Who you are for

Every marketing decision downstream depends on knowing who you are for. Most teams substitute a persona document for that knowledge, and personas are usually fiction with a stock photo attached.

ICP is a filter, not a portrait

An ideal customer profile is useful when it excludes. "Mid-market B2B" excludes nothing. "Companies with 50-500 staff running their own warehouse, where operations reports to the founder" is a filter you can act on: you know where to find them and what they care about.

The test: can it tell you who not to sell to? If not, it is a description, not a profile.

Where the knowledge actually comes from

• Talk to customers who recently bought. Not satisfaction surveys — buying-decision interviews. What triggered the search, what they tried first, who else was involved, what nearly stopped them.
• Talk to people who chose someone else. Uncomfortable, disproportionately useful.
• Read your own sales calls and support tickets. The language customers use is the language your marketing should use, and it is rarely the language your product team uses.
• Look at who actually buys, not who you targeted. The gap is often the insight.

Ten real conversations beat any amount of secondary research. They also take a week, which is why they get skipped.

The buying committee

In B2B, "the customer" is several people with different anxieties: the person with the problem, the person with the budget, the person who has to implement it, and the person whose job is at risk if it goes wrong. Messaging that speaks only to the first one stalls at the second.

Jobs, not demographics

What is the customer trying to get done, and what were they using before? Demographics predict little; the job and the trigger predict a lot. "Finance team of four closing the month in five days" tells you more than "SMB, 35-54".

What trips people up

• Personas built in a workshop from what the room already believed.
• Targeting who you wish bought rather than who does.
• One profile for a business with two real segments, producing messaging that speaks to neither.

You have got this when

You can name the trigger that starts a purchase in your category, and you heard it from a customer rather than inferred it.