Most outbound teams have some version of an ICP doc. Maybe a Google Sheet with a few columns. Maybe a slide deck from a strategy offsite six months ago. Some even have personas written up somewhere.
But here’s what I see over and over again: that work sits in a folder, disconnected from the emails being sent, the calls being made, and the tools doing the outreach. The ICP doc says one thing. The reps do another. And then leadership wonders why reply rates are low.
The problem isn’t that nobody’s doing the work. It’s that almost nobody finishes it.
I call it The Relevance Matrix. One system, two connected layers, built so your team and your tech stack can actually use it.
Let me walk you through what it looks like, why most teams get it wrong, and how to build one that works.
What most teams get wrong
I want to be clear here. This isn’t about shaming anyone. Some teams are doing parts of this really well. But almost every team I work with has the same gaps, and it’s worth naming them.
Stopping at firmographics. Teams define an ICP by revenue, headcount, industry, and location, then call it done. That’s a targeting filter. It tells you who to add to a list. It doesn’t tell you anything about what to say to them or why they should care.
Building personas without enough depth. I see this a lot. Generic job titles with assumed pains. “Head of Marketing cares about lead generation.” That’s not a persona. That’s a job description. There’s no depth there. No understanding of what their day actually looks like, what keeps them up at night, or where they go to find answers.
Treating all personas the same across ICP segments. This is a big one that gets missed. A Head of Marketing at a 50-person Series A startup is living a completely different reality to a Head of Marketing at a 3,000-person enterprise. At the startup, they’re probably doing everything themselves. Paid ads, content, events, maybe even some outbound. They don’t have a team. They don’t have a budget for an agency. Their challenge is bandwidth and proving that marketing contributes to pipeline.
At the enterprise, they’ve got a team of 15, agency relationships, a marketing ops function, and their challenge is attribution, alignment with sales, and justifying headcount. Same job title. Completely different world.
But most teams build one set of personas and apply them across every ICP segment. That’s a relevance problem from the start.
Building ICP/persona work and pain point messaging as two separate exercises. This is the most common gap. The persona doc lives in one place. The objection handling or messaging framework lives in another. The email templates live in a third. Nobody connects them. There’s no thread that runs from “who this person is” through to “what we should say to them and why.”
The result? Reps are left to figure out relevance on their own, every single time they write an email or pick up the phone. Some get it right through instinct and experience. Most don’t. And then we blame the rep for low reply rates when the real problem is that nobody gave them the system to work from.
Layer 1: The ICP and Persona Map
The first layer of The Relevance Matrix is the ICP and persona map. This is the foundation, and it’s the right thing to build. The problem isn’t this layer. The problem is that most teams stop here.
It starts with ICP segmentation. Not just firmographics, but the full picture. Industry, revenue range, employee count, growth trends, fundraising stage, SIC codes, language, and technographic fit. That last one matters more than people think. You want to know the essential technologies they’re already using, the competitive tools they might be evaluating, and the complementary tech that signals they’re the right fit.
Each ICP segment is distinct because the buying behaviour is different. The way a 50-person startup evaluates and buys is fundamentally different to how a 3,000-person enterprise does it. Different budgets, different decision-making structures, different timelines, different priorities. That’s why they need to be treated separately.
Then you build personas per ICP segment. Not one generic set of personas across your whole market. Each ICP gets its own.
For every persona, you map out:
- Background — who they are, how they got to this role, what their career path looks like
- Activities — what they actually do day to day, not what their job description says
- Challenges — the specific problems they’re facing right now, not generic industry pain points
- Concerns — what worries them, what’s keeping them cautious
- Needs — what they need to succeed in their role
- Goals — what they’re measured on, what good looks like for them
- Where to find them — the communities they’re in, podcasts they listen to, influencers they follow, LinkedIn profiles of five real people who match this persona
That last point is important. Finding real LinkedIn profiles of people who match each persona forces you to ground it in reality. You can’t stay abstract when you’re looking at actual humans.
The challenges and pain points you identify here are specific. Not “wants to improve efficiency.” More like “struggling to prove ROI on content marketing because the attribution model doesn’t connect blog traffic to closed deals, and the CFO is starting to question the headcount.”
This layer is solid. It’s foundational. But on its own, it’s incomplete.
Layer 2: The Pain and Solutions Map
This is where most teams stop. They’ve done the ICP work, maybe even built decent personas, and they think the job is done. But the pains identified in Layer 1 are just the starting point. In Layer 2, each one gets expanded into something your team can actually use.
Here’s the key: the pains from Layer 1 feed directly into Layer 2. They’re not reinvented. They’re not a separate exercise. They’re the same pains, but now they’re broken open.
Every pain is mapped to its specific ICP and persona. This isn’t a generic list of pains floating in space. It’s structured. ICP 2, Persona 3, Pain 4. You know exactly who this pain belongs to, at what type of company, in what role, and in what context.
For every pain, you map:
- Cause — why does this pain exist? What’s the root of it?
- Impact — what happens if they don’t solve it? What’s at risk?
- Advice — your genuine perspective on how to approach it. Not a sales pitch. Real advice you’d give someone in a pub.
- Anecdote or proof — a client story, a data point, an example that shows you’ve seen this before and helped solve it
- Owned content — do you have a blog post, video, case study, or framework that addresses this pain?
- Likely objections — what will they push back with? “We’ve tried that.” “We don’t have the budget.” “That’s not a priority right now.”
- Next steps — what’s the logical next action for someone experiencing this pain?
Let me give you an example to make this concrete.
Say you’re selling a marketing analytics platform. Under ICP 1 (mid-market SaaS, 100-500 employees), you’ve got a persona for Head of Demand Gen. One of their challenges from Layer 1 is “can’t attribute pipeline to specific marketing channels.”
In Layer 2, that pain gets expanded:
- Cause: The CRM and marketing automation platform aren’t properly integrated. UTM tracking is inconsistent. The team is reporting on MQLs rather than pipeline contribution because that’s all the data they have.
- Impact: The CFO sees marketing as a cost centre, not a revenue driver. Budget conversations become defensive. The demand gen leader spends more time building reports to justify their existence than actually running campaigns.
- Advice: Start by fixing the data layer before buying another tool. Map every touchpoint from first touch to closed deal for your last 20 wins. You’ll start to see patterns that tell you where to double down.
- Proof: “We worked with a Series B healthtech company in a similar position. Within 6 weeks of fixing their attribution model, they identified that 40% of their pipeline was coming from a channel they were about to cut.”
- Objection: “We already have reporting dashboards.” (Yes, but are they showing you MQLs or actual pipeline? There’s a difference.)
- Next step: A 30-minute audit of your current attribution setup to identify the gaps.
Now your rep doesn’t need to guess. They don’t need to spend 20 minutes researching before every email. The thinking has been done. The relevance is built into the system.
Scale that across four ICP segments, four personas per segment, five pains per persona. That’s 80 pain-to-solution pathways your team can draw from. Not 80 templates. 80 pathways, each grounded in a real understanding of who this person is, what they’re dealing with, and why they should care about what you do.
Why this is built for AI and automation
Here’s where it gets interesting. The Relevance Matrix isn’t just a document for your reps to reference. It’s structured data that your entire tech stack can consume.
When you give this matrix to your AI SDR tools, your email personalisation platforms, your sequencing tools, they go from generic “Hi {first_name}, I noticed your company is growing” to messages that speak to the actual pain that persona is likely facing, with the proof and positioning already mapped.
I said this on a recent webinar and it’s worth repeating here: it doesn’t matter that the matrix is ugly. It doesn’t matter that it looks overwhelming when you first open the spreadsheet. You’re not the one reading it. It’s for the platform, for the AI agents, for the automation.
The companies getting the best results from AI-powered outbound right now aren’t the ones with the fanciest tools. They’re the ones who did this foundational work first and gave the machines something meaningful to work with.
Without the matrix, you’re automating irrelevance at scale. More emails, faster, saying nothing useful. With it, you’re scaling relevance. Every message is grounded in a real understanding of who this person is and why they should care.
That’s the difference between AI that helps and AI that just creates noise.
Where do you start?
If you’re reading this thinking “we don’t have any of this,” don’t try to build the whole thing in a week. Start small.
Pick your highest-priority ICP segment. The one that represents your best customers today. Build three or four personas for it. Identify five pains per persona. Then expand each pain into the full map.
One ICP segment, fully mapped, is more valuable than four half-done ones. You can always expand later. But getting one right gives your team something to work from immediately and gives you a model to follow for the rest.
If you want help building yours, that’s exactly what I do. Drop me a message or book a call through the link below.
How much of this do you actually have documented right now?