The ideal customer profile, or ICP, describes the companies you have the most reasons to contact. These are the companies that face the problem your offer solves, at a moment when they can spend time and budget on it.
What it contains
A useful ICP combines three types of criteria.
- Structural criteria: sector, size, market, sales model. You’ll find them on a website or a company profile.
- Organizational criteria: a sales team or a relevant department, and the tool it already uses.
- Situational criteria: growth, hiring, entering a new market, restructuring. Buying signals often reveal them.
How to phrase it
Start from the problem you solve and work back to the companies that face it. For each criterion, ask: “why does this criterion make the problem more likely?”. If the question has no answer, the criterion rests on an assumption and you can drop it.
Then write down how to recognize each criterion from the outside. You can check “sales team of two to ten people” on LinkedIn, but not “results-driven culture”.
Where it fits in the method
The ICP is the first step of signal-based selling, because it sets the accounts where you look for signals. Without it, every signal you observe forces you to requalify the account from scratch.
Example
A company selling a prospecting-preparation tool targets B2B software companies of ten to a hundred people, with at least one salesperson, selling on a cycle of a few weeks. An SDR hire at an account outside that scope does not trigger a message.
See also: Signal-based selling, Lead scoring, Intent data, and Buyer persona.