Finding Your Real ICP
More meetings that turn into pipeline, because you finally aim at real buyers.
- Win rate from 1-in-12 to better than 1-in-2
- Surfaced a buyer nobody was selling to: it became the #1 channel
- Derived from 1,000+ real customer calls
You have a filter. You do not have an ICP.
Ask most teams for their ICP and you get a Sales Navigator query: 50 to 500 employees, B2B SaaS, North America. That is a filter. It tells you who you are allowed to call. It cannot tell you why a single one of them would buy.
The real ICP lives a level deeper, in the humans. Which roles feel the pain daily, and what words do they use for it when nobody is selling to them. Who actually signs, and what do they need to believe. What environment is the deal happening in: what they have already tried, what just broke, what triggered the search, who else is in the room. Two companies can be identical in the database and opposite in every one of those answers.
This is the layer I dig into on every engagement no matter which of the four problems brought me in, because they all trace back here. The motion did not catch because it was aimed at a market instead of a buyer. The pipeline is fiction because qualified was a firmographic checkbox. The signals mean nothing until you know whose behavior you are reading. Who it is for is the first question of the whole system, and it is the one most companies have never actually answered.
- 01Your ICP document is a list of firmographics and nobody has read it since it was written
- 02Every pipeline review turns into an argument about whether a deal is a fit
- 03Reps describe the buyer by company size, not by the problem the buyer wakes up with
- 04Marketing and sales agree on the filter and disagree on every actual account
- 05Your best customers have almost nothing in common in the database, and nobody has asked why
And the ones who almost did, and the ones who left. Closed-won and closed-lost, in their own words. The ICP gets derived from the humans who actually bought, not asserted from the TAM. This is the tiebreaker for every argument that follows.
The roles who feel the pain and how they say it. The signer and what they need to believe. The environment: the trigger that started the search, what they tried first, who else is in the room. Written as observable facts a rep can check, not adjectives.
An ICP that lives in a slide is decoration. It gets wired into the scoring model, the routing, the qualification standard and the first-call questions, so the definition is the default and the filter goes back to being what it always was: a starting list.
What I hold firmly: deriving the ICP from the people who actually bought has never once come back empty for me. What I hold loosely: the answers themselves. Every market I have run this in surprised me somewhere, and the surprise is usually where the money was.
The companies are on LinkedIn. Here, the work speaks without the logos.
50+ prospect and customer interviews became the tiebreaker for every strategy argument in a struggling region. The ICP that came out of the buyers' own words rebuilt the motion: win rate went from roughly one in twelve to better than one in two, and deal size grew six times.
The ICP was rebuilt from 1,000+ customer calls, jointly with Product, the data team and RevOps, then wired into scoring and routing. It surfaced a buyer nobody was selling to, and the channel built around that buyer became the number-one source of new business.
- ×Not a firmographic filter with better formatting.
- ×Not a persona deck with stock photos and invented names.
- ×Not a one-time slide: it ships wired into scoring, routing and qualification, or it did not happen.