# ICP Discovery — Committee & Channels Reference *Part of the ICP Discovery skill: https://wavect.io/.well-known/agent-skills/icp-discovery/SKILL.md* Who to reject, how the buying committee triangle works, how to find 50 reachable names in two hours, and how to match your message to each stage of the buyer journey. ## The Anti-ICP — Who to Actively Reject Most ICP work focuses on who to target. The more valuable question is who to actively not sell to. Every customer who churns or generates disproportionate support load is an anti-ICP. These customers: - Dilute your NPS and retention metrics (making it harder to see real PMF) - Consume engineering resources with edge-case requests not relevant to the core ICP - Distort your product roadmap toward features the core ICP does not need - Produce bad word-of-mouth when they leave **How to identify anti-ICP characteristics:** Run a churn analysis segmented by the following attributes. Any attribute that is significantly overrepresented in churned customers vs. retained customers is an anti-ICP characteristic: - Company size band - Industry vertical - Acquisition channel (paid vs. organic vs. referral) - Role / title of the champion - Onboarding path taken - Feature set used (or not used) in the first 30 days - Time from signup to first core action Build an anti-ICP profile from this data. Then add it explicitly to your sales qualification criteria and marketing targeting exclusions. **Anti-ICP disqualification questions for sales:** - "How many people in your team would use this daily?" (Below threshold → not ICP) - "Have you tried to solve this with [Tool X] before?" (No = has not felt the pain acutely enough to seek solutions — extremely unlikely to convert or retain) - "What's your timeline to get value from a new tool?" (Longer than 90 days → the problem is not urgent — high churn risk) - "Who else needs to approve this decision?" (Buying committee > 4 people in early stage B2B → will die in procurement; not your ICP yet) --- ## The Buying Committee Triangle In B2B, the "ICP" is never one person. There is a triangle: ``` ECONOMIC BUYER (holds the budget) /\ / \ / \ CHAMPION ——————— END USER (sells internally) (uses daily) ``` Plus two satellite roles: - **Influencer**: respected advisor whose opinion the Economic Buyer trusts - **Blocker**: legal, security, procurement, or IT who can veto without having stake **The mistake:** Most founders sell to the End User (easiest to reach, most enthusiastic) but do not know who the Economic Buyer is or what they care about. The End User cares about: ease of use, time saved, workflows The Economic Buyer cares about: ROI, risk reduction, compliance, headcount impact The Champion cares about: looking good to the Economic Buyer, visibility of their win **Your ICP definition must specify:** 1. Who is the END USER (daily pain, product adoption) 2. Who is the CHAMPION (the internal seller — often different from the end user) 3. Who is the ECONOMIC BUYER (who signs the check and what they are measured on) If the Champion and the Economic Buyer are the same person, your sales cycle will be shorter but the deal size will be smaller. If they are different, your sales cycle will be longer but the deal can be 5–10× larger. **Selling to the wrong person in the triangle:** - Selling only to End Users with no Champion: product gets loved but never paid for - Selling to Economic Buyers without End User buy-in: contract signed, product not used, churn at renewal - Ignoring Blockers: deal stalls in legal/security/procurement with no champion to unblock it --- ## The Channel Hunt — Finding 50 Names in 2 Hours An ICP you cannot reach in quantity is a hypothesis, not a strategy. **LinkedIn Boolean Search:** ``` Title: ("Head of Engineering" OR "VP Engineering" OR "CTO") AND Company size: 51-200 employees AND Industry: "Computer Software" OR "Information Technology" AND Keywords: "developer productivity" OR "platform engineering" ``` **Apollo.io / Clay / Hunter.io:** - Export 500 matching companies from Crunchbase by funding stage + headcount - Enrich with contact data via Apollo - Filter by hiring signals (companies hiring for roles that indicate your problem) Example: company hiring "QA Engineer" = has a quality problem → QA tooling ICP **Reddit / Community mining:** - Find the subreddits where your ICP posts: r/devops, r/SaaS, r/startups, etc. - Search: "[pain keyword] OR [problem keyword]" and filter by last 6 months - The people who posted about the problem ARE your ICP. Their usernames often link to LinkedIn or GitHub profiles. **LinkedIn Groups + event attendees:** - Export attendee lists from industry-specific conferences (many publish them) - Join LinkedIn groups relevant to the problem and audit the member list **Hiring signals as real-time ICP trigger:** Companies that are hiring for roles adjacent to your product's value proposition are experiencing the pain RIGHT NOW. Use LinkedIn Jobs or Adzuna API to find companies actively hiring for these roles. This is a real-time trigger signal. **Reachability test — the 2-hour benchmark:** Sit down. Set a 2-hour timer. Try to build a list of 50 names with email or LinkedIn profile that match your ICP exactly. If you cannot do this in 2 hours, the ICP is still too abstract to build a go-to-market motion around. --- ## Buyer Journey Mapping The ICP is not static — different messages work at different stages of their buying journey. Mismatching the message to the stage is why most outbound fails. | Stage | Where they are | What they need | Wrong message | |---|---|---|---| | **Unaware** | Do not know a solution exists | Education about the problem space, not your product | "Book a demo" | | **Problem-aware** | Know they have a problem, not looking for solutions yet | Validation that others have this problem; cost quantification | Feature list | | **Solution-aware** | Actively researching solutions | Comparison content; why you vs. alternatives | Generic "we're great" | | **Product-aware** | Know you exist, evaluating you | Case studies from their exact ICP; ROI calculator | Another discovery call | | **Ready to buy** | Want to purchase | Frictionless trial or POC; fast sales response | Slow follow-up | **ICP + stage combinations:** Your ICP at the Unaware stage requires content marketing and community presence. Your ICP at the Solution-aware stage requires comparison pages, G2 reviews, and case studies. Your ICP at the Product-aware stage requires a champion who can sell internally. Build the go-to-market motion differently for each.