A client tells us the website isn't converting and new sales hires are taking forever to get going. Their bigger competitors have proper training programs, so they assume that's the gap. Then we go looking for the written-down version of who their customer is, and there isn't one. The fix wasn't a training program. Every new hire was spending a year working out who they were selling to. In this episode, Symon and Marcello get into ideal customer profiles and whether you need one before you launch. Marcello says nothing goes out the door until it's written down. Symon says that if you're new, you may have to launch on a guess. They end up closer than they started. This isn't a "research forever before you ship" take. It's the more useful one: every ICP starts as a guess, so make it an educated one, write it down, and change it when customers tell you you're wrong. For founders who think the customer lives in their head, and for teams trying to get new sales and marketing hires on the same page.
💡 Key Topics:
✦ The year-long ramp: when nobody has written down who the customer is, every new salesperson takes about a year to get up and running
✦ The persona access gap: only about half of people making content for sales teams say sales and marketing can get to the same buyer personas, and only 39% say sales uses the right content at the right time (Content Marketing Institute). That's marketers grading their own homework.
✦ Why "Marketing Mary loves hiking" isn't research: a stock photo, a job title and a quote add up to a nice-looking guess
✦ The Superhuman question: "How would you feel if you could no longer use Superhuman?" Focusing on the 22% who said "very disappointed" pushed that group to 33%, then 58% (Rahul Vohra's own account, no control group)
✦ Why the founder's head is the best starting point you have, and useless to everyone else until it's written down
✦ Why "businesses that want to grow" is wishful thinking, not a customer profile, and why a tight ICP doesn't mean tight ad targeting (a 2023 study of one Vienna car dealer)
✦ The one thing to do this week: write down who already buys from you or your competitors, then ask your biggest fans who would get the most out of your product
📖 Chapters:
0:00 — Write down who it's for
1:07 — The year-long sales ramp
1:57 — "It's all in my head" and thin persona decks
4:25 — Before launch? Superhuman's disappointment test
7:05 — Keeping the ICP alive, starting from scratch
9:22 — Verdict: get specific, then revise
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