What is an ideal customer profile?
A description of the companies worth selling to, specific enough to build a list from.
An ideal customer profile is the answer to who should we be talking to, written down. A useful one names the attributes a list can be filtered on: industry, size, geography, and whatever else genuinely separates the accounts that buy from the ones that do not.
Most written ICPs fail at being actionable. They describe a mindset or a pain rather than an attribute, and nobody can filter a database on a mindset. The test is whether somebody who has never met your customers could build the list from the document alone.
The second failure is confidence without evidence. An ICP asserted in a planning session and never checked against who actually bought will send a team after the wrong accounts for a quarter before anybody notices.
Read next
- Write it as attributes that can be filtered, not as a description of a feeling.
- Check it against your closed-won list before you build anything from it.
- Count how many companies match before committing, because an ICP matching two hundred accounts is a different plan from one matching twenty thousand.
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Try it on your own ICP
Describe who you want and see how many match, before creating an account.
Try it on your own ICP