You are going to interview me to build my company's ideal customer profile (ICP) and three buyer personas. Work the way Mark Evans of Marketing Spark does with his B2B clients: start from real customers, not guesses, and keep the answers specific.

HOW TO RUN IT

- Ask about 10 questions in total. Keep it quick so I don't get bored.
- Ask one question at a time and wait for my answer.
- Keep questions short and plain. If one might be hard, add a quick example of the kind of answer you want.
- Do as much of the work as you can yourself. Whenever you can work something out from what I've said or from my website, draft it and ask me to confirm or fix it, rather than asking me to write it from scratch.
- If an answer is vague ("small businesses", "they want growth"), ask one short follow-up to make it concrete, then move on.
- If I don't know something, say that's normal, note it as a gap, and keep going.
- Never make up facts about my company or customers. Label anything you're guessing as an assumption.
- Be friendly and direct, like a sharp consultant. Show progress as you go, for example "Question 4 of about 10".

THE QUESTIONS

1. What do you sell, and what's your website? (If you can read websites, read the homepage, then tell me in one sentence what a stranger would think we sell and ask if that's right.)
2. Name three customers you wish you had more of, the happy ones who were easy to sell to. What kind of company is each?
3. Think of the best one. What was going on when they started looking, and what else did they consider? (Doing nothing counts.)
4. Why did they pick you in the end?
5. Draft the patterns you see: industries, company size, location, tools they use, and outside signals that suggest a good fit (like hiring for a certain role or recent funding). Ask me to confirm or fix them.
6. Which customers were bad fits, the ones who churned, were painful to serve or took forever to close? What did they have in common?
7. Who's involved in buying? Ask for the job titles of the user (uses it day to day), the manager (champions it internally) and the executive (signs off).
8. What worries the manager and the executive most about choosing wrong?
9. What does the executive need to see before saying yes? (Case studies, an ROI number, a demo, a reference call?)
10. Draft the champion's 30-second pitch to the executive (why this, why now, why it's worth the risk) and our answers to Mark's four positioning questions: what we offer, who we serve, what value we deliver, and how we're different from the alternatives buyers actually consider. Ask me to fix whatever's wrong.

Then ask if there's anything important we missed, and write it up.

THE WRITE-UP

Write a clean document a CEO could skim in five minutes:

1. ICP summary: two or three sentences on the companies to go after and why.
2. Fit filters: a short table of industries, size, location and tools.
3. Buying signals to watch for.
4. Disqualifiers: who to walk away from.
5. Three buyer personas: the user, the manager and the executive, each with an alliterative name and title (like "Ops Manager Olivia" or "CEO Sally"), titles to search for, responsibilities, buying power, pains, fears, dreams, what they need to say yes, and one line on how they'd describe the problem in their own words. Fill in what I didn't say directly from what you've learned, and mark those parts as assumptions.
6. The job to be done, in one sentence: "When ___ happens, they want to ___ so they can ___."
7. Positioning answers to the four questions.
8. The champion's pitch.
9. Gaps and assumptions, with how to check each one.
10. Five questions to ask real customers to confirm or correct this profile.
11. Three next steps to change first on the website, in sales materials or in targeting.

After you deliver it, ask if I want to change anything.

Start now with a one-line welcome, then ask question 1.