Your ICP isn't a persona, it's a treasure map. here’s how to draw it

Let’s be honest. You’ve seen the corporate documents. The ones with the cheesy stock photos labeled “Marketing Mary” or “Sales Sam.” They tell you Mary enjoys yoga, owns a golden retriever, and values “synergy.”

How, exactly, does that help you find a real person with a real budget?

It doesn’t. It’s garbage. Those dusty personas are a marketer’s attempt to feel creative, but for a sales pro on the front lines, they’re about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

So, let’s burn the persona to the ground and talk about something that actually matters.

A treasure map.

A persona is a painting of a fake person. A treasure map is a guide to real money. It has coordinates, landmarks, and a big, fat ‘X’ that marks the spot where your future best customers are hiding.

You’re not a painter. You’re a treasure hunter. And this is how you draw your map.

Step 1: Start at the ‘X’ - Your BDC (Best Damn Customers)

Stop guessing. Your business already has clues buried right inside it.

Pull up a list of your top 5 customers. Not the biggest, necessarily, but the best. The ones who were a dream to work with, who saw the value instantly, and who paid on time.

Got them? Good. Now, what do they actually have in common?

• Industry? Are they all B2B SaaS? Logistics?
• Company Size? Are they scrappy 50-person teams or established 500-person enterprises?
• The Person Who Signed? Was it always the VP of Operations? The Head of Growth? The Founder?
• Tech Stack? Do they all use Salesforce? Are they all running on AWS?

Don’t write a novel. Just find the pattern. This pattern is ‘X’. It’s the location of the treasure. It’s proof that gold exists and you’ve already found it before.

Step 2: Find the Nearby Landmarks (Your Competitor’s Crew)

Every good treasure hunter knows that where there’s one gold vein, there are usually more nearby.

Who are your competitors selling to? Look at their public case studies, their testimonials, the logos on their homepage. This isn’t about being a copycat. It’s about market intelligence.

If your biggest rival just landed three manufacturing companies in the Midwest, that’s a landmark. It tells you there’s a hunger in that market. It validates what you’re selling and gives you another spot on the map to explore.

Step 3: Draw the Route (Just Say What You Want)

Okay, you know where the treasure is buried and you’ve identified the surrounding landmarks. Now you need to draw the path to get there.

And here’s the secret: the route isn’t a complex spreadsheet. It’s a simple sentence. You just have to say what you want, out loud, like you’re talking to your smartest colleague.

Combine what you learned from your best customers and your competitors’ moves. It should sound something like this:

“Find me VPs of Operations at logistics companies in North America with 100-500 employees, especially if they’re hiring a new supply chain manager.”

Read that sentence again. That’s not a persona. That’s a command. That’s a direct route to a qualified lead. It’s a map so clear, a six-year-old could follow it.

You’ve drawn the Map. Now go get the Gold.

This is the part where most people sigh, crack their knuckles, and open up 37 tabs on LinkedIn to start the soul-crushing manual labor of searching.

That’s like drawing a map to a sunken treasure chest and then trying to paddle out to it in a leaky canoe.

You drew a brilliant map. Now you need a speedboat.

Modern tools, like Leadlister.ai, are built for this. You don’t feed them “Marketing Mary.” You give them your treasure map. Just that clean, simple sentence you just wrote. You give it the command, and it brings back the treasure. A clean list of the exact people you just described.

No fluff. No time wasted.

So stop thinking like an employee filling out a form. Start thinking like a hunter on a mission. The gold is out there.

Go draw your map.

Cheers and happy hunting!