​ When I first started learning GTM, I thought the hard part was finding the ideal customer profile. Turns out, that's only the first layer. In B2B, your ICP is usually an organization, not a single buyer. And that's where the complexity begins. Within the same ICP, there are multiple personas. Each has different responsibilities. Each has different incentives. Each experiences the same problem differently. Which means each needs different messaging. If your goal is customer acquisition, you can't stop at knowing who you're selling to. You also need to understand: Where each persona spends time. What success looks like for each of them. What pain they're trying to eliminate. What type of content actually earns their attention. Then comes another layer. The buying committee. The person using the product isn't always the person approving the budget. The person championing the solution internally isn't always the final decision-maker. So your GTM strategy isn't just about reaching one customer. It's about aligning multiple stakeholders with different motivations around the same product. The deeper I go into GTM, the less it feels like marketing. It feels like understanding people, organizations, and decision-making systems. That's a level of complexity I didn't fully appreciate when I started.

of requirements. But proximity to where that IT team is located or where those IT teams are located, in addition to where the clients are located, in addition to where the end users are located, still is a really big deal. So with that in mind, when it comes to your marketing and sales playbook, there's a local and a long-distance version. For most companies that want to really grow and differentiate their managed services and co-location business, the local version looks something like this: understanding your ideal client profile, the tight geographic location where they are relative to that 30 or 60-minute drive of your facility, how big or small those clients are, the industries they tend to be located in. From that ICP, from that ideal client profile, you should be able to build out your target account list. A couple dozen, a couple hundred, maybe a few thousand, depending on where you're located, of potential companies that you'd love to do business with. That usually gets divvied up among your sales team. And then you figure out your prioritized buyer personas, your segmentation strategy, who's the most important economic stakeholder for that kind of client, who's the second most important kind of stakeholder for that economic buyer who's on the decision committee for that kind of client. And then once you have that primary and secondary, doing your homework, doing your research to understand each of those personas' biggest goals and challenges. So let's say for argument's sake, for each of those personas, there's five or six big goals, five or six big challenges. So in aggregate, you end up with about 10 or 12 topics that are top of mind that you've learned about from them and their own words. That's the key part. It's got to be in their own words. And in their own words, that research is what you use going forward for everything. Your website copywriting, when you put together a dedicated website page and some real estate on your homepage and some real estate on your website navigation for that particular buyer persona. That buyer persona research, in addition to the website copywriting, drives your lead generation and your lead nurturing strategy, like what your premium content should look like, what your webinars should look like, what your lunch and learn, what your breakfast

If you are a larger company and you're selling to enterprises, you'll likely need a much more granular segmentation strategy with multiple buyer personas. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of an ideal client based on actual research and educated speculation. And buyer personas are incredibly important because they help you to figure out how you're going to segment your market, segment the different kinds of users that you want to build brand awareness. And this is super important because we want to make sure that no matter how inundated your target clients are, that we come through with messaging that's incredibly unique, that's incredibly precise for who they are and what they care about. And if we're too broad and we skip this step, it's very possible that we're going to go out there with a website and social media and digital ads and event marketing and email marketing and it's just going to fall flat. And the reason why it would likely fall flat is you are probably trying to reach too broad of a market with too broad of a message and one size fits all is resonating with no one. To make sure that we do the opposite, we want to really, really dial that in. So for an edge provider with a handful of different facilities, you'll end up with an ideal client profile that actually needs a version of that created for each one of these facilities because the different clients, different target clients will have different levels of proximity to your different facilities, depending on where they're located. In much the same way that you'd build and refine an ideal client profile and target account lists for different co-location locations. But again, so we want to know historically when we look at your clients where you've been most successful, who shows up in your case studies, in your testimonials, in your reviews, showing great success with net promoter score, in your CRM system, your customer relationship management system, which clients stay with you the longest, are the most profitable, generate the most revenue. All of those positive indicators that likely give you a really strong sense of what kinds of clients you want more of. Once you know that, then you're looking at those clients, those most successful clients and seeing who was the primary stakeholder, the most important economic stakeholder in those accounts that you want more of.