What is Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?
A detailed description of the type of company that's the best fit for your product or service.
Definition
An Ideal Customer Profile defines the firmographic, technographic, and behavioral characteristics of companies most likely to buy, get value from, and retain your product. Unlike buyer personas (which describe individuals), ICPs describe organizations. A well-built ICP includes industry, company size, revenue range, tech stack, buying process, pain points, and common use cases. Most B2B companies start with a broad target and narrow their ICP as they collect data on which customers have the highest LTV and lowest churn.
Why It Matters
Without a clear ICP, sales teams prospect randomly, marketing targets too broadly, and customer success gets stuck supporting poor-fit customers who churn. Every dollar spent on an account outside your ICP is a dollar wasted. The most efficient B2B companies define their ICP from data (not intuition), then align every GTM motion around it.
Example
A sales engagement platform defines its ICP: B2B SaaS companies, 50-500 employees, $10M-$100M ARR, headquartered in the US, with at least 10 SDRs, currently using Salesforce. That definition narrows their total addressable market from millions of companies to roughly 3,000, which lets their sales team focus outreach and marketing invest budget efficiently.