The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Why It Matters and How to Create One

Understanding exactly who your audience is and how to speak to them allows you to focus your marketing efforts and improve lead generation with warm, high-value prospects.

This guide will explore how ICPs work, why they are important, and how you can create one for your business using an ideal customer profile template. 

Let’s start with an ICP definition.

What is an ideal customer profile (ICP)?  

An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a detailed outline of the model client for whom your product is a perfect fit.  Your ICP will contain various types of information that can be used to identify and classify your best prospects. This helps to direct and adjust marketing and lead generation tactics for the best chances of success.

ICP details may include:

• Demographics

• Firmographics

• Psychographics

• Company size

• Budget/revenue

• Industry

• Pain points

• SLA expectations

• Legal requirements

A detailed ICP serves as a guide to finding your best leads and potential clients. It helps you focus on customers who are both an ideal fit and most likely to remain loyal to your company. 

Ideal customer profiles are like “cheat sheets”. They serve as quick references for your sales, marketing, support, and success teams. ICPs are also a crucial part of any account-based marketing (ABM) strategy.

ICP vs buyer personas: The key differences

You might think ideal customer profile vs buyer persona is a redundant comparison—aren’t they essentially the same thing? 

While they are often viewed as synonymous, the difference between ideal customer profiles and buyer personas comes down to how they approach the customer and how they are used.

An ICP identifies your best target customers. For B2B this can include finding companies that are a good fit for your business and the solutions you offer. 

At Leadfeeder, for example, our ideal customers are B2B SaaS companies with over 10 employees—similar to ourselves. 

Meanwhile, buyer personas are fictitious people who represent decision-makers and stakeholders at those companies. These are the imagined customers that your sales and marketing teams will need to curate touchpoints around in order to create a better user experience.

At Leadfeeder we use an ideal customer profile template to define the goals of our target clients and figure out how our marketing must be adapted to each type of customer.

For example, even if you’re proposing the same solution, you will need to tailor your message to the recipient. You’d likely focus on cost savings when talking with a CFO but highlight features that solve specific pain points when targeting an end user.

Both sales and marketing teams can benefit from having an ICP to guide them—let’s delve deeper into how they are used. 

How is an ICP used in marketing?

By creating your ideal customer profile, you’ll better understand your target audience, which will ultimately help with your marketing. With a clear sense of who you're targeting, you'll know which platforms are best to reach them on and how to communicate more effectively.

For example, if your business is targeting 20-year-olds, you’re unlikely to find many leads by running paid ads on LinkedIn. Instead, you might look at using platforms like TikTok or Instagram. 

Using an ICP in marketing means creating campaigns that are more likely to resonate with your demographic. 

How is an ICP used in sales?

When you have an ideal customer profile, your sales team can better tailor their outreach efforts.

Sales demos? Tick. 

Cold emails? Tick.

Pitches and proposals? Tick, tick.

Rather than taking a stab in the dark, team members can use examples of ideal customer profiles to hone in on your target market in sales situations. 

As a result, they’ll have the best foundation for engaging in conversation with high-quality leads and sales prospects. 

Rather than taking a stab in the dark, team members can use examples of ideal customer profiles to hone in on your target market in sales situations.

As a result, they’ll have the best foundation for engaging in conversation with high-quality leads and sales prospects.

Why is an ideal customer profile important?

An ideal customer profile gives you a better understanding of your customers. It helps align strategy between marketing, sales, support, and other departments. 

According to Forbes, 81% of people prefer a company that offers a personalized experience. An ICP is the foundation for giving customers these personalized experiences.  

Let’s examine a few of the benefits your business can gain from using ICPs:

• Improve lead generation: Focus your sales and marketing efforts on the prospects who are most likely to convert.

• Target marketing: Cater your solutions and messaging to fit your dream customers. 

• Increase retention rates: Highlight the potential clients that are most likely to stick around for the long term.

• Be more data-driven: Use the research and data analysis required to build a comprehensive ICP to deepen your audience awareness and make better business decisions.

• Improve products and customer service: Find out exactly what your customers need and how to provide it.

• Save time and money: Focus your efforts on the best prospects and eliminate the waste of resources on those who are unfit for your business.

• Prioritize your pipeline: Identify the leads that your teams should nurture and the ones to place on the back burner. 

Don’t spend your time chasing any and every potential opportunity. An ICP helps you circle in on the highest-quality leads. 

Using an ICP is like moving the 17th-century blunderbuss of cold outreach to the laser-guided missiles of personalization and ABM. Which tool do you think is more likely to hit the target?

This is equally true of using Leadfeeder’s tools. You don’t just want to identify anyone and everyone visiting your site, you want to find the visitors who fit your ICP and are ready to convert. Using Leadfeeder’s customizable feed and lead scoring features, you can find these leads and create a personalized sales and marketing plan for them. 

How to create an ideal customer profile 

While we can provide ideal customer profile examples, there  is no one-size-fits-all ICP—you've always got to do the work to figure it out for your specific business yourself. Luckily, it isn't a complicated process.

Step one: Make a list of your best customers

The first step is to identify your best current customers and spot which characteristics they share.

Keep in mind that "best"  can be defined in many different ways.

For example, you might compare their lifetime value, how long they stay with your company, how long they take to convert—or any mix of other metrics.

Learn as much as possible about your current customers to get a better understanding of which you think are the best—and why that is the case. 

Is it the size of their company, how fast they’re growing, or their location?

Make sure you’ve gathered all the information about them that you can before you move on to the next step.

Step two: Research common attributes

You can now look at the attributes that are shared by your best customers. These could include the following:   

• Company size: Are your best prospects startups, multinational enterprises, or something in between? The size of an organization affects its needs and budget as well as the duration of the buying process. Bigger companies often have more gatekeepers.

• Industry: What industries and verticals are your potential customers operating in? You probably market to multiple industries. However, you wouldn’t take the same approach with a pharmaceutical company as you would with a telemarketing company.

• Location: Geography is a critical factor for your ideal customer. Besides language, culture, and customs, you also have to consider legal requirements. Certain countries or regions may make it more difficult for customers to use your products. Even without legal obstacles, you’ll want to tailor messaging to fit each geographic market.

• Maturity: Company size is one thing, but what about factors such as fundraising or project growth rates? Different businesses have different goals depending on where they are in their lifecycle. Is your product scalable? Does it have quick implementation times? If not, it may be best suited to large and established organizations. 

• Budget: Annual revenue and other core financials impact how much a customer can spend on a solution. This doesn’t always have to be about identifying prospects with the most cash to burn—find out what budget is the sweet spot for your product and what different price points you can offer.

Research lies at the heart of an effective ICP, but digging up information on your target market isn’t always easy. Consult industry experts, sales intelligence tools, and competitor reports to find the information you need. With Leadfeeder, you can track website visitors and identify firmographic information, such as company size, industry, and location.

Once you know the common attributes of your best potential customers, it’s time to dig deeper into your opportunities.

Step three: Outline opportunities and challenges 

Now you have a rough draft of your ICP—it’s time to add the details and really make it pop.

Opportunities are the specific pain points your product solves for customers. What advantages or improvements do you bring to the table? Build your messaging around the opportunities you bring to the table, for example, if you save a company money when they switch to your solution.

What about sales challenges? These are the potential obstacles your sales and marketing teams may encounter that halt momentum. It could be anything from budget to adoption to infrastructure and technical limitations. 

Knowing challenges ahead of time helps you prepare to meet them head-on. Alternatively, it guides your team to de-prioritize prospects that carry red flags to the buying process. 

How do you find out about opportunities and challenges? Talk to the people who know best: the potential clients themselves. Use customer feedback surveys, in-person observations, and interviews to gain a better understanding and flesh out your ICPs.

Step four: Document your ICP

You've gathered all the data, you've done all the work, and now you have a strong idea of who your best customers are—as well as how to recognize them.

The final step is to create a document that clearly outlines each ICP and lists all the information you've gathered about them.

Use a visual document, such as a slide show or PDF, to present this information, and make sure to continue to update your findings with new data regularly.

Should you use an ideal customer profile template?

While every ICP is unique, an ideal customer profile template can ensure you add all the information your team needs to maximize opportunities. A B2B ideal customer profile template is particularly useful as it makes it easy to focus on the right details during the research process. 

Sections to put in an ideal customer profile template for B2B prospects include:

• Company size: How many employees does the company have?

• Business niche: What industry/vertical does this customer type do business in?

• Company type: Is the prospect a public, private, non-profit, or government organization?

• Annual revenue: What is the company’s turnover and annual revenue? This will affect its spending budget.

• Location: Is the organization located in your main markets? If not, what complications might be caused by its location?

• Buying process/decision-makers: What steps does the prospect take when purchasing a product or service? Is it senior managers, C-suite executives, or someone else that you need to connect with?

• Pain points: What are the key problems the business faces? Does your product solve them?

• Business goals: What are the short-term and long-term goals of the company?

• Tech stack: What existing tools does the organization use? What are their attached strengths and weaknesses?

• Differentiation tactics: What content is this prospect looking for?

Potential challenges: Are there any obstacles to this prospect being ready to buy? Do they have a limited budget or cybersecurity issues?

How do you use an ICP to grow your business?

Once you’ve created your ICP, you need to turn theory into action.

Use your CRM and other customer account tools to compare your current customers to your new ICP. Do things match up well, or are you spending too much time on low-yield clients? No worries if that’s the case—now’s the time to fix it.

Let’s start with your sales pipeline. Consult industry databases and market research to hunt for prospective clients that fit your ICP. Leadfeeder provides website visitor tracking that you can use to easily find warm leads. Make sure to consider company information, such as firmographics and geographical location during outreach. 

Rank each section of the ICP template according to importance. Compare organization profiles against the relevant ICP template sections. Score leads based on how many and which boxes they tick.

Your marketing team can use the ICP to adjust and tailor messaging and tactics. Let’s say that it turns out your ideal customers are companies with 400 to 800 employees. If most of your marketing currently targets smaller businesses, your team can use ICPs to align campaigns and generate the leads that sales expect. 

Take this same approach to customer success, service, and support. Using ICPs to optimize experiences to suit your ideal buyer persona will increase customer satisfaction and retention. 

An ICP unifies your organization to focus on targets with the best return on investment. 

Create your ideal customer profile with help from Leadfeeder

If you don’t know by now, I don’t know how else to tell you that an ideal customer profile is essential for effective sales prospecting and lead generation.

An ICP allows your sales team to zero in on the most promising leads and saves them from wasting time on less promising ones. Meanwhile, your ICP marketing helps your teams create personalized experiences that keep your customers happy.

Every ideal customer profile needs to be based on accurate, identifying information, which is what Leadfeeder and Dealfront provide.

Sign up for a product demo today and find out how Leadfeeder helps you discover target accounts that are already visiting your website today.