Trailhead Thoughts
“Everyone is not your customer.”
- Seth Godin
Trail Map - Learn. Think. Act. ™
You Don’t Need More Leads, You Need to FOCUS on the Right Ones
📚Learn
An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn’t a marketing exercise. It’s a strategic filter to focus your time, teams, and resources on people and companies you can actually help and who want what you offer.
Fictional personas. Get rid of them, they don’t belong here. Personas have manufactured problems. People in roles, the people you work with, real people. They have real problems.
Real ICPs are built from traits based on customers who you’ve had success with before.
Pick 5 clear, ranked characteristics. This gives you what we call Lines of clarity. Doing this will help you know who’s in, who’s out and why. The lines support decision making. The clarity creates focus.
***You might not be thinking - I’m not a revenue leader. You may be looking for your next hire, your next job, your next date. Here’s the cool thing. This model applies there as well.***
🤔Think
Are your sales, marketing, and success efforts aligned around a clear ICP? Or do you find yourself chasing every shiny opportunity?
Ask:
Who are our best customers and what do they all have in common?
Where are we wasting our effort on bad-fit leads?
Are we building for everyone or for someone specific?
💪 Act
Define your ICP using 5 specific traits (e.g. industry, role, team size, pain points, growth rate)
Stack rank them in order of importance
Audit your current pipeline
Who fits?
Who doesn’t?
When you know your ICP, you stop selling and you start speaking to what your customer needs.
Clarity creates traction. Confusion stalls growth.
