FRAMEWORK 02 / THE ALWAYS LIST
An ICP tells you which companies belong on the list. This tells you which of them will actually buy. Five layers, drawn from your own closed-won record rather than a workshop.
THE IDEA
Standard ICP work stops at the firmographic layer. Vertical, headcount, revenue band, a job title, maybe a tech stack. That describes a category of company, which is useful for building a list and almost useless for predicting an outcome. Everyone in the category looks identical on a spreadsheet and a third of them will never buy.
What actually predicts a win sits a layer below that, and every experienced seller carries it around without having written it down. It is the set of granular, observable traits that make you think we are going to win this in the first ten minutes.
If you could hand-pick every account your team talked to, who would you pick, knowing they would buy?
AN ICP
tells you which companies to put on the list.
THE ALWAYS LIST
tells you which ones to spend Tuesday on.
They are different jobs and conflating them is why target lists get built and then quietly ignored. A rep with two hundred accounts that all match the ICP has been given a category, not a decision. A rep with twenty that match the Always List has been given somewhere to start.
THE FIVE LAYERS
The specific traits differ by business. The layers do not. A wide field of accounts enters and a small set survives all five.
01
The condition
Something structurally true about the account that makes the problem permanent rather than occasional. Not a bad quarter. A shape of business that guarantees this problem recurs. This is what separates an always buyer from a sometimes buyer.
02
The evidence
Something observable that proves the condition is actually biting. A job posting, a public statement, a reorganisation, a hire, a tool they bought that solves half of it.
03
The person
Not a title. A person who owns the outcome, feels the pain personally, and can spend. In the best deals these are one person. In the worst they are three.
04
The admission
In the first two calls, they say some version of we have tried to fix this and it did not work. This is the single strongest predictor there is, because it means the problem is real, funded in principle, and already failed once internally.
05
The clock
A reason the conversation is happening now that did not come from you. If the only urgency is the urgency you manufactured, it is a sometimes buyer.
Four or five present: always buyer. Two or three: workable. One: that is not a target, that is a hope.
WHERE THE TRAITS COME FROM
Take the last twenty or thirty deals you won, and the ones you lost late, which matter more. For each, the question is not what industry were they in. It is:
What was true about this account before we ever spoke?
What was true in the first two calls?
What did the buyer say or do that, in hindsight, told you this was going to close?
And on the losses: what was missing that you noticed too late?
The traits are already in there. Nobody has pulled them out because it is tedious and because the people who know them are busy closing.
THE TEST THAT MAKES IT REAL
Not the ones that went dark early. The ones that went to a decision and you lost.
If most of them score two or below, you have just found where your team’s quarter goes. That is not a closing problem or a talent problem. It is a targeting problem, and no amount of enablement fixes it.
The five layers are a starting structure. On an engagement they get replaced by the traits that actually predict a win in your business, pulled from your own record. That substitution is most of the work and all of the value.
Under Read 02 on the Six Reads. Not enough first meetings points at targeting, and this is what targeting means in practice.
Run the Six Reads first. Six questions, three minutes, and it tells you whether this is where to start or one of the other five.