Ideal customer profile template

An ideal customer profile is the first layer of qualification. Before any SDR picks up the phone, it decides which companies are worth calling. A good ICP is specific enough that two people building a list from it would pick mostly the same accounts, and honest enough to include the companies you should not sell to.

It is often confused with two other things. A buyer persona describes a person: their role, goals and objections. An ICP describes the company that person works for. Your total addressable market is every company that could conceivably buy; your ICP is the subset most likely to buy, succeed and renew.

Inbound leads choose you. Outbound prospects did not ask to hear from you, so the only filter between your SDRs and a wasted hour is the list. A loose ICP shows up as low connect rates, conversations with the wrong people and meetings that account executives reject. A tight one makes every other part of the funnel easier.

It also settles arguments. When an SDR books a meeting and the account executive says it does not fit, the ICP is the document both can point to. If the account was in the ICP, the problem is qualification on the call. If it was not, the problem is the list. Our guide on who should build the prospect list covers how that responsibility is usually split with an agency.

1. Pull your best customers. Export closed won deals from the last 12 to 24 months. Sort by revenue, retention and how easy they were to win and serve. Your ICP comes from the top quarter, not from the whole list.
2. Look for what they share. Industry, employee range, location, ownership, technology used, how they were growing when they bought. Write down every common trait, then keep the ones that appear in most of the best customers.
3. Find the trigger. What was happening when they bought? A new leader, funding, expansion, a failed project, a contract ending, a regulation. Triggers tell SDRs when to call, not just who.
4. Map the buying committee. Who signed, who championed, who used it and who pushed back. These become your target titles and the people to multi-thread.
5. Write the disqualifiers. Use closed lost deals and churned customers. Too small, wrong industry, locked into a competitor, no internal owner. Disqualifiers save more SDR time than any other line in the ICP.
6. Test it on a list. Build 100 accounts from the ICP and check them with sales. If the account executives would not want meetings with most of them, tighten it before anyone dials.

The company reviewed 18 months of deals. Its best customers were multi-site employers with award-covered staff, between 200 and 2,000 employees, where payroll errors had become a board-level risk. Small single-site businesses churned quickly; large enterprises took a year to close and needed integrations the product did not have.

• Writing the ICP you want, not the one you have. Aspirational enterprise logos are not an ICP if you have never closed one.
• Averaging two segments into one. If you sell to both mid-market retailers and large hospitals, write two ICPs.
• No disqualifiers. Without them, every account looks like a maybe.
• Never updating it. Markets, products and pricing change. Review it every quarter.
• Keeping it in a slide deck. Put it where SDRs build lists, and in the brief for any outsourced SDR team.

An ICP tells you who to contact; the law sets how. In Australia, commercial email and text messages fall under the Spam Act 2003, which requires consent (in B2B, consent can sometimes be inferred where the message is relevant to the recipient's role and their address is conspicuously published), clear identification of the sender and a working unsubscribe. Telemarketing calls are covered by the Do Not Call Register Act 2006, so wash calling lists against the Register where it applies. In New Zealand, the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 sets similar rules for email and text. In Singapore, the PDPA Do Not Call provisions and the Spam Control Act apply.

This is a summary, not legal advice. Our guide to cold calling laws in Australia has more detail.