Put yourself in the mind of our hero of the story: you are a Product Marketing Manager staring at a blank slide deck, armed with feature specs and demo videos, convinced the pitch will land. Six months later, crickets. Pipeline dries up, adoption stalls, and the team scrambles for a pivot. Your CMO looks across the table and asks “do you know your ICP, or are we just guessing here?”
Does it sound (and feel) familiar? There is a reason that such a high percentage of startups fail. One of the most common issues that slows adoption is that they lack market need. Their shiny solutions chase ghosts instead of real pain. We call this the “solution looking for a problem”.
In product marketing, this isn’t just as much an enterprise epidemic as it is a startup trap. Positioning crumbles when messaging shouts features from rooftops while customers whisper about unsolved headaches. Press releases abound, but no customers are using the new features.
The antidote? Radical empathy for your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Not surface-level personas with stock photos and demographics, but a bone-deep immersion that turns marketing into method acting. Channel your inner Daniel Day-Lewis: live the role, feel the torment, and emerge with messaging that resonates like a gut punch.
The PMF Trap: Solutions Without Souls
Product-market fit (PMF) isn’t a checkbox; it’s the oxygen startups and scale-ups breathe. Yet most PMMs dive straight into solution-selling. You build battlecards around “AI-powered analytics” or “seamless integrations,” blind to whether your ICP even loses sleep over data silos or workflow friction.
Why does this fail, or slow down sales growth so often if we have so much history to draw from? PMMs treat ICPs as abstractions by building a character “VP of Sales at mid-market SaaS firms” instead of making it breathe and feel like flesh-and-blood humans juggling stakeholder buy-in, budget squeezes, and tech stack fatigue.
Take Slack’s origin story. Stewart Butterfield didn’t market a “real-time collaboration platform.” Early on, they obsessed over why teams hated email: context-switching hell, lost threads, decision paralysis. By shadowing internal users and grilling potential customers, they crafted messaging around “where work happens.” Result? Viral adoption and a $27B acquisition. Contrast that with Quibi: $1.75B raised on short-form video bets, ignoring creators’ and viewers’ real-world constraints like data costs and fragmented attention. Dead on arrival.
Your ICP, let’s call them Product Marketing Parker, is neck-deep in these battles. Differentiating in crowded markets (aka Red Ocean) means piercing the noise with problem-first narratives. Resonant messaging doesn’t list benefits; it mirrors the chaos Parker faces daily: coordinating cross-functional chaos, proving ROI to skeptical execs, and driving feature usage amid persona sprawl.
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. PMMs around the globe struggle with multi-persona resonance. It’s not easy to be ruthlessly pragmatic in your analysis (spoiler alert: you need to be). We need to reframe problems as our shared struggles. Make use of helpful and meaningful stats into hooks that validate: “You’re not alone in the persona puzzle, here’s the playbook.”
The ideal ICP is like a KYC (Know Your Customer). The ICP persona needs to include the sentiment they feel, not just the transactional part of the engagement. The work of Kahnemann and Tversky proved that it isn’t just the numbers that run economics.
Situational awareness for customer stories is also where PMMs and sales teams can lose their audience. You wouldn’t tell a customer problem story about multi-national financial services companies when you’re pitching to a regional health care provider. We need to infuse every part of their life and work situation into the decision. Every element of the marketing and sales process is about making the problem definition and the desired results relatable.
Method Acting for Marketers: Immerse to Illuminate
Hollywood’s method actors don’t phone it in. Daniel Day-Lewis lived as Abraham Lincoln for a year, obsessing over mannerisms and era-specific pains. Philip Seymour Hoffman is another fantastic example. He sought the “thing I really don’t want to find,” asking constant questions to uncover the character’s inner life, viewing acting as a process of becoming another person.
Product marketing demands the same: step into your ICP’s skin, not just sketch their shoes. Think of it like observability in tech stacks where we treat ICP pains like distributed traces: map root causes across silos for full visibility. You don’t need to be the ICP to know your ICP.
This is about achieving strategic immersion that yields compounding returns. I’ve seen measurable SQL bumps from teams that use these immersive methods at both PLG and sales-led SaaS companies. It changes the way the team approaches the sale, and it fundamentally changes the style of engagement your prospect will have with you.
Here’s how it transforms PMF:
- Uncover Hidden Jobs-to-Be-Done: Parker’s “job” isn’t “buy martech.” It’s “orchestrate launches that stick amid competing priorities.” Shadow sessions reveal they spend 40% of time wrangling product teams for crisp narratives (perfect fuel for your battlecards)
- Reframe Problems as Shared Struggles: Turn stats into hooks that validate and entice them with your understanding of the problem so that they are aching to dive deeper: “You’re not alone in the persona puzzle, here’s the playbook.”
- Craft Human-Centric Messaging: Ditch feature tables and Harvey Balls. Airbnb marketers immersed themselves in hosts’ fears (empty rooms, guest nightmares) and travelers’ dreams (belonging). “Book homes, not hotels” was what emerged from lived stories.
| Before Immersion (Feature-Led) | After Immersion (Human-Led) |
| “AI-powered analytics platform” | “End data silo nightmares in 5 mins—reclaim your week from dashboard hell” |
| “Seamless Kubernetes integrations” | “Debug SLO breaches without alert fatigue across hybrid clouds” |
Real-world proof abounds. HubSpot’s early PMM team interviewed 100+ marketers, discovering “content chaos” as the core pain. Their messaging pivoted to “inbound methodology,” exploding growth. Dropbox? They mapped user drop-off via immersion, turning “file sync” into “work from anywhere without friction.”
For one of our GTM Delta clients, we immersed ourselves in an ICP exploration session to understand what an SRE would care about based on lived practitioner experience and thousands of hours of interactions with real users across multiple verticals. We mapped those experiences to the client’s platform capabilities using customer language, and real anecdotal examples.
Within 90 minutes of this process we led them to a messaging pivot from “observability platform” to “SLO autopilot”. It may sound small but this sparked a renewed approach to their marketing. A small messaging change led to us infusing the site with clear practitioner language, realistic problem stories, and heartfelt scenarios.
Proof of the Know Your ICP exercise was shown by increased time on page, more organic search results, higher CTR, and earlier trust with prospects. The message was aspirational but also made sense, and felt realistic to their prospects now.
Practical Steps: A “Know Your ICP” Immersion Process
If you resonate with the challenges of PMMs like Parker targeting technical buyers (e.g., SRE leads wrestling Kubernetes sprawl, alert fatigue, or trace latency), you are actually feeling what we are describing. You don’t need a 5 day exec retreat with a million-dollar consultant to method-act your way to PMF mastery.
Keep it lean. Prioritize emotional triggers with realistic scenarios (e.g., “help desk is ringing off the hook with calls about the customer reports that your system sent out this morning”). Avoid generic positioning questions that require prospects to search for what they really mean (e.g. “are your systems healthy?”).
For enterprises, grill ex-Fortune buyers on procurement pains like RFI hell. Find forums that tell the tales of brutal onboardings, and POCs that went way over initial timelines. There is a wealth of data and examples to find in the wild.
To wrap up, here are 4 buckets of effort you can dive into which will fundamentally change the result when done well:
- Live the Life: Shadow your ICP. For Parker targeting SREs, sit in sales calls, join Slack channels, mimic workflows, run POCs on their prod stack (e.g., trace latency in Kubernetes). Track friction relentlessly. Think as a procurement proxy for Fortune 500 companies by running mock RFI reviews.
- Synthesize into Messaging Primitives: Boil insights into archetypes using Jobs-to-Be-Done Canvas (Context + Struggle + Desired Outcome). Example: “In crowded SaaS markets [Context], craft positioning that cuts through persona noise [Struggle] to drive adoption [Outcome].”.
- Measure What Matters: Use A/B testing by running multiple landing pages; iterate while seeking 10-15% lift thresholds. Build up your objection list so that you can turn each into a 1-pager of shared pains to align sales/product amid pushback. Go deeper than your competition and be ready before the objections begin.
- Validate and Iterate: Embed quarterly “ICP immersions” with teams. Scale Metrics Dashboard: SQL-to-demo lift (target 25%), win rate +15%, feature adoption, LTV/CAC (aim 1.5x ROI on immersion time), expansion revenue. Monitor your pre/post NPS baselines.
Product marketing is an exercise in living your prospect’s experience through your messaging adoption lifecycle. Don’t wait for a customer to figure out how it “works”. You need to summon your inner method actor by living the experience yourself. If you don’t know your ICP, they will never know you either.
