ICP and positioning
Company size, sector and job title tell you who could buy. They do not tell you who is likely to buy now, or why. We define the ideal customer profile from the problem outwards, then test it in the market.
Before any outreach starts, each campaign has a written answer to these six questions.
Not every company in a sector has the problem. We look for the conditions that create it: the tooling, the shape of the team, the regulation it works under or the way it is growing.
The person who deals with the problem day to day. Often an analyst, an engineer or a team lead rather than the budget holder.
The person who can approve spend, or argue for it. Their concerns are usually risk, cost and timing rather than features.
A problem that has existed for years rarely creates a buying decision on its own. Something usually changes first.
Incumbent tools, add-ons to a platform the buyer already owns, an internal build, or doing nothing. The message has to account for each of them.
Security buyers carry the risk of a poor decision. Each role needs different evidence: references, technical validation, a contained pilot or clear commercial terms.
We review closed-won and closed-lost opportunities. Why deals were won, where they stalled, who was involved, and which triggers were present. Your best customers are compared with the rest to find what actually separates them.
History is limited, so we work from founder knowledge, early customer and design-partner conversations, product use cases and structured market tests. The first ICP is treated as a hypothesis and tested through outreach before anything is scaled.
Closed-won and closed-lost opportunities where history exists. Founder knowledge, early conversations, use cases and market tests where it does not.
Identify the companies where the problem is present and costly.
The person who feels the consequence and the person who can move budget.
The event that turns a known problem into a reason to act.
Written down, specific enough to exclude companies, and agreed with your team.
Make sure the outbound message matches how you present the company elsewhere.
Put the message in front of a defined set of accounts and personas.
Use what the market says to refine positioning, product priorities and the next campaign.
Triggers are used to decide who to contact and when. They are signals, not proof of intent, so each one is checked against the ICP before an account is included.
New leaders review tools, suppliers and team structure in their first months, and often have a mandate to change things.
New capital brings growth targets, hiring and closer investor attention to security maturity.
Bringing two organisations together exposes gaps in identity, tooling, data handling and policy.
Regulation, standards and audits create deadlines and a need for evidence. Examples include DORA and NIS2 for organisations operating in the EU.
An incident at the company, a peer or a supplier changes how the board views risk, at least for a period.
Large programmes create new exposure and new budget lines, and security is often asked to catch up.
A major customer asking for evidence, a questionnaire or a certification can make a long-deferred project urgent.
Selling into financial services, healthcare or the public sector brings new obligations and closer scrutiny.
Job adverts show where a team is investing, which tools it uses and where it is short of people.
When a buyer reviews its tool estate, contracts come up for discussion and new options get a hearing.
For early-stage companies, this work produces evidence: which segments respond, which problems buyers recognise, which roles engage and which objections repeat.
That evidence can support decisions about positioning, product priorities and product-market fit. It does not settle those questions on its own, and we do not promise to find product-market fit for you.
A 45-minute call about your ICP, your current outbound and how opportunities are qualified. You should leave with a clearer view of where to focus, whether or not we work together.