Growth in B2B is rarely about doing more; it’s about focusing on winning the right customers. A clear Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and well-defined buyer personas help teams focus their efforts on where long-term value is created.
This article builds on the same principles as our original ICP guide and adds practical guidance to help you move from insight to execution.
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Christine Hammeren, Marketing Manager at Viking Growth
Although they are closely related, ICPs and personas solve different problems:
In short:
Both are required for effective go-to-market execution.
The goal of your ICP is focus. It should be grounded in data from your existing customers, not assumptions or aspirational segments.
Review customers who:
Look for shared patterns across these accounts.
Just as important: define negative criteria – the attributes of customers that are a poor fit and should be deprioritized.
“Our ideal customer is a B2B SaaS company with 50–250 employees, operating in Northern Europe, experiencing rapid growth and struggling to align go-to-market execution across teams.”
Once you know which companies to target, you need to understand who matters inside them.
In most B2B organizations, buying decisions involve multiple stakeholders, such as:
Mapping the buying group helps you anticipate objections and internal friction, understand where deals stall or derail, and align messaging and plan outreach more effectively.
Buying group personas describe the stakeholders and key roles within your ICP accounts and how each contributes to the buying decision.
Strong personas are built using a combination of:
Avoid stereotypes. Personas should reflect real patterns observed in your data.
Understanding how your ICP accounts move from problem awareness to purchase is critical.
Map the journey across key stages:
This exercise helps you identify:
ICPs and personas only create value if they are actively used across teams.
Alignment across teams is critical.
Your market, product, and customers will change over time. Your ICP and personas should evolve with them.
Review them regularly, especially when you see signals such as:
Treat ICPs and personas as living tools, not one-off exercises.
Defining and operationalizing an ICP is only valuable if it leads to better outcomes. While no ICP is perfect, there are clear signals that indicate whether your focus is improving or drifting.
Strong ICP fit typically shows up as:
Warning signs of poor ICP fit include:
Regularly reviewing these signals helps ensure your ICP remains a practical decision-making tool rather than a theoretical construct.
One pattern we consistently see is that most growth challenges are not caused by weak execution, but by insufficient focus.
Teams often broaden their ICP in pursuit of short-term revenue, only to pay for it later through longer sales cycles, lower retention, and increased organizational complexity. The strongest companies do the opposite: they narrow their focus as they scale — even when it feels uncomfortable.
A well-defined and consistently applied ICP acts as a forcing function for better decisions across marketing, sales, product, and customer success. It creates alignment, reduces friction, and compounds learning over time.
Validating or operationalizing your ICP and buying group personas, this is often one of the highest-ROI starting points for focused growth.
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