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🪤 The ICP trap
Why broad markets weaken positioning — and how to fix it
Ian Ito
March 08, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
ISSUE #283
B2B SaaS growth plays, right in your inbox
Happy Sunday 👋
Three reads to think about this week:
The State of GTM Engineering report
The ICP trap: Why broad markets create weak positioning
How to run effective campaigns
Let's dive in!
Ian at SaaS Weekly
THIS WEEK IN SAAS
Interesting LinkedIn posts and industry news
Is it just me, or is this becoming the new norm: news headlines “mostly” feature companies that are extreme outliers – $100M ARR in months, huge Series A or B rounds, teams of 20 (or less than 10) outpacing orgs of 500.
It makes for a good title, but it skews the narrative for most B2B SaaS companies. The fundamentals of building a good business still look familiar — which raises a simpler question: how do you know if your company is performing well relative to others at your stage?
I’ve been referencing ICONIQ’s State of Software report for years now – it’s one of the few benchmarks that helps answer that question. Here are three metrics that help ground the narrative behind today’s headlines:
ARR per FTE: how much revenue the company generates per employee. When this number rises, it usually means revenue is scaling faster than headcount.
Net Dollar Retention: tracks whether existing customers expand or shrink their spend over time. When companies ship new products or pricing tiers, NDR shows whether that new revenue sticks.
POC → Paid Conversion: how often product pilots/ free trials turn into paying customers. It’s the clearest signal that product usage is translating into revenue.
A few years ago, "GTM Engineer" sounded like a niche operator title – usually someone under RevOps, stitching together outbound tools or building clever Clay workflows. Fast forward to today, and the data tells a different story.
Job postings jumped from 63 in 2024 to 3,342 in 2025, and the stack is converging around a shared toolkit: CRM, Clay, and AI coding tools. The role is starting to look less like a scrappy growth hacker and more like the systems architect for modern revenue teams.
To me, the larger narrative is how GTM teams are adopting a new model: adding someone who sits between marketing, sales, and data systems.
Which is why GTM Engineering is becoming its own function – one focused on building the infrastructure that turns pipeline strategy into technical execution, not simply a subset of RevOps with a cool title.
FROM THE TRENCHES
Perspectives from industry operators
The ICP trap: Why broad markets create weak positioning
Messaging & Positioning | Mike Northfield, Artifacts of Influence
ICP alignment is simple in theory but difficult to defend in the field.
Stakeholder groups often pressure marketers to broaden the market position. It usually comes from a fear that excluding buyers leaves opportunity on the table.
But an ill-defined ICP makes for rounded-off positioning and messaging that talks to everyone while resonating with no one.
For stakeholders who haven’t internalized this idea yet, the biggest hurdle is showing that a tight ICP is indeed restrictive — but in the right way. It creates the conditions for attracting customers who are better fits, happier customers, and easier sold.
When the pressure inevitably comes around, I often explain the idea with a baking analogy.
Think of your GTM resources — budget, people, energy, attention capacity — like a baking pan. You only have one to work with. Trying to go after your entire TAM is like cramming the whole sheet of cookie dough onto that pan. You can fold it over and make it fit, but it bakes into an uneven mix of burnt and raw portions.
For the best outcome, you have to be realistic about how much fits on your pan. Your ICP becomes the cookie cutter — a deliberate claim on the part of the market you can realistically win right now.
Mike Northfield, Artifacts of Influence
HOW COMPANIES GROW
Examples of growth plays and GTM Agent usecases
How Gong turned LinkedIn into a demand engine
Growth Strategy | Matteo & Jonathan, HyperGrowth Partners
I’ve been thinking about a pattern lately: LinkedIn has quietly become the default distribution layer for B2B brands.
The problem is that most companies treat it like a content channel – posting occasionally from the company page and hoping something sticks. Gong approached it differently. They treated LinkedIn like a coordinated GTM motion.
Instead of relying on a single account, Gong mobilized the entire company to create content and shape the conversation around revenue intelligence. The result was a multi-layered presence that made the category (and Gong’s leadership in it) feel consistently familiar.
The playbook breaks down into three parts:
Employee takeovers: coordinate posts across the org during key moments (new hires, launches, events) to create platform-wide visibility.
Multi-layer thought leadership: executives and operators publish perspectives tied to their roles, shaping the narrative across the buying committee.
Edutainment brand voice: combine educational insights with entertaining posts to keep engagement native to LinkedIn.
ARTICLES TO BOOKMARK
Resources to build your next growth play
A guide to positioning with multiple products
Positioning | April Dunford, April Dunford's Newsletter
Bookmark this for when: Your team ships a second product and starts building separate positioning for each one.
Why this matters: The moment a second product ships, the instinct is often to spin up separate messaging docs – one for each product, one for the company, one per persona.
The result is five narratives that say slightly different things – and a buyer who is more confused than when you had one product and one story.
April Dunford’s point is simple: multi-product positioning should follow the buying motion, not the product org chart.
Key takeaway: Choose your positioning model based on how products are sold.
Independent positioning: when products are sold separately to different buyers – each one gets its own narrative
Lead-product strategy: when one product anchors the sale and others expand from it – position the lead, let the rest fall behind it
Family / platform positioning: when buyers adopt products together – position them as a single story
How to run effective campaigns
Growth Marketing | Emily Kramer, MKT1 Newsletter
Bookmark this for when: You're planning a product launch, event, or demand gen push and need help coordinating the moving pieces across your marketing team.
Why this matters: I've seen marketing teams where everyone is busy (content is shipping, ads are running, events are on the calendar), but nothing builds on the other. Each channel operates in its own lane, resulting in a lot of activity that doesn't add up to a single coherent push.
Key takeaways: Emily Kramer's framing is that campaigns are where that coordination happens.
Marketing needs both "fuel" (creative, content, product marketing) and an "engine" (channels, distribution, demand gen) working together around a specific audience and objective.
When those two sides operate independently, impact shrinks – regardless of how much you ship.
As a result, treat everything as a campaign (product launches, events, content pushes, ABM plays). They all follow the same operational structure: align fuel and engine, assign a single DRI, and build tight feedback loops across the team.
TOP READS FROM LAST WEEK
The most clicked-on links
The buyer's orbit (the gravity of buying) [Artifacts of Influence]
AI Companies Are Hiring Human SDRs (And Building Enterprise GTM) [Peer Signal]
How Brex Grew Signups 3x [B2B Growth Insights]
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