From Reads to Leads is a newsletter for writers who want more. It's about marketing. Strategy. Positioning. Operations. Results. And yes, it talks about writing too. But through a marketing lens. If this was sent to you, subscribe here so you don't miss the next email.
In today's newsletter:
They often look like this:
- Business domain: finance, logistics, healthcare, agriculture, real estate
- Location: US, UK, EU, Australia
- Company size: 50-1000 employees
- Buyer persona: C-level, founder, Head of Product, Chief Product Officer, VP of engineering
These aren’t ICPs. They’re APCPs → All Possible Customer Profiles.
Because they are having a really hard time deciding on which segment to prioritize and how to describe it. They’re missing one crucial element that makes all the difference.
They get stuck on:
- Industry – which often means nothing because many companies target multiple industries and don’t have specific value propositions for each one.
- Location – often irrelevant, especially for software development service providers with global clients and no “local” focus.
- Buyer personas – when you have too many roles to target, it’s hard to manage them all in your marketing.
Building an ideal customer profile isn't just about narrowing down industries, locations, or buyer personas.
It's about documenting a set of characteristics that let you:
⚡ Write messaging that resonates
⚡ Reach decision-makers at just the right moment
⚡ Differentiate from competitive alternatives
⚡ Solve specific, urgent problems
Buying triggers
What’s happening in your client’s company that makes them seek a solution like yours?
If you don't know your ICP's buying triggers, you’ll struggle to create effective messaging.
But when you do…
It changes everything.
One of our clients at Zmist & Copy is a game development company. While working on their positioning and building their ICP, we identified a buying trigger:
Buying trigger: A publisher needs to release their game on a new console to reach more players. But very few game developers know how to work with it.
💡Clues↓
💃Marketing → Once the new console is released, we need to have everything ready with our offer and go-to-market strategy.
By being one of the first to offer game porting services for this new console, the company can capture early demand and gain a competitive advantage.
Another client of ours offers a software solution for fleet management. During the ICP development process, we identified a buying trigger:
Buying trigger: Hiring a C-Level executive: New executives often introduce fleet management systems they've used in previous companies.
💡Clues↓
🕺Sales → Contact when:
- Hiring announcements appear on the company’s blog
- LinkedIn work history shows a recent job change
By leveraging this buying trigger, we can time our outreach just right and tailor our messaging to connect with the decision-makers based on their experiences with alternative solutions.
💃Marketing →
- Create messaging that compares our fleet management software to the alternatives these new executives are likely familiar with
- Build comparison pages [X competitor vs our solution] and use them in both marketing and outbound sales
Another client of ours at Zmist & Copy is a software development company that targets mature enterprise organizations. During our work on their ICP, we identified a buying trigger:
Buying trigger: M&A: The company is undergoing organizational changes (e.g., mergers, acquisitions, or restructuring).
💡Clues↓
🕺Sales →
- Keep tabs on M&A deals for timely cold outreach. Example Source
- Develop a targeted offer showcasing how we can support IT integration during and post M&A.
💃Marketing → Write guides to help companies integrate new technologies post-merger (eg. Key phases of IT integration in mergers and acquisitions; A working approach to an M&A technology integration for CIOs)
Specific problems your customers are running into where they might need your help
Competitive alternatives they might be considering, prompting you to explain how you differ
Visible signals that indicate the right timing for your marketing and sales outreach
Of course not! That’s exactly where demand generation comes in.
Demand gen is about taking someone from:
“I’ve never thought about using a consulting company to solve my delegation problems,”
to
“I want to see how a consulting company can help me get out of the trenches.”
But here’s the catch:
If you can’t convince them that consulting is a way to break free from the daily grind, they’ll never buy.
That’s why great demand gen content isn’t about ranking high on search engines. It’s about articulating your customer’s struggles better than they can themselves and convincing them why your solution is the answer.
Have a boss weekend. It's great winter is over.
Kate
P.S. If we aren't connected already, follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram. If you like this newsletter, please refer your friends.
P.P.S. Need a hand with content? Fix your mediocrity problem with Zmist & Copy
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