How to build an ideal customer profile from your best 20 customers

An ideal customer profile (ICP) describes the companies most likely to buy from you, stay and grow. Most teams write one from instinct: "mid-market tech companies." That describes thousands of companies that will never buy.

The better source is a list you already have. Your best customers have told you, with their money, which companies your product is for.

Start with your best 20, not all of them

Pick the 20 customers you'd most like to clone. Look for the ones that:

• Closed quickly, without a long evaluation.
• Pay well for what they use.
• Renewed or expanded.
• Need little support to get value.
• Would recommend you.

Leave out the biggest logo if it took a year to close and still costs more to support than it pays. Your ICP should describe the deals you want more of, not the ones you're proudest of.

Pull the same facts for every customer

Build a table with one row per customer and the same columns for each:

• Industry and what they sell.
• Size, in employees.
• Region where the buying team sits.
• Who bought: the title of the person who signed, and of the person who pushed for it.
• What was happening when they bought: a funding round, new sales hires, a new market, a tool they replaced.

Twenty rows is enough to see a pattern, and few enough to fill in by hand in an afternoon.

Find the pattern

20 best customers · example

• B2B software15 of 20
• 50 to 500 employees14 of 20
• North America or Europe17 of 20
• Hired SDRs or raised funding in the last 6 months13 of 20

All four traits: your ICP12 of 20

In this example, 12 of the 20 customers share all four traits. That overlap is the ICP. The other eight are still good customers. They just aren't the pattern to scale.

Look for traits that cluster, not traits that appear once. One customer in healthcare doesn't make healthcare a segment. Fifteen in B2B software do.

Turn the pattern into filters

An ICP your outbound can use has three parts:

1. Which companies. Industry, size and region: the filters that build the target account list.
2. Who to reach. The titles that buy and the titles that champion.
3. When to reach them. The signals that mean the timing is right, such as new sales hires or a recent funding round.

Add what to leave out: existing customers, companies too small to need you, regions you can't serve.

Write it in one paragraph

Filters build the list. A plain paragraph explains the why, to your team and to anyone writing emails:

B2B software companies with 50 to 500 employees in North America and Europe that have hired sales development reps or raised funding in the last six months. We reach the VP of Sales, the Head of Sales Development and the RevOps Manager.

If someone new can read the paragraph and name ten companies that fit, it's specific enough.

Count your market

Run the filters and count the companies. That number is your total addressable market (TAM), and it tells you what outbound can do: the Cold Email Revenue Calculator turns it into meetings, deals and the sending setup it takes. A market that turns out smaller than expected is useful too. It means you can cover it account by account.

Revisit it every quarter

Every new customer and every lost deal adds a row. Look at the table again each quarter: if your newest wins look different from the old pattern, the ICP is moving, and your list should move with it.

How Leadgenerator.io uses your ICP

The ICP paragraph is exactly what the agents need. Add it to your knowledge as who to reach, and the agents find companies that fit it, can add new ones every day, and find the right people inside each one.