Broken sales process? Start with your customer.
It’s a sales tale as old as time: the product works, “leads” are being generated. But the sales team is in an endless cycle of low-quality meetings, missed forecasts, and unexpected losses. What gives?
Maybe your sales leader isn’t the right fit. Maybe the team lacks discipline across discovery, pricing or procurement processes. You could fire the sales leader. You could bring in an external consultant to train the team on any number of qualification frameworks. You could introduce AI-powered tools to streamline or improve the quality of discovery and seller messaging.
You could consider each of these choices, one by one, and apply a ‘best practice’ solution. Don’t make that mistake.
Identifying the Real Problem
Before you attempt to fix a broken sales process, ask yourself: is my leadership team aligned on (a) who our ideal customer is and (b) how that ideal customer thinks about the outcome our product facilitates? No new tool, person or process can fix a fundamental misunderstanding about your buyer’s priorities.
Let’s back up a minute. Your company’s success hinges—above all else—on your ability to acquire new customers and retain existing ones. Top-of-funnel tactics, pricing strategy, sales quotas, messaging, acquisition channels—all of these decisions should serve your company’s primary mission: to gain and retain customers.
Start there. The customers you need to gain and retain: what do they want, from you?
To do this well, you’ll need an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Your ICP lays out the core characteristics of a high-value potential customer. This is not your total addressable market, it is the subset you will prioritize acquiring. These are the customers you want to focus your sales strategy on because they are the ones you are best positioned to acquire, retain, and earn a high lifetime value from. If the idea of an ICP is new to you, here’s a starting point. Remember: serving everyone is a great way to end up serving no one.
Your ICP is the starting point, but it won’t solve your sales woes on its own. To do that, you’re going to need to set aside your assumptions and consider how your ICP thinks about the outcome you’re going to help them achieve. Doing this well will save you a ton of time on ‘unlikely-to-ever-close’ deals and help you avoid those ‘we-should-have-never-sold-this’ customers. It will inform sales messaging, qualification and value realization decisions.
Unpacking Customer Thinking: The Criticality - Complexity Matrix
There are many ways to unpack ICP thinking. The Criticality-Complexity Matrix does that by mapping how your ICP perceives the problem you solve along two axes: Criticality (how important is the problem/outcome to the organization’s top-line goals) and Complexity (how difficult is to to achieve).
To do this, imagine you’re in a room with the executive responsible for the problem your product addresses. That executive is having a private conversation with their trusted number two, who has been tasked with evaluating options to deal with the problem. The way the executive frames their guidance is influenced by two factors: how critical and how complex they perceive solving the problem to be. What’s the last piece of guidance the executive gives to number two before ending the conversation? Let’s walk through how different conversations might play out using the matrix to clarify customer thinking and priorities:
Low Criticality, Low Complexity: “I’m tired of spending time/energy/money on this issue. I want to see that go down.”
High Criticality, Low Complexity: “This has a ton of eyes on it. I don’t care how it gets done, it needs to happen fast.”
High Criticality, High Complexity: “This cannot fail. I need a status update every week until we find a solution. Don’t lose track of the details.”
Low Criticality, High Complexity: “There’s got to be a way to solve this problem that doesn't lock up so many of our team’s resources.”
Avoiding Common Pitfalls
Maybe you agree with examples I’ve sketched out. If you don't, that's okay – discussion is good! A couple of ground rules, though. Don’t assume that only products facilitating outcomes in the “high criticality” half of the matrix are worth selling. If you do, you’ll end up trying to justify why your product belongs there. Customers don’t care how you think they should prioritize outcomes. It’s your job to understand their reality so that you can meet them where they are — or qualify them out. Every organization has problems, projects, and outcomes that fall into each quadrant.
You also want to avoid assuming that a technically simple outcome must also be low-complexity. Be sure to account for the people, processes, and operational changes needed not just to buy your solution, but for the customer to achieve the outcome they care about.
Keep in mind that not every company you could sell to will fall into the same quadrant. Some may have less technical debt or more efficient processes that reduce complexity, while others face external pressure or internal dynamics that raise the stakes for a particular outcome. Where does your ideal customer—the one who will partner with you to maximize value and become a referral champion—fit?
Sales Strategy Implications
This matrix helps clarify lots of decisions. But since we’re talking about why your sales aren’t where you want them to be, let’s consider how this framework can help you improve your sales strategy.
To do that, let’s extend our exercise to include not only how the executive and their number two perceive the outcome, but also what they need to feel or believe about the vendor they select. Here’s an example:
Low Criticality, Low Complexity: “I’m tired of spending time/energy/money on this issue. I want to see that go down.”
= I need to believe you can lower my total cost of ownership (TCO).
High Criticality, Low Complexity: “This has a ton of eyes on it. I don’t care how it gets done, but it needs to happen fast.”
= I need to feel confident you’ll handle this quickly.
High Criticality, High Complexity: “This cannot fail. I need a status update on this every week until we figure out the solution. Don’t lose track of the details.”
= I need to believe in your technical expertise and that you understand the nuances that matter to me.
Low Criticality, High Complexity: “There’s got to be a way to deal with this problem that doesn't lock up so many of our team’s resources.”
=I need to see how you can streamline this for me so it’s less of a resource drain.
What does this mean for your sales strategy? Let’s break this down by quadrant, starting with the lower left corner.
Things that customers perceive as low complexity and low criticality are things they want to spend less resources on. Can your sales motion show them how you’ll effectively reduce time or money they spend on a problem?
If complexity is still low but criticality is high, your customer likely wants something done quickly. They have a high-visibility issue that they perceive as relatively simple to handle: can you shorten their time to value?
High complexity, low criticality situations are a pain in your customer’s neck. They are spending more energy on this problem than they want to. Maybe they feel stuck. Your sales motion should center around efficiency. How can you reduce administrative burdens, free up time, or automate tasks?
When an outcome is both highly critical and complex, decision-makers are often under immense pressure. The stakes are high; these projects can make or break a career. The depth of your expertise and your reliability as a vendor become non-negotiable.
How does your ICP perceive the outcome your product facilitates? As you work through the exercise, don’t create false tradeoffs that don’t need to exist. The matrix is about setting priorities, not ignoring secondary or tertiary messages. Consider the weight each axis holds. Is one a stronger indicator of a likely adopter than the other? Does one have more implications for how you reach, qualify, sell to and onboard prospective customers?
Putting the matrix to work for your organization
While understanding your ICP's priorities won’t solve all your sales challenges overnight, it will provide you the right foundation to build on. People, processes and tooling decisions are important. But, aligning those choices with what your ideal customers need from you is what ensures these decisions facilitate predictable, sustainable revenue growth.
The Criticality-Complexity Matrix is one way to do the work of unpacking customer thinking. There are other methods you could try. If you use this one, remember that the goal is not to simplify complex buyer dynamics but to sharpen your focus on what matters most to your customers. This clarity will make your sales messaging better, streamline opportunity qualification, and drive alignment between your pre- and post-sales processes so that you can improve customer acquisition and retention outcomes. Whatever approach you take, make sure it’s one that starts with your customer.
Next Steps:
Gut Check: have you defined an ICP?
Apply the Matrix: Get your leadership team in a room. Make sure you have voices from different organizational functions so that you’re not in an echo chamber — bonus points if you have somebody representing the voice of the customer. How does each stakeholder plot the ICP? What can you learn from the differences?
Align Your Team: Use the exercise to identify where your team lacks alignment on the basics of your ICP and how that ICP thinks about the problem you solve. Unpack disagreements. Build consensus.
Refine Your Tools and Processes: With a better understanding of customer priorities, revisit your tools and processes to ensure they support the right outcomes. What are the implications of this improved ICP understanding for your sales strategy?
Revenue success is more than closing deals—it's about closing the right deals in the right way. You can’t solve win rate, forecast reliability or churn rate issues if you and your team are unclear on who your optimal customer is and what they care about. Remember: their success is your success.
Happy selling!