ICP and Buyer Persona Brief

A sharp ideal customer profile (ICP) with firmographics and disqualifying criteria, plus two or three buyer personas covering jobs-to-be-done, pains, buying triggers, objections and where each is reachable — written as testable hypotheses, not as a persona poster.

A Markdown ICP and persona brief containing: (1) an ICP with firmographics, three to five qualifying criteria and three to five disqualifying criteria; (2) two or three personas, each with role and accountability, three to four jobs to be done, pains with consequences, buying triggers, two to three objections, reachable channels, and the evidence needed to say yes; (3) no fictional names or biographies; (4) an 'Assumptions to test first' section of four claims with the fastest test for each.

# ICP and personas — contract review against a playbook

## Ideal customer profile

**Firmographics**
- 200-2,000 employees. Below 200 there is rarely a legal team to sell to; above 2,000 you meet a CLM incumbent and a procurement process that outlasts your sales cycle.
- An in-house legal team of 2-8 people. This is the load-bearing criterion, not headcount.
- Sectors with high inbound contract volume: software, professional services, healthcare services, logistics.
- A legal operations function exists, even if it is one person doing it part-time.

**Qualifying criteria**
- A written playbook or fallback positions exist in some form, even a Word document. Without one there is nothing to review against and the product has no input.
- Inbound volume above roughly 30 contracts a month. Below that the pain is real but annoying rather than expensive.
- Someone in legal is measured on turnaround time. If nobody is, there is no metric your product improves.
- Contracts arrive as third-party paper at least half the time. On your own paper the review problem is much smaller.

**Disqualifying criteria** — these matter more than the qualifiers
- **An existing CLM deployment that legal considers successful.** Four of your six wins came from legal ops, and your notes say most losses were 'we will do it in our existing CLM'. A satisfied CLM is not a competitor you beat, it is a deal you should not enter.
- **No written playbook and no appetite to write one.** You would be selling a six-month internal project with your product attached to the end of it.
- **Legal team of one.** No process, no delegation, no operations budget, and the single lawyer's own judgement is faster than any tool.
- **Contract review is a revenue-generating activity** (law firms, some consultancies). Their incentive is billable hours and your product removes them.
- **Regulated environments requiring on-premise processing** unless you support it. Discover this on the first call, not in the security review.

## Persona 1 — Legal Operations Manager (four of six deals)
**Accountable for:** turnaround time, workload distribution across the team, and the tooling budget nobody else wants to own.

**Jobs to be done**
- Get routine third-party paper off the lawyers' desks without increasing risk.
- Show the general counsel a defensible number for review throughput.
- Make the team's process survive someone leaving.
- Justify the tooling spend at renewal with something other than sentiment.

**Pains**
- Every NDA takes a qualified lawyer 20 minutes, and the consequence is that commercial contracts queue behind them.
- The playbook exists but lives in one person's head and in a document last updated two years ago; the consequence is inconsistent positions across the team.
- No visibility into where a contract is stuck, so the answer to sales is always 'let me check'.

**Buying triggers**
- Headcount request refused. The tool becomes the alternative to a hire, which is the single strongest trigger in this ICP.
- A commercial deal delayed by legal review, visibly, in front of the executive team.
- A new GC arrives and asks for metrics that do not exist.

**Objections**
- "We already have a CLM." — the loss reason in your notes. Handle it as a scope question (execution and storage versus review), not a feature fight.
- "The lawyers will not trust it." — legitimate. They will not, initially.
- "Who is accountable if it misses something?" — the answer must be 'the reviewing lawyer, and here is the audit trail', never 'the tool'.

**Reachable on:** legal operations communities and Slack groups, CLOC-adjacent events, LinkedIn, peer referral. Not cold email at volume — this is a small, well-networked population that talks to itself.

**Needs before saying yes:** a pilot on their own paper with their own playbook, a defensible turnaround-time comparison, and one reference from a legal ops peer at similar scale.

## Persona 2 — General Counsel (two of six deals)
**Accountable for:** risk, the team's capacity, and not being the reason a deal slipped.

**Jobs to be done**
- Keep risk consistent as volume grows without adding headcount.
- Spend the team's expensive attention on the contracts that actually matter.
- Answer the CFO's question about what legal costs per contract.

**Pains**
- The team is the bottleneck on revenue and everyone knows it; the consequence is a standing political problem.
- Risk position varies by whoever reviewed it, and that only surfaces during a dispute.

**Buying triggers**
- A contract went out with a term nobody intended to accept.
- Board or audit pressure on contractual risk.
- A budget cycle where a tool is easier to approve than a person.

**Objections**
- "I am not putting our contracts into someone else's model." — this is the first question, and the security answer must precede the product demo.
- "My people will rubber-stamp whatever it says." — a real behavioural risk and worth agreeing a control for.

**Reachable on:** peer referral and in-house counsel networks, almost exclusively. A GC does not respond to outbound; they ask another GC.

**Needs before saying yes:** the data-handling answer in writing, an audit trail they could show a regulator, and evidence that the reviewing lawyer remains accountable.

## Assumptions to test first

1. **That 'we have a CLM' is a scope confusion rather than a genuine overlap.** If it is genuine, your disqualifier list needs to grow and your ICP shrinks sharply. Fastest test: call the four losses and ask what the CLM actually does for review specifically. This is the highest-value hour available to you.
2. **That the legal ops manager is the better entry point.** Four of six is suggestive at n=6 and nothing more. Fastest test: compare sales-cycle length and discount depth across the two entry points in the six wins.
3. **That 30 contracts a month is the right volume floor.** It is my inference, not your data. Fastest test: plot inbound volume against realised value across the six customers.
4. **That a written playbook is a hard prerequisite.** If a good enough playbook can be assembled from a customer's last 50 contracts, that is a services motion that unlocks a much larger market. Fastest test: try it once, manually, with a willing prospect.