ICP Positioning and Messaging for founders
A founders guide and workbook for building your ICP positioning and messaging.
Acquiring customers is hard, but we often make it overly complex. It doesn't have to be.
I’m not going to tell you that you can skip the hard parts of growing your business, but if you’re having trouble acquiring customers, you may be operating with too much complexity - or lack of clarity - at the top of your funnel, starting with how you position your company.
To acquire customers, you need messaging and positioning that resonates with them, and you have to understand a few things about the value you bring to the table. If you don’t nail this, you’ll end up spending time and money on trying to sell something that just doesn’t resonate with your buyer. And the irony is that your product may be great, but you never get enough interest to validate that.
So what should you do if you suspect that you may have a problem?
A framework that I use to think about a GTM motion is what I call the "Problem Solution Message Matrix."
The framework breaks the components of acquisition down to the ICP you are going after, the value prop that your product/solution offers, knowledge of the acute problems your ICP faces, and then your solutions and offer for those problems.
Broken down into steps, it looks like this:
1. Who is your ICP?
Who exactly are you selling to? What is their role? Seniority? Title? How big is their company?
2. What are the key value props your product or service provides?
What major value do you bring to your ICP? You need to quite literally spell this out and truly understand your product or service value before you can sell it.
3. What acute problems does your ICP have?
Not the 'nice to have’ problems, but the acute problems they face that you may be able to help them with. Now, I’ve seen posts on LinkedIn claiming that you should never think about the pain your client faces because they probably don’t know they have the pain in the first place. I think this advice is misguided. If you don’t make at least a baseline assumption that they feel some pain, how will you sell a solution?
Need an example?
Recently I was working with a client on data enrichment - focused on enterprise SaaS pipeline building. To reach this segment we need to use outbound and inbound, and also try to get in front of our buyer via phone. You may think phone is old-school, but I’ve seen reports showing that 70%+ of enterprise sales leads are coming from calls in combination with other channels. Anyways…my client was struggling with phone number enrichment and the pain was real. None of the platforms we had access to were working to find numbers. In fact, on various platforms we’d find under 30% match rate or lower, and we were spending time and money searching various platforms to try to source the data.
And while I wasn’t actively searching for a solution to the problem - I didn’t search “phone enrichment” in Google or ChatGPT - I absolutely was problem aware. And I knew what to do to solve the problem, because I’d been seeing ads and social posts from Clay for months claiming they could help with GTM and lead enrichment. So when I got to the breaking point with my client, I signed up for their trial, and the rest is history (for now). Will it displace all other enrichment platforms? No. But will it be a tool in the toolbox moving forward? Yes.
The takeaway is that you need to solve a problem, and you then need to be in the market with a solution to that problem (see below) - and that requires good marketing. If Clay sucked at marketing, I’d never know about them, and they’d never have converted me.
4. What is your solution to those problems?
This is easy. How do you solve the problem your client has? Is it a product or service? How are you better? How do you compete with the market? How clearly do you show how you solve your clients problems?
5. What is your offer?
This is one of the most overlooked aspects of product marketing, but is luckily one of the easiest to test rapidly. How are you actually pulling users in? What do you to do showcase the solution to a problem that a client has by focusing on the value you provide, and then wrap that all into a strong and compelling offer?
A tool to help you
If you're struggling with figuring out how to message your ICP, I have a handy template you can use. After grinding out the problem set above probably 100 times in the past few years, I’ve come up with a straightforward methodology for mapping the value prop to problem to solution to offer and to get that in front of your ICP.
Right now this tool is in spreadsheet form. Simply grab a copy, and fill it out for each ICP you are targeting, and you'll be on the path to finding more clarity with your messaging and positioning strategy.
From there, you can move more tactical into channel and ad specific messaging and at that point, you’re much more likely to see results with your efforts.
Here is the sheet to copy. Reach out if you need help!