Find your Enterprise ICP. Align your team. Build trust. Accelerate your vision.
Are you a founder or executive who:
- Feels like they are repeating their vision over and over but their product and sales motion just don’t match what they have in their head yet
- Is tired of hearing product and sales grumble about each other
- Knows they have a team of smart and brilliant people who are capable of bringing your bold new idea to its next level – if only they could start rowing their boats in the same direction
Or maybe you are a product leader who:
- Feels like you’re building exactly what sales and marketing have asked for but they’re not happy and still asking for it again and again
- Is tired of listening to your sales leaders ask for features that your current users have not requested
- Spending each quarter building to meet a new objective only to have your work discounted when a new strategy emerges after the next quarterly offsite
Or possibly you are a sales leader who:
- Struggles to understand what exactly you need to build to accelerate deal speed or increase contract value
- Feels frustrated after sharing what you’re hearing in sales conversations with product and marketing colleagues only to remain misaligned
- Losing steam in your attempts to build trust and alignment across product, sales, and marketing
You believe in your vision.
You believe in your team.
And you believe that something has to change if you’re ever going to start working together again.
But what?
For many teams, the first step to rebuilding trust and aligning around a shared strategy is changing your decision-making state.
If you were to ask every member of a team to write down their understanding of who you build for, what they want, and how they define success, how will they respond?
Will they all agree?
If your team has a single, shared, empirical understanding of your customers, each team member will respond similarly. Not identically, which is neither our goal nor a real possibility. But team members will respond similarly enough using similar language and frameworks. If you went out and asked your customers a few questions, their understanding would also line up with what your team says.
“Customer Consensus” is the decision-making state held by teams where every person understands and agrees on their Ideal Customer Profile. And it’s the foundation of trusting, aligned, high-growth teams.
When your team makes decisions from this state, you’re in alignment, marketing and product aren’t bumping into each other but supporting each other, sales is having the quarter of a century and product has more demand than they know what to do with.
Teams get to Customer Consensus intentionally and over time, first by researching and understanding their ICP. Then by building trust and alignment around how that ICP fuels a broader strategy.
However.
If you ask your team members, “Who is your ICP?” and one person says one thing and someone else says something different and your marketing copy says something else and your customers have entirely different ideas to share, there is no consensus. Not within teams. Not across teams. Not between your team and your customers. You have many different versions of the same story.
“Customer Folklore” is a decision-making state characterized by disagreement and disjointed understanding that still “sounds right.” It’s the root cause of broken trust and stalled growth.
When you’re making decisions in this state, there is some truth in who you understand your ICP to be. But your truth isn’t the same as the truth sales sees or the truth product sees.
Product leaders resist insights from sales because they don’t see the same findings reflected in their data. Sales leaders can’t get the assets they need to show prospects they’re onboard. Leaders wonder if they need to hire someone, fire someone, or quit.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
The Customer Consensus Engagement helps leaders get aligned around a single enterprise ICP so leaders can move their vision forward, product leaders can work on the knife’s edge of demand, and sales leaders can increase total contract value.
Here’s how it works:
Outcome we work toward:
Cross-functional trust and alignment that allows your team to increase your total enterprise contract value while still delivering an end user experience that delights your existing customers.
Artifact we create:
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) map that gives your team a single source of truth for understanding who you are building for and selling to.
How it works:
I interview stakeholders at your enterprise customers and map the journey your product makes across the organization before it gets to yes. I share the raw VOC with your cross-functional colleagues in bite-size chunks so folks can see, feel, and hear what your customers are experiencing.
What makes this project unique among research and strategy projects:
The research question we’re asking in this engagement is, “What happens at an organization that leads it to become a retained and ideal customer?”
Many user experience research projects are just that – user experience projects focused on understanding the struggles, desired outcomes, and motivations of individual users.
This project is the struggles, desired outcomes, and motivations of multiple people including users, non-users, buyers, decision-makers, champions, and detractors.
The investigation we’ll undertake is about understanding how each individual progresses through the sales process as well as how the group decides. What meetings do people have before they raise objections? What offhand water cooler comments do detractors make? What emails do champions forward to evangelize your product?
The work we’ll do together is less about developing that artifact as building customer consensus, the trust your team has to move forward in the same direction.
What you need to get started:
You’ll need 2-3 recently closed enterprise deals where you have a strong relationship so you can ask for their participation. When the time comes, I’ll help you make the ask.
How much time it takes:
The first phase of our engagement is a quarter-long engagement to run your interviews, build trust bridges across departments, and map V1 of your ICP.
From there we’ll evaluate how much more trust needs to be built – and whether it’s time to transition our engagement into a fractional strategy engagement to operationalize everything you’ve learned.
Do you want to keep pushing this boulder the hill up by yourself?
Book a consult with me today.
