ICP marketing is the practice of building your marketing around an ideal customer profile, a precise definition of the companies most likely to buy, succeed and renew, so budget and message concentrate where revenue actually lives. Done well, it goes a layer deeper than the profile. In episode nine of the CEO Insights podcast, Chief Revenue Officer Anna Gurina explains that layer: the human buyers inside the account.
Episode nine, opening at the ICP conversation. The full episode page has chapters, takeaways and show notes.
What is ICP marketing?
ICP marketing starts with a document and ends with people. The document is the ideal customer profile: industry, company size, geography, budget, the problem you solve. The people are the ones the document conveniently flattens, the manager who champions you, the finance lead who questions you, the executive who signs. Anna Gurina’s whole method lives in that gap, as she told me in the full conversation on the CEO Insights podcast.
We don’t just map ICPs, we map humans, even in B2B. Humans work with humans.
Who is Anna Gurina?
Over 15 years in SaaS, fintech and data tech, Gurina led channel sales and named accounts at a data-management company that is now a unicorn, ran global partnership strategy at a global collaboration software company, where she forged strategic partnerships with major technology platforms contributing over $3 million in annual recurring revenue within six months, and now leads sales, partnerships and customer success as Chief Revenue Officer at the payments company where she works today.
One distinction worth settling early, because the textbooks blur it. The ICP meaning marketing guides usually offer is the firmographic checklist above, and the ICP meaning sales leaders carry adds intent: which of those companies is likely to buy now, and through whom. Gurina’s point is that both definitions stay theoretical until you study the humans inside the ICPs marketing plans are built to serve. Having the right profile on paper, she notes, is now table stakes. Everyone does it. The advantage sits in what you do next.
Go narrow, then map the buying committee
Asked which levers she pulls to accelerate pipeline, Gurina starts with focus. “We go narrow and relevant. We don’t spray and pray,” she says. Narrow means fewer accounts, better understood, which is also the economics behind serious B2B lead generation: a small list of right-fit companies outperforms a large list of maybes on every metric that reaches the board.
Understanding an account starts with a contact map. “In B2B, who is in the buying committee, who influences the decision and who signs the deal? It’s important to understand,” she says. The buying committee is simply the group of people involved in a B2B purchase, and it is why business deals move slower than consumer ones. Gurina’s deal cycles run three to six months, which is why she builds the foundation for Q1 pipeline months before the quarter starts. If your marketing only ever addresses one persona, the other members of that committee meet your company for the first time inside a procurement meeting, without you in the room.
At the top end this becomes account-based marketing, ABM, where you research individual people in a handful of high-value accounts, their business priorities and even their personal interests, and tailor campaigns to them by name. Gurina is candid about the cost: it is expensive, and worth it mainly for multi-million contracts. For everyone else she recommends industry-targeted messaging plus what good salespeople do anyway, checking who the key decision makers are before every conversation. Much of that checking happens in one place, LinkedIn, which is exactly why LinkedIn lead generation works best when it is aimed at a mapped committee rather than a job title guessed from the profile.
Learn the exact words your buyers use
Then comes what Gurina calls her favourite part: “listening to how they talk, the exact words and verbs they use when they describe their challenges and goals.” Her rule is simple.
If they don’t say go but say run, then I run with them.
Her examples make it concrete. In travel and hospitality, nobody says increase revenue; they say “boost occupancy, fill more rooms, extend stays, drive bookings”. So instead of pitching customer lifetime value, she pitches “get your guests to stay longer and come back next season”. Creative agencies and design studios do not want process automation; they want to “free up brain space, streamline workflows, bring ideas to life faster”. In her payments world, a gaming company cares about instant payments and player loyalty while a travel platform cares about frictionless bookings, and as she puts it, the “underlying capability is the same. The way I talk about it is not.” The same translation exercise works anywhere. A corporate services firm does not buy compliance software, it buys clean audits and calm regulators. A shipping and logistics operator does not buy visibility tooling, it buys fewer where-is-my-container calls.
This language layer compounds across every channel you run. It decides which terms your SEO targets, what the headline on your web design says, how your brand identity sounds in a sales deck, and whether AI assistants recommend you, since AEO and GEO reward pages that mirror the exact phrasing buyers ask in. Gurina adds one caveat worth keeping: language tuning fine-tunes a strategy, it does not replace one. Get the profile and the committee right first, because if you are selling to the wrong person, it does not matter what language you speak.
One go-to-market idea, every Thursday.
No fluff, no digests of other people’s takes. One thing we shipped, and what it taught us.
Ask why five times: what clients ask for versus what they need
One of Gurina’s favourite lessons came from a product colleague: “Differentiate what the client asks for and what they actually need.” At the collaboration software company, a client kept requesting more custom fields and flexible task views. It looked like a routine interface tweak. “We looked closer. The real problem was visibility.” The client was juggling multiple teams in one workspace and could not get a clear snapshot, so instead of shipping five more settings, the team built a team-level planning view. It was not what the client asked for, and it solved the problem, lifting product adoption across departments.
The tool she recommends for finding that gap costs nothing. “When your client is asking you for something, you keep asking why. Why do you need this? Why do you need this now?” Five whys in, the request for custom fields becomes we are too many people in one space and nobody knows who owns what, and suddenly you have something a product or service team can actually solve. For a B2B service business, this exercise belongs in every discovery call, because the brief a client arrives with is rarely the problem they will pay to fix.
Making the answers travel is the harder half. Gurina calls cross-functional alignment one of the most underrated growth levers in go-to-market, because sales, marketing and product each speak their own dialect. Her framing is a relay: sales brings the field intelligence, the real-time client feedback and friction points; marketing turns that intelligence into a message that scales; product supplies the why and the how it can actually work. The mechanism is shared rituals and shared metrics, meetings where teams listen rather than report, and outcomes measured by segment and campaign rather than by department.
Treat outbound as a product, and feed the engine
Gurina’s second lever reframes prospecting entirely: treating outbound as a product. “What hypothesis are we testing this week?” Her own example from the episode: a recorded podcast versus a LinkedIn live stream, measured on reply rate and conversion rate, with learnings captured from every touch point. Which leads to her third lever, speed to insight.
If something’s not working, I would love to know in week two and not in Q2.
Run outbound lead generation this way and cold outreach stops being a numbers lottery and becomes a live experiment that gets smarter weekly.
The fuel for all of it is sales-call intelligence. I record every sales call I take and mine the transcripts for friction points and the phrases prospects actually use, and that vocabulary flows straight back into our content and campaigns. Gurina’s counter was about scale: with a team of 10, 20 or 30 salespeople, no leader has capacity to listen to even one call from everyone, which is where AI becomes the copilot, summarising calls and surfacing insights so leaders spend their time on strategy and execution. She shared a telling detail from a friend who builds AI call-analysis software: most companies that start analysing their sales calls end up changing their call structure, even ones convinced their approach was working. She is careful to distinguish structure from scripts, which she does not believe in; the value is guidelines on what discovery must uncover, what the value proposition covers and what the next step is.
What a small B2B team can do this week
You do not need a revenue organisation to run Gurina’s playbook. A founder and a marketing lead can start with five moves:
- Write the profile, then the people: pick your ten best customers, define the company pattern, then name the roles in the buying committee for each.
- Record your next five sales calls and pull out the exact nouns and verbs prospects use to describe their problem.
- Rewrite one key page, a hero, a sequence or a proposal, in that harvested language and watch reply and conversion rates against the old version.
- Run the five whys on the next inbound request before quoting it.
- Pick one outbound hypothesis for the week and agree in advance which number will prove it.
That is ICP marketing in practice: a profile sharp enough to focus budget, and enough human detail inside it that every message reads like it came from someone who gets them. Hear the whole engine in the full conversation on the CEO Insights podcast, and browse more founder and revenue-leader conversations on the podcast index.
