Ninety percent of the SaaS founders I work with have an ICP that's too broad. It usually looks something like this: 'B2B SaaS companies, 50–500 employees, Series A to C, using Salesforce.' That's not an ICP. That's a market. The difference between a market and an ICP is what separates companies with efficient pipeline from companies running on hope.
Why broad ICPs kill efficiency
When your ICP is too broad, everything downstream suffers. Your messaging tries to speak to everyone and resonates with no one. Your sales team pursues deals they can't win. Your content sits at the surface level because it has to be relevant to too many different personas. Your CAC climbs because you're running discovery calls that were never going to close. The root cause of most demand gen problems I diagnose is an ICP that hasn't been forced into specificity.
The trigger-event approach to ICP definition
The most powerful shift I make with clients is moving from describing who your buyer is to identifying what just happened to them before they became a buyer. These trigger events are the moments that move someone from 'vaguely aware this is a problem' to 'I need to solve this now'. For a sales enablement tool, that trigger might be a new VP of Sales joining. For a payroll platform, it might be hitting 50 employees. For a compliance product, it's a new regulation announcement. Once you know the trigger, you can build outreach and content around it.
- What organisational change typically precedes a purchase of your product?
- What failure mode or pain event pushes buyers into active search?
- What external event (regulation, market shift, competitor move) creates urgency?
- Who in the organisation feels this pain most acutely — and who has budget to solve it?
How to validate your refined ICP in two weeks
Pull your last 20–30 closed-won deals. Look for patterns that aren't in your current ICP definition: company stage at time of purchase, recent funding events, headcount growth rate, tech stack, which team initiated the conversation. You will almost always find that your best customers share 3–4 characteristics that don't appear in your formal ICP. Those are your signals.
The ICP → messaging chain
Once you have a tighter ICP, your messaging almost writes itself. You're no longer trying to describe generic value — you're speaking to a specific pain at a specific moment in someone's journey. 'We help B2B SaaS teams generate more pipeline' becomes 'We help VP Sales at Series A HR Tech companies build a repeatable inbound motion in the first 90 days post-funding'. One of these gets responses. The other gets deleted.
The work is uncomfortable because it requires saying no — to segments, to verticals, to deal types that feel like revenue. But the companies that do it well consistently report the same outcome: fewer deals, higher win rates, shorter sales cycles, and better retention. Specificity is the growth lever most teams are too afraid to pull.
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