How to define your B2B ideal customer profile (ICP) [template]

A lot of early-stage SaaS companies start and stop after they define their TAM (total addressable market).

The problem is that a TAM is too broad for an effective GTM strategy – especially for younger companies. In the beginning, you need to find customers that are a great fit, not just... a fit.

When you don’t define an ideal customer profile (ICP), it tells your marketing and sales teams to operate with a “spray and pray” mentality, trying to force product-market fit somewhere within your TAM. That’s really inefficient, especially when you have limited money and time to get results.

When you go after the wrong companies, write the wrong messages, promote the wrong value-props, and create the wrong content for too long, you run out of time to get results.

Creating an ideal customer profile (ICP) forces you to segment that market to find best-case accounts for your company – so you can focus your time on strategies that are most likely to get you customers.

Create your B2B SaaS ideal customer profile with our free template

• Outline the filters and signals you’ll use to build your TAM, SAM and SOM
• Provide direction for your messaging and sales materials by defining simple customer personas

What’s an ideal customer profile (ICP)?

An ICP is an outline of your ideal customer – the ones you want more of. The ones that buy from you consistently and tell others about their great experiences. The customers that don’t churn. The customers that had a real pain and clearly saw your value proposition. The customers that had the shortest sales cycles and lowest sales friction.

Your ICP provides guidelines to your sales and marketing teams. It tells them which companies are a great fit – and what they should look for to find more like them. It should be the “North Star” for your team as they build your customer base.

To be very clear, your ICP should not be used strictly to accept or reject all new prospects. There may be companies that fall outside of your ICP that are still a great fit for your product. Your ICP’s main job is to provide guidance for the companies you want to approach outbound.

One of the first things we do when we start working with our partners at Kalungi is hone in on their ICP. It’s important to get this step right. It influences almost all of the GTM work that follows.

What should your final ICP look like?

It doesn’t need to be complex – in fact, it should be (somewhat) simple. If it’s too strict, you’ll find yourself with too small a target to aim for. If it’s too broad, it defeats the purpose of the whole exercise.

If you’re struggling to find the right balance, start with lots of detail. When the time comes to size up your TAM (total addressable market), SAM (specific addressable market) and SOM (specific obtainable market), you can always remove certain filters to make your pool large enough to be meaningful.

At Kalungi, when we define ICPs for our partners, we try to fit them onto a single slide. If you need more space than that, it might be worth rethinking your filters and signals.

Before you start: have you reached product-market fit (PMF)?

Before starting this exercise, you need to answer one very important question: Have you reached product-market fit (PMF)? Depending on your answer to this question, you may want to approach your ICP development differently.

How do you know if you’ve reached PMF? Here's a good litmus test: How many of your customers were referred to you by your existing customers?

If it’s ~30% or more – it’s a good indicator that you’ve reached PMF within a segment of your customers. Obviously this also depends on the verticals you service and the kinds of software you sell – but it’s a good place to start if you’re unsure.

You’ll know you’ve reached PMF when your customers are really excited about what you’re selling – maybe even more than you are. Josh Porter from Rocket Insights sums it up well:

“Product/Market Fit is a funny term, but here’s a concrete way to think about it: when people understand and use your product enough to recognize it’s value, that's a huge win. But when they begin to share their positive experience with others, when you can replicate the experience with every new user who your existing users tell, then you have Product/Market Fit on your hands.”

- Josh Porter, Rocket Insights

• Strong NPS scores (9+) for referral customers
• A significant portion of new (profitable) business from referrals (30+%)
• High retention (or low churn rates) within a specific group of customers

How to segment your target customers in B2B

If you’ve reached PMF

When you’ve reached product-market fit, firmographics, technographics and demographics are good primary methods for segmentation. The first thing you can do is analyze your current customer dataset. Are there any trends in the data that create a cluster or a “beachhead” that represents customers you want more of?

If you haven't reached PMF

When you haven’t yet reached product-market fit, it can be risky to segment your ICP in the same way as above. You may need to focus more on psychographics and job-to-be-done characteristics to segment the market.

ICP segmentation methods for PMF

Firmographics

Firmographics are characteristics of the companies where your customer personas work. Think about the accounts that are the best fit for your product. A few sample questions you can answer are:

• What industry (or industries) are they in?
• How many people are in the company?
• How big is the department you sell into? Is there a minimum or maximum size?
• Is there a typical revenue band your ideal accounts are in?
• Where are they located?
• How old is the company?
• Are there any organizational changes that could affect their propensity to buy? I.e. recent departure or addition of a certain leadership role.
• Do they have partnerships that make them easier to sell to?
• What is their business model (i.e. B2B or B2C)?

Technographics

These are the technologies your ideal customers use to run their organizations. Are there tools they use that make them a good fit? Some sample question to get you thinking:

• Does your product only integrate with a certain technology suite (i.e. does your product have any tech dependencies)?
• Does your product replace a certain technology really well?
• Are there certain tools that tell you a company is trying to optimize a part of their business that your product helps with?

ICP segmentation methods for non-PMF

Demographics

These are characteristics of the specific people that interact with your team – both in the sales process and as an end-user. The people who use the product on a daily basis are just as important as the people who make the decision to buy – and in some cases may be the same person.

• What job titles do your ideal customers have?
• What age bands do they typically fall into?
• What kind of education do they have?
• Where do they go for information (what are their “watering holes”?)
• What motivates them personally or professionally?

Job-to-be-done

This is the actual job your customer is trying to accomplish. It should be something that’s solved by your product, or is tangential to the problem your product solves. It should also be findable – there needs to be a virtual footprint that tells us someone is trying to do this job. You may be able to combine these with technographic data. For example, if someone is a Monday.com user, they’re likely trying to solve a project management problem.

• What are they trying to accomplish in their role?
• What “job” are they hiring their existing solution to do for them?
• What friction do they face in their current day-to-day?
• What pains are caused by the current way of doing things?
• What’s the “dream state”? If they had the perfect solution, what would it allow them to do?
• What is the event (or “switch”) that encourages someone to buy?

Filters vs. signals

As you build out your ICP, note which segmentation criteria are filters and which are signals. This is an important distinction.

Filters are used to remove portions of the market from your consideration pool. You can use filters to create a shortlist of accounts you want to go after (this is also your SAM, or Specific Addressable Market).

Within this final list, you can use signals to prioritize which accounts to prioritize. Signals are indicators that certain companies are better fits than others. They tell you which accounts are tier 1 vs. tier 2.

Next steps

Document relevant customer information

Create a centralized document of your ideal customer profile's relevant information that gets sign-off from your leadership, sales, and marketing teams. Here’s a template to help you get started.

Develop and define customer personas

Once you’ve segmented the market and landed on your ICP, you’ll want to create simple personas that reflect the actual people you’ll be selling to – the users, influencers and decision-makers. Read more about our method for creating personas here.

Create your TAM, SAM and SOM

Once you’ve defined your ICP, you can scope the size of your market and begin list building. This is a crucial step in developing your account-based marketing strategy.

Build out the rest of your GTM strategy

Decide where your sales and marketing teams are going to focus their efforts to find accounts that match your ICP. Depending on your customer personas, your company resources, and existing materials, you may decide to prioritize inbound more than outbound in the short term – or vice versa. There are also other approaches to reaching prospects that should be considered.

We like to balance both inbound and outbound together. Inbound is a more long-term, sustainable approach – you need to build the machine to educate customers and help them find you. But, if you’re in an immature (or new) market where customers don’t necessarily know they have a problem (or aren’t looking for a solution), a strong outbound approach may be best to help you get more immediate results while you build the inbound infrastructure in the background.

Keep your ICP fresh and relevant

Don’t let your ICP sit too long without a refresh. Refine and update it with learnings on a regular basis. Include customer success, sales and marketing teams in the conversation.

As your company grows (and if you create multiple different product offerings) you might consider creating different subset ICPs. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to this. Do what gets the best results for your company.

Miss it before? Download our free B2B SaaS ideal customer profile template

• Outline the filters and signals you’ll use to build your TAM, SAM and SOM
• Provide direction for your messaging and sales materials by defining simple customer personas