How well do you know your customers? If you’re like most clients we serve, you’re probably thinking anywhere from “pretty well” to “really well” right now. Ok, let’s test that…

Acid Test: Your Ideal Customer Persona

  1. Who buys your products / services?
  2. What does a day in their life look like?
  3. What are they trying to achieve?
  4. What pain points are they solving for?
  5. How else could they solve the problem?
  6. What matters to them, what does not?
  7. Who decides to buy your services?
  8. Who’s involved in / influences the purchase decision?

If you can’t wax lyrical in your answers to the 8 questions, you don’t know your clients as well as you should. That’s not a rhetorical problem. You can’t target customers you don’t know really well. The effectiveness of your marketing hinges on how well you know your clients, your Ideal Customer Personas.

The effectiveness of your go-to-market hinges on how well you know how to reach them. In other words, how well you know your customers and how to reach them drives your top line as well as your cost of sales.

A blueprint to building robust ideal customer personas

Creating a great Ideal Customer Personas that can drive your marketing and go-to-market efforts requires a structured, data-driven approach.

  1. Start with real customers – Start your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP) analysis with real customers. For each customer, answer the 8 questions above. Cluster your answers by demand-driven use cases. These form your initial ICP.

  2. Validate your ICP with interviews – Conduct 10–15 structured interviews with customers and churned accounts. Ask them the 8 questions in your series of questions. Refine your ICP based on their feedback.

  1. Formalize your ICP – Specify the criteria for a customer to be an ICP. For a company, it should include notions of industry and company size. For decision makers within those companies, it should include notions of job title and responsibilities.

  2. Map ICP’s Buyer Journey – Document your ICP’s buyer journey: from awareness through consideration to purchase. Be specific and articulate how they know they have a problem they are prepared to solve (as opposed to doing nothing about); how they define their consideration set of solutions to solve that problem; how they select vendors to engage with; what key performance criteria matter to them in evaluating vendors; who decides and how.

  1. Operationalize ICP Across Marketing and Sales – Integrate the ICP profiles into your marketing and sales operations to increase your focus on high-fit prospects. For instance: update marketing assets – website, sales collateral, ads – to target ICP. Rebuild MQL and SQL scorecard to qualify leads. Target your ICP with outbound lead generation at scale campaigns.

By following this approach, your marketing and go-to-market motions will become laser-focused. Your Marketing team will be a lot more deliberate about where you expend time and money. Your Sales team will be a lot more disciplined about opportunities where they devote their time.  


Reach out if you have any questions on how to create insightful Ideal Customer Personas to drive your Sales and Marketing efforts forward.

Mores articles on Go-to-Market here and on Revenue here

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