The First Thing My VP of Sales Checked Wasn’t My Pitch
When I missed my meeting numbers as an SDR/BDE, my VP of Sales rarely asked me to rewrite my emails or change my call scripts. Instead, he would ask me to pick five random companies from my prospect list and explain what each company did. That was the entire diagnosis, and more often than not, it worked.
We followed a sales playbook he had built and tested: the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), buyer personas, messaging, scripts and objection handling. These weren’t random tactics someone had picked up from a sales course. They had been tested, refined and proven in our environment. That’s where his confidence came from.
His reasoning was straightforward. If everyone was following the same playbook and one rep was consistently missing their numbers, it made sense to examine the variable that differed: the accounts they were targeting. And when he asked us to explain what those companies actually did, the problem often became obvious. We were reaching out to businesses without understanding whether they were genuinely suitable customers.
The issue wasn’t always that we couldn’t sell. Sometimes, we were trying to sell to the wrong companies in the first place.
Your Sales Playbook Can’t Fix the Wrong Target Accounts
Sales teams spend considerable time improving execution. They refine email sequences, experiment with subject lines, coach reps on cold calling, practise objection handling and introduce new prospecting tools. All of these can improve performance, but they assume the rep is targeting the right people at the right companies.
Imagine a rep who sends 100 carefully written emails to companies that don’t have the problem your product solves, lack the resources to buy it or have no reason to prioritise it. Better copy might improve the response rate slightly, but it won’t fundamentally change the suitability of those accounts.
Now imagine another rep sending the same number of emails, using the same messaging, to companies that fit the ICP, have a relevant business problem and are more likely to buy. The same sales playbook can produce very different results because the underlying opportunities are different.
This is why activity metrics can sometimes hide a targeting problem. A rep might hit their daily call target, send hundreds of emails and keep the CRM updated, yet still struggle to generate meaningful meetings. Before concluding that the rep needs better execution, sales leaders should examine the accounts behind those activities.
More activity against the wrong accounts doesn’t create a better pipeline. It creates more wasted effort.
Understanding Your ICP Is Only Half the Job
An Ideal Customer Profile defines the characteristics of companies that are most likely to benefit from your product or service and become successful customers. Depending on the business, this could include industry, company size, geography, technology environment, business model, growth stage or the specific problems the company is trying to solve.
A well-defined ICP gives sales and marketing teams a common understanding of which accounts deserve their attention. It helps them prioritise prospecting, personalise messaging and allocate resources more effectively.
But my VP of Sales taught us another lesson that has stayed with me: understand your Anti-ICP as carefully as you understand your ICP.
He brought up Anti-ICP accounts in team meetings repeatedly. His message was simple: don’t waste your time pursuing accounts that are fundamentally unsuitable and then blame the market or the product when you fail to get results.
There is an important distinction here. Anti-ICP does not simply mean every company that falls outside your ideal customer profile. It also includes accounts that look promising on paper but repeatedly fail to convert or turn out to be poor customers in practice.
These accounts can be particularly dangerous because they appear to qualify at first glance. They might operate in the right industry, have the right employee count or use relevant technology. Yet, when salespeople engage with them, they discover that the problem isn’t urgent, the budget doesn’t exist, the buying process is unrealistic or the solution doesn’t fit the way the business operates.
Such accounts quietly consume prospecting time, meeting capacity and pipeline attention. A rep can spend weeks nurturing an opportunity that was unlikely to close from the beginning.
How to Identify Your Anti-ICP Accounts
Defining an Anti-ICP requires more than labelling lost deals as bad prospects. Sales teams need to look for recurring patterns across their pipeline and customer base.
Start by examining deals that repeatedly stalled, never progressed beyond the first meeting, lost to inaction or required disproportionate effort to close. Look for common characteristics. Did these companies lack a compelling business problem? Were they too small to justify the investment? Did they have no clear owner for the initiative? Were they buying for a use case your product wasn’t designed to support?
Also examine customers who signed but turned out to be poor fits. Some may require excessive support, struggle to adopt the product, churn quickly or fail to realise the value they expected. These patterns can reveal that winning the deal wasn’t necessarily a good outcome.
The goal isn’t to create a blacklist based on a handful of disappointing experiences. It’s to identify repeatable warning signs that help salespeople make better decisions about where to invest their time.
Once those patterns are clear, turn them into practical qualification criteria. Reps should know not only what a good-fit account looks like, but also which seemingly attractive accounts deserve additional scrutiny or should be deprioritised altogether.
Before Fixing Sales Execution, Check the Accounts
I still follow the lesson my VP of Sales taught me. When sales performance falls short, I don’t automatically assume the answer is another messaging workshop or a new sequence. I want to understand who the rep is targeting and whether those companies have a credible reason to buy.
That doesn’t mean the playbook is always right or that every missed target is an ICP problem. Sales execution, product-market fit, pricing, competition, territory design and market conditions can all influence results. But account suitability is an important variable that deserves attention before a sales leader prescribes another tactical fix.
If a rep can’t explain what the companies on their list actually do, why those companies need the solution and what makes them plausible buyers, there is a more fundamental problem to solve.
And if the same types of accounts repeatedly fail to convert, the team should learn from that pattern rather than continue prospecting into it.
My VP’s five-company test was simple, but it forced us to think beyond activity and focus on the quality of our targeting. His repeated emphasis on Anti-ICP made the lesson even more valuable: knowing who not to pursue can be just as important as knowing who to target.
Before asking your reps to make more calls, ask them to explain five companies on their prospect list. You might discover that the problem isn’t how they’re selling. It’s who they’re trying to sell to.
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