In B2B businesses, not every customer is the right fit for what you offer.
Some accounts align perfectly with your product, see great value, and stay with you for the long term. Others might not be the best match, taking up your time and resources without much return.
So how do you focus on the customers and the people who truly matter?
That’s where an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) comes in. Let’s explore it in detail.
And once you’re ready to build your ideal customer profile, we have a free customer profile template for you to download and use!
What is an Ideal Customer Profile?
An ideal customer profile (ICP) defines or describes a company’s dream customer and the perfect user for the problem they solve for. An ICP is the description of the kind of company or customer you want to target for your business. The hypothetical company and the person that fits your ICP is one that would realize the most value from your product or solution, stays loyal to your product, and refers you to others, giving you high returns on the investment you make to acquire the customer. When B2B companies say ICP, they could be referring to either ideal companies or ideal individual users.
An ICP helps you figure out which companies and people are the best fit for your product or service. It’s a way to focus your efforts on the accounts and individuals most likely to benefit from what you offer, making your sales and marketing more effective.
Once a business has defined an ICP, they can streamline their go-to-market strategy, run targeted marketing campaigns, generate high-potential leads that are more likely to convert, and explore upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Businesses will see an improvement in customer lifetime value (CLV), better retention rates, increased lead to customer conversions, and beat revenue targets.
A clear ICP doesn’t just help you prioritize your outreach; it ensures your efforts are relevant and focused. When you know both the right companies and the right people to target, you’ll save time, improve engagement, and close deals faster.
An ICP answers two important questions:
- Which companies are the right fit for our solution?
- Who are the key decision-makers and influencers within those companies?
Finding the right companies can be relatively easy with firmographic data like industry, size, or location. But identifying the right people whose responsibilities align with your solution is often the harder and more important step. These individuals are the decision-makers, champions, or influencers who can help move a deal forward.
This guide will take you through everything you need to know about building an ICP.
Why do you need an ICP?
If your sales and marketing teams are targeting everyone, they’re effectively targeting no one. Without focus, you risk wasting resources on accounts that may not convert or, worse, accounts that churn quickly after they do. That’s why having an ICP is so important. An ICP provides clarity on who your ideal customer is and ensures your efforts are always directed at the right opportunities.
Advantages of a well-defined ICP and its impact on your business:
- Improve sales focus: Narrow your targeting to high-fit accounts, so your team knows exactly where to invest time and energy.
- Personalize your outreach: Tailor your messaging to address the unique needs and challenges of your target audience.
- Increase ROI: Spend less time on unqualified leads and see better results from your campaigns.
- Align your teams: Get your sales, marketing, and product teams on the same page about who your ideal customer is.
- Shorten sales cycles: Focus on accounts that are more likely to convert, reducing time wasted on poor-fit leads.
An ICP doesn’t just help you find better customers, it helps you build better relationships with them, setting you up for long-term success.
How to create an ICP?
Creating an ICP is not complex, but you don’t just pull ICP criteria and attributes out of a hat. There are certain steps you need to follow and some analysis that needs to be done before you have a well-defined ICP.
You have to analyze and understand your current and past customers, categorize the profiles, identify common characteristics and use all this to identify prospects similar to the best ones.
Think of it like building a roadmap that guides your team to focus on accounts that matter most.
You can use this simple, clear framework to build an ICP for your business:
Step 1: Start with your best customers
The first step in building your ICP is looking at the customers who already work well with your product. These are the companies that generate the most revenue, stay loyal, and advocate for your brand. By analyzing these accounts, you’ll find patterns that define your ideal customer.
Pro tip:
- Review your top-performing accounts and look for patterns.
- Identify common traits like size, industry, and location.
- Note any shared challenges or problems your product solves.
In most cases, you’ll find that the ideal customers share the following characteristics:
- Industry ICP fit: they all belong to a certain industry or kind of business that requires the unique solutions that you provide.
- Profitable with large budgets: they have the financial resources and budget to use products like yours to scale their business
- Ready to buy: there is an immediate pain to be solved or a gap that holds them back from growth
- Ability/goals to scale: they have a roadmap and revenue targets that they are chasing, and need a product to help meet these goals
- Employee/company size: they are all of a certain size in terms of employee headcount
- Geographical fit: they are all based in one geographical region or cater to customers in a certain geography
For instance, if you sell B2B SaaS solutions, you might notice that your top accounts are mid-sized tech companies with growing sales teams. These companies likely face challenges your product is designed to solve, like streamlining workflows or improving team performance.
Step 2: Talk to your customers
Data can reveal a lot, but talking directly to your customers adds a layer of depth you can’t get anywhere else. Conversations with your best accounts can uncover insights about their challenges, decision-making processes, and how they view your product. Learn about why they chose your product over competitors, and how your product solved their pain points.
Pro tip:
- Ask customers what challenges led them to your product.
- Learn about alternatives they considered and why they chose you.
- Understand how they’ve benefited since using your solution.
Step 3: Analyze behavioral data, patterns, and signals
These behaviors give clues about when they might be ready to buy or engage with your product.
For instance, you might notice that your best customers often download your whitepapers, attend webinars, or visit specific pages on your website before they convert. These actions—called buying triggers—are valuable signals to look for in future prospects.
For example, if a prospect is visiting competitor websites, downloading industry reports, or engaging with relevant LinkedIn posts, it’s a strong sign they’re exploring options.
Pro tip:
- Look for common actions your best customers take before purchasing.
- Identify triggers like demo requests, webinar attendance, or whitepaper downloads.
- Track activities like competitor research or engagement with industry content.
- Use tools to prioritize accounts showing intent signals.
Step 4: Create and refine your ICP document
Once you’ve gathered all this information, it’s time to put it together into a clear and actionable ICP. Think of this as the blueprint that guides your marketing and sales efforts.
Your ICP should include:
- Firmographics: Industry, size, location, and revenue.
- Behavioral Traits: Buying triggers and engagement patterns.
- Pain Points: Challenges your product solves.
- Key Roles: The decision-makers and influencers you need to target.
Pro tip:
- Document your ICP in a simple, shareable format.
- Regularly review and update it to stay aligned with market changes.
Important note:
Keep in mind that an ICP document is not something you create once and etch in stone. Your businesses’ ideal customer profile must be revisited, refined, and updated periodically based on how the market, your product, and technology evolves.
How is an ICP different from a buyer persona?
It’s easy to confuse an ICP with a buyer persona, but they’re not the same thing.
- An ICP focuses on the organization, its size, industry, location, and other attributes.
- A buyer persona focuses on the individuals within that organization, including their roles, responsibilities, challenges, and goals.
For example, your ICP might be mid-sized SaaS companies in North America with $10M–$50M in revenue. Meanwhile, your buyer persona could be the VP of Sales Operations, who is responsible for improving CRM processes and driving revenue growth.
By combining ICPs with buyer personas, you can create highly targeted strategies that resonate with both the organization and the individuals within it.
Ideal Customer Profile template [Download for free]
You’re now familiar with what needs to be done to create an ICP for your business, and need to put the theory into practice. To make it easy for you, we’ve created downloadable templates and questionnaires you can use to define your ICP.
Click here to access and download the free ideal customer profile template! The ready-to-use worksheet includes an ICP template for an overview, and a questionnaire for your interviews with your top customers.
How to find the right people in the ICP companies?
Once you’ve identified your target ICP companies, the next step is finding the right people within those companies to reach out to.
This is often the hardest part because job titles don’t always tell the whole story.
For example, if your product focuses on sales compensation or quota planning, your ideal contact might not have an obvious title like “Compensation Manager.” Instead, you might need to target:
- A Senior Manager in Finance responsible for sales incentives.
- A Director of Revenue Operations overseeing sales analytics.
- A VP of Sales Enablement managing quotas and territories.
Identifying these decision-makers requires a deeper understanding of their roles and responsibilities, not just their titles.
With the advancements in AI-powered tools, finding the right person has become significantly more precise. AI doesn’t just look for job titles, it analyzes responsibilities, activities, and even social engagement patterns to surface the most relevant contacts. This approach ensures that your outreach is directed at the individuals most likely to resonate with your offering.
Here’s how HighperformrAI can help:
- Analyze responsibilities: AI identifies keywords and patterns in job descriptions, LinkedIn profiles, and activity data to match roles to your ICP.
- Find decision-makers and influencers: Beyond the title, AI pinpoints contacts with the authority or influence to act on your pitch.
- Adapt to role variations: AI bridges the gap between different naming conventions for similar roles across industries or regions.
Get started
Building an ICP doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With Highperformr AI, you can simplify the process and focus on what truly matters, finding the right ICP companies and the right people.
You can use Highperformr to:
- Automatically enrich your data to keep your ICP fresh and accurate.
- Identify decision-makers and influencers based on their actual responsibilities.
- Track real-time insights like job changes and LinkedIn activity to stay ahead.
Whether you’re just starting to define your ICP or want to refine your approach, Highperformr gives you the tools to streamline your sales and marketing efforts.
Don’t waste time chasing the wrong leads. Start building smarter ICPs today with Highperformr, by signing up for a demo and onboarding with our GTM engineer.
