Right words, wrong people

On ICPs and pushing up hill

We spent two years saying the exact words our buyers use – to the people who were not our buyer.

This morning a head of sales at a Series B software company used our language back at me, word for word, on a discovery call. It was totally unprompted and just came up in the flow of the conversation.

It was the phrase that felt right but never seemed to land for us. It rolled off his tongue like it had always been there in his brain. Ready to go.

The voice in my head screamed <sigh>yep, that’s exactly what I ******* thought.</sigh>

Then my second reaction was frustration. If this is how someone like this guy naturally describes the problem, and we’ve been saying the same things for a while now, why have the last few years felt like push rocks up hills?

Firmographically, we had the right picture — the right size and type of company. But turns out we’ve been targeting the wrong person inside those companies. The people who feel the problem most acutely AND have the authority to do something about it. Seems obvious, right?

Right words, wrong room

He also clarified something we knew, but hadn’t operationalized enough: who your users are versus who your buyers are.

In most bigger companies, those aren’t the same person. They’re likely not even be in the same department.

Lesson learned: When you only talk to the people who already use your product, you keep optimizing for them and miss the person who has to sign the check. He painted our buying committee in one sentence. That conversation was worth two years of guessing.

This is why you talk to customers

There’s a harder version of this lesson – why you should also talk to people outside what you believe your ICP to be, even when things are going reasonably well. We have traction, but not as much as we’d like.

So stepping outside what we know felt a bit silly. But I’ve learned to talk to adjacent roles in the same companies we’re already selling into. Understanding the tangential people who feel the problem differently, or feel it more, or feel it and happen to have budget, is wicked important people, and it’s the thing that’s easy to skip because going off-script feels like a detour.

It’s not* a detour. It’s where you find out you’ve been in the wrong room.

(*My 5yo would correct me to say “It snot a detour”)

The changing mechanics of capturing this stuff

The other thing to talk about is the mechanics of how this research actually works now.

I take notes by hand during calls. Always have – it keeps me in the conversation rather than in the transcript.

But after this call, I went into a couple of Slack communities I follow, and what I’ve been doing with AI is capturing all of that context too. I take screenshots of threads I can’t API into and give those to Claude.

This helps build up a knowledge graph I can ask Claude or Codex to review and find connections.

After this call, Claude flagged something really useful. It pointed me to a thread from two weeks ago that was saying the same thing as my call, from a completely different direction. Someone in a RevOps community had described the same problem through a different lens.

I’d replied to that thread when it came through, but I sure wasn’t going to connect it to this morning’s call on my own.

Claude found the transcript and the notes from this Slack group and brought it up. Pretty awesome.

Before tools like this, holding the transcripts, the Slack thread, the handwritten note, and the recording all in the same working memory needed either a full-time assistant, everything being stored in Drive or Confluence (it wasn’t), or relying on my brain (mistake). I can remember a lot, but I cannot seem to remember which Slack channel to look in for anything I actually want to find.

The synthesis cost was the reason most founders do customer research in bursts and then stop. That cost has dropped enough now that I don’t believe the excuse holds anymore.

What AI doesn’t replace is the conversation itself

Calls go off in directions I couldn’t have predicted. I don’t think AI would have known to ask the right questions in the moment, or had them staged and ready. The human interest and the relationship you build on real calls is what goes sideways in unpredictable and often wonderful ways. That’s irreplaceable.

What got synthesized today only had value because the conversation happened first.

“Talk to your customers” is the most tired advice, yeah. All of us know we should do it more often and in more volume. We still don’t do it consistently. AI doesn’t change that, but it does change what happens after those calls and touchpoints. It’s easier now than ever to keep what you learned.

This thirty-minute call with the right person told me more about our business than two years of talking to people in the wrong roles. The tools let me build that connection faster (or maybe finally).

Talk to people. Then let the tools help you hold and make sense of what they said.

TTFN,

Peter

PS: This isn’t an argument to outsource thinking to LLMs. Guide them well and they serve you well.