Glossary: targeting
What is an ideal customer profile (ICP)?
An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a written description of the kind of company most likely to buy from you, get value and stay. It lists traits you can filter a list by, such as industry, size, region and a trigger.
The four parts of an ICP
Industry
The sectors you sell into
Company size
A band of employees or revenue
Region
Where you can sell and serve
Trigger
An event that creates the need
An ideal customer profile has four parts you can filter by.
An ICP describes companies, not people. Industry, company size, region and a trigger should each be something you can check in a data source before you send a single email.
Firmographics set the outline.
Industry, employee count, revenue band and region decide which companies are in or out. They are the easiest traits to filter, so they come first.
A trigger says why now.
A trigger is an event that creates the need for what you sell, such as a funding round, a new hire in a key role or a move into a new market.
Exclusions keep the list clean.
Write down who you do not want: sectors you cannot serve, companies too small to pay or too large to move, and existing customers.
Here is an ideal customer profile for an invented payroll company.
Imagine Tavelock, an invented company that sells payroll software. It looks at its best customers and finds that most are logistics firms with 50 to 500 employees in the United States, and that most bought within a few months of opening a second site.
Tavelock writes its ICP in one line: logistics companies, 50 to 500 employees, United States, opened a new site in the last 6 months. A data search for logistics companies in the United States returns 9,000. The size band leaves 2,400. Adding the trigger leaves 380, and those 380 get the first campaign.
Tavelock's list narrows as each part of the ICP is applied
Use your ICP to decide who goes on the list.
An ICP earns its keep when it changes who you email. These steps turn it from a slide into a filter.
The four steps in order
- 1Study your best customers
- 2Write filters
- 3Test one segment
- 4Revise it
- 1
Start from the customers you already have.
List the accounts that bought fastest, paid most and stayed longest. Look for the traits they share before you guess at a market.
- 2
Write each trait as a filter.
A trait you cannot search for is a wish. Turn every line into something a data source can check, like a headcount band or a job title.
- 3
Test one segment at a time.
Send to one slice of the profile, read the replies and keep the slices that answer. Then widen.
- 4
Rewrite it when the replies disagree.
If a different sector keeps replying, the profile was wrong. Update it and rebuild the list.
Prymatica starts with an onboarding call to understand exactly who to target, then sources a custom prospect list for your exact ICP and verifies every contact before sending. See how Prymatica's cold email process works.
Teams make these mistakes with an ideal customer profile.
The profile is too wide.
"Any B2B company" is not a profile. If the description fits most of the market, it cannot tell you who to email first.
It describes a person, not a company.
Job title and seniority belong to the buyer persona. The ICP picks the account, and the persona picks who inside it gets the email.
It never changes.
Markets move and products change. A profile written two years ago describes the customers you used to win.
These glossary terms sit next to ideal customer profile.
These Prymatica pages go deeper on ideal customer profile.
Questions
People ask these questions about ideal customer profile.
What is the difference between an ICP and a buyer persona?
An ICP describes the company: its industry, size, region and trigger. A buyer persona describes a person inside that company, such as the head of operations, with their goals and objections. You need the ICP first, because it decides which accounts the persona is looked for in.
How many ideal customer profiles should a company have?
Start with one. A second profile is worth writing when a different kind of company buys for a different reason and needs a different message. Each profile should get its own list and its own campaign so the results can be read separately.
What goes into an ICP for B2B cold email?
Industry, employee count or revenue band, region, the trigger that creates the need and a list of exclusions. For cold email, add the job titles you will write to, since the list has to contain named people with verified addresses.
How often should you update an ICP?
Review it whenever a campaign finishes. Compare who replied and who booked a meeting with who the profile said would. Change the profile when the replies point somewhere else.
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