Ideal Customer Profile Refiner
A structured ICP builder — industry, size, role, pain points, triggering events, disqualifiers. Output: a one-page ICP summary your team can actually use.
Who it’s for: Founders, heads of sales, and product-marketing leaders who suspect their ICP is too broad — or written at a level of abstraction that helps no one.
1 · Firmographics
The company shape. Specific enough that your SDR can source a target list from LinkedIn in an hour.
2 · Buying role
The human who feels the pain, signs the cheque, and decides it is urgent. Often three different people — name each.
3 · Pain and trigger
The shape of the problem and the event that makes it urgent this quarter, not next year.
Not your category — their complaint. Quote a real customer if you can.
What makes the pain a budgeted priority now?
4 · Disqualifiers
Shapes that look like ICP but aren’t. Naming these saves your pipeline more than any scoring model.
5 · Five named examples
If you cannot name five companies that fit, your ICP is still an abstraction.
Real names, ideally current or past customers. No placeholders.
Read it honestly, not charitably.
A good ICP passes the stranger test: hand this worksheet to a new SDR and ask them to build a 200-account list. If they get back to you with a list you recognise, the ICP is tight. If they get back to you asking “what counts?” every row, it is too loose.
Watch for the five named examples. If they feel forced — if you are stretching to include companies that aren’t actually customers — the ICP is aspirational, not descriptive. An aspirational ICP tells you nothing about who to sell to this quarter.
Three moves you can make this week.
- Run the last 20 closed-won deals against this ICP. How many fit? If fewer than 14, either the ICP is wrong or your sales team is working outside it. Both matter.
- Check your marketing landing pages against the pain quote. If the page headline doesn’t echo the language of the pain statement, your inbound is chasing a different buyer than your sales team is.
- Share it with your account executives and watch their faces. A fake cheer is the signal that something is wrong. Press gently.
Why these questions, in this order.
ICP documents fail when they live at the altitude of “mid-market B2B SaaS.” That describes tens of thousands of companies; it gives nobody a rule for qualifying a specific deal. The sections here force you down one altitude each step: firmographics, roles, pain, disqualifiers, named examples.
The disqualifier section is doing disproportionate work. Teams rarely lose deals because they didn’t know their ICP in the abstract; they lose because they couldn’t name the lookalike shapes that drain a quarter. Two honest disqualifiers save more pipeline than a third pillar.
The named-examples field exists because abstractions mutate under pressure. When your team is scrambling for pipeline, “mid-market SaaS” expands quietly to include anyone with a logo. A list of five specific companies holds a harder line.
Run the full Positioning Audit.
Eight-lens diagnostic of your site against your own strategic intent.
- One-Page Positioning WorksheetFill in audience, category, differentiator, proof, and emotional response in one page.
- Competitor Battle Card TemplateBuild one battle card: claims, reality, your response, with coverage score built in.
- Messaging Hierarchy BuilderCategory, pillars, proof. Build a three-level messaging pyramid you can print.