🔦 Spotlight - ICP research
How to know why they click and stick
The long term readers of the SBO Hub will be familiar with all the aspects of building a Strategy and BizOps function. One question I get often is, “when should I start building BizOps? The easy answer is ‘it depends’. Usually when you know you need to start scaling you should already have a BizOps person, at least. But ideally you have a foundation on which to build - and that foundation is basic systems and an ICP. That could have been built by BizOps or a sensible team before that. But BizOps can’t do anything of substance for your company before you have nailed what the ICP is. We can (probably) fix the system if it was clunky. But ICP is Business 101. You don’t need to have a fancy MBA to know this.
If you didn’t have it, it would be akin to building a house on sand: Marketing doesn’t know who to talk to, Sales have no idea how to approach the sales conversation, CS doesn’t know how hard they should work to keep a customer, Finance might be pushing for “efficiency” in the wrong ways... I’d even ask, “What is there to scale?” Your sand castle in the sky? Doesn’t work like that.
But, even when I hear founders telling me they know their ICP, at times, I have had to at least polish, or build the ICP from scratch.
How do I know you have an ICP problem?