Gary

Back when I led marketing at voice of the customer vendor Confirmit, our global sales leader knew what it took to scale our business. John was an advocate of arming our go to market organization with a very strong focus.

The company had successfully executed on the first conquest of its mountain strategy, having dominated the market research industry, and it was ready for its next mountain.

My role was to find the industry with the largest market opportunity for our geographies and with our best customer stories. Banking, financial services and insurance, BFS&I was the clear focus for us.

We immediately built a set of targeted assets and collateral that allowed us to dominate that industry. And within 12 months, we had more than doubled our revenue from BFS&I.

This gave us a cookie cutter that we repeated afterwards to sell aggressively and successfully to other industries, allowing us to scale the business from $13 million to over $50 million in ARR in less than five years.

What we had done was to identify our ICP – ideal customer profile – as well as the key buyers in our customers buying committees.

Successful go-to-market teams, once they’ve established product market fit, bring great into their businesses by identifying their ICP, building content to drive awareness and purchase-decision intent among the key personas within that ICP.

Leading the market intelligence function at Veracode, former Gartner analyst Robert Rhame played a key role in identifying Veracode’s ICP and researching our key target persona, driving an account-based marketing approach that led to sales and revenue success.

2:21

Gary

Robert, thanks for joining me today. It’s great to see you. Please tell our listeners about yourself and what you’re up to these days.

Robert

Hi. Thanks, Gary. It’s good to be here.

Yeah, I’m an American living for the past 24 years in Europe. Former Gartner analyst, did 15 years of pre-sales. I’ve got a two times market intelligence.

And currently I am an advisor at Lionfish Technical Advisors, advising vendors primarily on on their market intelligence strategies. We’re a bunch of, Gartner analysts that have formed a small group that work with the vendors, in security and infrastructure operations and cloud.

3:00

Gary

That’s awesome. You’ve got an amazing background, and I really enjoyed working with you over at Veracode.

Robert

Same, same,

Gary

In the last episode of What Great Looks Like, we talked about the importance of product market fit. In scaling out in early stage startups. It’s kind of like the chicken in the egg. Which comes first, product market fit or understanding of your ICP and key personas? 

Robert

That is a really interesting topic because these are all very, very, very much intertwined. It’s understanding who you’re selling to, understanding the people that are your target audience and understanding what your vertical is. These are all things that really kind of come together and they form the basis of your messaging. They form the basis of your product roadmap.

They help inform the sellers on how to approach their territories, and you can have various levels of maturity, and to kind of spoil the ending, there’s not really necessarily a one right way to do this. It kind of depends.

It’s just getting it started and beginning to iterate, because this is also not something that’s one and done. You don’t deliver your ICP and you’re finished. That’s not how it works. You don’t deliver your personas and that’s the end of it. It’s very much an ongoing thing.

4:20

Gary

Now that’s really interesting, Robert. And I imagine it changes as the company grows. So I think many people think, you do your ICP when you’re just getting started, but PE-backed companies that have hundreds of millions of dollars of ARR probably need to look at their ICP as well.

Is that your experience? 

4:37

Robert

That’s accurate. So for example, ICP drifts. ICP, can very much be something that maybe at the very beginning of, of the product life cycle, of the company life cycle, it wasn’t appealing to a certain group of, they didn’t need it or didn’t think they needed it.

And then suddenly the early adopters, the buzz catches on, and the word gets around, and folks are saying, hey, look, we need this too. So, I mean, there might be a good bit of shifting and evolution in the market as you progress. And that’s something that we detected also with buyer personas, how there was a big change in the way that the personas were deciding to purchase a product and who the responsible parties were.

So that’s precisely the reason why it’s not like a one and done type thing. They have to evolve.

Gary

And it must change as a company acquires new technologies or, it changes over time, not just its size and scale, but what it’s offering to the market. So that must all factor into this. 

Robert

Absolutely. Your competition makes moves. You could have a tectonic shift in the way that the analysts are looking at the market segment, and they’re saying that certain things need to happen or will happen. And then when they begin to happen from the vendors saying, okay, well, we’ll deliver that because it sounds like a good idea, or the customers begin to ask for it.

Then you might wind up with very different groups that we’re no longer or we’re not originally talking to so much. And they can be very dysfunctional buying committees if it’s not addressed properly.

6:20

Gary

So what are your first considerations in determining the ideal customer profile? I’d expect that many factors, including geography, company revenue, or employee count, industry, and others come into play. 

Robert

Yeah, that’s true Gary. Determining the ideal customer profile, it’s similar to the product market fit. There’s a lot of stuff that goes into it. It’s more than just a vertical.

It’s more than just like one customer, but it informs a lot of different things. It’s built up of the firmographics technographics, and it’s kind of conflated in the other two of the demographics. And as part of that…

Gary

Can you define these for our viewers? 

I think demographics, most people know. But firmographics and technographics might be new for some folks.

7:10

Robert

Yeah. So firmographics is kind of a larger umbrella with demographics built into it. And that’s things like the location, the vertical, the DUNS number, the revenue, what mode they’re in. It’s literally like, just a description of the company and their location and the different subsidiaries, because you can have, for example, a larger company like a BMW or a Toyota or GM, and they’ve got locations all over the place, and it’s good to know where they are, what their decision making process is.

For example, BMW is a very centralized decision making process, but VW is a federation of a lot of different locations and the central process is just a recommendation for how they test things. And then the subsidiaries can buy from this service catalog or not. And when you talk about technographics, you’re talking about the enterprise architecture for the most part, that’s literally like where this company is, what they’ve got installed, how cloud ready are they, how far are they into the cloud. 

Are they staying, keeping a lot of on-prem? What’s the installed base? What different products are there? Those things that information can be pulled from things like resumes that are out there, the various different job titles. You know, when you see the requirements for a position in IT, you can very easily see what types of things are installed in that location.

And that tells you your cohorts, or it can even inform your addressable market or begin to. and that’s something that’s really interesting because you get the larger overview of where your product and your competitors actually play in the marketplace. 

9:15

Gary

That’s really interesting. I was at a telemedicine company several years ago and our ecosystem was such that different vendors embedded our technology into their products.

And so we leveraged that by creating demand gen campaigns that focused on companies that used specific electronic health record vendors that we integrated with. So we knew that they were users of our partners’ product, and it was a much more straightforward sell to turn on what we had embedded in their products. Is that the kind of thing that you’re talking about, and does that apply? If you wanted to know who’s using my competitors so I can go after those companies too?

Robert

Exactly. that informs the take out campaigns and stuff like that. For example, if you have a strategic alliance with a larger vendor out there, they can sometimes provide you with customer lists; that can also be embedded into that.

But what you’re looking for is the mix of, let’s say, let’s pick a type of security product. So what are they running? You know what type of talent are they looking for? And how long has that been going on? And this is stuff that will give you from an analytics standpoint. You’ll begin to hone in on what companies are buying what products.

And that tends to indicate that these are more interesting customers and that can inform the competitor takeout campaign for who your customer targets are, in which regions. And you can do this by looking at, once you get this information and it’s structured in an Excel spreadsheet, for example, or depending on where you are in the company maturity, how many customers you have, you can analyze the CRM, so Salesforce data, and analyze which are your most successful customers.

Which ones? Where’s the sweet spot and pull that into something like Power BI or Tableau. And look at it from a geographic standpoint as well.

11:12

Gary

Help me understand, does the ICP evolve over time? Because I know we did some work together at a late stage PE-backed company, working on building the ICP, and obviously early stage startups need to define it very tightly.

And you alluded earlier to talking about how you want to replicate, especially at an early stage success, where you’ve had and build on that. Do you expand on that? 

Robert

Yeah, sure. So depending on where you are in your company, maturity and your life cycle, you’ll have either a lot of data that you can trawl through with Power BI or Tableau looking for where you’ve had success.

You can add in your customer metrics like support cases and things like that and understand, like how is it working for these customers? So at an early stage, you’re not going to have a whole lot of data. So you need to understand, like where you’ve had your success and when at a later stage you’re going to have a lot more customers, maybe several thousands, and you’ll be able to understand, okay, well, which ones are we closing within, let’s say six months or three months, depending on what you’re looking for or which ones take a long time, like we’re talking about a year or more. and then of course, which ones are leaving. And that’s kind of what you’re trying to get to. You’re trying to figure out where are you having success, how are you able to replicate that?

And for targeting purposes what’s your verticals? What’s your revenue target like? Is it small enterprise. Is it large enterprise. Is it very large enterprise or is it somewhere in the middle? You know what type of capabilities do you have to support these customers once you get them onboard? And how do you onboard them? That type of stuff.

So there’s a lot of different factors that come into defining the ideal customer profile. And a lot of it is very heavily analytics.

13:06

Gary

Right? So I worked with a company recently and the CEO told me our ICP is Fortune 1000. And I felt that that was a little bit broad. It was an early stage Series A company. They had some good success in some specific verticals around banking, financial services.

How would you advise them in that kind of circumstance?

Robert

If you’re looking at where you’ve had success, if you say Fortune 1000, then you’re effectively just, either using a shotgun or casting the net a little bit too widely. It doesn’t allow you to do any sort of targeted marketing approaches, develop collateral research.

Like, if I’m a customer and I’m looking at your product. I want to know what other customers have you had? Where have they had success? Success stories. and that’s something that’s very important to me. and if you don’t have, I guess, like, enough, resources, let’s put it that way, to develop this stuff for all the verticals then and at an early stage, you’d want to come in and, you know, choose the top 2 or 3 and say, okay, well, we’ve got success stories here. These are published. We know these are okay. 

And then as you get more mature, I’d say like, somewhere over a thousand employees, maybe 1500 to 2000, you’re going to have vertical-based selling, and you’re going to have the resources most likely within the marketing group to do that. You’re going to have the enablement capabilities, and you’re going to be able to define that ICP as it evolves over time.

It’s not just the marketing group. It’s not just the sales groups, not just the engineering. It’s your roadmap and everything else, your product market fit, these things all come together. It needs to be looked at from a holistic standpoint. That’s where ICP begins to inform a lot of different areas, left and right of what you think you’re doing.

15:06

Gary

That’s really interesting. So early stage, really you’re looking at replicating success and building, in effect, a cookie cutter, right? 

Focus on a particular vertical. As you mentioned, let’s build that customer success story, set of documents. Let’s build focused collateral. And once we’ve done that and dominated that industry that we chose, then you’ve got a recipe to just rinse and repeat. I know I’m mixing metaphors. 

15:35

Robert

No no no no, it’s exactly what I call your core competencies. And, you know, your core competency is very important when you’re looking at that at the company overall, because that’s what makes it appealing to these ideal customer profiles.

It’s kind of a two way street here.

If I have X number of resources to apply towards developing the product and, and then marketing the product and then selling the product at a Y stage of the company’s maturity, then you need to apply those appropriately, so that you get the most return on investment. And then when you get more mature, you begin to branch out rather than saying, okay, let’s, suddenly we sell, you sell to a very large customer, which is kind of the danger, for a lot of startups, they sell to a large customer, and the customer then defines their roadmap for them.

I’ve seen that very often. in, in, a lot of different companies where, where they sell to

16:38

Gary

I think we’ve both seen that in effect. The danger is your company turns into a consulting shop for one particular customer, as opposed to developing a product that many potential customers could use, 

Robert

which winds up being unscalable.

It’s not a scalable approach. You wind up fitting their need, which is very specific. and it doesn’t necessarily apply to other targets in the market.

Gary

You talked earlier about your buying personas. We were talking about that and ICPs and product fit are probably like the troika of what we’re trying to achieve here. Can you define for our viewers what the buyer personas are and then talk about the process that you use for identifying and researching them?

17:26

Robert

So I guess the buyer personas are – it’s not a title, because it can be a lot of different titles. For example, if I say that I’m a front end developer or back end developer, you can just basically sprawl really quickly. So you need to create bucket profiles for the personas within an organization that actually are the ones that are participating in the research, identifying the need, researching the companies that are out there, eventually making the decision, and then, of course, implementing the product itself.

And that’s going to be a buying committee. It’s going to be a number of different people in any mature organization. And this is getting a little bit more, I guess, institutionalized and better understood within most organizations that they need multi-departmental sign off to be able to really implement something successfully. Now, let’s start off. I’m going to kind of break my own rule and say that the CIO is a persona which is, it’s very difficult to find an organization that doesn’t have a CIO.

But then there might be an I&O leader, then head of engineering, the CISO; maybe it’s a marketing product that you’re using, and then you might have a marketing leader. So it’s basically you’re just looking for the types of people that your product is going to appeal to during their buyer’s journey.

Now, this cannot be misunderstood from a buyer’s journey, looking towards the buyer. It’s the way the buyer is looking at you. That’s always a very important distinction. It’s not like their movement down your funnel. It’s their journey and their touchpoints, their research, everything that they’re doing as they move towards making a decision and reaching out. 

About 70% of the buyer’s journey is done, by the time they reach out to the first vendor.

19:27

Gary

It’s really interesting because what you’re describing is creating unique and differentiated messaging for each of those people. And if your buyers committee has 40 people in it, that’s probably extreme. But if you can group them into, as you describe, sort of different functional roles, you’re talking about creating messaging for each of those. Now let me ask a question.

We worked together in an organization that sold to, well, the purchase decision or the signature of the contract was largely in the security team. It could be the CISO or designate of the CISO, but developers were the users of the product. Now, in many organizations, we felt like we had to overcome the friction between those groups. But both of those groups needed something like what we did to solve their problems, but they didn’t always get along.

How do you attack that? How do we attack that where we understood our personas and created messaging for groups that didn’t necessarily trust each other, but depended on each other? 

20:42

Robert

Yeah, that’s it. So I mean, basically it violates the power of one. So if you have one message, then, you know, if I’m writing a story, for example, and every time I refer to this group or that group, then suddenly we get very complex in your messaging.

So when you begin to talk to two people and that’s something that at Gartner we always use the know your constituency. Write for one. And that’s when you begin to say, okay, well, look, some of this collateral you identify, during the persona development, you understand what they like. Maybe a developer wants an in-depth technical whitepaper.

They’d like to, a direct interaction might be with a technical person, a wizard, whereas a more business oriented person, like a DevOps leader, might be open to the sales process and looking for that sales type thing because they understand the business at a very organic level. So I guess what you’re coming down to is it’s all the different attributes of the person is what defines the persona.

And then that informs the guardrails for content creation. And so it’s building the mix of what each of these people expect when they participate in the buyer’s journey the most. And what type of interactions they like, you know, for example, a CISO, they very much are happy to go to a conference and interact there.

They want to be viewed as a knowledge leader, a thought leader. So it’s how do you support that? And that’s usually done by doing a survey that analyzes people, and then cross-referencing that with other, cross-validating that with other data sources to understand exactly who these people are, what makes them tick.

And that creates your guardrails for your messaging, content development, website development, and understanding what type of journey each one of those people is on as part of a group.

22:52

Gary

So that’s really interesting, Robert. And I think, you know, it’s a lot of work obviously. And it’s critical if you want to really reliably and predictably increase your sales and grow your business. 

Could you do a quick kind of summary?

Does even make sense to ask you for a couple of bullets on here’s the key things for building an ICP. Here’s the key things for building a content strategy that targets your key persona. 

23:20

Robert

So for ICP, I think one of the key things is understanding the firmographics and the technographics and understanding what data sources you have already at your disposal to determine what you’re going to target.

Then, of course, once you’ve gotten into that, you’re looking at, understanding your own capabilities for how many different verticals you’re able to approach.

And that needs to be holistically informed by the personas within those organizations that are going to be responsive. And then probably the final thing is reuse the work. This is reusable work for a marketing targeted campaigns on these customers and also for informing sales and their regional possibilities of the potential, the greenfield, the competitive displacements, the total addressable market for setting quotas and, and targets.

it’s three things. It’s the research, leveraging the research. And then of course, then creating the product at the end.

Personas. Get started.

I think that’s the big one. You’re not going to be finished with this thing. It always moves just like the ICP. So start interviewing some of your salespeople, understanding who they come into contact with, looking at 6sense, the people that are searching for your company, understanding what their titles are and what buckets they fall into.

So that’s, that’s really, understand, like get started and have some basic, not too many, maybe five tops, personas and where they play, who, who sees them. And it can be very, very basic at the beginning as long as you’re beginning to understand that and you have an intent to continue to develop it, then the next is consistently, deploy these into the organization. That’s marketing, sales, product, and that’s done through enablement mostly.

25:20

Gary

That’s your secret to having an aligned go to market team, right. 

Robert

That’s it. Yeah. And you have to understand who you’re approaching. And then of course there’s the win loss aspect of it understanding, you know who the people were that did work with you.

And I’d say that’s, that’s really the getting that journey down because the journey has exploded since 2020.

And you have to understand, like, you may not be even contacted first. So it’s very critical that the first 70% of the buyer’s journey is covered with collateral. That’s going to be indirect, not direct, interactions with you. It’s going to be the Gartner Peer Insights, the blog post, the organic mentions, stuff like that.

And there are ways to influence all of these things. It’s not just like some imaginary land that you have no control over.

Gary

Because they’re interacting with you before you have any idea that they are. 

Robert

That’s it. You got it. 

Gary

Modern buying. Robert, this has been fantastic. I could talk to you about this for like days and days.

But in closing, and I know we kind of did some, some tips on some specific areas, but for those who are embarking on this journey, what are your key takeaways for viewers today?

26:39

Robert

So I’d say that the biggest one is really, it’s almost another chicken and the egg. 

Implement a market intelligence practice. The reason why is because you’ve got a lot of different silos within your organization, and this creates a lot of waste that can be consolidated into an effective program that has competitive, win/loss, personas, ICP, all these different projects that may be being done throughout the organization without, you know, the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing, it’s a waste. So market intelligence can really make an organization more efficient. 

The next is looking at ICP and personas. If you try to deliver something just over dimensional, you’re not going to get it done unless you have a lot of resources and time.

I took six months to completely revamp personas last time, but I was dedicated on that, and I had the time. It was important enough that we did the project and everything else? So don’t just think that you’re going to start it and it’s going to be done. This is an iterative process that is continually growing. It needs to be revisited. It needs to be redeployed into the organization for consistency.

And it’s not a one and done. So that’s the second probably big recommendation.

27:56

Gary

I really appreciate your spending the time with us today. Robert, it’s been great chatting with you. And just want to remind our viewers, if you haven’t already, definitely hit the subscribe button on the What Great Looks Like podcast. And, be sure to look at previous episodes.

Overall, what we’re doing here is finding experts like Robert who are going to tell us how to build an aligned go-to-market team and aligned go-to-market strategy so that you can execute and increase your sales. That’s what everybody’s looking for. And stay tuned for the next episode. So Robert, thanks again. 

Robert

Thanks, Gary. 

Gary

Thanks, everybody.

Until next time, take care.