😱 Do you know where your ICP is right now?

“Part of the challenge of being a consultant is telling the truth,” Marc Sirkin told me when we sat down together at UNBOUND in September. Here’s three hard marketing truths that you might not hear from anybody else. 

Meet the Master

Marc Sirkin

Chief Growth Officer, Walk West 

Fun fact: Marc started his career as a graphic designer … until his boss told him that he wasn’t a top designer, but had a strategic mind. Fortunately for him, “it unlocked my career.”

Lesson 1: Literacy before licenses.

Sirkin doesn’t call it “AI training.” He tries to get his clients to think about AI from both the top down and the bottom up. “The C-suite needs to understand that AI is not magic … and from the bottom up, you cannot take advantage of an AI tool if you’re not literate about how it works.”

“It’s not about leaning on the AI to do my work. It’s about understanding how the tools work and pairing that with your domain expertise to create something wholly new. The teams having success [aren’t] doing top-down only or bottom-up only. They’re pairing the two.”

Sirkin gives me an example of using the default auto setting in Microsoft Copilot. “That’s the worst possible model to use,” he explains. But if you don’t have the literacy to know that it’s defaulting to a lower-level model, you wouldn’t necessarily know why you’re getting bad results. 

I thought I was reasonably AI literate until he gave me a mini checklist of basics: context windows, tokens, harnesses, applications. I can tell you about maybe half of them.

As Sirkin sees it, domain expertise is the real human edge when it comes to AI. “You can get a lot of time back, but you cannot delegate your human intelligence. That’s where I think domain experts have such a distinct advantage.”

Lesson 2: “Show me your ICP.” 

“Not a metric. Just send me the doc.” It’s how Sirkin begins conversations with new clients, and I was surprised when he told me that nine out of 10 prospects don’t have one. 

“It’s easy to overthink it,” he admits. “You think you need to be everywhere. But you don’t, especially as an SMB.” 

A lot of his prospects will hand him a list of competitors or a list of customers. “That’s not an ICP,” he says. And without an ICP, “you’re going to have a hard time.” 

Sirkin uses AI to help build ICPs, but emphasizes that you have to have enough context and knowledge of your ICP for AI to be useful. “Say you’re in the Raleigh area,” he says. “There are answers to the question, ‘Where are my customers hanging out?’ Part of it is going to talk to your customers and your prospects, then ask yourself what will make an impact.” 

AI might help a little bit with those questions, but "it's actually simple,” Sirkin says. “Where do my customers hang out, and how do I reach them most effectively? Again, if you don’t have an ICP, or haven’t written it down, it’s hard to know.”

Lesson 3: Your scaffolding is probably broken.

There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes technical elements to any website. Sirkin calls it scaffolding, and he tells me that “scaffolding is 10 out of 10 misunderstood and incorrectly set up.” 

There’s a brand element to getting it right — “the speed of your website, the schema, the structure, the user and buyer experience, how forms work, the fields, and the size of the box.”

No one wants to talk about things like schema and site speed, so Sirkin likes to use analogies. “It’s a little bit like you want to be driving a Ferrari but, no offense, you’re driving a Corolla. Not only do you have the wrong tires and the wrong chassis, you may in fact have the wrong driver.” 

Ouch. But “this is the reality: You’ve built a website that doesn’t run fast and that confuses your customers, and I know you really like the colors, but that’s not the issue … The website actually has to perform.”