Method, not
marketing.
How to define a market that returns companies worth calling, how evidence should be scored and dated, and what this category quietly gets wrong. Written by the people who build it.
How to write an ICP that returns companies worth calling
The half of an ICP nobody writes down is the half that works.
Most ideal customer profiles are demographics with a logo attached. Here are the four parts of one that actually filters — and why anti-signals do most of the work.
Read itWhat actually counts as evidence for a buying signal
Three tests a claim has to pass before it earns a place on a list: a date, an openable source, and a stated link between them. Everything else is a guess with formatting.
6 min readWhy most intent data is noise, and what to keep
Topic surge scores rest on two assumptions that stopped holding: that an IP identifies an employer, and that reading about a subject predicts buying it. Here is what survives.
5 min readThe anti-signals worth disqualifying a company on
Every team can list what a good prospect looks like. Almost none can list what a bad one looks like before the call. That second list does more work than the first.
5 min readHow to map a buying committee without guessing
Most committee maps are org charts with adjectives. Here is what can genuinely be established before first contact, what cannot, and how to keep the two apart.
5 min readThe best thing a chat widget can say is “I don’t know”
An answer nobody can check is worse than no answer at all. What it takes to build site chat that cites its sources and refuses cleanly when it has none.
5 min readFirst-party analytics: what to actually track
Most analytics setups collect hundreds of events and answer none of the questions anyone asks. A smaller schema, built backwards from the decisions it has to support.
4 min readVisitor identification: what is legal, what is possible, what is neither
The pitch is that you can learn who visited your site without them telling you. Three separate claims are bundled in that sentence, and they have very different answers.
5 min readOutreach that survives the first three seconds
The reader decides before they finish the first line. What has to be in it, why the second sentence is where most emails die, and how to test whether yours is doing any work.
4 min readA signal from March is not a signal in July
Most lead scores only ever go up, so they end up measuring database tenure rather than relevance. What it takes to make a score that fades the way the evidence does.
5 min readNo-shows are a qualification problem, not a calendar problem
Reminder emails recover the people who forgot. Most no-shows did not forget. What the show rate is actually telling you about the booking that produced it.
4 min readNew writing goes up regularly. Subscribe by RSS.