The Meeting Package ICP Framework: How Knowing Who Not to Sell To Accelerated Their Growth

Most ICP frameworks start with ideal customer characteristics. Meeting Package took the opposite approach: they started by identifying who they didn’t want to serve. This counterintuitive strategy dramatically improved their conversion rates and accelerated growth.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, CEO Joonas Ahola revealed how their unique approach to ICP definition emerged from hard-won marketplace experience.

The Initial Market Trap

Like many startups, Meeting Package initially cast a wide net. Their marketplace model targeted any venue that could host meetings or events. But this broad approach created problems. As Joonas explains: “We thought that we could scale it only by having enough interest from the demand to that hotel. And then we tried to close the hotel. That clearly didn’t work.”

The Elimination Framework

The breakthrough came when they started defining their ICP through elimination. “Let’s say your mom and pop hotel, or your hotel is in the middle of nowhere and you don’t really have any p, two P customers or corporates coming in. That was super easy for us to remove,” Joonas notes.

This process led them to focus on “enterprise SME’s that are more on the full service model” where “30% of your revenue at least is coming from meetings and events and groups.”

Technical Constraints as ICP Filters

Their ICP definition went beyond just business characteristics. Technical compatibility became a crucial filter: “The easiest sells for us is the ones that don’t have integration problems. Meaning we already have an integration to their operational system, whether it’s a sales and catering or a property management software.”

This insight helped them avoid deals that would stall due to integration challenges: “Everything sounds super good, but unless you have the integration to XYZ company, we cannot operate.”

The Evolution of ICP

Importantly, Meeting Package’s ICP isn’t static. As Joonas explains: “As we are a product based company and evolving our products to it as we go along. Our ICP also has changed over the course of the company that what we had in the beginning like hey you run on opera sales and catering, you are our customer now. It includes multiple sales and caterings, also standalone solutions, back office solutions.”

Building the Right Sales Team

Their refined ICP also influenced how they built their sales team. “We acknowledge the fact that we need to have people who can challenge the hotels because we’re not creating a vertical, we’re changing the way they operate,” Joonas shares.

This meant hiring industry veterans who could engage in consultative selling. The impact was clear: deals were “much harder when you didn’t have that kind of industry knowledge or background to question those ways of operating that are in the hotel.”

The Results

This precise ICP definition, combined with the right sales team, transformed their conversion rates. From marketplace-era rates below 10%, they now achieve “60% to 70% on average.” More importantly, it’s positioned them to reach their goal of “50,000 instantly bookable venues globally” by 2027.

For B2B founders, Meeting Package’s approach offers a valuable lesson: sometimes the fastest way to define your ICP is to start with who you don’t want to serve. By eliminating poor-fit customers early, you can focus your resources on prospects most likely to succeed with your product.

The key is having the courage to say no to potential customers – even when they’re willing to pay – if they don’t fit your precise ICP definition. In enterprise SaaS, a smaller market of ideal customers often leads to faster growth than a larger market of marginal ones.