Your ICP is Fiction: Selling to Situations, Not Demographics

Look at almost any early-stage B2B go-to-market deck, and you will find a slide dedicated to the "Ideal Customer Profile." It usually features a stock photo, a manufactured name like "Marketing Mary" or "Founder Fred," and a rigid list of attributes: VP level, B2B SaaS, 50-200 employees, based in North America.

We cling to these profiles because they map perfectly to the drop-down filters in traditional lead databases. It makes the math of outbound sales feel controllable and scientific. The logic implies that if you just scrape 5,000 people who fit this exact description and sequence them, a certain percentage will inevitably convert.

But a spreadsheet of matching job titles is a fundamental misunderstanding of why companies actually spend money.

The Trap of Static Attributes

Firmographics and demographics are static elements. They tell you the shape of the company and the structure of the org chart, but they tell you absolutely nothing about the current state of friction inside that building.

A VP of Sales who matches your ICP perfectly, but just signed a two-year contract with your biggest competitor last week, is a terrible prospect. Their title is right, their company size is right, but their timing is entirely wrong. Conversely, a junior Revenue Operations manager who falls completely outside your primary persona, but was just tasked with fixing a broken lead routing system by Friday, is a prime buyer.

When you sell purely to demographics, you are playing a game of blind probability. You are spamming the void, hoping to randomly intercept someone at the exact moment their current system fails. This is precisely why cold email response rates are plummeting. You are pitching painkillers to people who don't have a headache.

Buying Triggers are Events, Not Traits

B2B software purchases are rarely proactive; they are intensely reactive. They are catalyzed by a change in state.

These catalysts are events, not traits. A sudden spike in customer churn, a CRM integration that silently breaks, a missed quarterly quota, or a messy round of layoffs that requires the remaining team to automate their manual work.

These are situations. The friction caused by the event is what actually creates the urgency and unlocks the budget. Until there is an acute, recognizable pain, your product is just another "nice to have" competing for mental bandwidth in an overflowing inbox.

Shifting from Scraping to Listening

To sell to situations, you have to abandon the comfort of the list-building mindset. You have to stop scraping databases for nouns—titles, industries, headcounts—and start listening for verbs. You need to look for people who are complaining, searching, migrating, or struggling.

This requires tuning your operational radar to the environments where these situations are discussed candidly. When a technical founder goes to a niche Reddit community and asks, "How is everyone handling intent data without paying $30k a year?", they are not just making conversation. They are actively bleeding. They are in a buying window.

If you know what your customer's broken process sounds like when they describe it in their own words, you do not need an ICP document. You just need to find where they are vocalizing that exact problem.

When you align your outreach with a sudden, painful event, the dynamic of the conversation flips. You cease to be a vendor pushing a product through a cold email. You become the logical next step in their problem-solving process. Drop the fictional personas and start hunting for the friction. That is where the revenue actually lives.