How BoostIdeal Helps Businesses Optimize Their ICP with Peter Engleman and Greg toler

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts, uh, to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10X ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, And today I'm very excited to welcome 2 different guests, but both with a similar background and a connection to each other. We've got Greg Toler and Peter Engelman. Now I'm going to read their bios to make sure I get them right between the 2 of them. Greg brings nearly a decade of experience in consulting and in-house marketing, specializing in growth strategies, process optimization, and framework development. His marketing work focuses on refining go-to-market targeting strategies to help businesses drive growth. Greg has developed scalable systems that improve operational efficiency and deliver measurable results. And then Peter is a SaaS executive with nearly 15 years of go-to-market experience in sales, partnerships, and business development. He spent his time working across the spectrum of company sizes and has founded companies, worked in venture capital helping SaaS companies in their go-to-market efforts, Led growth stage scale-ups as well as turnaround efforts. So Peter, Greg, I'm super excited to have you on the show. Welcome.

Thank you. It's good to be here.

Yeah, great to be here.

Thank you. So obviously there's a little bit of a story as to why the two of you are on together, uh, and as we've been, uh, sort of talking about, you have sort of an interesting story of kind of how you met and then sort of the roles that you worked on together. And, uh, that aligns very well with the types of things we talk about here on the show. So kind Kind of tell us the story, tag team in a little bit. Tell us like how you guys met and how you sort of got to where you are today.

Yeah, yeah, happy to. Greg and I actually initially crossed paths 2 companies ago, but we didn't work that closely together. I was leading strategy and corporate development at a large marketing technology company. Greg was in the marketing department. And ultimately I left, followed my manager to a turnaround at a large SaaS company, Series D SaaS company, was recruited over there to lead partnerships, BD kind of strategy, ultimately took over sales over time. And Greg was recruited over there as well. So we briefly crossed paths. Prior to the turnaround. And then we worked very much hand in hand, sales and marketing, kind of traditionally combative groups, but we were able to kind of kumbaya and work well together over there.

Gotcha. And what about, you know, sort of the sales and marketing was attractive to you, Peter, that had you sort of move from partnerships into more of a sales and marketing role? I'm curious about that sort of shift from strategy into more of the marketing.

Great question. To be clear, Greg is the marketing expert. I was more on the sales side. So I, yeah, I joined, I've led sales teams in smaller capacities in the past. And as it goes at a turnaround or just a fast-paced kind of tech company in general, you wear multiple hats. So started off by kind of Leading ecosystem development partnerships, all that kind of stuff naturally touches sales. And there was an opportunity to take over as interim head of sales. And then that turned into longer than interim and became more permanent head of sales. We were building the business and doing all the things we needed to do to get it to a successful exit.

That's great. And so Greg is the, so, you know, self-identified, or I guess Peter identified you as the marketing expert. Tell us your story of kind of how you got started in marketing and then how you found yourself in this turnaround environment that Peter alluded to.

Yeah, absolutely. So as most people do, or some people do in their industries, they kind of fall into things. When I was in college at the time getting a business degree, I got an internship as a marketing analyst working in like data and market evaluation at a bank and finance company, and that rolled into a full-time job. And then kind of from there, every role continued to dive deeper and deeper into this marketing side of things. But I kind of grew up and cut my teeth on the marketing data side of things and analytics. So more of a data-based marketer rather than on the creative side of marketing. which played really well into consulting. So about 10 years ago, I started doing kind of go-to-market marketing data analysis from a consulting perspective, which dovetailed into building processes and operations, which kind of moved back into building better, more efficient marketing programs and go-to-market plays. And so kind of over the years, I've dual hat in both of those areas. And then I really like to build, I like to fix things and I like processes. And so I kind of transitioned what I do from a consulting perspective, moving into organizations and helping build into, into this full-time role. And so when, when I got brought into, to the same company that, that Peter was in, specifically with the goal of kind of turning around the programs that were currently there, it was right up my alley. A lot of what I've been doing for the, for the last 10 years or so. And it was, it was a lot of fun.

That's great. That's great. So both of you in, in your bios and, and you kind of talked about this in your background, talk about go-to-market or GTM as, you know, sort of an area of focus and expertise. And that's not the newest, but a newer phrase. And, you know, sometimes people, you know, get caught up in vocabulary and don't necessarily have clarity on what it means. I've come to really understand go-to-market as a collection of sort of strategies and systems within, you know, marketing, sales, and customer success that really tie together all of the ways that you generate revenue from acquisition to, you know, sort of, you know, recurring to expansion and really has more of a holistic approach. Is that the way that the two of you would define go-to-market as a, you know, as a definition of a collection of motions, or am I missing something there?

No, absolutely. So a lot of people see it from a siloed perspective where, you know, marketing is doing marketing, sales is doing sales, and often customer success and the product side of the house tends to not even be a part of the conversation as it relates to go-to-market, which is A pretty big misconception, as you even pointed out, but we collectively kind of see this as a holistic view of how an organization takes themselves, their brand, their product and service, both to market and to their current obtained market from a customer perspective. And so when we look at these programs and a lot of what we did at the turnaround startup as well is like the first thing that I always look at is what is the current customer data look like? Who are good customers who provide valuable product feedback? Who has better lifetime value? Who grows that way? Because a lot of times the, the outbound efforts or the sales and marketing efforts disaggregate themselves or kind of ostracize the customer base and build all of these programs on their own and miss kind of the holistic view of, to your point, what actual go-to-market for an organization should look like.

Yeah. Yeah.

So true. Well, and as you think about, you know, in today's kind of hypergrowth environments, everyone wants that right side hockey stick with that curve that goes up. But if you think about, you know, sort of if you just focus on acquisition, you know, the same amount every year has a declining growth rate and it just has sort of the straight linear line, you know, even if you're growing at the same rate, it's really by only, only by compounding that recurring revenue and that expansion revenue that you get that real exponential curve that everyone's chasing. And you just can't expect to do that if you're leaving customer success out in the cold, if you're not thinking about after that initial sale.

Yeah, most organizations really focus on pivoting with the market on the front end and often forget kind of insulating the current business that they had. And I think we saw this a couple of years ago when VC money dried up, when capital markets got tough, right? And not only were you unable to grow at the rate that most organizations historically were growing, but you were also churning largely at the same rate and slightly higher than you were before, really showing that most products are disconnected to their current customer base and what actually provides value to a customer. And so not only could they not insulate their current business, but they also weren't growing. And so we saw so many, so many companies taking a hit and realizing that that hockey stick motion is largely built from the foundation, making sure there's real product market fit first and Establishing a solid go-to-market to other customers that look like your current base that's got proven fit.

Yeah.

This was also a massive unlock for us kind of in that turnaround journey. I would say there were 2 kind of crucible moments, if you will. One was figuring out who is the actual ideal customer profile, like what are the attributes of your best customers? For a couple of reasons. One, there's only so many dollars you can spend on marketing and so many accounts that sales can pursue. But number 2, who are the customers that have a high LTV, right? Like in the spirit of wanting to grow accounts and reduce churn, you need to find those that are going to be not only good customers but good evangelists. So the first kind of big moment that we had was figuring out where, where do we want to focus the business from a new business perspective? Where do we want to run the account-based programs on the marketing side? Where do we want the BDRs to target and where do we want the target accounts for the sales reps? The other side was on that growth. A big part of the business was growing the existing customer base, disproportionately massive, I would say, where we were compared to kind of the traditional VC business. And based on that insight, we were able to formalize programs, account-based programs, To, to build that book of business. And that ties back, Mark, to what you said. That was a joint effort between partnerships, sales, marketing, customer success, business development reps in a unified motion to not only surprise and delight the customer, but then give them more opportunities to see value and grow with the company. So I would say those were kind of the 2 core pillars that helped us grow in a business that historically or previously was, was losing customers overall.

So you hit on one of the first ones there that I want to unpack a little bit with you because I think you've got some really great insight to share, which is this idea of really understanding your ICP, your ideal customer profile. Talk to us a little bit about, you know, maybe some of the activities that you did or the tools that you used or the motions that you did sort of, you know, refine that because a lot of companies think I know my ideal customer. They're this, this, and this. And maybe they rattle off some firmographic things or, you know, some names of some companies. But I suspect that if you really uncovered some powerful insights, you did a little more than that. Talk to us a little bit about what you did.

Yeah, this goes— well, I've had a lot of experience with this even prior to the turnaround. Both on the VC side, starting a company and having no idea who my target customer was. I've seen it time and time again and there's a few areas that you hit on that I think we should kind of click into.

Yeah.

Number one, I think the uncomfortable truth is that most people have no idea what their ICP really is. Like, it is a total joke. They say, yeah, but Fortune 500 in the US, right? Yeah. That means you have no ICP. So I think the biggest opportunity for the market is to kind of step back and really assess, do you know what your ICP really is at a granular level? And also, when's the last time you evaluated that? Because markets aren't static, your competitors aren't static, your customers aren't static, and your business isn't static. So your ICP should not be static. So these ICPs are done wrong quite frequently, and then they just collect dust. So, so that's, that's like the broad strokes kind of controversial statement that I'll make today. The other part is the creation of ICP, and this is kind of where Greg and I bonded at our previous company. Is the difficulty of actually building a smart data-backed ICP. And this is where Greg's experience comes in. I've been places where the CEO says, I think the market's going this direction, our ICP should be X. That's not an ICP.

That's right.

That's a gut decision. That's a hope. Yeah, that's right. That's right. It's potentially influenced by the board, or you write a LinkedIn post, or you just are hoping to zig when the market zags. is being cute. So, you know, historically it is Excel spreadsheets, manual data process. It is a little bit of guess, iterate, test, kind of that back and forth that takes countless cycles. With the advent of LLMs, we see folks starting to say, I'll just throw my customer base in AI and they'll tell me my ICP. But there's a lot of nuance.

Yeah.

A lot of considerations that make that kind of a false hope. So that's actually why we created BoostIdeals because foundationally for a go-to-market strategy, you need to have a data-backed ideal customer profile that is inherently dynamic. We've kind of coined the term of a dynamic ICP, one that evolves with your business in the markets and helps you refine your targeting strategy, which then has implications for marketing, for sales, for customer success. Greg, I'll let you add on since you are kind of the maestro on all things ICP.

No, yeah, I'm happy to jump in. The really the genesis of kind of Peter's and my conversation, like he was referencing with us bonding over it, was having seen that gap so many times. And we talked about this a little bit earlier, but a lot of times it It tends to start with who your current customer profile looks like and then adapting from there. And so many, so many times it's either opinion-based or it's AI black box telling you who sales sold to last quarter. And that is now your ICP, a new direction. So what we used to do and what we did as a part of this turnaround was kind of go through that analysis process to identify what does your current customer base look like? What, where is their proven success, consistency? success, product market fit, starting there as what I would define as kind of an initial ICP or a target customer profile to go build off of. And then the biggest gap that people tend to miss is conflating what is proven market fit with opinion market fit and who they want to go after. And so It's really when we develop a lot of these strategies is what we did at the turnaround is let's target a proven market first for growth because there's always one unless you're in a pre-ideal customer profile phase of business, which is all testing, right? But let's go after a customer base you see traction for and then identify what is emerging that you can target. What are additional profiles that look similar to your current base and then go from there. And then ultimately, how are you tracking that? How are you iterating? How are you seeing what's working, which to Peter's point, is a lot of where Boost Ideal steps in, helping not just kind of identify where you are, but over time, what's changing with your customer base, what's changing with your open deals that can impact where you go from an emerging perspective.

Yeah, like such an important step, but which as both of you called out is so often missed. And, you know, it's actually there, you can bring a lot of sophistication to it. But you don't have to, you know, sort of over-engineer it. You can do something very simple like rank all of your clients from the last 2 years by the, you know, revenue that they generated for you, sort it by that, do a percentage of total, look at the kind of the, you know, iron law of, you know, the 80/20 rule is about 20% of your customers are gonna wind up making up about 80% of your revenues. Just sorting it and having that picture starts to give such a better understanding of who your real customer is, not who you want it to be or who you spend most of your time with, which oftentimes is not those companies that make up most of your revenues. And one of the things that we see companies forget to do a lot too is, so even if they've done that, okay, well now we've got a tighter, you know, sort of definition. from a firmographic standpoint. It's not just Fortune 500 in the US, but they fail to look at what's the context that, that company was operating in that drove them to market, that made our solution out of all the ones out there the right solution for them. Because it's once you find that, that it really unlocks that sort of messaging that really magnetically attracts the right customers to you and also magnetically repels the wrong ones.

Yeah, right.

And it's, it's a lot, it's a lot broader than, and we joked about it a couple of times already, but it's not just Fortune 500 in the US, right? Like the basic firmographic foundation of a business. And there are naturally things about a business that make them a better fit or not a better fit from, from a firmographic perspective. So not to dismiss that, the way that we look at it is, is in 4 or 5 categories, firmographics being a basic criterion, technographics, internal qualifiers, market signals, and then historic engagement with you as a business. So we kind of build this module around what it looks like, and it really breaks into 3 types of models that we tend to create for our customers. The first is a basic fit criterion. This is what most people would consider as their, their ICP. It's general, either static or slowly changing data points about a particular company. Then there's a level of engagement that make them a better fit from a timing perspective. And then to your point, those in-market contextual things that make them a better fit now, not just because they know who you are and they're engaging with you or have historically, but because of what's happening in their business now that makes their, their need or their motivation for a solution like yours better fit now as well. So we like to break it up into those 3 areas to have a more holistic view of what a customer profile should be.

So I'm starting to get a picture here that the 2 of you met in this kind of turnaround scenario, gelled over and connected over the importance of identifying really who the ideal customer is, which then serves as the strategy for your go-to-market motions. And you sort of realized we can actually make this process easier, better for other folks like us who are tackling the same thing. And that was the genesis of Boost Ideal. Am I, am I getting that right?

Yeah, that's absolutely right. Peter has seen it from, from the top down so many times, specific in the VC world and investment where they're trying to figure out who has a really good handle on their customer base and their go-to-market motions. I've kind of seen it bottoms up with the consulting side of the world where I'm moving into an organization that's really struggling to find those things. And a lot of times in both scenarios, to Peter's point earlier, it tends to start in a spreadsheet or start in, in some sort of Google Sheet or document somewhere, even a Word doc where everybody starts to write down things. And so what we have created from Boostideo is a tech-enabled way to get to that information faster, but then also to use it for ongoing measurement and optimization in the future as well. So being able to use it for planning and account planning to be able to track your customer base to really see the back end of what's actually giving value and then use that same information to inform the front end of go market as well. And so that exactly is the genesis of Boost Idea and what we're trying to solve and where we think that we've got a lot of really good traction recently. Peter, anything to add to that?

Yeah, I would just add that the benefits are both tactical and strategic. So there's, you know, the time savings and removing the hassle of the operations of creating your ICP. There's the strategic side of let's move beyond just fit data, let's take in some market signals, let's understand beyond the who but the why for timing to be right, what messaging would resonate, that sort of thing. And then if you zoom out even more, you know, we kind of kicked off this, this conversation with joking about the lack of sales and marketing alignment. that I think plagues many organizations. I don't think it starts as a cultural issue. Oftentimes it's like, hey, the CRO hates the CMO. Yeah, maybe. But I think it starts as more of a strategic or a systems issue. Why do they hate each other? Well, because sales isn't getting enough leads or sales isn't following up with the leads. But that's just the, the underbelly of that issue is a lack of trust of what one another is actually doing and a misalignment on what does good look like. And all of that comes back to your ideal customer, right? Lead scoring, account scoring, territory plans, account-based programs, all of that comes from a core understanding of who should you target, when should you target them, And how should you target them? And when you have that unified vision across sales and marketing, it cuts the BS. There will always be, you know, headaches between the 2 groups. It's— we're humans, but it removes a lot of the mistrust. And there's what we're trying to bring is transparency into scoring at a very tactical level. But what that then creates is trust into how one another are looking at the business and where they're going from a go-to-market perspective. Yeah, yeah.

We see so often that when you align marketing, sales, and customer success on, you know, sort of fundamental things like who is our customer, what makes a good lead, if everyone can lead on, agree on what makes a good lead, well then marketing is chasing the right folks and sales is aggressively following up with them because they're both excited about it instead of this friction that comes when marketing is hitting a quota of leads regardless of quality and sales is griping about, you know, sort of their lack of fit. With who's actually potentially likely to buy. And bringing that together is such a hinge that brings the entire organization together. And not only that, not to forget customer success. If sales marketing is chasing leads that sales can never close, sales is closing deals by making promises that can never be delivered, then customer success is stuck over here trying to, you know, plug up a leaky bucket. Which can never create that hockey stick curve. You're just gonna grow as much as you can arm twist people into signing a new deal.

Yeah. Well, it's that horizontal view, right? It's something that we're trying to, not trying to, or we are solving in the way that we've built things to be able to track across all of them, right? So that there's real-time feedback to the front end of go-to-market with sales and marketing on what's actually working. And then even beyond that, we have use cases with some customers that product is using the customer data to prioritize feature requests or prioritize what to build because then they can see, okay, well, of these 10 feature requests that came in in the last week, when they do their weekly standup and prioritization, it's like, okay, well, 3 of them came from higher-tiered, higher-priority customers that have a longer tail with us, are more valuable. So it's even informing that, which then informs what we're taking to market. And we know that it's resonating with the right customers and right prospective customers as well. It's really tying all of those departments together in a way that creates a holistic view so that they're all moving the same direction. We're all tracking the same data, but then also can all pivot together too. As soon as one org is seeing a shift in what's working and what isn't, the rest can adapt to that as well.

Yeah.

Yeah. To add on to that quickly, we have customers, we sell them to never start with customer success. as initial conversation, but we frequently see them brought in. And Mark, I just— you've reminded me of this. Yes, they're often left holding the bag. Therefore, you should have better customers that aren't going to churn. However, think about it. Fit, engagement, and market signals, market research. All of a sudden, you're able to understand, is engagement going down? Maybe the financial report shows a financial loss or there's been a layoff at that company. Well, oh shoot, maybe that's churn risk. Maybe we should go ahead and get involved there earlier. So you're able to understand, well, maybe they weren't a great fit, right? Engagement's going down and there's some pretty bad news about them. Let's think about a play to make sure they're satisfied, to make sure that they're not going to churn at the end of that contract. So yeah, CS is something that we're seeing more and more as a benefactor of of Boost Ideal. And then going back to kind of the strategic importance of the ICP, I've seen, I've been part of conversations on the venture capital side to, as Greg mentioned earlier, does this company know their ICP? Do they have the go-to-market engine figured out? Is the flywheel going? And a lot of that comes from the ICP. I've also been in conversations in the M&A setting where we're getting acquired and the acquiring firm asks about our ICP and what gives us conviction about the ICP and how that has synergies with their ICP. So it, I know this is all about go-to-market, but then it starts to permeate to corp dev strategy, CEO level conversations because obviously you want go-to-market to work well, that gives you revenue growth. But also if you find yourselves in an M&A conversation, whether being acquired or acquiring a company, that ICP needs to be a North Star to understand if there will be synergies when the 2 companies come together.

Yeah, hey, so many good points there. And obviously we're all really passionate about strategic importance of alignment around who that customer is. You know, all marketing starts with the market, and that ideal customer profile is sort of that first stab at that. But I gotta be mindful of your time. But before I let you go, we've talked around it a bit, but why don't you give us the pitch? Like, tell us really what Boostideal does, who your best, you know, who your ideal customer is and the benefits that they get from working with you.

Nice. Cool.

Well, Boostideal is what we call full funnel scoring engine. So we create and help people identify, define, and track and measure their ideal customer profiles across the full funnel or full cycle of a customer journey. So With that, we get to— I'm nervous. Sorry. Hopefully we can edit this out. Let me start that again. I don't know why I got nervous there for a second.

Cool. So take it as, tell us about Boost Ideal and sort of who your ideal customer is.

Yeah.

And the benefits that they get from working with you.

Awesome.

Okay.

Sorry. Yeah, I'd love to.

Mark, do you wanna prompt the question so we could edit with that? All right, great.

Yeah. So tell us a little bit about Boost Idea, like who your ideal customer is and what the benefits are they get from working with with you.

Yeah, happy to. So Boost Ideal is a software platform. We hit on a few terms earlier. The ethos of Boost Ideal is creating a dynamic ICP. What that looks like in practice is a full funnel scoring platform where we're able to uncover what your ideal customer looks like from fit. So firmographics, technographics, that sort of thing. To engagement, meetings, how often they're clicking on your website, product adoption, that those types of metrics, and then market signals and market research. So all of this creates the opportunity to have smarter dynamic scoring around a dynamic ICP through the customer journey. So they come in as a lead, let's understand the context of the company and the person. they start going through the sales funnel and we want to understand who our target accounts look like. How do we do territory planning? How do we run targeted account-based programs? There's a unified view on who and why we approach those specific accounts. And then even on, as we talked about the customer success side, after they've signed the contract, let's understand as the business evolves, as markets evolved, as customers evolve, Are they still a good fit? And are there certain plays we can run to not only retain them but grow with them? So the TLDR is we're trying to put ICP at the focus of go-to-market. And what that looks like is dynamic scoring across the entire customer journey.

Fantastic. And so for folks that are listening and saying, yeah, that resonates with me, that makes sense that that would be the sort of linchpin for a strategic and successful go-to-market strategy, how do they get in touch?

You could reach out to greg@boostideal or peter@boostideal.com. Go to boostideal.com and check out what we have. I did not answer who our ideal customer profile is. It is not just Fortune 500s in the US. Actually, we're anchoring towards the growth company. So I would say companies that do not have large marketing organizations and RevOps organizations, but they're looking to bring enterprise-grade scoring at a price point that is both digestible and a platform that is easy to use to kind of transform how they go to market. So if you're in marketing, operations, sales, reach out to us and let's have a conversation about how we can find your ICP, your target account list, and help grow your business.

Fantastic. Well, Peter, Greg, thank you both so much for making the time to join me today.

You got it. Thank you, Mark.

All right, we'll talk to you soon. Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, please rate, comment, like on your favorite platform, and share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early-stage B2B services, tech, or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story? Send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.