When Your Pricing Strategy Stops Working: The Hidden Cost of ICP Drift
The problem might not be your pricing. It might be that you're no longer selling to the same customer for whom you set your pricing.
This is ICP drift - and it's silently destroying your monetisation strategy.
Why ICP Drift Breaks Your Pricing Model
When your Ideal Customer Profile shifts, three critical disconnects emerge:
1. Needs Misalignment: Your new customers have different pain points, different budgets, and different value thresholds than the ones you originally priced for.
2. Feature-Value Gaps: The features you've gated behind tier upgrades were designed for your original customer's journey. But your new customers don't value those features the same way - or worse, they need capabilities you've buried in higher tiers just to get basic utility from your product.
3. Monetisation Model Breakdown
Usage-based pricing, seat-based models, feature tiers - these were all architected around specific customer behaviours and expansion patterns. When your ICP shifts, the assumptions underpinning your entire monetisation strategy collapse.
ICP drift happens gradually
How to Diagnose ICP Drift Before It Tanks Your Revenue
1. Cohort Analysis: Check for Persona Consistency
Compare your customer cohorts from 12-24 months ago against recent signups. You're looking for shifts in:
Company size and employee count - Are you moving upmarket or downmarket?
Industry vertical distribution - Are you attracting different sectors?
Buying personas - Is your champion changing from technical buyer to business buyer (or vice versa)?
Use case patterns - Are customers solving the same core problem?
2. Target Customer Product Usage Patterns
Track how different customer segments actually use your product. Specifically, examine:
Feature adoption rates by cohort - Which features drive activation and retention?
Core workflow differences - Are newer customers following the same success path?
Depth of product usage - Are recent customers going shallow or deep?
Integrations and ecosystem dependencies - Are technical requirements shifting?
3. Time from First Use to Tier Upgrade
This metric reveals whether your pricing ladder matches your customer's actual value realization journey.
Track the median time from:
Signup to first paid conversion
Starter tier to mid-tier upgrade
Mid-tier to enterprise tier
The companies that scale sustainably through the £1-10M ARR range are the ones that continuously align their pricing strategy with their evolving ICP. The ones that plateau are still pricing for customers from 18 months ago.
