Audit the ICP and positioning
Who really buys, who stays, what convinces them, and how you compare.
The ICP written in your pitch deck is a hypothesis, and your billing data holds the answer. This chapter compares three pictures: who you say you target, who actually buys and stays, and how the market perceives you next to the alternatives.
The deliverable is an ICP card backed by data, plus a positioning map. As an illustration, take a B2B SaaS at 2M ARR that describes its target as companies of 10 to 50 people. All the numbers below are invented for the example.
Measure who buys and who stays
Join billing and CRM at account level, then cut by size band and by use case. Keep segments large enough to mean something.
SELECT
a.size_band,
a.primary_use_case,
COUNT(*) AS customers,
SUM(s.first_year_arr) AS starting_arr,
AVG(CASE WHEN s.active_at_month_12 THEN 1.0 ELSE 0 END) AS logo_retention_12m,
SUM(s.arr_at_month_12) / NULLIF(SUM(s.first_year_arr), 0) AS net_arr_retention_12m
FROM accounts a
JOIN subscriptions s ON s.account_id = a.id
WHERE s.started_at < CURRENT_DATE - INTERVAL '12 months'
GROUP BY 1, 2
HAVING COUNT(*) >= 20
ORDER BY net_arr_retention_12m DESC;| Size band | Customers | Share of ARR | Logo retention at 12 months | Net ARR retention at 12 months |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 to 10 | 410 | 22% | 55% | 70% |
| 11 to 50 | 180 | 38% | 80% | 98% |
| 51 to 200 | 45 | 40% | 90% | 118% |
The stated target sits in the middle, the volume comes from below it and the best economics from above it. That reading feeds the retention audit and may change who the marketing should speak to.
Then compare who reads with who buys. On an audit I ran for a B2B SaaS, a handful of pages carried a large share of the traffic and attracted companies too small to buy, because the topics were very operational. Pull the size of the companies behind signups per landing page, using enrichment on signup domains, and set it against the customer table above.
Interview for what convinces them
Numbers tell you who. Conversations tell you why. Talk to a handful of recent customers from your best segment, plus lost deals and churned accounts, and write down their exact words.
| Topic | Question | What you keep |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | What happened that made you start looking? | The event you can target |
| Alternatives | What else did you consider, including doing nothing? | Your real competitors |
| Decision | What tipped it? | The proof that sells |
| Doubt | What almost stopped you? | The objection to answer on the page |
| Language | How would you describe us to a colleague? | Copy for the hero |
The ICP card fits on one page: size, role of the buyer and of the user, trigger, alternatives, proof, disqualifiers. Disqualifiers matter as much as the rest, since they are what lets marketing say no.
Pick three competitors and state why
Three, each chosen for a reason, teaches you more than ten skimmed. I usually take the market leader, the fastest riser and a player with a different content strategy.
| Metric | How to collect it | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Indexable pages | Crawl, or sitemaps | Size of the content effort |
| Languages covered | Hreflang, language switcher | Real international ambition |
| Search volume on positions 1 to 10 | SEO tool, same one for everybody | The demand they actually capture |
| Share of brand in search and traffic | Keywords containing the brand name, over total | Demand built, or demand still captured from generic queries |
| Traffic per page | Estimated organic traffic over indexable pages | Whether the pages earn their existence |
These tools give estimates, so read them as relative positions between the four sites. A competitor with fewer pages and more traffic per page has something to teach you, and that is usually where to look first.
Do a cold read of each site
Open each site as a first-time visitor who has never heard of it, and write what you understand before you read anything carefully. Then put it side by side, item by item. The cells below are illustrative.
| Item | You | Leader | Riser | Content player |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Menu | Lists features | Organized by team | Two entries, one CTA | Resources come first |
| Hero | Category name, vague promise | Result and proof logos | One use case, shown in action | A strong point of view |
| Home | Long feature list | Segments by role | Demo in the page | Latest publications |
| Resources | A blog | Academy, templates, benchmarks | Free tools | Newsletter and reports |
| What I understood in ten seconds | What it is | Who it is for | What it does for me | Who is behind it |
Do the same for the video channels: format, publishing rhythm, thumbnails and which videos perform compared with the channel’s usual level. Often the most instructive thing is the gap between what a company publishes most and what its audience actually watches.
Score the resource types
List the resource types and score each one out of 10 on its contribution to awareness, signup and conversion, then tick who has it. The scores are your judgment for this market, and the ones here are examples.
| Resource type | Awareness | Signup | Conversion | You | Leader | Riser | Content |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | 3 | 7 | 7 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Alternatives pages | 5 | 7 | 8 | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Versus pages | 4 | 7 | 9 | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Webinars | 5 | 4 | 6 | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Use cases | 5 | 7 | 8 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Persona pages | 4 | 6 | 7 | ✓ | |||
| Templates | 8 | 7 | 3 | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Success stories | 2 | 5 | 9 | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Benchmarks from your own data | 8 | 5 | 5 | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Free tools | 8 | 8 | 4 | ✓ | |||
| Blog | 8 | 4 | 3 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Academy | 6 | 4 | 5 | ✓ | |||
| Ebooks | 4 | 6 | 2 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Newsletter | 4 | 5 | 4 | ✓ |
Read it by looking for high scores with few ticks. Here, free tools and versus pages score high and the company has neither, while it has invested in a blog and ebooks. This matrix also feeds the channel-by-channel acquisition audit. If comparison pages come out on top and you need many of them, the persona chapter of the programmatic SEO guide shows how to produce variations at scale.
Draw the positioning map
Finish with a single picture. Put the market on one axis, from horizontal to specialized, and target company size on the other. Each company is a bubble: size for quantity of content, color for brand strength. Place yourself twice, once where your deck says you are and once where your content, customers and search data put you.
The distance between those two points is your main finding on positioning. In our example it reads: “We say we serve companies of 10 to 50 people. Our content attracts companies below that, our retention is best above it, and the leader occupies the middle with a stronger brand. The audit recommends repositioning toward 51 to 200 on one use case, with comparison pages and proof to match.”
Your next step: run the segment query on your own billing data and write your ICP card from the output, then ask the sales team which line they disagree with.