Outbound Strategy Bulletin · Dream Giant

EvoStream Communications

ICP Intake Questionnaire April 2026

Your answers build your ICP from the ground up. The strategy bulletin you've seen is our starting hypothesis. This questionnaire replaces our guesses with your real-world customer knowledge. The ICP we build in Apollo (firmographics, titles, geography) and the messaging layer we use in outbound (positioning, proof, triggers, anti-targets) come directly from what you write below.

Specificity wins. Vague answers produce vague targeting, which produces the wrong leads. If you don't know an answer yet, leave it blank and we'll dig in on the kickoff call, but don't fill anything in unless it's true. Your progress saves automatically.

Target Companies

Walk us through your 3 to 5 best customers, the deals you'd happily clone.

Name each one, what they do, and in one sentence why they were a great fit. This is the most important answer on the page. Everything downstream builds from this.

What's the annual revenue range of those best-fit customers?

Give the floor and ceiling. If there's a sweet spot inside that range where you do your best work, name it.

How many employees do they typically have?

Range plus sweet spot. If the deal looks different at 1,500 vs 8,000 employees, tell us how.

How many physical locations, branches, or sites do your best customers operate?

Multi-location complexity is core to your value. What's the floor where you can credibly add value, and where does it max out?

Where do your customers actually operate? States, regions, countries?

Not where you're based. Where the deals come from. List them and call out the ones where you have the strongest density.

Are your best customers public, private, PE-backed, family-owned, or some mix?

Each one produces different signals (8-K filings vs press releases vs nothing). Tell us the actual mix you've sold into.

Which verticals do you actually win in? Rank by revenue contribution or win rate.

Don't list industries you'd like to be in. List the ones where you've closed deals. If banking is 60% of your book, say that.

Where has TechTriage methodology NOT translated? Industries you've tried and bombed in, or know are wrong fit?

Be specific. 'We tried two government deals and both stalled at procurement' is more useful than 'avoid government.'

IT Environment Signals

What does the IT organization look like at your best customers when you walk in?

Team size, reporting structure, in-house vs outsourced, where the gaps usually are. The pattern you keep seeing across deals.

What technologies are usually deployed at your best customers when you first engage, including where they are on cloud?

Carriers, PBX vendors, SDWAN platforms, contact center, security stack, plus cloud posture (on-prem, hybrid, AWS / Azure / GCP-first). List the actual brands and platforms you see in the field. Does cloud-first vs on-prem change the conversation you have?

What compliance frameworks govern your customers' environments?

SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI, GLBA, SOX, FedRAMP, others. Which ones produce the most urgency when an audit finding lands?

Personas and Titles

Who actually signs the contract? Title, role, where they sit in the org.

Use the names and titles from your last 5 closed deals if it helps. We want the actual buyer, not the persona we'd hope is the buyer.

Who else is in the buying committee and what role do they play?

Who blocks, who recommends, who signs the check, who has to be sold separately. The map of the room you walk into.

What's the lowest-level person at a target company worth pitching at first contact?

Director? VP? SVP only? Tell us where the line is between someone who can actually open a door and someone who'll forward the email to nobody.

Are your best buyers usually new in role (under a year) or seasoned (2+ years)? What's the pattern?

New CIOs often arrive with a mandate to overhaul. Long-tenured leaders own carrier relationships. Tell us what you actually see in your won deals.

Are there titles or roles that look like buyers on paper but never close?

The people who take meetings, eat your time, and never sign. Who do we filter out?

Signals and Triggers

Think about your last 5 closed deals. What was the event that made each one a buyer? Why was that the moment they reached out or said yes?

Walk through them one by one. The forcing function. The thing that pushed it from someday to now. This is how we'll spot the next 50 like them.

Which carriers do you displace most often, and whose contracts should we track on renewal cadence?

Verizon, AT&T, Lumen, Spectrum Enterprise, Comcast Business, Zayo, Windstream, others. The ones where you can credibly take over the account.

If we handed you a list of 100 target accounts tomorrow, what 3 to 5 signals on the page would tell you which to call this week vs which can wait a quarter?

Examples: 'open req for Network Architect,' 'announced acquisition in last 90 days,' 'new CIO under 6 months tenure,' 'public 8-K cybersecurity disclosure.' These become the scoring rules in Clay that tier your account list.

Positioning and Proof

List every client we can name in outreach, with a one-sentence outcome for each.

Format: 'Alma Bank, 8-year relationship, designed and implemented network across X branches.' Outcomes with numbers carry the most weight. The more we have, the more we can match to verticals in outreach.

In your customers' actual words, how do they describe the problem you solve?

The phrase that came back in five different sales calls. The line that ended up in the signed proposal. The complaint they voiced before they knew the technical name for it. Outreach written in your customers' words sounds like a peer. Outreach written in yours sounds like a vendor.

When a customer first reaches out, what do they say their problem is? How does that differ from the technical trigger we'd monitor for?

Example: customer says 'our calls keep dropping at our Atlanta site.' Underlying trigger we'd track is 'MPLS expiring' or 'legacy PBX at end-of-life.' We need both. The stated pain to open with, the technical trigger to time the outreach.

Stephen's bio, in your own words. What earns immediate credibility with a VP Infrastructure on first contact?

Specific AT&T roles and years, named projects, certifications, board seats, industry recognition, customer wins from prior chapters. Don't be modest. This is the credibility opener for every cold message.

Who do you compete against, and how do you win?

Name the top 3 competitors you see in deals. For each: one line on the reason you beat them.

Who do you lose to, and why?

Honest answer. This saves us from chasing deals you'd lose anyway and tells us how to position around the gap.

Different from who you lose to: where do deals STALL? Walk us through your most painful stall.

Not 'who said no.' 'Who said yes, then nothing.' Procurement, legal, security review, board approval, budget freeze, internal politics. Tells us which prospect signals predict deals that will actually close vs deals that will fade.

Describe a company that LOOKS like a great fit on paper but is actually the wrong customer.

The pattern that fools us into spending a quarter on the wrong logo. Be specific about what makes it look right and what makes it actually wrong.

Deal Economics and Outbound

What does a typical deal look like financially?

Contract structure (carrier commission vs consulting fee mix), average first-year value, range from smallest to largest deal you've closed. The full picture, not just the average.

What does a prospect say in the first call that tells you they're a real buyer vs a tire-kicker?

The signal that makes you lean in. Examples: 'we have budget approved,' 'CFO is asking about our MPLS spend,' 'we just got an audit finding due in 60 days.' This becomes our SQL qualification rule. Without it we'll book meetings that waste your time.

From first meeting to signed contract, how long is your typical sales cycle?

Average and range. If certain deal types (audit-driven vs M&A-driven vs contract-expiry) move faster, tell us which.

What outbound have you tried, and how did each channel perform?

LinkedIn, cold email, events, partner referrals, paid ads, anything else. Be specific: what got traction, what burned cycles, what you'd never do again.

What offer or CTA has actually worked to get a first meeting?

Free network assessment, technical audit, peer benchmark, carrier contract review, vCIO hour, something else? What gets the yes when prospects are on the fence about taking a meeting?

Once all questions are answered, submit them to the Google Sheet. Answers appear on the Dreamgiant tab in Dream Giant Clients Answers.