How many ideal customer profiles should you have?

One per motion that needs a different list or a different argument. Two or three is common in a company selling to distinct segments. Beyond that the profiles usually stop being distinguishable, and the effort is better spent on personas inside one profile.

How often should an ICP be revisited?

Whenever the closed-won and churned data has moved enough to change the answer, which in practice means each time you have a meaningful number of new renewals and losses to compare. An ICP written once at founding and never revisited describes a market that no longer exists.

Can you build an ICP before you have customers?

You can build a hypothesis, and it should be labelled as one. Without won and churned deals to compare there is nothing to separate a real pattern from a guess, so the first version exists to be narrowed by early results rather than to be defended.

JaxSuite AI

What Is an Ideal Customer Profile?

TL;DR

An ideal customer profile, or ICP, is a description of the type of company most likely to buy and stay. It is written at the account level from attributes such as industry, headcount, location and technology in use, which is what makes it usable directly as a set of filters on a contact database.

What goes into an ideal customer profile?

Only attributes you can filter on. Industry, employee headcount, revenue band, location, technology in use and business model are all queryable in a contact database, so each one narrows a list. Statements such as ambitious or growth-minded are not, and an ICP built from them cannot be turned into a segment.

A useful ICP also names its exclusions. Companies below a headcount that cannot fund the purchase, industries with a regulatory blocker, and regions you cannot support are worth writing down, because an exclusion removes more waste from a list than another inclusion adds signal.

How is an ICP different from a buyer persona?

An ICP describes the company, a persona describes the human inside it. The ICP answers which accounts belong on the list, and the persona answers who to write to and what argument lands with them.

Both are needed and they fail differently. A strong ICP with no persona produces a list of the right companies contacted at the wrong job title, and a strong persona with no ICP produces a well-written message sent to companies that were never going to buy.

How do you build an ICP from customers you already have?

Start from won deals rather than from ambition, and look specifically at accounts that renewed or expanded rather than every account that ever signed. Pull the firmographic attributes those accounts share, then check the same attributes against the deals you lost and the customers who churned.

The attributes that appear on the retained side and not on the churned side are the ICP. That comparison is the whole exercise: an attribute that is common to every customer, retained and churned alike, describes your market rather than your ideal customer, so it does not belong in a filter.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

One per motion that needs a different list or a different argument. Two or three is common in a company selling to distinct segments. Beyond that the profiles usually stop being distinguishable, and the effort is better spent on personas inside one profile.