Author: Barry Witonsky



Dear CMO, Your Ideal Client Profile Should Do More Than Describe — It Should Drive

May 1, 2025
Barry Witonsky

In our last post, we explored how ideal client profiles (ICPs) can be activated through thoughtful sales territory design. Before that, we unpacked how AI can drive smarter, more trustworthy ICPs. Today, we turn our focus to another critical member of the C-suite: the chief marketing officer (CMO).

For CMOs, the pressure is immense. They are expected to be equal parts creative strategist and revenue contributor. But many CMOs are forced to operate with broad, generic definitions of their target market: industry, company size, maybe a technology or two.

The result? Campaigns do not land. Account-based marketing (ABM) efforts lack focus. Content misses the mark.

A strong ICP can change that. But let’s be clear: Not all ICPs are helpful. Only a robust, timely and targeted ICP can truly empower a marketing team to drive demand and align with revenue goals. Here is how you can build one that does just that.

NOT JUST A PROFILE — A PLAYBOOK

An ICP built for marketing success goes beyond surface-level firmographics. The strongest ICPs include:

  • The core attributes of best-fit accounts: Industry, size, revenue, technology stack.
  • Compelling events: Has the company recently raised funding? Hired a new executive? Changed strategic direction?
  • Urgency signals: What challenges are they likely facing that you can speak to right now?
  • AI-enhanced insights: Scraping websites, job postings, press releases and more to learn what is really going on inside the company. You can now determine their strategy and align that to how you can add value.
  • Engagement intelligence: Is this company engaging with your brand already? Have they visited your website, joined a webinar or downloaded a whitepaper?

With this intelligence, CMOs can move beyond broad-brush marketing to precision plays that generate real results.

6 WAYS A ROBUST ICP HELPS A CMO WIN

  1. Precision ABM
    With a smart ICP, ABM efforts focus on accounts that are not just a fit, but in market. This saves time and budget and increases campaign efficiency.
  2. Content That Converts
    Knowing the challenges and goals of specific ICP segments helps marketing teams craft messages that speak directly to buyer pain points. The result? Content that educates, persuades and drives action.
  3. Campaign ROI
    Generic campaigns lead to generic results. When campaigns are based on ICP-defined segments and urgency signals, ROI improves, and marketing becomes a true revenue partner.
  4. Sales Enablement That Actually Enables
    Content, tools and messaging built around the ICP are far more relevant to sales teams. It supports the conversations they are actually having with prospects, rather than theoretical ones.
  5. Website Personalization
    Dynamic website experiences rely on knowing your visitors. A robust ICP enables marketers to tailor web experiences by industry, persona or even signal, increasing engagement and conversion.
  6. Engagement-Driven Prioritization
    By layering in real-time engagement metrics — like site visits, webinar attendance or content downloads — CMOs can prioritize ICP accounts that are already showing interest, turning attention into action.

AI MAKES THE ICP SMART — AND ACTIONABLE

Today’s best CMOs are leveraging AI to enrich their ICPs and uncover:

  • Who is showing intent, even if they have not raised their hand.
  • What changes are happening inside companies that might trigger a buying decision.
  • Why certain accounts deserve attention now, not six months from now.

AI-enhanced ICPs go beyond a static list. They offer a living, breathing playbook for where to focus, what to say and how to drive urgency in the market.

LOGISTICS SOFTWARE CMO TURNS ICP INTO A REVENUE ENGINE

When a logistics software company brought on a new CMO, leadership had a clear mandate: win larger enterprise deals. The CMO turned to the ICP to make it happen.

The ICP needed to align the marketing, sales and product teams. It had to identify ABM targets. It also needed to provide marketing and sales teams with enough input to enable months-long ABM engagements.

By examining historical success, the CMO had a strong starting point for the ICP. Next, they engaged sales and marketing to uncover key buyer pain points and urgency signals. Lastly, they used AI to aggregate insights from multiple data sources.

In the six months since improving the ICP, the logistics company added 57 new client logos in France, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, China, Argentina, Panama, Chile and the United States, among others. The sales team also achieved 121% of their quarterly bookings goal and executed a record number of contracts. Optimized ICPs truly can drive meaningful outcomes.

IF YOUR ICP IS NOT DRIVING ACTION, IT IS JUST A LIST

At Mereo, we believe that marketing should be aligned with revenue from the start. That begins with a smart, AI-enhanced ICP that goes deeper than industry and size. When you define your ICP by both fit and urgency, you unlock marketing that drives demand progression — not just awareness.

  • Up Next: How ICPs empower product teams to prioritize features, markets and messaging with confidence. Subscribe to our blog below.

Ready to build an ICP that gives your CMO clarity and confidence? Schedule 30 minutes with one of our revenue experts and let’s talk.



From Ideal Client Profile to Sales Territory Design: Activate Your Sales Strategy

January 23, 2025
Barry Witonsky

A highly successful CEO I worked with once said that a salesperson’s success is 50% due to the environment they are placed in and 50% up to their talent, grit and drive. And assigning the right accounts to the right sellers is the biggest contributor to setting up an environment where salespeople can thrive. Combine this skill with a solid sales process and training, and you give your team an environment they need to succeed.

The ideal client profile (ICP) is a good start to selling success. Taking that definition and using it to prioritize accounts is even better. However, a list of prioritized accounts by itself will not help you meet your sales goals. What really matters is how you use the list — or, as one private equity operating partner puts it, how you activate it.

Luckily, there are several ways to activate prioritized accounts to drive your go-to-market (GTM) engine and fuel growth, including:

  • Aligning size of ICP market to revenue planning
  • Lead generation
  • Account-based marketing (ABM) targeting
  • Comparing your ICP to competitors
  • Designing sales territories
  • Aligning size of market and growth goals to the ideal size of your sales organization
  • Product roadmap

In this article, the second in a series on ICPs, we will explore how you can leverage ICPs in sales territory design to win an unfair share™ of the market.

DETERMINING CAPACITY FOR SALES TERRITORY DESIGN

To design effective sales territories, start by determining the capacity for each sales role. Capacity metrics can vary, but common options include:

  • Number of accounts assigned
  • Existing revenues
  • Potential revenues
  • Company-specific metrics

Capacity should align with the selling professional role. For example, the capacity for a new logo hunter will differ significantly from that of an account manager or sales engineer. Similarly, handling large global accounts requires a different capacity model than handling smaller companies with one or two locations.

The most commonly used metric to define capacity is the number of accounts. To calculate this:

  1. Break down a salesperson’s time into selling and non-selling activities. Within their selling time, outline their 7 to 10 key responsibilities and estimate the time required for each.
  2. Next, define the time and number of accounts that can be handled by a salesperson. For example, a salespeople going after new customers typically have their time split between prospecting, administrative tasks, developing proposals, pricing and managing opportunities.
  3. Evaluate how account size, verticals and/or geography affect your business. These factors will influence how accounts are assigned to the right people.

If you are struggling to come up with these metrics, survey your sales team or, if you have a smaller organization, hold a workshop. Alternatively, you can also build a useful capacity model based on existing data and assumptions.

TOOLS FOR SALES TERRITORY DESIGN

With the key inputs established, you are ready to build territories. You have many tools at your disposal, such as Excel, business intelligence (BI) platforms, visual tools such as Tableau or even custom software specific to sales territory design.

At Mereo, we frequently use Excel, BI tools and Tableau:

  • Excel: Ideal for sharing with outside constituents (e.g., other functional teams, partners), gathering feedback and managing individual account overrides.
  • BI Tools: Useful for scaling territory assignments for organizations with more than 10 sellers. These tools can automate territory rules and account assignments.
  • Tableau: Excellent for visualizing territories, such as grouping states or regions and analyzing metrics like number of accounts, revenues, and potential within each territory.

Once sales territories are built, review them to ensure their size aligns with sales quotas and overall growth goals.

ICPS IN SALES TERRITORY DESIGN IN ACTION

One past client wanted to upgrade their ICP and be able to assign the right accounts to the right salespeople. Their current ICP broadly defined target accounts as those with $50 million in revenues and 50 employees. Their sales team included about 15 new logo hunters and 15 account managers.

We helped their organization develop four ICPs — strategic, field accounts, inside sales and government segments. Using these definitions, we prioritized accounts within each ICP via a scoring formula. By surveying the sales team and aligning territory sizes with quotas and revenue plans, we built territories that supported current salespeople and anticipated headcount growth in 2025.

The result? Activating these ICPs and this territory design approach gave the company a robust roadmap for growth, identified high-potential accounts that can drive that growth, and established metrics for tracking success month-to-month.

READY TO ACTIVE YOUR ICP FOR SALES TERRITORY DESIGN?

If you have an ICP and are not seeing results, you might benefit by talking to one of our experts on how to activate this tool for sales territory design. Schedule 30 minutes with one of our revenue experts today.



Unlocking the Potential of AI-Driven Ideal Client Profiles (ICPs) for Your GTM Strategy

November 21, 2024
Barry Witonsky

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed how companies define and leverage their ideal client profiles (ICPs). With AI-powered tools, businesses can now analyze a vast amount of data from firmographics, websites, LinkedIn, job postings, reviews and more — creating ICPs with unparalleled precision.

However, the complexity of AI models can often make them feel like a “black box,” leaving leadership teams skeptical about using them as a basis for go-to-market (GTM) decisions. So, how can you build trust in an AI-based ICP and ensure it supports, rather than confuses, your strategy?

THE POWER AND THE PUZZLE OF AI-BASED IDEAL CLIENT PROFILES

AI tools are powerful. They can aggregate more than 500 data points, providing a holistic view of accounts. The best of these tools, like the one we use at Mereo, let you build custom signals across this data, tailoring insights to your business’s specific goals. Advanced analytics tools’ ability to create a robust, data-backed ICP has never been better.

Yet, AI’s strength — its ability to handle vast, complex datasets — can also make it hard to understand why certain accounts are prioritized over others. For business leaders, especially those at the helm of marketing, sales, and product departments, the prospect of using AI to guide major decisions about GTM strategy, account-based marketing (ABM) and outbound messaging can be both exciting and daunting. Before you bet your strategy on an AI-powered ICP, you need to understand more of the “why.”

THE SCIENCE AND ART OF CRAFTING A TRUSTWORTHY IDEAL CLIENT PROFILE

Creating an ICP demands a blend of data science and human insight. This human insight, the “art” to data’s science, results from qualitative insights that only real conversations can provide. What defines a strong account? Which personas need to be engaged? How do you best approach an account to usher them along the buyer journey with your company?

By combining the data science approach with the human insight art, you can create ICPs that are not only accurate and effective but meaningful to the teams who will be using them.

And once you have an initial AI-driven ICP, you must bring the rest of your organization on-board. Socialize the ICP, modify it and dial it in for organizational buy-in and until all key stakeholders feel comfortable. Once you do that, you are now ready to base your GTM strategy on the ICP.

AI-BASED IDEAL CLIENT PROFILE SUCCESS STORIES

But how does this apply in the real world? Consider the case of a company that initially rejected an AI-based ICP because they did not understand how the model prioritized accounts. We helped them overcome their hesitancy by blending AI capabilities into their legacy ICP approach. Once leadership understood why accounts scored high, they gained enough confidence to base their 2025 GTM plans on AI recommendations and outputs.

In another example, a CEO was skeptical following an AI approach. But, as we tailored the model to include custom signals specific to her top customers, she began to see the power of this tool. We ran the model on accounts recommended by her board, which her team spent nearly a month evaluating. AI replicated the top 10 accounts in minutes, and she was amazed and ready to base her GTM strategy on this approach.

WHAT IS COMING NEXT?

In this series, we will dive deeper into each stage of aligning AI-based ICPs to work across marketing, sales and product teams. You will gain practical steps to ensure AI enhances your GTM initiatives rather than complicates them. Stay tuned as we explore how to make AI work for you — turning data-driven insights into GTM success with confidence.

Ready to take your ICP to the next level? Do not let a “black box” mindset hold back your GTM potential. Book a call with our experts to assess your current ICP and explore how AI-driven data combined with the art of human insights can strengthen your organization’s targeting and drive sustainable revenue performance. Schedule 30 minutes with me today.



Make Your Revenue Plan Come True With a Risk Assessment

February 22, 2024
Barry Witonsky

By now, heads of sales everywhere have their revenue plans in place for 2024. And whether or not you took part in the creation of the plan, as the head of sales you now own the commitment to see it through for your team, your investors and your organization.

But your plan is only good as its weakest link. What would happen to your organization, your people, your own role, if the revenue plan is not met and that could be avoided?

Last year 49% of companies were adjusting their growth projections already in March. This year, 70% of companies, too, are seeing average deal sizes flatten or shrink. You cannot rely on one big deal to help you hit the target.

You can set your organization up to stay on track to meet — and exceed — your plan by training your eye on key revenue operation KPIs. A risk assessment exposes your risks and helps you keep a pulse on performance. We’ll show you how.

DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO ACHIEVE YOUR REVENUE PLAN?

From win rates and deal sizes to market size and average churn, a number of KPIs, metrics and assumptions can give you insight into your risks and opportunities in meeting your revenue plan and achieving sustainable performance. Yet many heads of sales don’t know these numbers.

Can you answer these questions about where your team hits on a revenue plan risk assessment?

Funnel Conversion Rates
What do your conversation rates need to be to meet your plan? Did they fall in 2023?

Ideal Client Profile
Do you know who your best client targets are?

Ratio of Revenue from New Logos versus Clients
What percentage of your revenue is coming from new logos? What percentage from existing client?

Headcount Turnover
Are you appropriately covering your market territory?

Pricing
Did you raise your rates in 2023? Can you do it again in 2024?

Quota Attainment
What are you counting on in 2024? In an Ebsta report, 73% of reps missed quota.

UNCOVER YOUR RISK

If you have a clear line of sight on what you and your team must do to meet the revenue plan, great. If you are headed into this year not fully aware of the assumptions in your plan and hoping for the best, let’s talk.

Our experts can help you take charge of meeting your revenue plan by bringing to light hidden assumptions and risks.

Sign up for a free two-hour plan review with our leading B2B revenue planning expert. We will help you develop a risk assessment and see where your team stands for making your revenue plans come true.

 

PLAN TO SUCCEED