How revisiting your ICP twice a year can save your B2B product
How often do you revisit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)? Once a year? Twice? Or never?
Let’s be honest — “never” might be the most common answer. Many product teams treat ICP as something you define once during product discovery and then follow for years like it’s carved in stone.
But here’s my story: in the last four years, I’ve changed our ICP five times. And each pivot helped us double our product revenue year over year. Sure, we were starting from zero — but this approach played a key role in our success, and I believe it’s just as relevant for more mature products.
How I got the ICP wrong in year one
I’ve worked in marketing for about a decade, and when I stepped into product, I was confident in my ability to define our customer persona and build a go-to-market strategy around it. Our product? The CRM and CX domain of a low-code BPM platform. Our ambitious goal was to break into the top five in target markets within five years.
Spoiler: it took three.
I began with research. I looked at established competitors and saw that most of them were targeting sales leadership — VPs of Sales, Commercial Directors, Heads of Sales Teams. So we followed suit. We crafted an ICP around a Commercial Director at a B2B company, with a decent tech budget, regional sales team of 15 people, and a long list of feature expectations.
What happened next? We spent a year building features I now wish we hadn’t.
Lesson 1: Don’t build Your ICP from competitor playbooks alone
We assumed that copying CRM and CX features from incumbents would be the fastest way to win market share. They had hundreds of features, we had none. So we built as much as we could.
But when the first customers came (mostly existing users of our platform), they barely used 10–20% of those new features. Why? Because they were already used to the low-code flexibility of our platform — they didn’t want prebuilt CRM functionality. Instead, they wanted to build their own.
We’d ignored what made our product unique.
Lesson 2: Know who you are before defining who you're for
Every scale-up has a story. Ours was built around no-code flexibility and business process automation. We were trusted for that, not for traditional CRM features.
So we reframed the ICP not around sales leadership, but around internal product owners or sales automation managers in mid to large enterprises. These were the people responsible for choosing platforms, gathering requirements, and presenting solutions to the CEO or CDTO.
Once we understood this, everything clicked. We stopped chasing feature parity with competitors and started focusing on enabling custom, scalable automation through low-code.
Lesson 3: Your perfect ICP today might be useless tomorrow
In B2B, you're not selling to a single person anymore. You’re often dealing with a decentralized group of stakeholders. Frameworks like SAFe have made this even more pronounced.
Even when you identify key personas — CDTOs, CIOs, Heads of Sales Automation — you quickly realize they don’t want to make decisions alone. Or at all. Decision-making is shared among six or more stakeholders, each with their own motivations and veto power.
So the classic persona model no longer works. You need to build a collective ICP — one that reflects the internal dynamics of your buyer group.
Lesson 4: ICP is fluid — and so are buyer priorities
Even when the personas themselves stay the same, their expectations shift — fast.
One quarter, your buyers might care most about flexibility. Next, security takes the lead due to political tensions or new compliance requirements. Later, the focus may shift again — toward customer support and retention as the company pivots to sustainable growth.
If you don’t reflect these shifts in your ICP and go-to-market strategy, your product and messaging will miss the mark.
Final thoughts: Treat ICP as a living asset
If you want to drive consistent growth — especially with a product-led growth (PLG) strategy — you can’t afford to treat your ICP as static. You must revisit it regularly, at least twice a year.
Even in B2B markets that appear stable, decision-making dynamics, buyer motivations, and internal priorities are shifting constantly. The most successful product teams are the ones that catch the wave early — and adapt fast.
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About the author
Maria Ilina
A strategic Product Manager with 15+ years of experience in B2B SaaS, with a focus on CX, CRM, and connected services. Successfully launched products in EMEA, tripled ARPU, and defined high-impact GTM strategies for new markets. She has deep experience localizing value propositions and collaborating with cross-cultural teams across different markets. Skilled at turning complex solutions into clear customer value. Thrive in fast-paced, international tech environments where customer and human-centricity drive the development. SAFe certified.
