How to Choose Where to Play in B2B SaaS

Do you think of your ICP as a persona? You shouldn’t. A better way to think of the meaning of ICP is as a buying situation.

If your GTM feels scattered, it usually traces back to one root cause: your “where to play” is vague. When the field of play isn’t clear, everything downstream gets muddy. Your positioning, channel selection, lead quality, pricing, and roadmap will start to conflict with each other.

In Playing to Win, A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin make a simple point that a lot of SaaS teams skip: strategy is a sequence of choices. “Where to play” comes early because everything else depends on it. If you don’t make that choice, you don’t have a strategy.

This post shows you how to define “where to play” for SaaS in a way that makes the rest of GTM easier: a crisp, testable ICP defined by the buying context that creates urgency.

There’s also an ICP template tool you can fill out here (or just copy and paste it into a Google Doc).

ICP Meaning

ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile, but most SaaS teams treat it like a fancy way to say “target market.” That’s why it fails.

In B2B SaaS, an ICP is the situation where your product becomes the obvious next step. It’s the trigger that forces action and the buyer’s constraints line up with how you win.

A useful ICP does three jobs at once:

1. Focuses your strategy. This is the “where to play” choice from Playing to Win. An ICP is how you draw the boundary around the field you’re choosing to compete in so you can stop pretending you’re for everyone.
2. Explains why they buy now. A real ICP includes the reason budget appears: audit pressure, tool consolidation, a new security requirement, a workflow breaking at scale, a leadership change, a cost-cutting mandate. If there’s no trigger, you’re doing generic pain-point marketing and hoping urgency magically shows up.
3. Defines the rules of the deal. Constraints determine whether you’re even eligible: integrations, procurement, security review, compliance, implementation expectations, data requirements. This is the “relevance is operational” point you see in enterprise GTM thinking (like Lilia Shirman’s 42 Rules for Growing Enterprise Revenue): you don’t win enterprise deals with messaging. You win by fitting the buying reality.

1) The mistake: treating ICP like demographics

Most ICP definitions are some variation of:

• industry
• company size
• job title
• tech stack

That’s not an ICP. It’s a mailing list filter.

A real SaaS ICP is built around a buying situation. You need to identify the moment a company is forced to change, plus the constraints and stakeholders that shape how they evaluate, buy, and adopt.

Michael Porter’s work is useful here. Strategy is partly about choosing what you will not do and getting clear about the competitive boundaries you’re stepping into. “Where to play” is the boundary line.

2) How to define your ICP

If you can’t name these, you don’t really know your ICP yet:

• Trigger: what changed that makes this urgent now
• Job with a finish line: what “done” looks like
• Constraints: what must be true for adoption to happen
• Buyer coalition: who’s involved and who can veto
• Alternatives: what you’re replacing (including “do nothing”)
• Economic logic: how the buyer justifies spend
• Success definition: what must be true in 30/60/90 days

This is also why Shirman’s point lands so hard in enterprise: “relevance” isn’t a copywriting problem. It shows up in how you sell, how you implement, how you package, and how you support real-world constraints.

3) “Where to play” in SaaS is a bundle of choices

Think of “where to play” as a set of decisions that have to fit together:

• Segment (SMB, mid-market, enterprise)
• Use case (the job you’re hired to do)
• Buying trigger (why this becomes urgent)
• Environment constraints (security, compliance, integrations, procurement)
• Motion (self-serve, sales-led, partner-led)

In Go-To-Market Strategy, Lawrence Friedman emphasizes the need to answer the alignment question: do your target customers, channels, selling approach, and value proposition actually fit together in the way buying happens?

If they aren’t aligned, you’ll pay for it in CAC, cycle length, discounting, and churn.

4) The ICP rewrite: from “who they are” to “what’s happening to them”

Use this structure:

Our best-fit customers are [segment] who are [in a specific situation] because [trigger] and must [accomplish outcome] despite [constraints].

They will choose us when [decision criteria] and we can prove [proof].

We are not for [not-now list].

Here are some generic examples just for illustrative purposes:

• Mid-market finance teams moving from spreadsheets to a controlled system of record because audit pressure or reporting complexity crossed a threshold, and they need time-to-control fast with minimal IT lift.
• Security-conscious SaaS companies upgrading access management because enterprise customers now require SOC 2-aligned controls and centralized permissions, and security review is now a gating step.

Notice that the trigger and constraints are doing the work, not the job title.

5) The “where to play” checklist for SaaS

5.1) Segment by business model

SMB vs enterprise isn’t “bigger deal sizes.” It changes:

• stakeholders and veto power
• procurement and security review
• implementation expectations
• proof required to win
• channel economics
• what retention and expansion look like

If you’re trying to be self-serve and enterprise with the same product story and packaging, your ICP is lying to you.

5.2) Define the primary use case as a job with a finish line

A use case is not “project management” or “analytics.” It’s:

• the job someone is accountable for
• the “done” state they want to reach
• what failure looks like (risk, time, money, reputation)

A tight use case calms the roadmap because it tells you what not to build.

5.3) Identify the trigger that creates budget and urgency

Most SaaS purchases happen when something changes:

• compliance or security requirement
• leadership change
• growth complexity
• cost pressure
• tool consolidation mandate
• a workflow breaking at scale

If you can’t name the trigger, you’ll default to generic pain marketing and wonder why pipeline is soft and sales cycles are long.

5.4) Write the constraint list that shapes the buying process

Constraints determine whether you’re even eligible.

Examples:

• must integrate with Salesforce and Okta
• must support approvals and audit trails
• must pass security review
• must work with procurement/legal
• must be deployable without IT for first value

This is where Shirman’s enterprise lens pays off: if your packaging, implementation, or selling motion violates the customer’s constraints, no amount of clever messaging fixes it.

5.5) Choose the motion that matches buying reality

Self-serve tends to work when:

• time-to-value is fast
• evaluation doesn’t require committees
• activation is measurable and repeatable

Sales-led tends to work when:

• stakes are higher
• stakeholders multiply
• ROI and risk mitigation matter
• procurement and security are involved

Partner-led tends to work when:

• distribution is the bottleneck
• partners already own the relationship
• your product fits inside a broader solution

If your motion doesn’t match the buying situation, you’ll feel it everywhere: CAC, sales cycle, discounting, churn, and team conflict.

6) Validate “where to play” fast (without months of research)

You don’t need a perfect ICP. You need a testable one.

6.1) Interview for triggers and constraints, not opinions

Ask recent buyers:

• What changed that made this urgent?
• What alternatives did you seriously consider, and why?
• What would have killed the deal?
• Who had veto power?
• What did success need to look like in 90 days?

If you want a research mindset without turning this into a thesis, books like The Practice of Market Research (McGivern) and Marketing Research: Tools and Techniques (Bradley) are good reminders that the goal is decision-quality insight, not “more data.”

6.2) Tag pipeline by buying situation

Add simple fields in your CRM:

• buying trigger
• primary use case
• constraint tier (low / medium / high scrutiny)
• primary alternative (spreadsheets, legacy suite, internal tool, do nothing)

Then check:

• win rate by trigger
• sales cycle by trigger
• discounting by trigger
• churn/expansion by trigger

Your real ICP will show up in the data faster than it will show up in a workshop.

6.3) Write a “not now” list and enforce it

A “not now” list is what protects your strategy:

• segments you won’t pursue
• use cases you won’t support
• channels you won’t invest in
• deal types you won’t customize for

Porter would say this is the discipline that keeps “strategy” from collapsing into operational effectiveness and doing everything for everyone.

7) Don’t do this (and what to do instead)

• “We’re horizontal.” This usually means “we haven’t chosen a buying context.” Pick one use case and one trigger where you can become the obvious choice, then expand deliberately.
• “Our ICP is anyone with this job title.” Job titles don’t buy. Situations buy. Rewrite around triggers and constraints.
• “We can do self-serve and enterprise.” You can, but only if you build separate systems (packaging, onboarding, enablement, success, measurement). If you don’t, you’ll be mediocre at both.
• “Marketing will figure it out.” Marketing can’t compensate for a mismatched field of play. GTM is a cross-functional system, especially once constraints get real.

8) A practical template you can fill out here or paste into a doc

Winning aspiration (12–24 months):

Where we play:

• Primary segment:
• Primary use case (finish line):
• Buying trigger:
• Primary alternative (what we replace most often):
• Top constraints (security, procurement, integrations, compliance):
• Buyer coalition (economic buyer, champion, veto roles):
• Primary motion and channels:
• Not now list:

How we will win (preview, because it follows “where to play”):

• Value proposition mechanism:
• Proof:
• Retention logic:

If you’ve read Playing to Win, this should feel familiar: strategy becomes a set of choices you can operationalize, not a pile of initiatives.

If you want an execution plan that adds up, narrow the field of play first. Define your ICP as a buying situation with a trigger and constraints. Align motion and channels to that reality. Then build the rest of GTM on top of it.

About Roy Harmon

Roy Harmon is a fractional CMO and marketing strategy consultant who helps SaaS businesses grow. He has worked with multiple startups to drive revenue to seven figures, secure eight-figure funding rounds, and position them for acquisition.