How to effectively define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

If you're attempting to market to everyone, you're in danger of engaging no one. The broad brush, spray and pray approach has never really worked with potential buyers, but when they’re now armed with more knowledge and choice than ever before, you have to stand out for all of the right reasons.

If you're early-revenue or scaling fast, a well-defined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is the foundation of focused, effective B2B marketing. It sharpens your messaging, guides Go-to-Market (GTM), and helps you prioritise the accounts most likely to convert (and grow).

But defining your ICP isn’t just a box-ticking exercise, it’s a strategic move that can make or break your pipeline. And spending the time to make sure it’s right, and what you’re building appeals to their biggest priorities, will set your entire commercial structure up for success.

That’s because an ICP isn’t just something that’s used by marketing, it’s the core reference point for your sales and product teams too. The whole team works out how to make this person’s life much easier, removing friction points and freeing up time.

So, how can you build an ICP that keeps your marketing and sales efforts aligned, efficient, and grounded in the reality of your best-fit customers?

What should you include in your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) document?

To start with ask yourself three questions:

1. Who is experiencing the pain points your product is trying to solve?

2. What connects these individuals?

3. What does the ideal customer look like? (Job title, company, industry)

Real world customer data is key here - what do all of your current clients have in common and how are they using your product? What are some of the biggest challenges they’re facing and how are you helping? 

Then start to look at some of the core attributes that are currently linking it all together:

• Key pain points 

• Job title

• Seniority within organisation

• Desired company industry or industries

• Ideal country or region

• Company size

• Estimated budget

• Decision making factors, including organisational structure and key stakeholders

• Where they read and consume information

  
  

Prioritising the pain points

Create a pain points matrix where you can start to collate all of the information on your ideal customer and what their priorities are. You’ll then be able to categorise later on into tiers, and even start to shape your product roadmap.

If you don’t know where to start, here’s an anonymised example I have used very recently:

Aim to have 10 pain points and how you can solve them mapped out and in priority order. This will help narrow down your ICP and start to give your messaging some structure.

Developing your ICP

By now you should have all of your customer and industry research, your pain points matrix mapped out and an idea of who you are targeting. All you need to do now is get it on a page to align the focus throughout your business.

I’ve seen ICP documents in many shapes and sizes across the years, but the one thing I always advise to start out simple and then refine when you absolutely have to. And if you want to use AI to generate your ideal customer into a real person, then that helps too.

The template you could use to map this out could look like this one:

What’s next?

Test it. Start working with sales to segment out the data that fits this and work on a very targeted set of messaging that is all about the customer and how you can help. Start logging the feedback and successes and then you’ll start to know when to refine and what product can add to the roadmap later down the line.

But, seriously, log these conversations in your CRM or somewhere very central. 

Need fractional marketing support to ensure that your ICP comes to life? Book in a 20 minute chat about your requirements.