Stop Selling to the Wrong Customers | The Science of Scaling Your ICP with Mark Roberge

Summary

Revenue Builders Podcast: Stop Selling to the Wrong Customers | The Science of Scaling Your ICP with Mark Roberge

Podcast: Revenue Builders
Hosts: John McMahon, John Kaplan
Guest: Mark Roberge, Author of The Science of Scaling
Date: January 18, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this enlightening episode, the Revenue Builders hosts sit down with Mark Roberge to unravel one of the most misunderstood yet crucial aspects of business growth: Identifying and evolving your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). The conversation explores why many businesses stagnate by failing to adapt their ICP to market and product changes, and how data—not gut feeling—should drive these decisions. Listeners gain actionable frameworks for scaling and learn the company-wide impact of getting ICP and product market fit right.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Why Companies Fail to Evolve Their ICP (00:39 – 02:12)

• Many companies set their ICP once and rarely revisit it, despite shifting market conditions and evolving products.
• Emotional vs. Data-Driven Decisions:
  • Mark Roberge emphasizes that reluctance often stems from emotional attachment and the allure of any revenue, rather than rigorous data analysis.
  • Quote [01:28]:

    “If it’s emotional and ICP is emotional and it’s not backed by data… that’s the fundamental principle that I see.” – John Kaplan

2. The Role of Lifetime Value (LTV) Over Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) (02:12 – 04:30)

• Many sales orgs mistakenly define ICP by where demand is highest or where close rates are greatest (lower CAC).
• Mark clarifies that the optimal ICP should hinge on segments delivering the highest lifetime value—customers who renew, expand, and refer others.
• Quote [02:22]:

  “It really needs to be that the ICP is based on segments of the market where when people buy it, they see tremendous value, they renew, they expand and they tell their friends.” – Mark Roberge

3. Building a Scientific ICP Framework: The Green/Yellow/Red Model (04:30 – 06:40)

• Roberge describes his “green, yellow, red” classification system:

  • Green: Core ICP; sell aggressively into these segments.
  • Yellow: Adjacent or next-most-likely fits; accept opportunistically but don’t target.
  • Red: Absolute misfits; should not sell to under any circumstances.

• Quote [05:28]:

  “Red is you cannot sell these people. If you sell them, we rip up the contract.” – Mark Roberge

• The framework allows for controlled expansion by experimenting at the ICP’s periphery (yellow) without diluting focus.

4. How Mature Companies Should Handle Existing “Red” Customers (07:10 – 10:55)

• Many organizations find their pipeline (or existing customer base) packed with non-ICP “red” accounts due to historical misalignment.

• Roberge recommends:

  • Immediate triage: Re-classify the customer base by current ICP standards.
  • Resource allocation: Assign reduced support/account resources to non-ICP accounts while focusing growth and care on ICP customers.
  • Proactive communication: Transparently share the science and strategy behind the shift with both employees and affected customers.
  • Quote [09:07]:

    “I found it very important from a leadership perspective to communicate effectively the science behind what you’re doing as a company… No customer wants to buy something that is not—if you’re not going to serve me as if I’m your ideal customer, nobody wants to be in that red area.” – John Kaplan

• Balancing churn: It’s better to let go of misaligned customers than drag the business down by spreading resources too thin or risking reputation with poor service.

5. Organizational Impact: ICP is a Company-Wide Mandate (10:57 – 12:17)

• Properly defining and acting on ICP isn’t just a sales activity—it defines marketing, product development, and customer success strategies.
• Achieving and maintaining product-market fit around a well-defined ICP aligns every function, creating faster growth and deeper value.
• Quote [11:39]:

  “There’s a reason why I didn’t call it the sales system. I call it the go to market system... The sales team is part of the go to market team... and those have to be looked at holistically.” – Mark Roberge

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Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

• On Emotional Selling vs. Data Discipline:
  “People are chasing revenue versus ideal states.” – John Kaplan ([01:35])

• On the Pitfall of Chasing Any Revenue:
  “No customer is a bad customer and we can sell something to, you know, this customer… If you don’t have the data… I think that’s fundamentally [the issue].” – John Kaplan ([01:28])

• On Letting Customers Go:
  “You just gotta like rip off the band-aid… And all the future quarters only sell into that ICP, you will wake up a year from now and 95% will be in the ICP.” – Mark Roberge ([10:03])

• On Cross-Functional Alignment:
  “When you do the ICP right and you know, you have product market fit, it rallies the entire company…” – John McMahon ([10:57])

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Key Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|-------------------------------------------------------| | 00:39 | Why companies struggle to update their ICP | | 01:28 | The emotional trap: chasing any revenue | | 02:12 | ICP should focus on LTV, not just CAC | | 04:30 | The “green, yellow, red” ICP framework | | 07:10 | What to do with existing “red” customers | | 09:07 | Employee and customer communication during ICP shifts | | 10:57 | The company-wide (not just sales) impact of ICP focus | | 11:39 | Defining “go to market fit” |

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Tangible Takeaways

• Regularly revisit your ICP as your product, competitors, and market dynamics change.
• Use data, especially LTV, not just intuition, to guide ICP.
• Implement a clear, objective framework (“green, yellow, red”) to classify customer segments and focus resources.
• Trim your installed base and pipeline aggressively—support non-ICP customers minimally and transition out where possible.
• Clearly communicate the rationale for ICP decisions both internally and externally.
• Align all go-to-market functions around your ICP.

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For listeners seeking scientific, actionable frameworks to ensure you’re scaling with the right customers—and not just any customers—this episode with Mark Roberge is a must-listen.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast with John McMahon and John Kaplan. This podcast is brought to you by the team at Force Management. In this segment, we revisit our conversation with Mark Roberge, author of the upcoming book the Science of Scaling. Many of you know Mark, and here he breaks down why so many companies fail to evolve their ideal customer profile despite changing market conditions and reveals the surprising truth. It's often emotional decision making, not data holding them back. Here we go.

[C]

That's right, Mark. I want to go back to icp. You know, you, the ICP in the book. And again, we're talking to Mark Robert about his brand new book due out February 3rd, called the Science of Scaling. And you treat, you know, ICP as a scientific input into scaling essentially. But what I got to understand is why don't so many companies build an icp and then to Cap's point, the market changes, competition changes, product. Your product is constantly changing and they don't go and change their icp. To me, it's like you're constantly going through, if you do it right, constantly changing your ICP and constantly looking to see whether or not there's real product market fit in different use cases.

[A]

I have a hypothesis. Can I try?

[D]

Mark, Go, go.

[A]

Because I look at this, I do this for a living for the last 20 years. And I find that if it's emotional and ICP is emotional and it's not backed by data, real data, that's the fundamental principle that I see. Because if you have people like me, you guys a little bit more scientific than me, that can will their way to selling things and no customer is a bad customer and we can sell something to, you know, this customer. If you don't have the data to support what actually happens from that revenue from that customer. I think that's fundamentally, like you said, people are chasing revenue versus ideal states. That's my hypothesis and I think it's supported in your book.

[D]

It's so hard because like the. I think a great ICP is based on ltv, not lowest cac. And that's where a lot of people get that message.

[A]

Just for some of our young listeners or some of our early people, would you mind kind of defining what that is?

[D]

Yeah. So it's just like a lot of people and there is an intuition there, but when you really think about it, it's a broken intuition which is like, okay, what's our ideal customer profile? Some people might say it's where our inbound demand is, whoever's coming. And it's like that's scary because that's like, that's not necessarily correlated to who you built the product for and who is going to end up being a successful customer. The next level of answer is like, oh, it's wherever we have the highest close rates, which usually would correlate with a lower customer acquisition cost. Right. Cac and again like only true. If that's a great customer that's going to stick around. It really needs to be around lifetime value. It really needs to be that the ICP is based on segments of the market where when people buy it, they see tremendous value, they renew, they expand and they tell their friends. And sometimes those companies are not necessarily the highest inbound demand to your website and sometimes they're not the easiest to sell. I. E. Have the lowest cost of acquisition. But like it really needs to be around ltv and the, it's, it's a cool thing because I do talk about the. At the end I had to talk, I had to write appendix about how AI will change these concepts. Yeah. And I still wanted to write the book because these are not like post AI irrelevant. These are principles that will need to be built into the models. And I'm very excited about how AI will guide this ICP piece and I actually write a little bit about it. So Mac, what you saw in there was like I took a little deeper view on the ICP and so I basically set up this green, yellow, red framework that I use with a lot of companies. And basically what you're picturing here folks is like you have like five to eight attributes of your icp. It's common to have like company size, location, industry, stuff like that. So like we might have five in there. Okay, so let's just work with three to keep it simple. It's like they're in the U.S. they're between, you know, 50 mil and 500 mil. And then we'll deal with healthcare and finance just to have a working model. Okay, so that, that is our green icp. Our red is like, green is like we want to sell these, we'll take them all day. If we're going to build an email campaign, we're going after, we're going to build a cold calling campaign. We're going after those people. Red is you cannot sell these people. If you sell them, we rip up the contract. So like if they're in Europe and Asia, we're not ready for it. If they're in manufacturing, we're not ready for it. If they have over 500 million in revenue, we're not ready for it. We're ripping it up. But then, like, the yellow is like, we're not sure, you know, like, it's probably going to be where we're going to go next. But if someone comes up to our trade show booth and says, I've been looking for this my entire life, how do I sign up? Or if someone comes as an inbound lead and they're like, I, we. This is our number one issue this year. And they're in the yellow. Maybe they're in the tech sector. Maybe they have 40 million in revenue, not 50. So they're close. Then we can sell those people. And that allows us to create a structure where we can explore the periphery of the ICP to naturally expand. And that's what Degnan talks about at Snowflake Mac, through your guidance. When I asked him, like, when do you go upstream? He's like, you're pulled up.

[C]

Yes.

[D]

He's like, that's what happened to us is we were selling SMB mid market to the, the smaller sectors. You were talking about Mac. And then once they hit 5, 6, 7 in revenue, they had these early adopter enterprises come in, and that was in the yellow for them. And they're like, okay, you know what? We'll give this a shot.

[C]

Right? And your point is? We're not going to have our sales reps target the red or the yellow. But if a customer comes to us and almost, like, wants to buy, sure, okay, we'll. We'll make the effort and then we wake up.

[A]

You guys are making an assumption, which I love, but what you just said, Johnny, is, you know, we have a red and the sellers aren't going to sell to it. But in reality, like when we go into these things and I ask a question, what's your ideal customer profile? And if I'm lucky enough to get it, then I get it. And then I look at the pipeline and I'm telling you it is, it's right there. And so how do. What advice? Yeah, they're in the red.

[C]

It's right there. It's in the red.

[A]

They're right there. So, Mark, like, let's say like in a framework example. In a framework example where you're laying it down like an X ray, and wherever you are, there you go, and you see a pipeline like this, you're talking to existing customers. Let's say you didn't do this, you know, sequentially. And again you are. There you go. What do you do as a company, as a total company, not just a, you know, Sales, marketing, you gotta readjust to prevent it.

[D]

Or if you wake up now and you realize you wake it up and, and what do you do now?

[A]

Wake up?

[D]

Yeah. S. So you, you fix it at that moment. Right. So like I've never seen a company where we're starting out, we, we're, we're pursuing product market fit and we do our icp. We do that with every company. I've never seen a company where that initial hypothesis is right and state even for the first year.

[A]

Yes.

[D]

Like, it's just, we don't know. And when, once we start going in there a dozen 2,000, 3,000 customers, we start to see the patterns. It's like, oh my gosh, we totally missed that. Like, it turns out that like there's a critical component of the tech stack that we're not ready for. So we have to put these people into the non icp. So you'll see in the frameworks there that when we're measuring the pursuit of product market fit as measured by the lir, we push out some early customers who are no longer icp and you can just. And then, so when you're measuring the LIR and you're, you're only measuring on the current icp. So that would be my answer. Cap is nail it down now. Separate your install base into ICP and not. And then like on the not, like just put them over here. Maybe if you run like an account manager ratio of like you know, one account manager to 30 accounts, you know, whatever it is, just run it as a one account manager to 200 over there. Know what I mean? Like just. We're not going to ignore them, but we're not going to, we're going to model pretty bad.

[A]

This is an important part right here. I love what you're saying because if you are down the line and this, this happened to, for this has happened to force management a few times in the 20 years of our existence. I found it very important from a leadership perspective to communicate effectively the science behind what you're doing as a company. And I have not had one company come back and like think we were jerks because we, somebody was not in our critical. But when you don't talk that way because nobody, no customer wants to buy something that is not. If you're not going to serve me as if I'm your ideal customer. Nobody wants to be in that red area, right? But the sellers listen. All sales leaders listen. What most people do is they just stop calling on those accounts. They stop supporting them or they stop and then all of a sudden you get a bad reputation in the marketplace. You're not following up. You're so just, yeah, you need a little something.

[D]

It's a very difficult place to be because even like a lot of people make so many mistakes. They try to save every customer. Even though we decided they're no longer a fit. We can't afford that churn. You just got to like wipe off the, you know, rip off the band aid. But again, you have just like a lower version. You have some people there to see what they can do. You're going to forecast a much higher churn right there. And you will wake up a year from now where if you listen to this and you're like, oh, damn. And you carved it up in 60% were an ICP and 40% weren't. And you put the right ratios on the 60% and all the future quarters only sell into that ICP, you will wake up a year from now and 95% will be in the ICP and 5% won't. And I get it, Cap, like, it's tough because there's going to be a bunch of customers out there. Like, I tried it and it didn't work. And that's. There's nothing you can really do about that other than being crisp about who you're for.

[A]

Love that. Thank you for that.

[C]

The huge benefit that, that we're not talking about right now is that this isn't only about sales and selling. This when you do the ICP right and you know, you have product market fit, it rallies the entire company from a marketing standpoint. They know what the sales people are talking about. It rallies development when they're prioritizing what features and capabilities should be in the next releases. That's a huge part of this that I don't think most people really take into account. And, and that's why it's so important to have an ICP and truly understand product market fit. And where you to your point, Mark, you know, creating value for that customer.

[D]

There's a reason why I didn't call it the sales system. I call it the go to market system. There's a reason why I didn't call it sales market fit. I called it go to market fit because like we, the sales team is part of the go to market team. The go to market team is how we create demand marketing SDRs, how we sell that demand sales, how we retain that demand and expand that CSM account managers Revops is supporting us sales name like that's the whole system and those have to be looked at holistically. That was a massive movement in the cloud era that helped companies, you know, separate themselves.

[B]

Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe, rate and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information.