ICP and Targeting: 20 Outbound Plays You Can Hand to Your Agent

For a founder, sales rep, or small sales team doing outbound who needs to pick the right accounts and the right people inside them before writing a single email. Every play works on its own. Together they form one system: learn from your best customers, narrow the list, tier it, map the personas, and disqualify everything outside the slot.

20 plays, each with a copy paste agent version. Informational guides and prompts only. They do not send emails, make calls, build lists, or book meetings for you. You still do the outreach yourself.

Informational guides and prompts only. They do not send emails, make calls, build lists, or book meetings for you. You still do the outreach yourself.

All 20 plays

1. Build the ICP from best customers and closed-won lookalikes
2. Tier accounts and match outreach effort to the tier
3. Map the golden path of personas before prospecting
4. Define incision points first and build one sequence per persona from its top two problems
5. Define your slot, close-lost everything outside it, and ban out-of-slot meetings
6. Research an executive account in four ingredients before writing any outreach
7. Write a different talk track per persona, weighted to company relevance
8. Prioritise with the hierarchy of relevance and the martini glass
9. Shrink outbound to a martini glass: fewer verticals and personas, much deeper
10. Give reps a prioritised account focus instead of letting them work a list top to bottom
11. Reverse-engineer your last wins to build a martini-glass territory plan
12. Enter through a narrow wedge, then expand
13. Map TAM and prioritise ICPs in tiers before campaigning
14. Scale pre-call research in proportion to deal size
15. Run micro-segments of fifty or fewer with two personal attributes
16. Tier every account A, B or C on use cases plus likelihood of budget, then have reps validate the data
17. Build high-velocity pipeline from inbound plus a named target account list
18. Run extreme firmographic sprints to make reps industry experts
19. Tier a new territory green, yellow and red by size of prize times likelihood to close
20. Set no-exception rules of engagement for who can work which accounts