Marketing & Branding with Stefan Maritz 🎯

Stop calling it "best-fit customer" when you really mean "whoever will pay us."

Real best-fit isn't your ICP. It's narrower. It's the answer to this question: if you could pick the next 10 customers who walk through your door, what would they look like?

Most companies define their ICP as "anyone who might buy from us." Best-fit is "the customers who make us the most money and are happiest with our product." There's a massive difference.

Look at your top 20% of customers by product utilization, NPS scores, and profitability. Those are your best-fit customers. Everyone else is just revenue.

When you get this right, everything changes. Your marketing becomes surgical instead of spray-and-pray.

Everything becomes easier…

Your sales team stops chasing tire-kickers. Your customer success team works with accounts that actually want to succeed. Your marketing starts getting super tailored.

But this also means you have to act up and walk the talk: you have to say no to revenue that doesn't fit. That means turning down deals that would hit your quarterly numbers but create long-term problems.

The ripple effects go deeper than most realize.

Your product roadmap becomes clearer because you're building for customers who actually use what you ship. Your support tickets drop because best-fit customers understand your product's intended use case. Your team morale improves because they're solving real problems for people who appreciate the solution.

Most companies get seduced by vanity metrics. They celebrate landing a "big name" customer who barely uses the product and complains constantly. Meanwhile, the mid-market customer who's driving 10x ROI and referring new business gets ignored because their logo isn't impressive enough for the home page or sales deck.

Your best-fit customers become your competitive moat. 

They don't just buy from you - they become advocates who make switching costs irrelevant. When a competitor tries to poach them, they laugh it off because you've become integral to how they operate.

The math is easy.

A best-fit customer might pay you $50k annually but cost $5k to serve. A poor-fit customer pays $100k but costs $40k in support, custom development, and opportunity cost from distracting your team. Which one actually drives your business forward?

Here's what separating best-fit from everyone else looks like in practice:

Your marketing budget gets concentrated on channels where best-fit customers actually spend time, not where you think they should be. Your sales process becomes a qualification filter, not a persuasion engine. Your pricing reflects the value you deliver to customers who can actually capture that value.

The hardest pill to swallow? Some of your biggest customers might not be best-fit.

They're anchors disguised as assets - generating revenue while slowly killing your margins and team's focus.

The companies that master this don't just grow faster. They grow more predictably, with higher margins and lower churn. They build businesses that compound instead of just scale.

How well do you really know your best-fit customer?

Regards,
Stefan