Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

A vague target, "businesses that need marketing help", sends effort in every direction. A sharp ICP tells a team who to prospect, what to say and which leads to turn down. Time spent on poor fits is the real cost: they take long to close, ask for custom work and leave early.

The ICP also guides product, pricing and content. If it is wrong, every one of those is aimed slightly off.

• List the best customers: the ones that paid well, stayed long and recommended the business. Find what they share.
• Compare them with the worst customers. The differences are often more useful than the similarities.
• Write the profile on one page, so a new salesperson can apply it without asking.
• Score every new lead against the profile before spending time on it.
• Review it each quarter. If the win rate shifts, the real fit has probably moved.

An ICP describes who to sell to. It is written from evidence, such as the best customers a business already has, not from hope. A useful ICP names:

• The company: size, industry, country, tools used and how it is organised.
• The person: the job title who feels the problem and the one who signs.
• The trigger: the event that makes the problem urgent now, such as a new funding round, a new leader or a failed system.

Example: "Dutch marketing agencies with 10 to 50 staff, led by a founder who still handles sales, that have just lost a key hire."

• Describing the whole market instead of the best part of it.
• Listing only company traits and forgetting the trigger.
• Mixing up the ICP with a buyer persona. The ICP says which companies. The persona says which people inside them.