Glossary
Ideal Customer Profile
Also called ICP
A written description of the kind of company and person most likely to buy from you and stay. It names firmographics, the role that decides, the signals that suggest timing, and the characteristics that rule a company out.
An ICP is not a persona. A persona describes a human being and their motivations; an ICP describes a filter you can apply to a list. The test is whether someone else, or a machine, could apply it to a spreadsheet and reach the same answer you would.
The most common failure is an ICP that quietly covers three different buyer types at once - a startup segment, a mid-market segment and an enterprise one - held together by the word "or". A blended profile produces mediocre scores for all three, because every prospect matches part of it and none matches all of it.
A useful ICP includes disqualifiers as well as qualifiers. Knowing who is definitively not a customer removes more work from a list than any positive criterion.
More terms
- Lead scoringAssigning each prospect a number that represents how well they match your Ideal Customer Profile, so a list can be worked in order of fit rather than in the order it arrived..
- Lead qualificationDeciding whether a prospect is worth a salesperson’s time before anyone spends it.
- Outbound prospectingContacting potential customers who have not approached you first, usually through email, LinkedIn or the phone, after deciding from research that they are likely to be a fit..
Start here
Definitions are the easy part
Applying them to 1,500 rows at once is the part that takes a team all week. Bring one export and see what a scored, ranked queue looks like on your own list.
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