brief overview (e.g. a one-page PDF, a website mockup, or a short demo), start to understand how a customer resonates with your current product thinking.

• What do you think of this product?

• How would this product solve your problem?

• How do you imagine this would change your life? / How has our product changed your life?

• What has changed in the last 5 years that has made this much more valuable?

Using the template

You’ll see the questions down the left column.

The first two columns you’ll see are Assumptions and Confidence.

In Assumptions, take an hour and state your current assumptions for each question – and mark your confidence against it – high, medium, or low. This is a really quick exercise that will tease out how well you know your ICP.

Next, set up interviews with current customers, prospects, and friendly people in the market. I’ve left four columns, but ideally the more customers you speak to, the stronger the patterns (aim for 10-15). Record the calls, make transcripts, and make notes.

Then review all the notes to look for patterns – jot those down in the next column.

Extracting insights

Now we have evidence, so we need to turn it into usable information.

For each persona that’s apparent – key stakeholders in the buying process, discovered throughout your research and experience – review the evidence and refine into these four categories:

• Key jobs – common activities that your customer does as part of their day-to-day

• Top 3 gains – their personal, professional, or business goals they want to achieve

• Top 3 pains – marks of failure and frustrations the customer must avoid,

• Likely triggers – their motivations to search for a way to solve their problem and switch away from their current solution

Evidence over assumption

Momentum is an outcome of focus and confidence.

To build confidence, you need to really understand what’s going on for your customer – their view of the world, their challenges, and what they care about.

So set up some calls, and get started.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter @jdomanpipe.

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A misguided founder is asked who the ideal customer is. “Everyone!” That’s the genius of it! Everyone in the world will need this product!”

The same applies to eager early-stage B2B startup marketers, founders, and sales leads. “We will sell to every company in the industry.” Revisit a few months later… and you’ll find are still in the same place. Trying to sell to everyone – SMBs, midmarket, enterprise – without much success.

But those who narrowed their focus on a particular, specific type of customer will usually be further along. They’ll have evidence of traction, be starting to build their ‘mini-brand’, and a pipeline to match.

Why? Niching down brings a multitude of value to early startups: improving alignment, reducing ambiguity across all teams, and bringing people from product to success together to build for the right person. The priority is velocity.

Many startups are reticent to get niche and narrow. “We’ll lose too much time,” or “we need to sell to anyone who’ll take it,” overpowers target-focused teams. And in six months, they wonder why they aren’t seeing any patterns in their data, let alone closed won deals.

Enter the Ideal Customer Profile.

What’s an Ideal Customer Profile?

An ICP is a hypothetical representation of a best-fit customer for your business today. Let’s break it down:

• Hypothetical – a method for testing and iteration, not a hard rule

• Representation – a depiction, caricature that’s easily recognisable

• Best-fit – objective assessment of the type of customers that you can market to, sell to, and support effectively

• Today – that you can market/sell/support today (or in the very short-term)

ICPs aren’t personas – they don’t describe a person. They describe the company, the firmographics, and any identifying information that makes it easier to recognize them in the marketplace.

An Ideal Customer Profile probably contains information like:

• Industry

• Number of employees

• Revenue

• Growth rate

• Geographies

• Target market (e.g. sells to B2B or B2C)

• Attributes (e.g. tech stack)

• Behavior (e.g. company goals and daily activities)

• Business challenges

ICP fails

I see two common issues with startups using ICPs in their go-to-market strategy.

Balancing breadth

Firstly, the profile has to be broad enough to support marketing and sales activity, yet specific enough to provide a yes/no qualification with a high likelihood of converting to a customer. Unfortunately, the symptom for ICPs that are both too broad or too specific is the same: lack of traction.

ICP as fantasy

Secondly, I’ve seen some teams use ICP as a theoretical device; a dream of the perfect customer… if only they actually existed. An ICP must be based in evidence, or at least be a structured, hypothesis-based attempt to discover a customer segment that will react strongly to your current proposition.

In these scenarios, ICPs become meaningless busywork rather than a strong guiding light for teams across the business.

Bringing structure to your ICP journey

Most ICP advice on the internet just tells you to research your current customers, look for common patterns, and then document it. Easy.

Not so simple… especially if you’re just starting out.

Notion (the VC, not app) has a great resource guide on ICPs, and I’ve used their ICP template multiple times to bring structure to this part of GTM.

Without repeating their post, I’ll summarise the key steps with my tips below:

1. List the possibilities: get “uncomfortably narrow” and list out all of the segments that you could serve. Use your existing customers, current prospects, market research, and more for inspiration. Segment via industry, revenue, number of employees, geographies, and anything else that can used to create a representation of an ideal customer.

2. Size the opportunities: add a bottoms-up TAM calculation or a proxy for the size of the market in the Addressable Value column. Tip: use lead-gen tools to search for lists of companies that match the descriptions you’ve created.

3. Assess Product Market Fit: agree the criteria that match the capabilities of your product with the needs of the customer. Try to keep them simple with Yes or No answers, like “accepts card payments” or “receives 1000s of customer emails each day”. Use an obvious ratings system for scores. Average out the criteria score for each segment.

   • On obvious rating systems; I use 5 for yes or high, 3 for maybe or medium, 1 for low, 0 for no. This create clearer delineations between scores, for easier prioritization.

4. Assess their propensity to buy: using the same approach, list criteria that defines how easy it is to do business with those segments. These criteria might range from simple (are their employees easy to find on LinkedIn?), to complex (does this segment require custom setup? are they willing to do business with a startup?). Use the same scoring system and average it up.

Then, the fun bit: combine the PMF criteria and propensity to buy score for each segment, and explore in conjunction with the addressable value you detailed.

• Are certain segments bigger markets, but harder to sell to?

• Are there high PMF segments you could reach today, but don’t have big markets?

• Do any segments stand out particularly high or low in either category that challenges current thinking?

You’re then left with a prioritized list of Ideal Customer Profiles that you can discuss, make decisions on, and – most importantly – use as a hypothesis to experiment with your go-to-market.

Validating the ICP

Ultimately, your ICP is a bet that you’re making. Are we able to build/market/sell/support these companies effectively? Hopefully, your ICP is based on current activity, and becomes a refinement rather than a redo. Then, validation is less of an issue: continue to do the work, see the results.

For those where an ICP is new and untested, think about the odds of success along the bet. Based on what you know and have done, is the biggest unknown whether you can market to them, or sell to them? This helps understand where to focus your validation efforts. It might be useful to assign a small cross-functional ‘tiger team’ to focus just on ICP customers before rolling out to the rest of the business.

ICP is strategy

An ideal customer profile is a tool to speed up your go-to-market by aligning product, marketing, sales, and success on the type of organization you are building for.

Don’t let it become a stale artefact. ICPs should adapt every six months as you learn more, better understand your performance with segments, and narrow down the ideal customers for your business.

If an ICP doesn’t work out… that’s fine, it’s expected. The ICP is a device to test our hypothesis, whether we can build for/market/sell/support this customer effectively. Look for qualitative signals (lack of excitement and urgency) just as much as quantitative ones (responses to marketing/sales activity, revenue).

Use the ICP as an alignment tool. Embed the profile across the business in conjunction with personas to reiterate the customers that you’re building and solving for (and importantly, who you are not solving for). Velocity – how much is achieved in a certain time period – will increase as a result of reduced ambiguity.

Eventually your ICP will broaden, as a halo effect of success organically introduces you into adjacent segments. But that’s another challenge.

In the meantime, remember: niches for riches*.

• For non-Americans: ‘niches’ rhymes with ‘riches’ in American English (yep, like “nitches”…)

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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It’s no secret that the most effective teams are the most aligned too.

Although I’d hazard a guess that – for most organizations – alignment is focused on internal business goals. Priorities, imperatives, strategic pillars, mission and vision. Ways of working, values, responsibilities.

But how many teams are fully aligned on the foundation of their business: the customer?

Take the empathy map challenge

I bet if you asked five people across your business to explain your archetypal customer, you’d end up with five completely different versions. So that’s what you should do.

Ask a few people to take one hour of their day, and complete an empathy map individually – and importantly, mark each note if it’s an assumption, or if it can be evidenced.

Get them back, and see how they differ. You’ll not only uncover what your team know about customers and can provide evidence to back up, but you’ll see the type of assumptions that people are making across your business. These might be strong and correct – but could be limiting and even damaging to your business.

With that insight, you’ll be empowered to make changes – and have evidence that there’s a need to focus on building knowledge.

What is an empathy map?

An empathy map is a concept borrowed from the UX world, with the aim of articulating what is known about a particular type of user, and creating a shared understanding.

There are different versions available, but this is the one I use:

The empathy map is made up of six sections: four in a grid, and two summaries underneath.

• Say & Do: What does your customer say about their business, challenges, and your product? What steps do they take?

• Hear: What do they hear from friends, colleagues, the media, passers-by? What is influencing them?

• See: When they look at the marketplace, what do they see? What do they see from your competitors? What are they reading or watching?

• Think & Feel: What emotions is your customer feeling? What’s their interpretation of their challenges, their options, and how they want to do business?

In the two sections underneath, apply some critical analysis and summarise the insights above through two opposite lenses:

• Pains: What are the challenges and frustrations your customer is facing? What does failure look like? What does your customer want to avoid?

• Gains: What does success look like? What does your customer stand to gain from solving their challenges?

Assess these at three levels to be super strong: business outcomes, professional outcomes, and personal outcomes.

Shared understanding is a foundational competitive advantage

In air navigation, the rule of 1 in 60 applies. For every one degree traveled off course for 60 miles, the plane will land 1 mile off the intended destination.

As an analogy, every person in your business is one plane. Teams are squadrons. A startup is an entire air force.

Without aligning teams on their core understanding of your customers – and course correcting where necessary – you’ll never end up in the same place.

But what would you achieve if you could get all teams focused on the same intended destination?

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