I recently had Randy Brasche on the Moneyball CMO Podcast, Randy started his career at Oracle, working on the marketing team behind Larry Ellison's $500 network computer. He led B2B marketing for decades and wrote Some Assembly Required: The B2B Revenue Marketer's Survival Guide. Today he is Chief Revenue Officer at Spot-On.
Near the end of our conversation, I asked him a simple question: Who owns the ideal customer profile - the ICP?
"Who owns that? No one. Who owns that today? I don't know who owns it."
He has run marketing and now runs revenue. If he can't say who keeps the profile up to date, most companies can't either. That used to be an annoyance. Now it is a real risk, because your AI agents use that profile every day. It was decided in one meeting and a powerpoint slide, that everyone forgot about - but AI agents remembered.
Conversions Won't Keep Marketing In The Room
I asked Randy what he thinks CMOs need to change today. His answer was - CMOs need to show up to the weekly pipeline meeting.
"So conversions are not going to get you and keep that seat at the table."
Many marketers don't attend those meetings. Randy thinks they should be there every week, "defending, you know, what they're responsible for what they own."
His view changed when he started carrying a revenue number himself. Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to talk about conversion rates. He had to keep three to four times the target in pipeline, and replace every deal that dropped out.
Conversions didn't help him with that. Pipeline did.
And pipeline only works if sales, marketing and RevOps agree on who they’re actually trying to bring into the business. As Randy put it, once everyone agrees on that, “everybody’s accountable. And so there’s no hiding in those pipeline calls.”
That shared definition is your ICP.
And right now, a lot of companies are treating it like a static slide instead of something the entire revenue team should actively manage.
CROs From Sales Push Marketing Into Spray And Pray
I asked Randy whether sales leaders also need to change what they expect from marketing.
He is a CRO, and he still said yes. Most CROs came up through sales. Many still run the business quarter to quarter. When the number gets tight:
"it suddenly turns into, we need more volume, we need more leads, we need more numbers, we need this. And it turns into forcing marketing, into doing spray and pray, which we know how that ends."
The problem is timing. Buyers pick their shortlist long before they talk to sales. Randy says you have to build awareness "months and months or even years in advance to get on that short list."
If nobody has agreed who the right buyer is, the only thing left to ask for is more leads - which will lead to a bigger pile of wrong prospects.
Your ICP Was Decided In One Meeting
I asked Randy how often the ICP should change. He said it could change weekly. Then he described how most companies actually set it:
"it's just one of these things that's a one meeting and a PowerPoint slide, and that becomes the decision."
He called it "the most unsexy sort of, but the most important part that gets overlooked."
Here is what happens to that slide. It gets copied into the CRM, the lead-scoring rules, the ad audiences, the target account list and the instructions for your AI agents. Each copy then changes on its own. A year later, sales, marketing and RevOps each work from a different version, and nobody knows which one is current.
Your agents don't know either. They use whichever version they were given, and they use it on thousands of accounts. Randy put it bluntly. The industry stacked tools on the CRM, then ABM on top, "and now we're plopping these agents on top of it, too, and we're failing at scale."
His fix is simple. Everyone signs off the ICP, and they review it regularly:
"so that all of the different stakeholders approve it, and they talk about it on a regular basis. That is the most important thing."
The five places your ICP lives
The slide from the last planning meeting
The CRM fields and lists your sales team filters on
The lead-scoring rules in marketing automation
The ad audiences and target account lists
The instructions you give your AI agents
If these five don't match, your agents are each working from a different customer.
How To Fix It This Week
Run an ICP sign-off
Find every version of ICP. Ask your CRO, your head of RevOps and your own team which ICP they actually use. Get the slide, the CRM filter, the scoring rules, the audience lists and the agent instructions. Put them side by side.
Create one source of Truth. Who you sell to (industry, size, region, buyer roles). Who you don't. The signals that mean an account is ready. What you say to each segment.
Give it an owner. One named owner, the date it was signed and the date of the next review. We suggest a monthly review and a full sign-off every quarter.
Get everyone to sign off. The CRO, the CMO, RevOps and customer success all approve it in the room (preferably a pipeline meeting).
Update every copy. Change the CRM, scoring, audiences and agent instructions to match the signed page. Note the version number in each.
Agree what triggers an early review. Don’t wait for the quarterly meeting if something important changes. A sudden drop in win rates for one segment might trigger a review. So might a new type of customer showing up repeatedly in your closed-won deals. Your ICP should change when the evidence changes and that’s an important distinction.
What this process does not do. It makes sure everyone, people and agents, uses the same definition. It does not tell you if the definition is right. For that you need a fit model built from your won and lost deals, scoring on live buying signals, and small tests before you add a new segment. Start with the sign-off anyway. A better model is no use if half your systems still run on the old list.
Agents Can Scale Your Story. They Can 't Write It.
Early in his career, Randy watched Larry Ellison sell the network computer with plastic models. A photographer spent hours shooting them. Randy kept saying they were only plastic. The photographer said it didn't matter, because they were "really capturing people's imagination."
Randy thinks AI hasn't changed this. People still buy from people. Work out your story yourself first, then automate it: "really nailing your personal narrative at a human sense first and then automating that." And he can tell when a team skipped that step: "I can look at a document, say that's 100% has not been vetted by a human being."
Your ICP is the same. Deciding who you sell to is a human job. Agents can take that decision to thousands of accounts. They can't make it for you, and they won't notice when it's out of date.
Marketing Should Own the ICP
Randy expects much of the traditional CMO role to be folded into whoever runs go-to-market. I think that leaves an opening. Someone has to own the definition of who you sell to, and every agent you add will use it. Randy thinks marketers are the right people, because they see the whole customer lifecycle and they now understand the technology too.
Ask your team who owns your ICP this week. If nobody answers, it's yours.
To conclude:
Go to the weekly pipeline meeting and defend the pipeline you own.
Keep one signed version of your ICP, with an owner and a review date.
Update every system and every agent stick to that version.
Write your story yourself, then automate it.
Watch the full conversation with Randy Brasche.
P.S. The Moneyball CMO is a series of conversations with marketing and revenue leaders. Know a CMO who should be on the show? Reply to this email. If your ICP lives in five places and your agents use all of them, that is the problem RevSure's context layer solves: revsure.ai.