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B2B sales, networking, and soft skills.
“Who is our client?”
What to do if the ideal customer profile is not clear to your colleagues and team
How to use email and social media messages to land a large deal
“We don’t know who our client is” is the most honest phrase I’ve heard from salespeople.
While consulting a large business on B2B sales, I once heard this from a head of sales at a top-10 bank. We were discussing how to systematize their approach, and he honestly admitted:
— You know, we still don’t really understand who our client is.
I paused for a moment.
— Wow, I thought. If even companies like this struggle with it, how does small and mid-sized business survive?
From that point on, I started digging deeper into the topic. And after about two years of observation and experimentation, I realized: this honest question is exactly where a real transformation of the sales department begins.
When attempts to “browse LinkedIn” and “buy a database” end up wasting budget, a moment of truth arrives:
who is our client, really?
The answer “IT companies with 50+ employees” is not an ideal customer profile. It’s a warm-up. It’s not even a hypothesis.
To get out of this dead end, you need two steps:
- Learn to recognize ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) not by job title, but by behavior.
- Use AI not as an encyclopedia, but as a filter that quickly weeds out “not our kind.”
What actually works (tested in practice):
Take a list of 1,000+ companies and give ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral — or even Bing — a simple instruction:
[prompt for GPT]
Find among them those who:
— have launched a new business line or hired a Head of Growth;
— mention scaling on their website;
— are implementing technologies similar to ours;
— are actively hiring for roles we typically use to start conversations.
AI doesn’t replace strategy — it accelerates routine.
Instead of saying “we don’t know who our client is,” within a few days the team has a list in hand:
“Here are 42 companies that are experiencing pain right now exactly where we know how to help.”
And that’s where the real work of a salesperson begins.
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