Sergio Iacobucci
·
Updated
Every B2B SaaS company has an ICP document. Most of them read the same way: mid-market, 50 to 500 employees, “digitally mature”. Ask the sales team when they last opened it and you’ll get a blank look. Which is fair enough, because it’s a description of who the company would like to sell to, usually rushed and no where near data driven enough.
An ICP needs to be evidence-based and heavily validated. It’s not a quick process. Here’s how to check yours.
What is an ICP in sales?
An ICP (ideal customer profile) is a one-page description of the companies that buy fast, churn least and expand the most, written so your sales team can decide who to go after and who to walk away from. In sales it works as a filter: an account fits or it doesn’t, and a good disqualifier is worth more than a page of fit criteria. It should come from your best existing customers and your churned accounts, not from a wish list of who you’d like to sell to.
Get it wrong and sales spends its time on accounts that were never going to buy. Or worse, ones that buy and then churn.
It describes the company. Buyer personas describe the people inside it, so keep them on a separate page (mixing the two is how you end up with “Marketing Mary, 50 to 500 employees”).
1. Start with the customers you already have
Name your five best customers. Not the biggest logos: the ones who bought fast, churn least, expand the most and refer others. Now work out what they share.
To do this you need to push past solely firmographics. Industry and headcount are the easy answers and have their place but they’re usually the least interesting ones. The better question is why each of them bought: the specific moment they decided to go looking for a solution. A new leader arrived, a spreadsheet finally broke or maybe there’s a regulatory change. Triggers repeat across your best customers far more reliably than industries do, and sales can act on a trigger because at that point, the pain is real.
No pain = no deal.
If you have fewer than five paying customers, be honest that you’re working with a hypothesis, not evidence. Write it down anyway. Be comfortable with this changing frequently, it’s still very early for the business.
2. Treat churn as evidence
Your churned accounts are the most honest dataset you own. Nobody churns politely to spare your feelings!
Every account that leaves is telling you something about what your ICP should be. Line up your lost and churned accounts and look for the pattern: what did they have in common on the way in? Often, you’ll find the warning was visible at the first call and everyone ignored it because the logo was nice and shiny.
This is where your disqualifiers should come from. A disqualifier that came from three real churns (“no internal owner”, “bought us to fix a problem the product doesn’t solve well” etc) is worth more than a whole page of fit criteria, because it stops bad deals entering the pipeline instead of explaining them after they’ve died. After factoring in true CAC, bad customers really are bad business.
3. Watch where the value actually lands
Knowing a customer’s industry and headcount won’t tell you why they renew. For that you need to see the product through their eyes, and the best place to do it already exists in your business: the QBR/weekly calls/product usage data.
I always go deep in QBR call recordings for clients, listening to how their customers describe the product when nobody’s selling to them. What a customer says they’d miss about your product in a renewal conversation is the strongest ICP signal there is, and it’s frequently NOT the thing on the homepage.
Read the QBR notes, listen to the calls and compare which modules your best accounts use against which ones they bought. When the accounts that renew and expand all lean on the same corner of the product, the companies who need that corner are your market. Build the ICP around them. The ICP needs to heavily reflect where the product is today, not where is it going tomorrow (we all know it’s not tomorrow!)
4. Get your data into a state you can trust
Everything from here on involves running numbers against your account list, and the numbers are only as good as the list. Raw CRM exports are always worse than anyone admits. The industry field is half-blank sometimes with free text and ten spellings of “manufacturing”. One global customer is scattered across ten country rows, which means your biggest account might be masquerading as ten smaller ones. And sometimes clients pay in different currencies. It can be a hot mess. You must fix it, or your analysis is pointless.
Three fixes before you test anything. Roll subsidiaries up into parent accounts, conservatively: same brand is not always same company, and merging two independent co-ops because they share a name will cause you pain further down the line. Classify every account against a fixed list of sub-industries instead of whatever the rep typed in 2019. And put every value in one currency.
None of this is glamorous. But the segmentation gets built on the raw export and every number downstream inherits the mess, so it needs to be right.
5. Enrich the base with AI agents
The cleanup in step 4 used to be the real reason nobody validated their ICP: classifying and verifying a few hundred accounts by hand is weeks of work nobody has. It isn’t anymore. Criteria that used to require these manual checks and therefore never made it into the list are now a scalable reality. AI Agents can make this possible, reliably.
I run enrichment with a fleet of AI agents working in parallel. Each one takes a batch of accounts and the fixed taxonomy, checks the less obvious companies against their actual websites and writes back a label, a confidence level and a one-line evidence note. A pre-agreed industry taxonomy is highly important here, otherwise the agents will all come back with their own versions of the same industry.
Run a pilot batch of 40 accounts first. It’ll expose the gaps in your taxonomy while they’re easy to fix, and then you can let the rest loose. A few hundred accounts, classified and web-verified in minutes and everything remains auditable because you can ask the agents to ensure they keep the evidence for their reasoning and scores.
The part I like most: the engine is reusable. Once it exists, testing a new hypothesis against the whole customer base (“how many of our customers transport their own goods on their own trucks?”) stops being a quarter-long project and becomes a question you can ask on a given day of the week.
6. Test whether each dimension earns its place
Your ICP probably scores accounts on several dimensions: region, vertical, company type, product depth, maturity. They look like separate cuts of the account. However, I have found that when I run the numbers, they usually aren’t. I’ve had many instances of four dimensions in each segmentation strategy: geography, platform, customer cohort and module depth. However, statistically they were one axis because the four cuts moved together so tightly that segmenting on all of them meant counting the same thing four times.
The test is simple to describe: does each dimension still predict account value after you control for the others? Most don’t. They’re proxies for company size or for each other. A dimension that survives the controls earns a place in your ICP. A dimension that doesn’t gets demoted to metadata (still has its use). Fewer, cleaner axes beat an impressive-looking matrix.
7. Write it down so sales can use it
The output is one page.
One line at the top: we sell [what] to [who] when [trigger]. Your two or three real segments, each with a named flagship customer and the structural reason it fits. The disqualifiers, with their receipts. A scoring rubric small enough to use on a live call: fit, timing, access, intent, three levels each. And the deal economics, because an ICP with no revenue attached is a persona.
Then revisit it quarterly against actual conversions: which segments closed, which disqualifiers held, which signals predicted anything. An ICP is a working document.
If you want help with it (the churn interviews and QBR digging are the parts most teams never get to): that’s what I do. sergio@thedialog.co.uk
