How to Change Your ICP While You’re Still Selling | Lauren McHugh

Changing your ideal customer profile sounds straightforward until you have to do it while the business is still selling. Lauren McHugh is Head of Marketing at Docket and the product marketer who launched ZoomInfo’s ABM platform. She has done this twice: once by adding a buyer, and once by replacing one. At Docket, the switch from selling to sales leaders to selling to marketers meant rewriting the messaging, the website and the content library. The hard cutover tanked their SEO and AEO, and some of the old content had to come back. At ZoomInfo, adding marketers as a buyer created a different problem. Sales leadership had to let existing reps sell to a new ICP without risking quota, and finance had to figure out how to report revenue that wasn’t recurring. Follow Lauren on LinkedIn (  / lauren-mchugh-24454118  ) and see Docket’s new positioning at docket.io. Key Takeaways Lock positioning and messaging before you touch the sales motion. Quota changes last. Don’t hard-cut old content. Docket brought back the sales pages that still ranked and rewrote them around the handoff to sales. ZoomInfo required a specialist overlay on every marketing deal for about 18 months. When 6 overlays couldn’t keep up with hundreds of sellers, that was the signal to train and test the whole team. Expansion into the install base moved faster than net new, even with a database that was about 75% salespeople. Bring finance in early. Non-recurring ad spend and commission rules were the hardest part of the launch. Chapters 00:00 Your best customer isn't who you built for 05:11 What has to change first when your ICP changes 07:07 How ZoomInfo trained thousands of sellers on a new buyer 09:20 Docket's full 180 and the search hit that followed 18:07 The two problems nobody planned for: ad spend and commission 21:23 Why every marketing deal required a specialist for 18 months 25:11 From Niche Player to Gartner Leader in three evaluations 28:25 Selling to marketers from a database that's 75% sales 36:23 15 years of launches, and the CFO was the hard part 39:06 What to do Monday morning if your ICP is changing Built for founders, CROs, sales leaders and marketing leaders who are adding or replacing a buyer while the number still has to land. This episode is sponsored by Docket. Docket’s inbound demand agent talks to your website visitors in real time, qualifies them in the conversation, and books meetings with full context for your sales team. Not another MQL. Visit Docket and mention the show for a special rate: docket.io Subscribe to the Revenue Problem Solvers Podcast for conversations about sales leadership, go-to-market and building predictable revenue. Tell us in the comments which part of an ICP shift you’d get wrong first. Share this with whoever owns your website before the new homepage goes live. #ICP #GoToMarket #RevenueProblemSolversPodcast #ProductMarketing #SalesLeadership