The Tyranny of the Average in Sales (Part 1)
Your Ideal Customer Profile is a lie.
Your Ideal Customer Profile is a lie.
Not because it’s wrong - it probably describes your best customers accurately enough. But because it describes a pattern, not a person. And every deal you close this quarter will be won or lost in the distance between those two things.
Here’s the uncomfortable part:
Most ICPs are built by people who don’t sell. Never did. And will absolutely tell you how to do it.
Isn’t it interesting how selling is the one profession where people with no experience will look you straight in the eye and explain how you should do your job?
You don’t have to be a world champion to coach a football team. But you should have worn running shoes at some point in your life. And you should still be able to lace them today.
Most ICP thinking comes from people with a conceptual understanding of what selling might be. People who think selling complex solutions works like selling commodities: find the pattern, replicate the blueprint, scale the machine.
And for certain products, that’s true.
If you’re selling interchangeable widgets with clear use cases and predictable buying motions, the blueprint works. Optimize for volume. Follow the process. Let the funnel do its job.
But let’s be precise: that’s not selling.
That’s order-taking.
And the people doing it aren’t Reps in any meaningful sense - they’re process executors. The fact that we use the same word for both roles already tells you everything about the limitation of the exercise.
When you sell complex solutions - enterprise software, infrastructure, strategic services, anything that requires consensus, customization, and a twelve-month decision cycle - the blueprint breaks.
Because the deal isn’t a transaction.
It’s a negotiation between specific people with specific politics, specific fears, and specific career stakes that your segmentation model will never capture.
And yet B2B organizations build strategy around averages anyway.
Average deal size.
Average cycle time.
Average customer profile.
Average buying committee.
The logic is seductive: if we can identify what typically works, we can replicate it. Scale it. Optimize it. Turn randomness into system.
It creates the feeling of control.
And in Sales, the feeling of control is worth almost as much as actual control.
It works - until it doesn’t.
The statistical seduction
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology, spent decades documenting a similar contradiction.
He watched doctors apply population-level thinking to individual patients. He saw how medicine - necessarily, inevitably - operates through statistical norms. You can’t run a hospital, design treatment protocols, or train physicians without generalizations.
Averages and benchmarks make the system work.
But Jung understood something most people miss.
The psyche - the actual person in front of you - exists only as an individual.
Not as a data point.
Not as a demographic category.
Not as a case study in a pattern.
Statistics can tell you what usually happens to populations.
They say nothing about what will happen to this person.
B2B lives in the same contradiction.
Your marketing team segments by firmographics. Your Rev Ops team stages deals by probability. Your CRM dashboard shows you conversion rates, pipeline velocity, win rates - all of it derived from aggregated behavior.
These tools are necessary. They let you allocate budget, set quotas, and forecast revenue without descending into chaos.
But the deal you’re working right now is not average.
The CFO dragging her feet isn’t “typical budget resistance.”
The VP who loved your demo but went dark isn’t “standard ghosting behavior.”
They’re specific people, in specific political situations, with specific fears and specific career calculations that your funnel stage will never capture.
Jung called this the illusion of the “statistical man” - the idea that you can understand an individual by knowing what category they belong to.
In medicine, it leads to misdiagnosis.
In B2B, it leads to the same thing - except we don’t call it that.
We call it “loss.”
Where the average breaks
Buyer personas are the cleanest example.
Most B2B companies have them: detailed profiles of titles, pain points, objections, and preferred content types. They’re built from real data - surveys, interviews, closed deals.
They’re useful for content strategy, messaging architecture, and sales enablement.
But the moment a Rep treats the persona as the buyer, the deal starts to die.
Because the persona describes what CFOs generally care about.
It doesn’t tell you why this CFO is stalling.
The persona says “risk-averse, values ROI, needs peer validation.”
Fine.
But what it doesn’t say is that she just burned political capital on a failed implementation, reports to a CEO who doesn’t trust her judgment anymore, and is now locked in a zero-error mode that no amount of ROI modeling will overcome.
That’s not an edge case.
That’s the deal.
And this is where the average becomes dangerous.
Averages scale operations. But they erase the very signals that predict whether this deal closes.
The lie you don’t notice
The real danger isn’t that your ICP is inaccurate.
It’s that it makes you feel like you understand the buyer.
It gives you language. It gives you categories. It gives you the illusion of insight.
But in complex Sales, insight is never a category.
It’s diagnosis.
It’s understanding what is true in this account that is not true in the others.
And the irony is that most Sales organizations already know this.
They just don’t build around it.
They build around what can be standardized, tracked, and rolled up into dashboards.
They build around what is legible.
And in Part 2, you’ll see what happens when the organization starts confusing that legibility for reality.
Because once your models become more real than the deal, you stop selling.
You start managing the appearance of selling.
What this means for you (right now)
Use ICP and personas for what they are.
A starting hypothesis.
A map (not the territory).
A way to allocate attention and resources.
But the moment you treat them as the buyer, you lose the only thing that closes complex deals:
The ability to see the individual.
Averages scale operations.
Individuality closes deals.
Part 2 will explore what happens when this same logic infects pipeline, forecasting, and stage-based management - when the map becomes more real than the territory.
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