4Rooks Strategy
02_gtm_strategy/icp_and_personas

ICP and personas (operational version)

The detailed persona tables live in the prior research report. This file is the working version used to build account lists and outreach.

ICP (the company we want to talk to)

Dimension Best-fit
Geography DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) — primary; Benelux, Nordics, Northern Italy — secondary
Revenue €20m–€500m
Headcount 50–1,500
Embedded engineering team 5–40 engineers
Sector priority 1) Building automation 2) Industrial edge 3) Smart home 4) AgriTech 5) Automotive Tier-2/3
Trigger event Hardware target change · standards integration (Matter / KNX IoT / Thread / LoRaWAN / OPC UA) · regional SKU expansion · CRA exposure · platform engineer attrition
Disqualifiers <5 embedded engineers (too small to need reuse) · Pure ODM with no IP ambitions · No upcoming change event

Primary buying committee (who we sell to)

CFO-led economic buyer

  • Job titles: CFO, Group CFO, Finance Director, VP Finance
  • Pain: hidden platform spend, repeated NRE across SKUs, launch-delay cost, hiring scarcity, CRA-driven lifecycle cost
  • What they need to hear: fixed-scope spend, payback in 12-24 months, margin protection, roadmap certainty
  • What they sign: the €200k–€400k pilot

CEO-led sponsor

  • Job titles: CEO, MD, BU GM, President Connected Products
  • Pain: roadmap stalls, engineering bottleneck, dependence on a few specialists
  • What they need to hear: time-to-market, capital efficiency, strategic optionality, no need to grow a permanent platform team
  • Their role: reframes the deal as strategic capacity; can overrule hesitation

Technical champion

  • Job titles: VP Engineering, CTO, Head of Embedded, Firmware Manager, Platform Architect
  • Pain: forked codebases, brittle BSP ownership, protocol churn, standards migrations, lack of reusable abstractions, test burden
  • What they need to hear: portability, performance, integration risk, maintainability, board/SoC fit, testability, update path, DX
  • Their role: runs diligence, sets pilot scope and acceptance criteria, internal sponsor + technical veto

Procurement gatekeeper

  • Job titles: Head of Procurement, Strategic Sourcing Manager, Vendor Manager
  • Pain: new-vendor risk, continuity concerns, IP ambiguity, support uncertainty, cybersecurity due diligence
  • What they need to hear: legal clarity, clean SOW, milestones, liability boundaries, support terms, exit rights, supplier stability
  • Their role: can slow or kill the deal — addressed pre-emptively via the procurement pack

Secondary personas (influencers — see prior report for full table)

  • Finance team validator (FP&A Director, Controller)
  • Product / programme sponsor (Product Director, NPI Leader)
  • Security / compliance influencer (Product Security Lead, Compliance Director)
  • Channel buyer (ODM CTO, design house owner)

Account-list construction principles

  1. Start with DACH building automation OEMs — KNX manufacturers list (knx.org has 500+) is the seed
  2. Cross-reference with companies showing recent: hiring of embedded engineers, new product launches, certification news, CRA-readiness statements
  3. Tier accounts:
    • Tier 1: ICP fit + visible trigger event + reachable contact
    • Tier 2: ICP fit, no visible trigger
    • Tier 3: ICP-adjacent, monitor only
  4. Target 60 accounts in the working set, weighted ~35 / 20 / 5

Last modified 2026-05-05. Suggest a change to this page →