To: B2B SaaS Growth Leaders
From: Glenn Leese – Rivelah Founder
Your ideal customer might not be who you think it is.
Getting this wrong is a bigger issue than you think. It's not one team's problem. Marketing spends on traffic that becomes a vanity metric, product builds features that your highest spenders don't care about, sales burns time and travel on deals that were never going to convert and support is so overloaded with low impact customers that they can't even help the right ones.
Your ideal customer profile (ICP) is the origin of all business activity decisions. It's simply that important.
While you've been looking outward for the next growth opportunity, the answers are, in fact, inward. Within your own data and your own people - and they are going stale because nobody is connecting the dots.
Talk to us Ten minutes. Help us build the solution.Why your company gets this wrong
Usually it's a combination of 4 core problems
You don't actually know who your best customer is
(no validation of a true "ideal customer")
Most teams don't have a real definition or a validated answer. They have a best guess, assembled from memory, external market targets, confusing customer signals and whichever deal closed most recently or highest.
Different people believe different things
(misalignment of people and departments)
Sales, Marketing, Product and Customer Success each hold their own particular belief without realising the others disagree. It's a quiet misalignment that reduces efficiency and scatters resources.
Your best customer and your market are fluid
(ICP drift can cause you to fall out of sync with the market)
Who you targeted and built for last year is not necessarily who is looking to pay you today. You fail to update at the same cadence and you don't even realise it until a quarter doesn't add up or your revenue has hit a plateau.
Your best people don't stay forever
(institutional knowledge walks out the door, not captured properly)
The people who understand your ideal customers best might not be here next quarter, and when they leave, years of frequent insights vanish. You ask them why they are leaving, but fail to record their historical knowledge.
What it costs your company
The cost of getting this wrong shows up everywhere, across all departments and teams
Marketing
SEO that lands as vanity metrics. Performance campaigns with low ROI. Partnerships that feel heavy to get off the ground and even slower to add value back. The traffic you do achieve wants simple and cheap. The traffic you should have achieved that understands your complex value and has the budget doesn't arrive - because they never even knew you were speaking to them.
Sales
Zoom calls and meetings that book fast and consume time, but never reply to your follow-up and pricing. Travel and conferences that have your CEO asking about what deals were actually signed after that huge cost of attendance. Every deal is hard won. Discount requests and shorter cycles are common topics. The deals that do close are hard to work with and need far more hand holding than you ever planned for.
Support and Success
Half the day is spent dealing with similar painful queries. You are trying to stay on top of those 1 and 2 star reviews. People keep saying your product is complex, expensive and that they have found a free alternative. Your whole support and success team ends up carrying customers who shouldn't have been sold in the first place. High-effort, low yield and never quite the fit the product was built for.
Product
Your dev team's roadmap is packed with features and releases, yet you are still getting product complaints. The new features you release have little traction and barely move your ARR, even though you poured time and effort into them. You find yourself becoming a feature factory and making your product broader. Your product team is now building for the loudest in the room and the next exciting idea - not necessarily whoever's actually paying and staying.
What we believe
ICP alignment is a living thing that is constantly evolving, not a static doc
You must track and understand how in or out of sync you are at any one point in time. Intelligence that points to a shift in the customer or market must also shift communication, strategy and product. What truly matters is knowing when drift happens - and how to close the gaps.
Your own data outranks your opinion, because it's proven and measurable
Revenue, CRM, product usage, support tickets, churn reasoning, reviews and more... This data already know more about who is valuable than any one person does. Not all data is equally weighted - and understanding which types to connect, in what hierarchy and grouping and how to fill the gaps is the key. The answer to the growth problem is not external opportunities, but rather internal data and knowledge, enriched by market research.
Clarity equals confident decisions, efficient teams and holistic growth
The pathway forward (including gaps to be closed) should be obvious and well evidenced. A self-aware, intelligent company not only has an edge on competitors but improves the ecosystem. Decisions become apparent and clear. Teams move together, deals close faster, customers stay longer.
Who this is for
Usually whoever ends up owning the answer to the growth problem.
Growth, Sales, Marketing and Founding leaders working across departments, using multiple tools and data feeds and doing endless market research to connect the dots and move the needle (I mean really move it, not create vanity metrics).
I've personally solved this multiple times and I know first hand how hard it is to put all the pieces together in a way that holistically lifts the business.
Whether you are putting the puzzle together or you are the one that decides if all the pieces are in place - this note is for you.
Where we're at, honestly
We're mid-validation. This isn't a launch (yet).
As we build out a solution, I'm talking to people living through these problems right now.
If any of this sounds familiar or if you are currently tackling similar issues internally, I'd love to connect in a way that suits you - in person, phone call or even email / text. I'll ask about your world, and tell you honestly what we're building and what I'm learning. You can also just join the list to hear when we launch if you prefer not to chat.