Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Isn’t a Wishlist: Here’s How to Define it Strategically

You know what would be cool? If we could sell only to people who are really awesome, will use our product every single day, and later become the absolute best customers ever.

This is where a lot of people start when creating an ideal customer profile (ICP).

Then, they go on to create a wishlist of traits that they feel their ideal customers should have:

• Unlimited budget
• Desperate need for their product
• Immediate availability for onboarding and implementation
• A C-Suite that is absolutely on board with the purchase
• …and on and on…

Unfortunately, they’ll have about as much luck finding new customers that match this criteria as they would if they were to submit this list to a large, jolly, bearded man around December.

Your ICP shouldn’t be a list of hundreds of data points you need to check off for every new customer.

Instead, it should be a strategic list of a few key attributes that, when used correctly, lead directly to an increased conversion rate and lower churn.

An ideal customer profile is a basic description of the type of customer that is truly successful with your product or service.

So, how better to build this profile than by basing it on the people who already use and love your product?

Your happiest and most successful customers should be the foundation for your ICP.

I mean, sure, it would be great to land Google and Microsoft as customers.

But building an ICP is just as much about making sure your product is the right fit for them as it is about finding the right customers for you. 

Why would you chase Google and Microsoft if customers like them aren’t successful with your product?

So, instead of thinking, “Who do we want to sell to?” start thinking, “Who gets the most long-term value from our product?”

When you find the commonalities between your happiest customers, your ICP will take shape on its own.

Not all of your current customers are the best foundation for your ICP. So, how do you pick the right ones to analyze and build from?

To start simply, look at the data. 

The most important metrics here would be high LTV and low churn: i.e., customers who are willing to keep paying you over time because they find value in your product.

To dig deeper, work with your CS team to identify truly successful customers. 

Remember, these aren’t necessarily the customers who quietly use your product and never reach out to CS. As Steli Efti, CEO of Close, says, “Successful customers always push you to get better. They make support requests, ask for new features, and call you up with questions. They have a vested interest in your improvement because the better your product is, the stronger a company they are—your product is that vital to them.”

So, ask your customer success team: 

• Which customers reach out with questions? 
• Which ones use the most integrations? 
• Which ones ask for customizations or improvements? 
• Which ones are using our product to its full potential?

Once you have this list of customers, do more research. 

We’ll dive more into specific criteria below, but the idea here is to look for patterns. 

Learn about these customers from the data logged in your CRM. Watch recorded sales calls or onboarding conversations. If possible, conduct interviews or surveys of these customers.

Your goal here is to find out what qualities link these truly successful customers. What makes them different from other customers? What aspects of their business are similar?

With this data in hand, you’re ready for the next step.

Remember, you don’t need to choose 10, 15, or 100 aspects to match ideal customers. You don’t even need to have something from each of the four categories we’re about to discuss.

Here are the two most important things to consider when choosing what goes into your ICP:

• Which criteria are relevant to your business and your customers? 
• Which criteria include information that is publicly available to your team while doing research?

Now, let’s discuss four types of information that you may choose to include in your ICP.

Firmographics are company-level traits that help you identify whether a business is a good fit for your product. Think of these as the high-level stats you’d look up on a team before playing a match against them.

What this might include:

• Company size: How many employees do they have, or what’s their annual revenue range?
• Industry: Are they in healthcare, finance, SaaS, manufacturing, etc.?
• Location or language: Where are they based, and what languages do they operate in?

Where to find this information:

• LinkedIn and company websites: You can usually see employee counts, headquarters and team member locations, and industry classification.
• Third-party tools: Platforms like ZoomInfo, Crunchbase, or even your own CRM’s enrichment features can help you confirm more details.
• Online communities and networking events: Tap into conversations with your target market, and you might pick up tidbits on expansion plans or market focus straight from the source.

How to use firmographics in your ICP

The goal here is to understand which firmographic attributes relate directly to long-term success with your product. 

For example, maybe your most successful customers are all mid-market tech companies with at least 500 employees, but you notice that companies with less than 100 employees don’t get as much use out of your product, or tend to churn at a higher rate.

By zeroing in on firmographic details, you can quickly filter out companies at a high level that aren’t a good fit, and focus on the ones that match your sweet spot.

Knowing which tools a company already uses can help you predict whether your product will fit seamlessly into their workflow—or if they’ll need extra effort to make it work. 

It’s also a great way to see how mature this customer is in the market—are they aware they need a solution like yours? Are they using a competitor that you have a distinct advantage over? Does their current stack make it easier or harder for them to get started with your product?

What this might include:

• Tools they use: CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, analytics tools, etc.
• Integration compatibility: Does your product integrate with the products they’re currently using?
• Technical requirements: Do they typically look for cloud-based or on-premises solutions? What security protocols do they need?

Where to find this information:

• Technology tracking services: Tools like BuiltWith and Datanyze can reveal what’s under the hood of a company’s tech stack.
• Job listings: Companies often list desired expertise (e.g. “Salesforce experience) in their job descriptions.
• Company websites and case studies: Check the websites of relevant SaaS companies to see the logos they list or the case studies they’ve written. This gives you insight into who is using their product.

How to use tech information in your ICP

Your product’s value often hinges on whether it easily meshes with a prospect’s existing tech environment. 

For example, Influ2 is more valuable for teams that use our CRM integrations. Not only does it make the product easier to use, but it enables specific features like automated revenue reporting. Sure, you can still use Influ2 without the integrations, but it requires more manual work.

If you choose to incorporate tech stack compatibility into your ICP, you can quickly identify which accounts are primed for success, and which may need a more hands-on approach—or a different solution altogether.

Chances are, your product is best suited for a specific department (or even a specific role) within a company. So, adding team-specific criteria to your ICP helps you see if a company has the right people internally to support using—and seeing success with—your product.

Understanding how a prospect’s internal teams are organized can be a game-changer for identifying if they’re truly a fit.

What this might include:

• Titles: Who typically uses your product within a company? Who owns the buying process?
• Team structure: Do they have dedicated teams for sales, marketing, or customer success? Who is responsible for these teams? Is a single person juggling multiple responsibilities?
• Specific departments: E.g., if you sell software for outbound sales, your ideal customers should have an outbound sales department (and if they don’t, they’re probably not an ideal customer).
• Buying committee makeup: Who is typically responsible for purchase decisions? Who signs off on new tools?

Where to find this information:

• LinkedIn profiles and team pages: Use LinkedIn to research employee titles, team structures, and department distribution.

• Industry reports and databases: Tools like ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator can offer deeper insights into organizational structures and team compositions.
• Job listings: Review current job postings to understand which roles are prioritized.

How to use team-specific information in your ICP

When you know how your happiest customers set up their teams—and which roles your team typically interacts with during the buying process—you can build an ICP based on people, not just on high-level company facts.

Let’s look at Influ2 as an example again: our tool isn’t a great fit for teams that aren’t running outbound motions. If they don’t have SDRs, AEs, or people who run an ABM program, it’s probably not the right fit. However, if they have an outbound team that works alongside a Head of ABM, they’re probably a great fit!

Pro tip: You can also use your ICP to narrow down the tactics you use to sell to your target audience, even down to an individual level. 

If you want to target Microsoft, you don’t need to target the entire company. Your time is best used when you target buying committee members who match the titles you’ve defined in your ICP. 

This is where Influ2 shines—you can use it to target the individuals who are most likely to be part of a purchase decision with contact-level ads. With a well-defined ICP that drills down to the individual level, you can use Influ2 to directly influence sales. Book a demo to see how it works.

An ideal customer profile isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. You can’t just copy what another company is doing, or download some internet guru’s ICP template and expect it to fit your unique situation.

Depending on your industry and product, you may need to add criteria that are uniquely relevant to your customers’ maturity, regulatory obligations, or market focus. These attributes will probably look very different from what another company chooses to include.

Do you need these in your ICP? That will depend on the patterns you’ve found in your most successful customers, and whether or not it really affects how you do business with these people.

What this might include:

• Industry-specific requirements: Certain certifications, regulations, or frameworks that companies must follow.
• Market maturity signals: Public disclosure reports, specific compliance filings, or third-party accreditations may show a company is ready for your solution.
• Funding status: Are your most successful customers typically VC backed, or bootstrapped? How much funding do they have, and what series of funding are they at?

Where to find this information:

• Public filings and reports: Companies often disclose compliance details or funding details in annual reports or investor documents.
• Regulatory databases: If you’re targeting organizations under specific laws and guidelines, check official registries or government portals.
• Third-party research platforms: Tools like Crunchbase can tell you more about a company’s funding status.

How to use this in your ICP

Your custom criteria should reflect those must-have conditions that show a prospect is both ready for and likely to benefit from your product. 

For example, let’s say you offer a solution for carbon compliance. You might focus on companies that publicly disclose carbon emissions or hold certain certifications—strong signals they’re ready to invest in more sustainability efforts.

By adding these extra criteria to your ICP, you’re not just guessing about fit—you’re basing it on real-world signals that tie directly to your product’s success. 

Whether it’s a niche certification, a specific operational setup, or a maturity milestone in your industry, these details help you zero in on accounts that will make the most out of what you’re offering.

Creating an ideal customer profile isn’t just a Marketing job. Neither is it just a job for Sales or CS.

To win, all these key players need to get onto the field and play the match as a team. 

When Marketing, Sales, and CS work together to build an ICP, each department knows what “ideal” looks like, and they’re spending their energy trying to attract, close, and retain the same key accounts.

So, host a brainstorming session. Gather people from all of these teams and review the data on your most successful customers, like we talked about earlier. Talk through what each team sees as “must-have” vs. “nice-to-have” attributes.

Then, once you’ve validated these criteria with real customer insights, document your ICP clearly. Keep it short and sweet, and store it somewhere that’s easy for all these teams to reference.

Then, each department can start using this ICP in their daily work.

For Marketing, this could include:

• Creating ABM target lists: With a clearly defined ICP, your ABM team can identify which accounts are more likely to become long-term customers, and pinpoint the buying groups within those accounts to target.
• Building a content strategy: A clearer picture of the people you’re targeting can help you create content that speaks directly to the pain points and challenges of your ICP.

For Sales, using an ICP means:

• Qualifying (or disqualifying) new leads quickly: For inbound, a quick discovery call (or even a well-worded form question) can tell your sales team if this lead is likely to convert. For outbound, sales teams can focus more of their time and energy on the prospects that closely match your “must-have” ICP criteria.
• Adapting sales messaging: Sales teams can also tailor their outreach, using specific language to talk about the pain points of their ICP. Knowing what’s bothering them, what’s happening in their industry, and what really matters to them is key to creating sales messages that stick.
• Dynamic prioritization: As Desiree-Jessica Pely, CoFounder and CEO at Loyee says: “We pull data from CRM, financial reports, hiring trends, and tech adoption to continuously adjust prioritization. This way, sales and marketing don’t waste time on accounts that just look good—they focus on the ones most likely to close.”

For Customer Success, using your ICP might look like:

• Assigning CSMs specializations: Especially if you have multiple ICPs, you can assign each CSM a specific group to work with. That way, they get to know that profile and industry on a much deeper level, and can speak from a place of real expertise.
• Building custom onboarding processes: Each ICP has specific needs, and creating a custom onboarding experience that’s tailored to their needs can help with adoption.
• Finding expansion opportunities: Knowing the ICP helps CS teams spot accounts that are primed for upsells or cross-sells—especially if certain traits (like a growing tech stack) correlate with more product usage.

Here’s an example: At one company I worked with, the team decided to create three separate ICPs for three unique types of customers. Marketing then developed industry-specific content, and even interviewed influencers and niche content creators in each space. Sales created tailored sequences for inbound leads that identified with a certain ICP. And CS created customized demo environments and onboarding resources for each group.

The key point? An ICP isn’t just a marketing tool—it’s a company-wide guide to finding and serving the right customers in the best way possible. 

If you take one thing away from this article, let it be this: an ICP should be practical, not perfect.

Most ICPs end up lost in a folder collecting (metaphorical) dust. 

To avoid that, resist the urge to pile on every imaginable criterion. Too much detail can turn your ICP into a bloated 52-page document that no one will ever look at again. Instead, make sure it’s concise, relevant, and collected in a format and place where everyone can use it.

At the same time, remember that your ICP isn’t the final word on which customers you can and can’t serve. Think of it as a helpful roadmap, not a rigid set of rules. There will always be exceptions—so keep an open mind to those hidden gems that don’t perfectly match your ICP, but see huge value from your product.

Do all of this, and you’ll have an ICP that’s more than a document—it’s a powerful tool for higher conversions, smoother onboarding, and happier customers who stick around for the long haul.