Nearly every dollar spent within a marketing department is directly or indirectly based upon reaching, educating, and converting target personas and accounts within their ICP. Yet, most companies treat their ICP as an afterthought.
When was the last time you updated your ICP?
How much confidence do you have in the accuracy and recency of your ICP?
What marketing investments (tech, people, ad spend, etc) do you make that have no basis in reaching the people and companies within your ICP?
Pointing the finger at marketing leaders is not the point of this article. Marketing teams live in ambiguity, often judged by things beyond their control, often being the GTM pressure valve when there's too much to do and not enough people to do it.
The point of this article is to highlight how our pursuit of efficiency, velocity, and AI-adoption has caused us to lose the plot a bit. Caused us to get away from the fundamentals. It seems like GTM Teams, in particular, Marketing Teams, have been in a frenzy to do more, do it faster, and do it with less resources.
On the surface this seems great. What's the problem with this you may ask? These things are good but there is a shocking absence of using all of the technology under the AI-Revolution umbrella to help us re-think, challenge, and refine what we are actually doing. It seems like we've forgotten that scalability and velocity are actually bad things if they're not done so in the correct direction. It would be like a race car driver with the fastest car, going in the wrong direction faster than anyone, getting further away from the finish line, faster & better than anyone.
There are only 2 things:
All of the focus the past couple of years has been on #2, and very little on #1.
The biggest issue and opportunity with this predicament we've found ourselves in is the ICP (targeting, etc).
In my opinion, there is nothing under the marketing umbrella that is so high leverage and so underserved.
It's almost like executing on everything listed above takes up all of the Marketing Org's time and very little time is left to ensure the common denominator of your entire Marketing Org's aspirations is thoroughly vetted.
When was the last time you updated your ICP?
How confident are you in your ICP both on the inclusion and exclusion side of things? Anyone in it that should not be? Anyone out of it that should be in it?
Do you have a process or cadence to refresh your ICP?
Do you have a process for stress testing your ICP and analyzing data in a way that will give you some answers on how to better tune it, and quickly use those insights to tighten up your marketing activities and better spend those precious dollars?