Your Accidental ICP

Every B2B SaaS company has a slide deck that houses its ideal customer profiles and buyer personas.  Go-to-market teams use these templates to democratize the understanding of the target market to better align GTM teams.  Alignment enables companies to build better products that deliver exceptional outcomes for customers.

Because revenue leaders are focused on maximizing quarterly bookings, they tend not to consider how closing poor fit customers impact the business.  Today most companies don’t have easy ways to quantify and surface these insights.  For example, how do poor-fit customers impact company growth rates? How do they impact the product?  How do these customers impact customer acquisition cost, net revenue retention, average contract value, NPS, and gross margins?

Without focusing GTM teams, B2B SaaS companies end up developing an “Accidental ICP”.  The customer base is often much different than the defined ICPs.  The composition of the customer base dramatically impacts the trajectory of the business. In previous blog posts, we discussed how poor fit customers lead to product drift, which over time weakens product-market fit and slows revenue growth. Without strong product market fit, the path to building the proverbial startup rocketship becomes unattainable.

About Align Software: We are building a SaaS company focused on helping B2B GTM teams grow revenue faster and more efficiently by improving product market fit.  We just opened our early access program and are looking for companies to participate.  Sign up here to learn more.