Brady Jensen on this episode
Brady Jensen is CEO of Clear Go to Market, a go-to-market strategy firm specializing in ideal customer profile (ICP) validation and buyer intelligence. He spent years as a technology sales rep frustrated by unvalidated messaging, then as a product marketer discovering that marketing was often throwing untested creative over the fence to sales teams. His expertise lies in bridging the gap between internal hypotheses about buyers and what prospects actually want, using qualitative research and non-sales conversations to stress-test market assumptions.
Most B2B SaaS companies define their ICP far too broadly—spanning fourteen industries, multiple segments, and basically anyone with a budget—making it impossible to focus marketing, sales resources, and messaging effectively. The typical culprit: companies engineer their ICP inside the four walls rather than validating it with real prospects outside the company. They create a hypothesis based on what they think should work, but they never test it against buyers who don't have a dog in the fight.
Brady's reframe centers on validation through elimination. Rather than trying to get the ICP perfect on the first swing, the goal is to recruit and speak with prospects who perfectly match your hypothesis (ten of ten attributes, not eight of ten), then listen for where that hypothesis breaks and where buyers redirect you. When you consistently hear the same problems, same titles, same industry, and same size from multiple conversations, you've achieved what qualitative researchers call data density—you can predict what the next prospect will say because the pattern is clear.
The episode walks through concrete criteria for narrowing ICP (industry, revenue, headcount, whether they've raised capital, executive engagement), how to recognize when a customer outside your ICP will churn even if you win the deal, and why competitive intelligence should focus on strategic signals—executive hiring patterns, M&A propensity, investment trends—rather than feature-by-feature battle cards. Brady also stresses the importance of "weird" ICP characteristics (like executive engagement level) because those are often the true differentiators that separate signal from noise and prevent your ICP from collapsing back into vagueness.
What we cover in this episode
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1:41
Journey from Sales Rep to Product Marketer to Founder Brady shares his frustration with unvalidated messaging from marketing, discovering that sales feedback was ignored and creative work often wasn't tested with buyers.
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5:14
Defining ICP: Too Broad is the Norm Eddie outlines the problem: early-stage and mature companies alike define ICP as 14 industries, multiple segments, and SMB-to-enterprise, making it impossible to focus.
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8:20
Tangible ICP Criteria: Industry, Revenue, Headcount, Signals Discussion of concrete attributes like industry, company size, revenue, job titles, whether they've raised capital, geography, and non-obvious signals like executive engagement.
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14:20
Validation Process: Non-Sales Conversations with Perfect-Fit Prospects Brady explains recruiting prospects who match 10 of 10 ICP attributes (not 8 of 10) and testing hypotheses through qualitative interviews to find where assumptions break.
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19:23
Data Density and Iterative Narrowing Through Elimination The goal is to talk to enough prospects that they begin to agree and you can predict what the next person will say, then look backward to identify common characteristics.
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24:25
When to Say No to Revenue Outside Your ICP Brady and Eddie discuss the painful decision to walk away from profitable customers whose fit is close but not close enough, and the churn risk of being too inclusive.
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30:58
Competitive Intelligence: Strategic Signals Over Tactics Competitive intelligence should focus on executive hiring patterns and M&A propensity, not feature-by-feature battle cards. Understanding competitor strategy tells you more than tactical comparisons.
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35:40
Weird ICP Characteristics: The Real Differentiators Non-obvious traits like executive engagement level or buying patterns define your ICP better than industry and revenue alone, and they prevent your ICP from becoming too broad again.
The lines worth sharing
You can be good at a lot of things that your market just doesn't care about. But until you actually bounce it off of the buyer themselves, do you actually value it?
Brady Jensen · 0:45
The second you have a buyer who can't say upon first blush, these people get me, you've lost it. Your goal is for them to be like, these guys get me.
Brady Jensen · 30:58
It's sort of like a target. Your ICP is this mythical creature that is a perfect match of everything that you would want in the perfect buyer. The determination of how far off from that they are is a constantly moving decision.
Brady Jensen · 24:25
If you can't show credibility, show some social proof, and show them you know them, I don't think you're going to have much success on the selling side, no matter how good your sales team is.
Brady Jensen · 31:15
Common questions from this episode
How do you define an ideal customer profile (ICP) instead of making it too broad?
Validate your ICP hypothesis by recruiting and having non-sales conversations with prospects who perfectly match your criteria. Look for data density—when 10 conversations yield consistent agreement on problems, titles, and industry. Then work backward to identify the actual characteristics that define your best customers, using elimination to narrow rather than adding criteria.
What criteria should I use to define my ICP?
Start with industry, revenue, headcount, job titles, whether they've raised capital, and geography. Then identify non-obvious signals like executive engagement level or buying patterns. The weird characteristics often matter more than the obvious ones because they prevent your ICP from becoming too broad and help you focus resources effectively.
When should you say no to a customer outside your ICP?
Ask two questions: Can we deliver value to this customer? And can we retain them profitably? If you have to upskill your team, build new customer stories, or take on churn risk, it's usually better to walk away. Profitable but off-ICP customers often become support burdens that distract from your core focus.
How should we approach competitive intelligence?
Focus on strategic signals like executive hiring patterns, M&A history, and investment trends rather than feature-by-feature comparisons. Understand competitor propensity and trajectory to inform your own strategy. Avoid obsessing over competitor tactics; focus instead on what your ICP actually values.
What is data density in ICP validation?
Data density occurs when you've spoken to enough prospects that they all begin to agree on problems and needs, and you can confidently predict what the next prospect will say. It signals that your ICP hypothesis has been validated and you've identified the true characteristics of your ideal buyer.
Why do marketing messages often fail to resonate with buyers?
Marketing often creates messages inside the company without validating them with actual prospects. The gap between what marketing thinks buyers want and what they actually value is still embarrassingly wide at most companies. Testing differentiation messages with buyers in non-sales contexts before sales pitches prevents wasted months and failed campaigns.
SEO meta description
Brady Jensen, CEO of Clear Go to Market, reveals why your ICP is too broad and how to validate it by talking to real prospects. Learn the criteria and process to narrow your customer focus.
Target keywords
ideal customer profile ICP
how to define ICP
ICP validation
Brady Jensen Clear Go to Market
B2B SaaS customer definition
buyer validation qualitative research
competitive intelligence strategy
go-to-market segmentation
ICP too broad
customer targeting criteria
data density buyer validation
non-sales conversations prospects
Read the complete conversation
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Read the full transcript · 48 KB · Brady Jensen
BRADY JENSENyou can be good at a lot of things that your market just doesn't care about. But until you actually bounce it off of the buyer themselves and say, here's what we think meets the first three criteria, how about this fourth one? Do you actually value it? When we talk to people about differentiation, when we're talking to buyers in market, what we want to know is, what are the messages of differentiation you're hearing from all the vendors in market? What are you hearing from our customer? And then what are the alternatives that we could bring to bear that would do better
BRADY JENSENthan what our customers currently talking about with their buyer from a value standpoint?
SPEAKER_02Welcome to Go-To-Market Science. There's an art and there's a science to go to market. And in this podcast, we talk about the science by interviewing CROs, private equity investors, and other sales and marketing experts, as well as talking about what we learn every day in the trenches helping to build Go-To-Market engines.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAll right. Welcome to another episode of Go-To-Market Science. I'm your host and also the founder and CEO of Union Square Consulting, Eddie Reynolds.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I'm here with Brady Jensen, CEO of Clear Go-To-Market, to talk about understanding our customers better with data. Brady, I'd love if you give a quick introduction to Clear Go-To-Market and what you guys do. It overlaps so much with what we do. And I was really excited to dive into your particular area of expertise so that our audience can learn more about some of the stuff that we touch on, but maybe don't go as deep as you do.
BRADY JENSENYeah. Well, thanks for having me, Eddie. A quick thumbnail sketch about myself. I was a technology sales rep who became a product marketer, who became a product marketing agency owner, who became what is now Clear Go-To-Market. And really, it's been a journey from being a sales rep who was sort of frustrated that the stuff that was being told to me and my peers as far as what we should go out and pitch in market wouldn't necessarily land with the buyer. And our feedback tended to fall on deaf ears and not get addressed the way that I imagined it would. But at the same time, thinking, well, marketing, they got to be doing all this work to validate what they're asking us to go out and pitch. There's no way that they would have 50 salespeople go out and just try it out and see what works. And then I became a product marketer and realized how many times that's exactly what it was. It was throwing something over the fence that was really great creative writing, right? Top-notch stuff, but it hadn't been validated with buyers as how they really wanted to be sold and what would attract them and ultimately get them to purchase. And I got frustrated with that, candidly. And so as an internal person in product marketing, I was constantly looking for opportunities to fill this gap that I don't even think the company I worked for necessarily recognized, which was how do I become the equivalent of voice of the customer, but voice of the prospect, voice of the person who maybe is unengaged or disengaged at all with your company and really spent my time trying to sit at that intersection and constantly feed factual information into the conversation about what the buyer actually wanted from us. And that ultimately took what was a more generalized agency for product marketing doing a bunch of different things for go-to-market to then morph into exactly where I had ended up, or I guess where I had ended my experience as an employee, which was spending most of our time now in conversation with prospects and others in market who can help us understand and succinctly feed that ideal go-to-market to our customers.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd that's what really attracted me to this conversation. So we talk about go-to-market science being a podcast about the science of go-to-market, where there's an art and there's a science. And a lot of what you talk about, I think, is the art, but I also see this overlap with the science. And for us, like if you look at our go-to-market efficiency pyramid framework, it starts with ICP. And that's one of the places that I wanted to start with you is to drill in and talk about the best way to define ICP. And I'll caveat this with, when we talk to our prospects and our customers, I was just on the call with somebody a couple days ago. And I said, do you have your ICP defined? And they said, yes, absolutely. And this is, by the way, a pretty small company. They were asking me more for advice than a prospective customer, because I think they're too small for us. And they're saying, we're a small company with a small sales team. And our ICP are, bam, they list off 14 different industries, SMB, mid-market, enterprise. And I'm like, okay, cool. That's a million companies out there, or whatever the number is. And you have a sales team of, what, five, 10 people? Okay. Could we narrow this in at all? So I'm going to get into that with you. I'll ask a high-level question, then I'll probably poke you and drill you with more specific questions. What do you see as your best practice for defining ICP? ICP, in a lot of ways, gets defined for you, right?
BRADY JENSENYou can go the one direction of saying, like, we're going to build this thing, and it's going to be for this exact audience, and they're going to use it this specific way. And every plan's great until you get punched in the face, as I think Mike Tyson said, right? So the number of times that organizations early and even much later in their life cycle find is that who they even believed their ICP was was either too broad or it completely changed, right? So from my perspective, an ICP is who is the collective set of people, right? Because people are who actually buy. They sit within an organization, which you also need to define. But what are the characteristics of that buyer who sits in this type of organization that would lead them to be attracted to and ultimately buy from you? So if you're an early stage disruptive product, for instance, it probably shouldn't be 14 industries and six different titles within them across massive swaths of revenue. You want to say, how are we going to go after companies that have a propensity to buy something that can be sold as something that's going to dent the universe, so to speak? What are the types of buyers that need to be hired into a company like that that are going to be attracted to this message? And early stage, that's kind of what you're going to focus on is like, can we pick those types of people? And then maybe you do start with 14 industries, but you want to be ruthless about weeding out as soon as you're getting feedback that some of them are not working, right? So to me, it is a game of discovery more than it is a game of engineering, right? You could say, well, we're going to engineer the perfect ICP for the product, and it tends to fall flat. And I think that's why a lot of companies pivot pretty consistently over the time of they're building something is that if they're smart about it, they're not just saying we're changing the product, but we're changing as we refine and we learn about the organizations and people who sit within those organizations, so that you can have your best shot. Because to your point, if you're competing in a market that you are an early stage vendor, it feels right, it feels comfortable to spread your bets and just say, well, we can sell everyone and there's a value prop for everyone. But if there's a value prop for everyone, it's likely so diluted that there's not a value prop for any of them that is going to get them excited enough to consistently buy and allow you to actually create a repeatable go-to-market that's focused on that type of ICP.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. Let's drill into that. So I want the audience to have the opportunity to come away with tangible takeaways, like, okay, I want to better define my ICP. How do I do that, right? And so I think something I always struggle with, because we don't go as deep as you guys, is like, what criteria are we looking for? And the way that I think about this is, one, as a sales rep, I've been in this situation, for example, when I was at Salesforce, where I came from the investment management and financial services industry, and they had a dedicated team for finance, and they put me on the other team that covered everything else. I'm like, okay, cool. So I just need to learn every other industry under the sun. Thankfully, that team and that territory that I was given was heavily focused on B2B SaaS, professional services, and advertising and media. I spent three years there. I still don't know anything about advertising and media. All I know is just enough to know that I don't know anything about it. And then there's like 50 other industries, and I'm just like, I can't even pretend to understand. So as a sales rep, and I want to be careful about using industry, because I think for some products, the industry doesn't matter. For Salesforce, when you're trying to sell somebody on a tool that manages the sales process, well, the sales process in a B2B SaaS company is very, very different than the sales process in a venture capital firm, which I only know because I worked in sales, raising capital for VC and private equity funds. This is completely different, right? There might be certain products where you don't really care what industry they're in. You care about something else. But I tend to think of things like industry and segment. I think about revenue. I think about headcount. I think about what geography they're in. I think about whether or not they've raised capital, how fast they're growing, whether or not they have a key person for what we do, for example. It's really helpful if a company has a dedicated CRO. It's a lot harder for us to do what we do without that. Not impossible, but harder. I even think about things like when I was selling the marketing tool at Salesforce, we would go to a company's website. Well, if they have a shitty website and they don't have any tools on their website, then they're probably not super interested in investing a lot of money in marketing technology. Just going out on a hunch there, right? So I use these as examples, but I'd be curious from you, what specific criteria do you look for when you're working with a company and you're thinking, let's look at your best customers. How do we describe these customers? The customers that were easiest to win, had the fastest sales cycles, cost us the least to serve, are most profitable. What criteria do we use to define those companies so that we can then reverse engineer our ICP?
SPEAKER_08Well, to your point, there are a ton of different characteristics that you can use, sometimes to their correct effect and sometimes to your detriment, if you're picking the wrong ones.
BRADY JENSENSo I'm not even as concerned about making sure that the first time you select them that you're right, as I am concerned about how quickly you are willing to abandon the ones that are wrong. So to your point, yes, industry matters, size of organization matters in some instances, and some instances maybe less so. What we're looking for is to say, how can we make sure that all the people represented in your ICP, you have the best shot of them being similar. Similar in the way they operate, similar in what problems they face, similar in what sorts of things that they may have tried to solve the problem. Because ultimately, I think the ICP is the tip of the spear where really what you're trying to do is a sort. It's a sorting mechanism to say these people are alike and gravitate towards us. These people are not alike and therefore some people that are outside your ICP today, I think, could potentially be a great candidate in the future, but you don't have the manpower. Really, no company has the manpower to go after, for the most part, the entire market, especially right as you start.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I'm talking about mature companies here as well. I want to clarify, like, our audience and our customers are a lot of very mature companies, plus 100 million in revenue, but we still see the same issues. And maybe even more so, because now you have a lot of resources. You have a lot of people in marketing, a lot of people in sales, a lot of money behind that. But you're trying to point those resources in the right direction. And so, for me, like, this comes down to things like, well, what marketing content are we creating? Like, who are we speaking to? What territories are we developing? Or, like, I'll give you a very common problem that we run into with the companies we work with. Sales reps have too many accounts. So, we say, okay, like, we've run a capacity plan. And if your reps reach out to all the right people with all the right messaging, the right number of times before giving up, we've done the math, in a year, they could cover, let's just say, 100 accounts, 200 accounts, whatever. They have 2,000 accounts in their name. Okay, I've been in this situation so many times. Which 200 of the 2,000 am I supposed to call? And how do I figure that out? I don't think that's a salesperson's job. That's a data analytics job. That's a rev ops job. That's the CRO's job. Maybe that's your job, Brady. But what I want to figure out is if we know that that rep can only handle 200 accounts, how do we identify the best possible 200 accounts? And just give it to them on a silver platter and say, hey, you might dig into this and go to the website and see that they have, like, a shitty website. And maybe this isn't the best company to sell marketing technology to. But with the data that we have available, we've done the best we can to identify the best companies. And here it is on a silver platter so you can focus your time and energy on those companies. And same for marketing. Like, who are we generating content and marketing events and ads to? It can't be everybody in the world. What criteria can we use to narrow that down?
SPEAKER_13So where we spend our time is on the validation more so that we're not sales ops folks.
BRADY JENSENAnd I have a great respect for them because they cut the data to begin with and they start developing hypotheses about what an ICP should look like based on what they think will be the most likely to buy from them. And where we step in is once that hypothesis has been created. It's still a bit of a guess and a hypothesis is very common. We go out in a non-sales context to actually talk to people who fit that exact ICP, right? For these people in specific, we don't want it to be like you have eight of the ten attributes. We want to have ten of the ten, right? So we go out and we recruit and have conversations with people who are the perfect version of that ICP and we test the product. We test the hypothesis about whether or not they are the perfect company and prospect to be going after. And what we tend to find is more often than not, it's not who they think is the perfect prospect is not. So it becomes a weeding out process of saying we've talked to ten people that you believed in. Your hypothesis was that they were the perfect ICP because of these things, but they are not. And we can oftentimes also then point them to people who are. And sometimes that's as simple as you're in the right organizations, but you're in the wrong line of business. Or maybe you're in the wrong industry, but you're sort of scratching the itch, but you're not on it. They're in banking, but really they should ensure it is actually the right way to go. So what we do is when we have these conversations, I'll give you an example. There's a company we worked with on this specific topic and they had a hypothesis that they could take what they were selling to sort of middle office technical folks. And all they'd have to do is flip it and say, well, now we're going to sell to machine learning and AI folks in the same organization, because we think that organizations are right, but the titles are wrong. We go and talk to these machine learning AI folks and they're like, we will not ever touch a third party application like this. It's never going to happen, but we know of someone else and it's not actually where we're working. We're in, we're banking or whatever, but we know some folks in insurance, like this would be perfect for them. Right. So we have to help guide the conversation to say, let's look at who you think is perfect. And then let the co-creation process start with people in market because they're going to point you. It's almost, I guess, human nature to say, well, I'm not the right person for you, but I think it's actually right over here. So that's how we do it as a process of elimination where we start with their best guess and a company that realizes that until you actually bounce around and get outside the four walls of the company, so to speak, you're not going to get to the type of answer you're looking for. So I guess that is part of the kind of the science mixed with the art is that we have to engage in conversations and dig deeper than your surface level answers to get people to really think about if they are even the right person and right organization for you to target. And if not, allow them to give us the feedback that allows us to reformulate and continue to iteratively test until we get to the point where we get what in qualitative research is called data density, which is if I talk to 10 people, I'm going to get 10 of them sort of agreeing and I'm going to be able to guess what the next person is going to say. Right. If we get to that level and all of them are lining up and we can look and say 10 of these people, here's the commonality between all 10 of them, and they're all saying, I'm your guy, I'm the person who would buy it, have the pain, have the resources to purchase something like this. Well, that's your ICP, but you don't get at it by just kind of ivory towering your way into an answer. You have to actually allow the buyer to sort of direct the stream where it should go before you make a final decision on where you should be.
SPEAKER_13That makes a lot of sense. And I don't think I would ever advise somebody not to go speak to their customers or their potential prospects to have conversations like that.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo I think that's great. I guess my question is when you've done that exercise and you come back and let's use this concrete example. So we've now identified it's not banks, it's insurance companies that we're selling to. How else can you narrow it in so that we're not targeting the entire insurance space? Maybe we're looking at a sector, a certain size company. I'll just kind of ask my same question again. Like, what kind of criteria are you looking for so that we can then go back to sales and marketing and say, this is exactly who you need to target? Man, I hate to be repetitive, but let's say that that is the case, that insurance is the right place.
BRADY JENSENAnd now you've got property and casualty. You've got reinsurance. You've got all the different flavors of maybe health. And you're starting to look at it. It is the process of elimination. To get to that final answer would reiterate is to us, it's more about finding the group of people who all agree and then looking up and saying, what's the same about all of them?
BRADY JENSENSo that we can actually have those markers or identifiers to say, it's at this level of the organization.
BRADY JENSENIt's these titles, it's this industry, it's this size, because if we float a little higher and we're having conversations with people, they're not having the same problem, float a little lower, they don't have the budget, right? To actually equalize on who that is. And then you look and say, okay, not is this a big enough TAM right now, but is this a big enough potential buyers for where you're at in your organization to go after as your ideal? And stick as close to that ideal as possible until you realize you need to break new ground and go right outside of that established ICP, which is also something that we end up doing quite a bit. They've kind of exhausted the early adopter type person and they're coming in with a product that's disruptive and they need to know where's the next thing and what's the next bowling pin we need to knock down. So we go into it assuming that they're going to all match similar, they're all going to match kind of a similar set of characteristics, but the flavor is going to be a little different and it's not going to be a perfect one for one. So how are you going to kind of grab territory that is close enough because if your ICP work before, the last thing you want to do is go so far that these people wouldn't even reference each other if they were or consider it to be an acceptable reference if they were to ask.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI love that example because I've lived that when I started this company and we were less focused, we'd get a prospect and send me a customer story. And then I'm like, yeah, okay, cool. We've got this one customer story over here from a company in a totally different industry, totally different size, totally different situation. And I'm like embarrassed to send this to you because you're just going to look at this and say like, I mean, even when I was at Salesforce, like we had the same problem. I was on the SMB team and, you know, I'm trying to talk to a software company that, I mean, SMB at Salesforce was fairly mature, but I got like maybe a hundred million dollars software company. And I'm like, come, come to the Salesforce world tour, come to Dreamforce, come, come see this event. And they walk in and they're like, let's talk about how Pepsi is using Salesforce. And they're like, I don't care how Pepsi is using Salesforce. I think it was like, I vividly remember it was actually Coca-Cola. And they're like, we're using augmented reality to go into like a convenience store and show the convenience store owner where the Coke machine is going to go and what it's going to look like on their floor. How cool is that? And I'm like, it's not cool at all to somebody running a software company unless they are in the augmented reality space. It's not relevant. And it was very frustrating for me, even with the massive marketing engine that we had at Salesforce. They're like, hey guys, we need some stuff that is relevant for this specific customer. Can we please get that? And if you're spread too thin, you just end up in this trap. And then that leads me to my next question of like, it's one thing to figure out who you're targeting. And then the other issue is like, when do you say no to the people coming to you? So we have our ACP defined as effectively like B2B SaaS companies with 50 or 100 million plus up to like 500 million or a billion in revenue. Ideally have a CRO in place that runs all of sales marketing and CS, though we don't always get that. And they really care about building a repeatable data-driven, process-driven go-to-market engine. It's very specific for us. But then we'll get somebody that comes to us. Like I think I have a call later today with a company that does real estate investing. And they have a team that's going out and calling folks and trying to get them to sell their real estate. Okay, cool. So I have two lenses I looked at. I'm like, one, can we add value? Can we take what we've learned with software companies and apply that for this particular company? We're not going to get a great customer story out of it, but can we deliver value to this customer? And then two, can we retain them and make money off of them? Or are they going to be so difficult to serve and keep happy that we lose money? And part of that is like, do we have to like upskill our team in order to do that? And the answer is probably like, this isn't a good fit for us. And we have to decide whether or not we're going to be willing to take on that customer. And for me, that's always a hard thing. Like a lot of companies, like how many companies are out there saying like, hey, we won't work with you. I know you're not in our ICP, so we will not do business with you. That's a hard thing for a lot of folks to say. It's something that I feel acutely every day.
BRADY JENSENI'm sure you do too. More so than when it was easy for me to be on the other or not be on the side of someone who has to make that decision, right? I was in a product marketing role most recently, and product marketing is great at sort of saying like, they're not in the ICP, you shouldn't be selling them, right? Because theoretically on paper, it's better if you don't. But running my own company, there are plenty of times where it is a painful decision to say, we don't want that revenue. It's a short-term versus long-term mindset that you have to sort of switch into and be willing to say, this will be a churn. Even if we win, right? Even if they will overlook the fact that we have no success story that looks anything like them, and we go to try and we win this deal, what then? Can you build a business on a bunch of potential churn risks from day one that are just not a good fit? You don't have the right folks in-house. I think about it in terms of like, it's sort of like a, it's like a target, right? Your ICP is this mythical creature that is a perfect match of everything that you would want in the perfect buyer. And the determination of how far off from that they are is a constantly moving. It's a living, breathing decision you have to make about, is this an organization where we can provide it? Or we've thought about building this and they would help fund us building this thing that we already want to do because it's adjacent to us, but just off to the side. I think about it in terms of, if I take this customer, if I'm being opportunistic and saying, oh, that is actually really close to what we're already doing and it's not going to disrupt the business and we think it'll be great for the long-term health of the business. Try to embrace that and see if you can bring that into the ICP, which again, sort of like is a really hard call to make. But I don't think I would recommend my customers ever just say, well, you don't check all the boxes, so we're not going to service you, right? There are some financial realities, right? If you build a product that is for enterprise buyers, then no, you should absolutely say no to an SMB that should be buying through a product-led growth funnel, right? But if they're close and they look enough like them and they look related, then I think that it's a decision of, is this where we would go next if we got to choose, right? Because there's a crossing the chasm and all of that theory does talk about the bowling alley and like who is the next pin that's close enough would be referenceable to the other party because you do want to take that land after you establish a beachhead. But you have to make that call, I think, on saying, is this something that we would have thought of as a good idea before they showed up and expressed interest? Or are we trying to figure out how to make it a good idea because it's an opportunity and it's right in front of us?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, and I think like that's kind of the lens that I look through this at. I mean, I'll give you an example, like a number of years back, many years back now, it feels, I want to say like, oh, like a couple of years ago, and I'm like, well, that was like six years ago. We decided to no longer have private equity firms as our customers. Now, we have a lot of private equity firms as partners and they refer us into their portfolio and that's a major thing for us, right? But I'll give you an example of a specific customer and our contact there, his name is Eric. And I'm talking to Eric and I'm like, hey, Eric, we don't want to work with you anymore. And I said it in the most polite way possible. But the thing is, is like, it's a small PE firm. Not that it really matters how big the PE firm is. They only wanted us to help them figure out how to implement Salesforce and to manage their fundraising process and their deal sourcing process. I came from this world. I understand this business as well as I understand B2B SaaS. But every time we hired a new employee, we'd have to train them on this. I'd have to explain the nuances of private equity, which is really difficult, right? And they're like saying things like, well, who are your customers? And the PE firm is like, we don't talk about customers. We have investors. We have portfolio companies. It's like, there's so much training there, right? And I want to be careful here and not talk too much about services businesses. It's the same thing with a software company. You get these curveballs that like, I have this use case for your software that's not applicable for your ICP. And so I said, hey, Eric, like, I'm sorry, we can't renew this contract. At the end of the contract, we are going to narrow our focus. And he was very upset, didn't understand like why we didn't want the money. And for me, it was like, oh, it's so hard to walk away from a happy, profitable customer. But by doing that now, my focus is solely on B2B SaaS. I could ask him if they invest in B2B SaaS and if they'd be interested in talking to us about what we could do for their portfolio company. And the answer was no and no. I can then focus all my energies on solving problems for the B2B SaaS industry. And if we get somebody else that comes to us and they're like, hey, like we sell recurring revenue professional services, like we're a marketing agency and we have a big sales team and we're trying to solve the same problems that a B2B SaaS company is trying to solve. Cool. That's close enough for me. Like we understand concepts of MQL, SQL, SQL, forecasting, etc. None of that stuff applies to like a private equity firm, right? And so, I'm able to like narrow my focus as an organization on that. Every piece of marketing content we write has like this very specific buyer in mind. When we build out sales territories, it has a very specific buyer in mind. And we still spend a lot of time talking to PE firms, but we're talking to PE firms that invest in B2B SaaS companies and we're talking to them about how we can help those companies, which is just a completely different business. And that shift was hard. It was hard to say, hey, we're going to take a bunch of companies that are paying us money that are profitable and walk away from them, even to the extent that like they're upset with us. But the alternative is to spread ourselves too thin and be like master, jack of all trades, master of none.
BRADY JENSENYeah, it's interesting with our own customers, I often frame the question of how far you should go in being inclusive versus exclusive when it comes to ICP. And I always tell them the second you have a buyer who can't say upon first blush, like these people get me, you've lost it, right? Like your content, much larger companies, Salesforce, for instance, you get to a certain point, and yes, you have multiple ICPs and multiple segments and industries and all of that, and you specialize and all that. But you do that because you still have the prospect, ultimately, if they're reading content, if they're being pitched, whatever it is, your goal is for them to be like, these guys get me, right? They understand me. Well, and that's a really good example, because the reason we were selling into private equity is because I got them because I worked in the industry and Salesforce didn't.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd so Salesforce was getting like their lunch eaten by competitors that were solely focused on private equity. And then you've got a sales rep that was selling can and copy machines like two months ago. Suddenly, they're on the financial services team, and they're supposed to learn how banks work, how insurance companies work, how private equity firms work, how five other different types of companies work. And they're walking into a PE firm saying, tell me how you guys generate revenue and tell me, like, who's your ideal customer. And the PE firm is like, what? I don't even know what those words mean. Sorry. And then the competitor is like, okay, what is your investment criteria? What type of investors are you targeting? How many people do you have on your investor relations team? And it's like, okay, which product am I going to buy here?
BRADY JENSENWe work a lot with private equity as well as partners, not as paying customers as well.
BRADY JENSENAnd even for us, there are corners of private equity that I don't understand well enough to be involved in, right? We work with sort of traditionally, anyway, post-close value creation during the whole period. And we're pretty good at that because these companies can help us identify the ICPs that exist within their portfolio, right? But really what they're doing is they're being a connector saying, you're an expert in what this company in our portfolio needs because they're your actual ICP and they're the connector, not the customer. And that tends to work extremely well, but I think we would run into the same problem if we were to focus on private equity as the ultimate buyer. The truth is you're never going to succeed in a market if you can't show some credibility, show some social proof, right, which is your case study, your reference, et cetera, and show them you know them, right? Like, if you can't do those three things, I don't think you're going to have much success on the selling side, no matter how good your sales team is. I even, I remember even going, I started in software, stayed in software, but even my last gig was with a health tech company. It took me forever to understand health tech and it take, and sometimes they would hire a sales rep who killed it at Marketo or something, right? And then you bring them over there and it's, the depth is so different that even if we had the ICP completely nailed, they didn't understand it well enough. So there is a collaboration, right? Marketing has got a piece of this, sales got a piece of it as well, but your message is not going to be compelling if it's not delivered by a credible sort of actor on the sales side. And on the marketing side, man, if you don't understand them well enough, you're going to get killed. And I guess that in its essence of what we, is what my organization focuses on is saying, how do we just understand everything we can about these people to give you the best chance, right? We can't control markets, we can't fix markets that are being subsumed by other markets, but what we can do is say, we can hunt down the people, the organizations that are going to give you the best chance and help you develop the right go to market or tweak the go to market as necessary to give you the best chance. Because you're specifically designing it in a way that will get that buyer to perk up and say, these are the vendor who gets us, this is the one who knows us, and we're going to put our money there versus some other vendor who may have a better product. Who knows, right? They may have a better product, they may have a better salesperson, but they're not going to win.
SPEAKER_10Let's use that to talk about competitive intelligence as well, because I think like in that scenario, another thing that I was looking at is I said, okay, you just like rifled off this whole list of things.
EDDIE REYNOLDSLike we need these customer stories, we have to have like a strong product, this, that, and the other, all these things that I would need in order to compete in private equity. Now, we had dozens of customers in private equity that we were setting up Salesforce for, that we were helping them like define their fundraising process and their deal sourcing process and building it all out in Salesforce. But I looked at competitors and I'm like, there's at least three competitors that do a way better job of that than us. Now, that's not to say that we couldn't like figure it out and do a better job than them, but they were way ahead of us. They had a lot of great people, they had money behind them, they had all of these things. And when I looked at the B2B SaaS industry and I thought like, well, I spent three years in Salesforce and I really saw something unique there versus like in private equity where I worked for a small shop and there was nothing special that we did that any other private equity firm would look at and envy. And I said, I don't see a lot of competitors helping companies implement this repeatable data-driven process-driven playbook. I see a bunch of competitors that help folks set up Salesforce. I don't see anybody doing what we want to do. Whereas in private equity, I see a bunch of people doing a fantastic job of that. I could go and compete for that, but it just seems really hard and I'm also not as interested in it. Whereas like what we ended up doing, I'm like, A, I find it really interesting and B, like, I don't see strong competitors doing the same exact thing that we want to do. And so we have an opportunity to really niche in. I'd be curious how you look at that when you do competitive intelligence.
SPEAKER_13So competitive intelligence to me, and I will tell anybody who will listen, having been a practitioner of competitive intelligence for a long time now, people tend to think of competitive intelligence as competitor intelligence, right?
BRADY JENSENHow can I know my competitor? And it's not to say that's not a part of it, but it's called competitive intelligence. And in my perspective, it is all about the intelligence you need to be more competitive in your market, right? Which part of that is what your competitors are doing, but you can surely obsess too much about them at the expense of going out and innovating and differentiating yourself. And that happens all the time from a differentiation standpoint. I think that is part of the competitive kind of patchwork that you need to be successful, which is about saying, how do we lock in on and communicate with our buyer? The things where we are unique doesn't mean you're doing something that no one else is doing, but are you doing it in a unique enough way that people would recognize it as unique? Is it durable over time or is it something that could be adopted in two weeks of vibe coding, right? By your competitors? Is it provable to your buyer? So your buyer has to be able to accept some sort of way that you can prove to them that what you're doing is actually differentiated. And then the fourth one, which is the most important is, does your buyer actually value that thing, right? Because organizations can get caught up all the time in saying, let's think about our differentiators for next year. And they'll get in a room and they'll say, okay, guys, what are we good at, right? And that's always the starting point. And a lot of times it's the ending point. It's like, what are the three things we think we're the best at? And then off you go trying to pitch it instead of saying, you can be good at a lot of things that your market just doesn't care about. But until you actually bounce it off of the buyer themselves and say, here's what we think meets the first three criteria, how about this fourth one? Do you actually value it? When we talk to people about differentiation, when we're talking to buyers in market, what we want to know is, what are the messages of differentiation you're hearing from all the vendors in market? What are you hearing from our customer? And then what are the alternatives that we could bring to bear that would do better than what our customers currently talking about with their buyer from a value standpoint, but hopefully better than all of the ones that are being discussed in market by the other vendors, right? Because they're going to be making a decision based off of what everyone else is pushing out there.
BRADY JENSENAnd then here's our three value pillars, which are really just a fancy way of saying, like, here's how we think we're different. At the end of the day, like, to actually, like, make differentiation be something that matters, it's got to cross all those hurdles.
BRADY JENSENOtherwise, it's maybe an interesting thing to talk about, but it's not going to help you win an outsized number of deals compared to the competitors in the market.
SPEAKER_10I think those are some, like, you shared some really great points.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI mean, first, I agree with you. I think that most companies get far too obsessed with their competitors. And in my example, I think I was just looking at the competitive landscape and saying, this is what we need to do to deliver more value to our customers than other folks are.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd these other folks are way ahead of us. And I just don't want to go and do that thing. But I think, like, once you move past that point and you decide, well, we're going to commit to this, you really just need to focus on the customer and, like, what is it that they value? And sure, like, are you able to do that better than your competitor? But if you're too obsessed on, like, what your competitor is doing, you're like, oh, our competitor is launching this marketing campaign and our competitor just launched this feature. And you're not hearing from your customers or seeing from your customers that that's what they want. Well, then, I mean, if nothing else, it puts you behind the eight ball because now you're just following a competitor versus getting out in front of it and saying, like, what does this customer actively want? And how do we double down on that? But I think, like, it's really helpful if you really niche down because then your competitor is not really competing with you. You're going after, like, this one sector and this one industry, this one type of company, this one size of company, this one geography, and they're going after 14 different industries. And then you're like, cool, I don't care what new feature you just developed. What I know is with my very narrow niche, this is what they want. And I'm going to give that to them and let my competitor go and try to please 14 different industries.
BRADY JENSENYeah, I think it's very easy and it's human nature to assign a lot of intelligence to other people doing similar things that you are doing. So you have, like, you might even look at your own organization and be like, it's a mess, right? Like, we're developing stuff that isn't going to move the needle. But then you look at a competitor and you're like, they released this one feature. They must be on to something I'm not. And so you adopt it instead of saying they released this one feature, does our buyer and ICP actually care about that at all? Or is it something we're going to build and deprecate in six months because no one's actually using it and it's not helping us win any deals? I think ultimately, when you look at competitive intelligence and now talking specifically about monitoring your competitors, that is far more about understanding the propensity of an organization to do something. We go down, we do competitive work for our customers and we're looking into histories of the executives and what are the sorts of things they're doing? And how can we be like a canary in the coal mine that, yeah, they hired this executive. And if you just look at surface level, you might think, well, great, they hired an executive. But then you look and you're like, OK, the last four places they've been have all been in M&A play and they've all sold to this person has a history of taking companies private, right? You can actually look and start saying, well, what are the things that we can know about them and how do they actually ladder up to something far more important rather than saying like, tit for tat. Here's a sheet that shows that we're better than they are, where we pick all of the criteria to make ourselves look the best and shove it in front of customers. And they don't believe anyone because no one's really being an honest broker in how they go about doing it anyway. We think about it as being far more strategic than tactical. You can get to the tactical sort of like writing a very long letter and then editing it down. You can get strategic and then eventually be very tactical and prescriptive with your go to market teams about it. But it has to be something where even like our ICP, by and large, includes what I would consider to be a weird, generally weird characteristic of an ICP, which is executive engagement. I love those weird things because I think those weird things are like what really define ICP because if we're just like industry, revenue range, geography, like it's too broad.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut when you get into that weird stuff, like I had a friend and I don't know if this is a good idea, but he's like, we only say, granted, as a small company, we only sell to people that go to lunch with us. Okay, it's kind of weird. And I don't really agree with it, but at least you understand your customer and you understand how you win deals. It's not that he just loves going to lunch so much. It's just that that's how they win deals. And so if that works for them and they invite somebody to lunch and they say no, and they're like, all right, cool, we'll just walk away from this thing. Like that sounds like an efficient go to market to me from that perspective.
BRADY JENSENRight. And we, us in particular, have to go through the same refining process. We learned that we could try to enter and actually do deals with folks where the executives aren't highly engaged. But our value prop falls apart pretty quickly because we're in the insight game and we are driving insights and an insight that is delivered to someone five rungs below an executive and gets filtered up and bastardized and watered down before it ever hits an executive means that our customer stories are going to be. We think we maybe move the needle a little bit versus saying our customers' win rates are jumping 10 points, right? Because they're actually executing on the insight that we deliver. So even in our own market, we learned that that's the way to actually drive the amount of value we believed we could. And it required a non-typical characteristic. I often think about this as an aside about like measuring triggers or buying signals and these sorts of things. Like a lot of those, you get a standard vendor's look at like, here are the buying signals we can track for you. And more often than not, I think our customers would benefit from a signal that is non-obvious, more specific to them. And it's going to be a little harder to hunt down the right data broker, but they'll be way more effective than just saying like, we're just looking to see, is there executive turnover? Or they're trending downward on their earnings calls, all the same data that everyone else is looking at, like find some piece of gold that no one else gets, and then you just harvest it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I love that. And I know that like, if you do that, then you're getting really specific. Unfortunately, we are at time. So I've got to wrap this podcast.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBrady, how can people learn more about you or about these concepts and how they could do a better job of defining their ICP, their personas, segmenting that?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd we're doing competitive intelligence.
BRADY JENSENYou can always reach my organization at ClearGoToMarket. The URL is cleargtm.com. That's probably the best place to start. Or I'm bjensen, J-E-N-S-E-N, at cleargtm.com. Always happy to have a conversation around this. I'm also very quick to tell you if you're not a great fit, but that doesn't mean we can't share a bunch of information. I think the information, how to do this stuff, should be free. And we do our best to make sure that even if you're too early, we're not the right industry, whatever it may be, that we can get a guide in your hand about how to go execute this stuff, even if we're not the right partner.
SPEAKER_10Awesome. Brady, thanks so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_02Thanks for listening to the show. If this resonated and or you'd like help with anything we talked about in the show, please reach out to us. You can find us at unionsquareconsulting.com and the info will be in our show notes.
