Stop chasing attention. Start collecting evidence of intent.
By Prof. MarkAnthony Nze
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) & List: 200 Right Targets With “Why-Now” Signals
Most founders don’t lose because they lack skill. They lose because they aim at fog.
They build a product, write a pitch, post a few clips, send a few DMs, and then wait—hoping the market notices. When it doesn’t, they conclude the world is unfair, the algorithm is broken, or success is reserved for people with pedigree. In reality, the failure is simpler and more fixable: they tried to sell to “everyone,” which is another way of saying they sold to no one in particular, at no particular moment, for no particular reason.
In investigative reporting, you don’t solve a case by interviewing an entire city. You solve it by narrowing to a list of people with motive, access, and timing—and then you validate what you think you know with evidence that holds up under hostile questioning. Revenue works the same way. Your best prospects are not “people who could benefit.” They’re the small set of organizations already under pressure, already moving money, already facing a deadline, already trying to fix something that is leaking.
That’s why a list beats an audience—if the list is built like an investigation. That same “evidence-first” framing shows up in Zero to Revenue: Build a Business in 90 Days—Intro:
https://africatodaynewsnewyork.com/2026/01/29/zero-to-revenue-build-a-business-in-90-days-intro/
And the evidence supports this shift. B2B buying has become a digitally mediated journey, involving multiple stakeholders and long stretches of self-education before a buyer ever agrees to talk. When buyers can do their research quietly, sellers win by being precisely relevant at the right moment—not by shouting louder. This is reflected in research that maps how B2B buying has evolved from transactional models into multi-touch journeys, shaped by information seeking and internal consensus-building (Steward et al., 2019; Purmonen et al., 2023; Lundin & Kindström, 2023). It is also echoed in industry findings that digital channels increasingly dominate sales interactions and that omnichannel engagement is now baseline, not a luxury (Gartner, 2020; McKinsey & Company, 2021).
So the work here is not to become louder. It’s to become better aimed.
The filter that changes everything: who, when, and why
A broke founder markets to a crowd. A paid founder markets to a calendar.
The simplest way to build a list that converts is to apply three questions with discipline: Who is the buyer? When do they buy? Why is the pain funded? If you can’t answer all three, you’re not targeting—you’re hoping.
Who means you can describe your ideal customer so tightly that the wrong buyers automatically fall away. In practice, it’s not “small businesses” or “tech companies.” It’s a specific intersection of industry, size, role, tool stack, and constraint. This matters because segmentation isn’t a branding exercise; it’s a performance lever. B2B segmentation scholarship repeatedly shows that effective segmentation clarifies value propositions, improves fit, and reduces waste by aligning offerings to the customers most likely to buy (Cortez et al., 2021).
Industry gives you predictable economics. Size tells you whether a buyer has a budget and urgency. Role tells you who can sign—and who can kill the deal quietly. Tool stack tells you what you can integrate with, replace, or improve. Constraint tells you what is actually blocking progress (time, headcount, compliance, pipeline quality, retention, conversion, onboarding).
An ICP that works reads like a dispatch, not a slogan. It’s unromantic. It excludes on purpose.
When means you don’t just pick companies—you pick companies in a buying moment. Buying moments are measurable events: new funding, new hire, churn spike, growth target, compliance deadline, expansion, a broken funnel, a major product change, a pricing shift. These are not “good signs.” They are why-now signals—evidence that a budget conversation is already happening inside the organization.
Research on buying journeys supports this logic: buyer behavior moves through stages, and sellers gain leverage when they align to those stages instead of forcing a pitch when the buyer is not ready to decide (Marvasti et al., 2021). This “signal before selling” discipline is also the backbone of Zero to Revenue—Part 1:
https://africatodaynewsnewyork.com/2026/01/30/zero-to-revenue-build-a-business-in-90-days-part-1/
Why means the pain is budgeted. This is where founders usually fail, because they describe problems emotionally (“we want to grow”) instead of financially (“CAC is rising,” “onboarding is slow,” “churn is spiking,” “pipeline quality is degrading,” “risk exposure is increasing,” “delays are costing revenue”).
The market doesn’t reward need. It rewards funded urgency.
And because funded urgency often shows up in data signals—usage patterns, retention risk, behavior anomalies—there’s a whole stream of B2B research demonstrating how analytics and modeling improve the ability to identify which customers are likely to churn or require retention intervention. In plain language: signals beat guesses. That insight transfers neatly into prospecting: if you can detect pressure signals, you can target better (De Caigny et al., 2021; Gattermann-Itschert & Thonemann, 2022; Sanchez Ramirez et al., 2024).
There’s also a practical consequence most founders miss: when you can prove “why now,” you can package and price around outcomes instead of hours—because you’re no longer selling effort, you’re selling relief. That logic is developed directly in Zero to Revenue: Build a Business in 90 Days—Part 2:
https://africatodaynewsnewyork.com/2026/01/31/zero-to-revenue-build-a-business-in-90-days-part-2/
Read also: Why Ending Nigeria’s Visa Ban Serves U.S. Interests—Part 1
Why 200 is the number
Two hundred is small enough to be real and large enough to build momentum.
A list of 2,000 encourages laziness. A list of 200 forces research, precision, and discipline. It demands you know what you’re doing when you reach out.
Your 200 accounts should not be names on a sheet. Each one should be a mini-case file with four essentials:
● the decision-maker (the signer)
● two influencers (the people who shape the signer’s view)
● a trigger with evidence (funding announcement, hiring post, product change, public target, compliance update)
● one piece of micro-proof you can reference (a funnel issue, site friction, onboarding gap, messaging mismatch, process bottleneck)
This is not a new idea with a trendy label. It’s the practical core of account-based thinking: prioritize a defined set of accounts and tailor engagement to their context. ABM frameworks have emphasized the need for account selection, orchestration, and personalization for years (Interactive Advertising Bureau, 2019). And leading strategy work argues that ABM is evolving further into account-based engagement—less about “campaigns” and more about coordinated, evidence-based relevance across the buyer journey (Boston Consulting Group, 2020).
Micro-proof: the currency of modern outreach
Most cold outreach fails because it asks for trust before earning it.
“Can I get 15 minutes?” is not a strategy. It’s a request. And in an era where buyers self-educate, filter aggressively, and encounter endless noise, requests without relevance land like spam.
Micro-proof is how you earn attention without begging for it.
Micro-proof is not a full audit. It’s not a long essay. It’s one sharp, defensible observation that shows you looked, you understood, and you can help. It creates a moment where the buyer thinks: “They’re not guessing.”
Examples:
● “Your pricing page loads slowly on mobile; it’s likely leaking trial conversions.”
● “Your onboarding flow asks for nine fields before showing value.”
● “Your job post says ‘improve retention,’ but your onboarding emails don’t appear to address activation.”
● “Your landing page has no social proof above the fold; you may be paying to send traffic into uncertainty.”
Research on content match-making and relevance in B2B aligns with this: buyers respond to information that matches their current needs and context, not generic messaging (Upreti et al., 2021).
Micro-proof is also what converts “no-degree positioning” into credibility. Degrees can open doors, but in commercial life, sustained trust often comes from diagnosis, clarity, and measurable improvements. Thought leadership research suggests decision-makers are influenced by work that reduces uncertainty and improves decision quality—especially when it is practical and evidence-based (Edelman & LinkedIn, 2021). That same proof-over-posture theme is reinforced in Revealed: Ordinary Skills Making Extraordinary Cash:
https://africatodaynewsnewyork.com/2025/10/06/revealed-ordinary-skills-making-extraordinary-cash/
Read also: Why Ending Nigeria’s Visa Ban Serves U.S. Interests—Part 2
The no-degree advantage, stated plainly
Credentials are a signal. Process is a guarantee.
If you didn’t come through conventional gates, you don’t compensate with insecurity. You compensate with an operator’s posture: you show the work, you show the logic, and you show the next step.
In complex B2B environments, the buyer is rarely one person. It’s a coalition—sales, marketing, finance, ops, leadership. Research on sales enablement in complex organizations highlights cross-functional coordination, clarity, and consistent execution as the real drivers of effectiveness (Lauzi et al., 2023).
So your credibility isn’t a certificate. It’s your ability to do four things reliably:
● spot the leak
● explain it plainly
● fix it fast
● verify lift
That is what buyers pay for.
What you actually produce this week
At the end of this work, you should have three concrete assets—tools you can use immediately.
A single-sentence ICP
Tight enough to exclude the wrong buyer. Clear enough that anyone can repeat it without changing its meaning. If it still includes “anyone,” it’s not done.
A 200-account tracker with why-now notes
Not just company names: decision-makers, influencers, triggers, micro-proof, and next action. This becomes your operating system.
An objection library
The top ten ways buyers resist—mapped to evidence-based responses. Not persuasion scripts, but logic. This is how you remove friction.
The larger context is that B2B journeys are increasingly digital, data-driven, and AI-influenced—shaping how buyers research, evaluate, and engage. Research has explored AI-enabled marketing capabilities and analytics-driven decision-making as key enablers of performance in B2B environments (Mikalef et al., 2021; Saura et al., 2021; Hallikainen et al., 2020). The implication is straightforward: the sellers who win are the ones who operate with evidence, not vibes.
The week’s test: can you prove urgency?
By the end of the week, you should be able to point to:
● 200 targets built
● 20 “hot” targets with strong triggers and budgeted pain
● 10 targets ready for micro-value outreach (you already have a teardown/checklist for them)
But there’s a better test—one that cuts through self-deception.
Pick a random account from your list. Can you explain, in 20 seconds:
● why you chose them
● what changed recently that makes this urgent
● where the evidence is
● what the first small win would be
If you can’t, your list is not a targeting system. It’s a directory.
Closing: build your list like a case file
A founder without a list is a founder without leverage.
When you build a list of 200 right targets with evidence-backed why-now signals, you stop needing luck. You stop begging for attention. You stop pitching into cold air. You become relevant inside the buyer’s calendar—where decisions already happen.
This is the shift: from audience-building as hope, to target selection as strategy. From “anyone who might like this,” to “the exact organizations already paying for this pain.”
And if you need a reminder that “attention” and “intent” are not the same currency, read Khaby Lame’s Rise Proves Social Media Is Real Work Now—a case study in how systems compound when you treat distribution like work, not magic:
https://africatodaynewsnewyork.com/2026/01/30/khaby-lames-rise-proves-social-media-is-real-work-now/
Not louder.
Sharper.
Professor MarkAnthony Ujunwa Nze is an internationally acclaimed investigative journalist, public intellectual, and global governance analyst whose work shapes contemporary thinking at the intersection of health and social care management, media, law, and policy. Renowned for his incisive commentary and structural insight, he brings rigorous scholarship to questions of justice, power, and institutional integrity.
Based in New York, he serves as a full tenured professor and Academic Director at the New York Center for Advanced Research (NYCAR), where he leads high-impact research in governance innovation, strategic leadership, and geopolitical risk. He also oversees NYCAR’s free Health & Social Care professional certification programs, accessible worldwide at:
https://www.newyorkresearch.org/professional-certification/
Professor Nze remains a defining voice in advancing ethical leadership and democratic accountability across global systems.
Selected Sources (APA 7th Edition)
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