Persona-by-job-title doesn't survive contact with 13-person buying groups and an 80% self-directed journey.
Your ICP is probably a job title and a firmographic filter. Modern B2B buying isn't. It's a 13-person committee, 80% self-directed before you ever see them, and the people who actually shape the deal rarely fill in forms. We rebuild ICP around the buying group, not the buyer.
Sales says leads are bad; marketing says quota is too high
High MQL volume, low SQL conversion, no obvious pattern
Deals appear late-stage from accounts you never marketed to
Personas haven't been revisited since the last rebrand
Average stakeholders in a B2B buying group (Gartner)
Of the buying journey is now self-directed (Forrester)
Of buying time spent talking to any vendor
Replace single-persona ICP with a 5–9 role buying group map per segment.
Interview lost-deal committees, not just champions, to surface the people who actually killed it.
Score accounts on group completeness, not lead count.
Targeting that reflects who actually decides — and a sales motion that stops chasing the wrong human in the right account.
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