In a recent session with the CMO Circle, I broke down how AI is fundamentally changing the way we define, refine, and activate ICPs. With the right approach, you can go from blank slate to highly usable personas in under an hour.

For years, defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and personas meant days—sometimes weeks—of whiteboards, stakeholder workshops, and hand-wavy assumptions. Or very expensive primary research. But that paradigm is shifting fast.

In a recent session with the CMO Circle, I broke down how AI is fundamentally changing the way we define, refine, and activate ICPs. With the right approach, you can go from blank slate to highly usable personas in under an hour.

Here’s what we covered—and what you need to know.

The Three Big Questions

We centered the session around three critical use cases:

  1. Can AI create your initial ICP and persona definitions?
  2. Can it help build and enhance your target lists?
  3. Can it go deeper—into prospect motivations, challenges, and campaign messaging?

Short answer: yes. With caveats.

You can view the full video below - or scroll on the read the summary.

1. Building ICPs & Personas with AI

We started with the simplest approach: feed GPT-4 a company website and ask it to describe the ICP. Immediately, it pulled out key industries, personas, geos, and firmographic traits.

But here's the kicker: AI isn’t a magic oracle. It's a collaborator. Think of it like a new colleague—it needs probing, context, and refinement. The best results came when we prompted further:

  • “What would this look like as firmographic filters?”
  • “What are the top 3 challenges this persona faces?”
  • “Now give me 3 key messaging pillars that align with our value prop.”

This iterative dialogue produced remarkably accurate outputs—often 80-90% aligned with how our clients describe their own audiences.

🎯 Key takeaway: AI will give you average answers by default. If you want differentiated results, you have to push it.

How to Get Better Results

Want to go beyond surface-level outputs? Here's how we train our GPTs to go deeper:

  • Feed it transcripts from calls, podcasts, or YouTube videos featuring your buyers (tools like TL;DV, Turboscribe, or NoteGPT help here).
  • Use blogs and industry research to add vertical nuance.
  • Set clear output templates, examples of good/bad, and apply test scenarios (e.g. “Now use this persona to write email copy.”)
  • Configure custom GPTs or use Projects inside ChatGPT to build shared memory across inputs.

The results compound. We’ve used this exact method to create complete messaging houses—then repurposed that into landing pages, email copy, sales decks, and more - all in a couple of hours.

2. AI for List Building: Still Needs Work

List building sounds easy. In practice, it’s where most AI hype falls apart.

We tested three GPT-generated approaches:

  • Description-based lists in Clay: Often wildly inaccurate. GPT mistook competitors for target companies based on keyword overlaps.
  • Simplified firmographic prompts: Performed better. Sometimes, less is more.
  • Lookalike audiences: Overhyped. These models tend to surface “sister” companies based only on vertical, not deeper commonalities.

We also explored signal-based solutions like Trigify (social signals), RB2B (web pixel tracking), and CommonRoom (job moves, community signals). While promising, most still require big data sets, broad ICPs, and plenty of brand awareness to work well.

✅ Our recommendation: Stick to classic firmographic filtering + proxy triggers (e.g. hiring roles, posting tenders - publicly available info that is specific to your use case - which can be found using Revveal). Refine further in Clay or Freckle. It’s not sexy—but it’s effective.

3. Going Deeper: Prospect Motivations & Messaging

Beyond who to target, AI can help uncover why they buy—and how to talk to them.

We used GPT to map:

  • Top 3 challenges for a persona
  • Desired outcomes
  • Objections and how to counter them
  • Key messaging pillars aligned to value props

This layer is where AI shines—especially if you supplement it with real-world inputs like call transcripts from real world sales calls. And if you want to go granular at an account level, tools like Perplexity do a stellar job summarizing business context, goals, and triggers.

Need tone of voice personalization? The CrystalKnows Chrome extension will estimate someone’s DISC profile and recommend comms styles.

🎤 Pro tip: Ask GPT “What else should I be asking?” It’s a shockingly effective way to uncover blind spots.

Grading AI Across Use Cases

We rated AI’s performance across three areas:

Use Case

Ease of Use

Accuracy

Scale

ICP + Personas

A

A-

B (manual lift for now)

List Building

B

C-

B+ (Clay etc.)

Prospect Insights

B

A-

C (still copy/paste heavy)

The outputs are strong. The bottleneck? Application in a scalable way. Stitching outputs into your actual campaigns still takes work. But that’s changing fast.

So, Can AI Build Better Personas Than Your Team?

For initial drafts? Absolutely. With the right prompts, GPT can outperform a 2-week persona sprint in under an hour.

But if you want a differentiated go-to-market motion—not just a regurgitation of best practices—you’ll need to layer in:

  • Your voice
  • Real customer data
  • Strategic context

In other words, AI gets you 80% there. Your job is the final 20%.

Final Thoughts

Three closing rules of thumb:

  1. For Ad hoc usage - use ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. They’re phenomenal—but don’t scale easily.
  2. Scaling? Use specialist workflow tools (Clay, Freckle, etc). Accept some rigidity.
  3. Want the best of both worlds? Roll up your sleeves. Build your stack with APIs, webhooks, and custom configurations.

Pro Tip: RevvedUp is now live on Zapier, meaning you can integrate our world-class research and content generation capabilities within a wide range of use cases!

If you’re serious about operationalising this, that’s exactly what we do at RevvedUp. We’ll take your market, map the ICPs, craft the messaging, and generate the campaigns—at scale.

Want to see it in action? We’ll build a full campaign (copy, insights, targeting) for 10 of your top prospects—free. 

Just get in touch.

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