When Everyone is Your ICP, Where Do You Start?
When Everyone is Your ICP, Where Do You Start?
How this Workato business unit grew revenue 4X in the first year with a broad ICP and how to replicate this strategy
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Covered today:
Strategy and tactics for going to market when you have a broad ICP.
More on GTM for your eardrums.
More on GTM for your eyeballs.
Startups to watch.
Hottest GTM jobs of the week.
GTM industry events.
The old adage "more the merrier" doesn't quite apply when defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Clarity in your value proposition, persona, and ICP not only streamlines your sales process but also facilitates the quick disqualification of non-ideal prospects.
With a broad ICP, it can feel like you’re staring into a blue ocean.
Workato, and integration and automation platform, faced the challenge that many companies dream of: their product could potentially serve any industry that uses technology. This "blue ocean" scenario posed a unique dilemma, however—how do you focus when "everyone" could be your customer?
How do you carve out "swimming pools" within an expansive ocean?
GTM leader Stephen Farnsworth expertly navigated these waters for the RevOp Solutions team Workato, achieving a 4X growth in revenue across their target personas in just the first year. Now, as he spearheads go-to-market strategies at Armada, he is applying the same principles of success.
This week, we dive deep into the strategies that helped master a broad ICP and drive success - let’s get into it.
How this Workato Business Unit Grew Revenue 4X in the First Year with a Broad ICP
The strategy and playbook for handling a broad ICP 👇
The first 12 months: establishing identity and going after new logos
The primary goal was to engage new logos with revamped messaging that resonated more specifically with potential buyers, moving away from the generic pitches previously directed at IT buyers.
The task was to see whether they could take a generic product and launch 4-5 clear things that it enabled, to then take to market.
Tactically, in order to identify the areas that the product enabled and the new potential buyers they looked at two areas:
What existing customers were doing and how they were being successful.
Where other companies in the market, often more point solutions, were finding success.
Now, to speak effectively to different buyers a deep dive is needed:
What are the specific needs of these new buyers?
How do their purchasing behaviors differ from our known customers?
Should we consider different pricing strategies?
Is the sales motion different for these segments?
By sourcing the new potential buyers and analyzing the potentially varying requirements of them, all of the strategies and tactics for these new buyers could be taken to market and tested.
The Workato team was lean but efficient, consisting of Stephen, 2-3 solutions engineers, and support from a strategic SDR team. They used a dedicated marketing budget to craft content to take to market around the new messaging.
With this approach of targeting new logos with revamped messaging, Workato grew their revenue 4X. The new logo acquisition also set the stage for the next year (and following years) of growth.
Months 12-24: doubling down on customer expansion
Despite having the same resources of just a few people and actually a reduced budget, the following year the RevOps Solutions team grew revenue 2X.
Identifying the specific plays to use to go after the existing customers, leaning heavily into customer expansion.
There were two main objectives:
Engaging overall buyers: exciting IT departments about new solutions to old problems.
Targeting specific buyers: educating departments like revenue operations and marketing operations that they could leverage existing tools within their organization for their needs.
Customer expansion remains the core focus for this Workato business unit today.
Replicating success at Armada and key learnings
At Armada, Stephen is applying the playbook and lessons learned from Workato. With a similar broad ICP, Armada can sell containers of servers that companies can use in whatever way makes the most sense for them.
The overall playbook is:
Focus on acquiring net new logos.
A key learning from the process being applied is equipping SDRs with the questions that should be asked to disqualify buyers.
“If there are no questions, that's a recipe for a really inefficient funnel”
During the first year at Workato, it was difficult to disqualify prospects. This led to a pipeline filled with a high volume of leads that seemed promising but ultimately lacked real value. The takeaway from this experience was the focus on clearly identifying who is not the buyer and being very explicit about it, which is crucial for maintaining an efficient sales funnel.
For acquisition, drive inbound through content and events.
Focus on the broad buyer persona.
Master the core broad ICP sell.
Upsell other buyer personas.
Take SDRs and provide them with the “plays” for specific buyers, while leveraging solutions engineers to guide this pipeline through the funnel.
👂 More for your eardrums:
Subscribe to The GTM Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Eric Gilpin is Chief Revenue Officer of G2. He oversees all aspects of G2's revenue generation, including global sales and customer success, enablement, partnerships, and revenue operations. An experienced leader with 20+ years of experience building and scaling large technology businesses, Eric joined G2 from Upwork, where he oversaw a global team of 400+ and helped lead the company to a successful IPO in 2018 (NASDAQ:UPWK) where the business scaled to north of $600 million in annual revenue in 2022 while serving 50% of the Fortune 500. Prior to his tenure at Upwork, Eric held a number of leadership roles at CareerBuilder, most recently as President of Vertical Sales.
In this episode, you’ll learn about enterprise deal strategy, the stories behind Eric’s career success, lessons learned from losing big deals and how to increase win rates and more.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts by searching “The GTM Podcast.”
👀 More for your eyeballs:
ActiveCampaign just launched a new SaaS debate show (Angles and Insight). The inaugural episode goes deep into the future of work, AI and best GTM channels in 2024.
VP of Revenue, John Messina, shared advice on building a GTM motion around the customer journey, which isn’t linear. He dished this advice to the crowd at PLGTM, a product-led growth conference.
Spotify is putting its lyrics behind a paywall. This serves as a new way to push free users to a paid subscription. The amount of work in B2B SaaS produced with the tunes of Spotify in the background is astronomical (especially in the GTMfund office), so this particularly caught our eyeballs’ attention.
🚀 Startups to watch:
Owner - a key new hire just joined to fuel growth even further. After 10 years at Compass, building from an idea to an IPO, Rob Lehman announced that he has joined Owner as President & COO.
🔥 Hottest GTM jobs of the week:
Product Manager at Regrello (Remote - US)
Demand Generation Manager at Vanta (Remote - US)
Director of Revenue Operations at Gorgias (NYC)
Senior Product Manager at Cube (NYC, San Francisco or Toronto)
Lead Implementation Manager at Closinglock (Austin, TX)
See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.
🗓️ GTM industry events
Upcoming go-to-market events you won’t want to miss:
May 5-8: Forrester B2B Summit (Austin, TX)
May 15-16: The ELG Conference (Austin, TX)
June 6: CRO Summit by Pavilion (Boston, MA)
That’s it, that’s all.
By honing in on a targeted ICP, companies like Workato have demonstrated that you can transform a seemingly limitless market into manageable "swimming pools" for going to market.
While nuances will always be layered in for every company, a true mark of a successful playbook is its replicability. The playbook Stephen created at Workato is now being effectively applied at Armada, and the impact is evident.
Have a great weekend ahead!
Barker ✌️