Thinking Sales forward.
You look at your customer list and recognize a clear pattern.
On one hand, you have your champions. The customers where collaboration flows smoothly, the results are convincing, and your team is motivated. The customers who are happy to stay, grow, and recommend you to others. That was great!
On the other hand, there are the customers who drain a disproportionate amount of energy. The ones where every meeting is a challenge and who keep your team in a permanent „firefighter mode.“ Projects drag on, escalations repeatedly land on your desk, and at the end of the day, you realize this one customer causes more work than five others combined.
If this sounds familiar, the cause is often not in project management or support. It lies one step before that:
Your sales strategy is not fully aligned with sustainable customer success.
The Classic Sales Model – And Why It's Reaching Its Limits for SaaS
Many sales professionals would point to the importance of a clear Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) at this point. And they are right. It’s essential to know which industry, company size, and region you are targeting.
But for a modern B2B SaaS company, that’s just the foundation.
A classic ICP primarily answers the question: Who can we sell to? This thinking comes from a time when a deal was largely concluded with a signature. The sales team’s responsibility often ended with the contract.
However, the SaaS world operates fundamentally differently. Your business model is not based on a one-time sale. The majority of your revenue, and especially your profit margin, is generated in the period after the customer has signed.
Imagine the sales process no longer as a funnel that ends with the deal. See it as a loop: After the sale, the crucial phase of onboarding, successful usage (adoption), and expansion begins. This is where long-term value is created. This is where a customer becomes a partner. This is where a user becomes an advocate who actively recommends you.
And that’s precisely why an ICP alone is no longer sufficient. An inefficient process doesn’t get better with a new tool; it just gets faster. And a customer you can’t truly make successful doesn’t become a champion with a signed contract, but rather a resource-intensive problem.
The Next Logical Step: From ICP to Ideal Success Profile (ISP)
If you want to scale sustainably and profitably, you should broaden your focus and ask yourself a different, more powerful question:
Who can we make successful, repeatably and profitably?
The answer to that is your Ideal Success Profile (ISP).
The ISP is the logical evolution of the ICP for any B2B SaaS company that wants to grow without burning out. It shifts the focus from the mere sales transaction to predictable customer success.
Imagine the positive effects:
- Your marketing attracts not just leads, but the right prospects who value your expertise and a collaborative partnership.
- Your sales team can identify with targeted questions in the very first conversation whether a customer has the potential to become a champion.
- Your customer success team can focus on developing good customers into outstanding partners, instead of just reactively solving problems.
The result? Less friction. Less churn. A higher customer lifetime value. And above all: Clarity.
Clarity for your team, which is now pulling in the same direction. Clarity for your customers, who feel understood from day one. And clarity for you as a founder or leader, because you finally get to move from reacting to shaping the future.
Where Do I Start?
This shift from ICP to ISP is not a theoretical concept, but a focused, pragmatic work process. It’s about systematically analyzing your best customers (the champions) and your most challenging ones (the energy drainers).
Not just based on hard facts like industry and size, but also on the context of their success:
- What was their initial situation? (Situation)
- What pain did they really want to solve? (Pain)
- What specific benefit did they expect? (Impact)
- And what was the collaboration like on a cultural level?
I have developed a pragmatic guide specifically for this process. It leads you and your leadership team through a focused 2-3 hour workshop to a first, actionable version of your ISP. No week-long strategy project. No 50-page paper. Just a clear tool to get the wheels in motion.
Stop chasing every sales opportunity. Let’s create clarity for your growth together.
How do we want to proceed?
If you are ready to identify the crucial lever for your growth and define your own Ideal Success Profile, book a non-binding call with me here. We’ll talk about where you stand, where the biggest bottlenecks are, and how you can use the guide most effectively for your business.
