Ideal customer profile (ICP)

An ideal customer profile describes the type of company that gets the most value from what you sell and is most likely to buy, renew, and expand, defined by attributes like industry, size, geography, and situation.

It's a description of a company, not a person. A buyer persona describes the person inside the company who makes the decision. A total addressable market counts every company that could theoretically buy. The ICP sits between them: the subset of the market where deals close fastest and stay longest.

The mistake most companies make is building the ICP from firmographics alone. Industry, headcount, revenue. Those describe who a company is, and a list built from them is the same list every competitor built. The useful ICP adds situation: what has to be true at the company right now for it to buy. That's where buying signals come in.

An example

An MSP's ICP by firmographics is "companies with 20 to 500 employees in the metro, in professional services, healthcare, or manufacturing." There are 6,000 of those. Its ICP with situation added is "those companies, in the month after they post an IT admin job, hit a compliance deadline, or sign a lease on a second office." There are about 40 of those at any time, and they're the ones that switch.

How to write one down

Company size, industries in and out, geography, deal size floor, the disqualifiers your sales team already uses, and the three to five situations that mean a company is deciding now. That last line is the one that makes the difference, and it's the one most ICP documents leave out.

Related terms

Buying signal · Total addressable market · Lead qualification · B2B lead generation

If you want this run for you, see our lead generation agency, or lead generation for MSPs.