As we discussed in our podcast on the topic, one of the keys to scaling a B2B go-to-market motion is a well-defined ideal customer profile (ICP) that you refine as your products and use cases grow. Understanding whose pain points your product can solve better than anyone else’s gives you the right to win business from customers who will benefit from your solution the most—resulting in sustainable growth. This is especially important for today’s fast-growing AI-native companies who might be landing big deals, but need to prioritize the market in order to continue growing.
Though plenty of late-stage founders might think they know who their ICP is, few can answer the question with the granularity required to steer the business as it scales. In fact, the risks of not defining your ICP well can be massive. A poorly-defined ICP is often the hidden cause of a wide range of problems across your org, from high CAC and low conversion rates to sky-high marketing spend and bogged-down product roadmaps.
A great ICP is precise and accurate enough to allow you to target the right personas with your marketing efforts and build a repeatable sales motion using the same messages and levers. Below is a step-by-step framework to test if you know who your ICP is—or build it out if you don’t.
Do you actually know who your ICP is?
Great ICPs consist of specific, measurable qualities. When I ask founders if they know who their ICP is, nearly everyone will tell me, “yes!” But when I push them for a description, many offer broad and vague answers, like “enterprises and midsize companies that use computers.”
The test I give them to see if they can really identify their ICPs is: do you have high-fidelity responses to each of the prompts below?
- Company size (e.g., 1,000–5,000 employees) or revenue range
- Type of business (e.g., B2B SaaS, e-commerce)
- Geography (e.g., country, region, specific language)
- Industries served (e.g., manufacturing, government, banks)
- Job titles (e.g., engineering manager, social media manager)
- Has a problem that is defineable and you can solve (e.g., works in the cloud and needs to connect across clouds)
- Company specifics that define your problem statement (e.g., sales over Zoom, design focused, cost focused, developer led)
- Specific technologies used (e.g., a cloud data warehouse, GitHub)
- Unique buyer behaviors (e.g., only use specific messaging platforms or information sources)
If they do, great—they know who their ICP is. If they don’t, that tells me we have some work to do.
The Five Question framework
If you can’t describe your ICP with the level of detail I described above, the Five Question framework below can help you sketch out the initial contours of your ICP. The answers to these questions should give you a specific picture of what a good, successful customer looks like for you—while also providing the anti-patterns of customers that fall outside of your ICP.
- Which of your current customers get the most out of your products or services?
- What traits do your best customers have in common?
- What recurring objections do you receive from past customers or lost opportunities?
- Which customers are easiest to upsell to and why?
- What do the customers of your closest competitors have in common (with each other)?
If you don’t have clear responses to the above questions, ask your RevOps team to identify your successful, lost, and churned customers, and go on a listening tour with each cohort. Having someone from your product team (or even yourself as a founder!) lead these conversations can shift the tenor of the conversation away from “reselling” the product and toward a more constructive conversation about what your product does and doesn’t do for a given segment of the market.
No amount of sales or marketing can force a product to durably grow in a market where it isn’t needed by the buyers, so using these questions to get crisp on product-market fit first is key. These questions set aside your GTM performance by design, allowing you to clearly define the markets where your product solves the most urgent problems. Once you’ve figured that out, then you can make sure your go-to-market strategies (marketing, sales, pricing, etc.) help you reach those customers—but that’s for a separate post.
Below, we outline how each question helps you understand your ICP, then offer some pointers on how to gather the information to help you answer these questions.
Which of your current customers make the most out of your products or services?
Talking to your best customers can help you understand what customer problems your product solves especially well. Talk to them to figure out why they chose your product, how they use it, and what specific benefits they get from it.
A good rule of thumb when cohorting your best-performing customers to talk to for this question is to triangulate the cohorts with the biggest/fastest revenue growth (i.e., highest customer lifetime value) with the ones that have the quickest speed to purchase (i.e., shortest sales cycles) and quickest speed to growth (i.e., best retention rates). That way, you don’t overrotate on the customers with the highest ACVs who might not necessarily be the best fit for you. These customers might lead you to a short term, cash-rich place, but you also want to make sure they’ll lead you to a long term, customer-rich place that’ll help you continue to land customers who will help you grow profitably.
What traits do your best customers have in common?
Look for patterns in company size, industry, geographic location, revenue, and how they use your product. Aggregating those traits helps you narrow down the markets where your product works best.
Firmographic data gives B2B companies especially good insight into where their product is needed most. What similar technologies are those best customers using? What teams are using the product within the organization, and how big are those teams? Where do these customers fall on the adoption curve: are they software companies or part of what we call the Lagging 70%—or more traditional enterprises and verticals that control 70% of IT spend? What stack do they use to build their own products? The more granular you can get here, the better.
What recurring objections do you receive from churned customers or lost opportunities?
This question helps you identify antipatterns for your ICP and markets to avoid.
Specifically, the goal here is to figure out if your product or your process failed. Was your product a bad match for what they wanted, or did an external factor—like pricing competition or losing funding for the purchase—cause the deal to fall through or the customer to churn? The former is an ICP misalignment, while the latter is often a go-to-market strategy misalignment (or simply out of your control). Your answers to this question will help you figure out where there is misalignment between your product and your buyer.
Bonus round: though ICPs don’t include personas, you can use these calls as an opportunity to identify the typical roles and titles of decision-makers and influencers in the buying process. This can help you understand personas that might block you down the road, like security or procurement.
Which customers are easiest to upsell to and why?
Many founders land big deals with big companies and think: I’ve found my ICP! But this isn’t always the case. This question reduces false signal by helping you understand if you’re solving a meaningful problem across your customer’s org—or just offering a point solution for a single team.
Here’s an example of solving a big problem across an entire org. Let’s say you’ve sold your product to a small development team at a large retailer who builds internal applications on a GitHub stack. After a few weeks, you find more and more pockets of use within that same enterprise as that development team invites others to collaborate using your software. Soon after, you see customer-facing application developers and back-end developers using your product—they keep saying how well your product works for apps that require access to their cloud data and keeps customer data safe and PII compliant. Within 6 months, you’ve been deployed wall to wall within the organization.
Based on this organic adoption, you could surmise the following about your ICP: they’re large global retailers with onsite developer teams that use GitHub; have specific requirements for PII and customer data residence drive vendor decisions; and their cloud usage means they don’t have on premise requirements.
What do the customers of your closest competitors have in common?
This question helps you identify potentially suitable markets that you aren’t yet serving and the product requirements to do so.
If your competitors are selling to different customers than you, you can figure out if they have product features that give them the right to win that business or if they just have a better go-to-market motion. If there are common themes among those competitors that you know your product addresses, work with your RevOps teams to understand why you didn’t win their business in the past.
Revisit and refine your ICP
ICP isn’t something you can set and forget. It’s a given that your market, product, and customer base will evolve as you grow. To make sure you’re growing sustainably, ask yourself: as your product capabilities expand, does that expand your market? If so, that’ll change your ICP.
For instance, let’s say you have a collaboration tool that was commercially-oriented for a long time. Adding a single capability—like being able to manage more than 10,000 seats at a time—might expand your ICP significantly, allowing you to move from a commercial segment to mid-market. Getting crisp on this early will help you understand what investments you need to make in your GTM strategy in order to serve that new ICP, which will ultimately lead to better CAC, shorter sales cycles, better retention, right-sized marketing spend, and so on.
Getting your ICP right isn’t just a growth lever. It’s the blueprint for how and where your business wins. The more precisely you define it, the more efficiently you can sell, build, and scale. Clarity becomes your competitive advantage.
