Searching for the Ideal Customer Profile
How structured buyer research redirected Skillcraft’s outbound motion
Skillcraft — People Analytics
About Skillcraft: People Analytics
Skillcraft is a people analytics platform with roots in Harvard Skills lab and a partnership with Corporate Visions. GTMamas has served as Skillcraft's go-to-market advisor, working directly with the founder on buyer research, ICP validation, and outbound strategy.
The Situation: The team was running daily outbound against a hypothesis before validating market response
Skillcraft builds contextualized AI assessments and currently has focused on sales training use cases for its initial customers. Skillcraft is ready to explore new markets and rallied the team to pursue outbound outreach to a new market. However, that new market was not yet validated, and initial outreach was not turning into meetings.
The Approach: Leveraging warm connections, cold outreach, and an ICP hypothesis scorecard
Rather than scaling up outreach and hoping for signal, GTMamas built a structured way to find and then score real buyer conversations.
After co-developing the hypothesis, the whole team compiled a list of all of their warm contacts that fit the hypothesis and GTMamas supplemented the list using Apollo. The team leveraged HubSpot for outreach to ensure tasks and emails were executed efficiently and tracked in their system of record. By the end of the sprint, email volume was over 10x higher than the previous period!
By the end of 3 weeks over a dozen conversations were booked, and GTMamas developed the interview guide and scorecard. The goal of conversations was not to sell but instead to deeply understand the buyer. The conversations uncovered how directly the individual owns the problem, how urgently they feel it, where it ranks against competing priorities, the person’s level of budget and decision authority, and whether a forcing function exists to move a decision now rather than someday. Together the 5 dimensions allowed Skillcraft to explore whether an organization may experience the problem and what role the individual would play in such a purchasing decision.
“Bringing Christie on was a huge boon to our team's outbound proficiency. She brought clear expertise and made discovery & validation a clean and clear process for our team. She was generous with her support and left a lasting impact on the team.”
What We Found: Right approach, wrong problem
One of Skillcraft’s biggest strengths is the level of rigor involved in their assessments, and that strength was a big reason this hypothesis was aimed at a market where rigor matters. However, the conversations uncovered that the problem Skillcraft solves is not a significant priority for that particular market. In addition, the challenges uncovered around procurement and change management helped the team come to the conclusion that this was not the right market at this time.
The Outcome & Why It Matters: Speed to Clarity
The team now has the system to develop strong hypotheses and to execute warm and cold outreach to continue testing. Speed-to-clarity, not speed-to-volume, is the highest-leverage move available to an early-stage GTM motion.
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