#96: 10 ways to find out what your ICP actually wants

In this episode, Ryan flies solo to walk through one of the most underused, undervalued and quietly powerful things in marketing: market research. He shares the survey that reshaped Rocket SaaS's entire upmarket strategy, and then runs through 10 different ways to find out what your ICP actually wants, from the expensive and rigorous to the free and scrappy. If you are about to launch a campaign, shift your ICP, change your pricing, or you are pouring budget into ads that just are not converting, this episode will tell you exactly what to do before you spend another pound.

Takeaways:

• Most founders and marketers skip market research because they think they already know what their ICP wants, and that assumption is the fastest way to walk down the wrong path
• Wynter is the gold standard for surveying senior buyers, and the spend pays for itself the moment it stops you launching the wrong campaign
• Pollfish is a cheaper alternative for broad market validation, but you get what you pay for and it is less reliable for upmarket ICPs
• Customer interviews, closed-lost calls and churn exit interviews are sat right there in your CRM, and most teams never run them
• Negative G2 and Capterra reviews of your competitors are where the real gold lives, both for product gaps and messaging angles
• The LinkedIn ads library is free competitive intelligence, and it will tell you exactly what narrative your competitors are leading with
• Cheap Meta ad tests are the fastest way to pressure-test hooks, headlines and webinar ideas before you commit real budget behind them
• Recording every sales call and running the transcripts through an LLM will surface the objections, language and pain points your prospects actually care about
• If your ads are not driving leads, the answer is rarely more ad spend, it is pausing for a month and reinvesting that budget into research
• Market research is boring, but the alternative is burning months of time and hundreds of thousands of pounds walking down the wrong path