Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Overview

An ICP describes the company most likely to buy fast, succeed, and stay. A
persona describes the people inside it you talk to. TAM is the whole market;
the ICP is the sharp slice you actually go after. Get the ICP wrong and every
downstream dollar of sourcing, copy, and sending is aimed at the wrong target.

Core move: don't invent the ICP - derive it from your best customers.

Derive it from reality

1. List your 10-20 best accounts (fast close, high retention, expansion, referrals).
2. Find what they share that your worst accounts don't.
3. Write the pattern as explicit, filterable criteria. If you can't filter on it,
   it's not yet an ICP attribute - make it concrete.

Signal types

Type	Examples
Firmographic	industry/vertical, employee count, revenue, geography, business model (B2B/B2C), funding stage
Technographic	tools in their stack, cloud provider, CMS, competitor product installed
Behavioral	hiring for a role, launched a product, opened an office, website activity
Intent	researching your category, visiting pricing pages, G2 category activity

Trigger events (why now)

The strongest outbound rides a recent change. Watch for: new funding, a new
executive in the buyer's seat, a relevant new hire wave, M&A, a product launch,
a public pain (outage, bad review, compliance deadline), or a competitor switch.
A trigger turns a cold email into a timely, relevant one.

The weighted scorecard

Score each account so sourcing and sending go to the best first.

Score = Σ (signal_weight × signal_match)

Example weights (tune to your data):
  Employee count in 50-500 ....... 25
  Target industry ................ 20
  Uses complementary tool X ...... 15
  Hiring for relevant role ....... 15
  Intent signal in category ...... 15
  In target geography ............ 10

Tiers:  A = 80-100 (hit now)   B = 50-79 (nurture)   C = <50 (skip for now)

Anti-ICP (who to exclude)

Just as important as who to target. Write exclusions explicitly: too small to
afford you, wrong region/regulatory regime, a segment that churns, students/
job-seekers, competitors, free-email-only domains, industries you can't serve.
Exclusions keep your list clean and your deliverability safe.

Turn the ICP into prospecting filters

The deliverable isn't a paragraph - it's a search spec: title keywords +
seniority, headcount range, industry codes, geos, technologies, and the
trigger(s) to prioritize. That spec is what a sourcing tool (or Chronos) runs.

Do / Don't

• Do base the ICP on retention and expansion, not just closed-won.
• Do keep it to 3-6 attributes you can actually filter on.
• Don't confuse "anyone who could use it" (TAM) with "who buys best" (ICP).
• Don't let the ICP go stale - re-derive it every quarter from new wins/churns.

Common mistakes

• An ICP so broad it excludes no one (then every list is noise).
• Persona attributes (job title) with no company attributes, or vice versa.
• No anti-ICP, so junk and competitors flood the list.
• Scoring on vanity signals (brand you recognize) over predictive ones.

Go live with Chronos (optional)

• geo_analyze_website - infer a first-draft ICP straight from the user's site.
• geo_search_contacts - run the ICP as live filters to pull real matching people.
• geo_enrich_contact - fill firmo/technographic fields to score accounts.
• geo_get_database / geo_add_database_item - store the ICP so every campaign reuses it.

Connect in ~30s → `CONNECT-CHRONOS.md`. Free, no card.

See also: positioning-and-messaging, lead-sourcing-and-enrichment, account-research.