When the ICP Moves, PreSales Pays the Bill [68]
When companies shift their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), pre-sales teams bear the heaviest operational cost despite decisions being made at the executive level. Building a named second ICP with dedicated SEs before crisis hits—rather than after—enables survival when market conditions force a pivot.
Summary
The episode explores the hidden costs of ICP pivots in pre-sales organizations. Tim opens by describing how a single strategic slide—'refocus the primary ICP'—was approved in an afternoon at a strategy review, but required him to spend a Sunday rewriting demo scripts to make 200 people credible in an unfamiliar industry. The actual consequence plays out over four quarters, yet the initial decision appears cost-free at the executive level. Nate describes his company's margin pressure in automotive suppliers due to reduced car production, energy costs, tariffs, and material scarcity—drivers that eliminate budget urgency for their product. Rather than waiting for crisis, the speakers argue for proactive preparation: building a deliberately narrow primary ICP plus a named second ICP as insurance. Ava explains that the cost of switching depends heavily on domain depth. Her HR product translates relatively easily across industries like logistics and healthcare because workflows repeat. Nate's automotive supply chain expertise would take years to replicate in retail, making a sudden switch prohibitively expensive. Re-messaging the value proposition to focus on margin-driven narratives buys two to three quarters of time, but cannot sustain deals if the budget line ceases to exist. The critical insight is timing: product development moves in six-month cycles now, but go-to-market enablement requires a year of live calls for SEs to develop genuine fluency. Nate describes his director who quietly built presence in Central and Eastern Europe over three years with two SEs and a local partner, generating little revenue initially but providing crucial refuge when the core segment softened. The key difference between theoretical and real second ICPs is assignment—a slide without named SEs is worthless. Practical execution means naming the second ICP now, assigning two SEs, running one live deal per quarter in that segment, and building enablement from vocabulary gaps encountered on real calls rather than vendor curricula.
About this episode
A one-line strategy slide can redirect an entire go-to-market motion, but the retraining, domain language and demo assets all land on the SE leader. Nate argues for naming a second ICP as insurance long before anyone asks for it, and Ava pressure-tests whether a twelve-person team can afford that hedge.
Key Insights
- Strategic decisions to refocus the ICP take an afternoon but require four quarters of pre-sales execution to make 200+ people sound credible in a new domain, yet this cost disparity is rarely accounted for in strategy discussions.
- The feasibility and cost of an ICP pivot depends on domain depth—products sitting on repeatable processes across industries can pivot relatively cheaply, while deep vertical expertise like automotive supply chain knowledge cannot transfer to unrelated sectors in under a year.
- Product teams can now integrate new vertical features in six months, but pre-sales teams need one year of live customer calls for SEs to develop genuine fluency and avoid sounding inauthentic in discovery conversations, creating a persistent gap between product and go-to-market readiness.
Topics
Transcript
Hey there and welcome to Leading Pre-Sales, the show for solution engineering leaders who want to build teams that drive revenue and not just demos. My name is Tim and I'm the co-founder of SE Rockstars and together with Jan, we've coached over 350 solution engineers and their leaders across several dozens of companies. Every conversation you hear on this show is based on real coaching situations, real challenges, real problems that as leaders like you are dealing with right now. None of this is made up. We use AI to bring these stories to life through our two hosts, Nate and Ava. But the insights come straight from the trenches. Each episode gives you one actionable takeaway you can…
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