Amateurs, Professionals, and the Ideal Customer Profile

Defining your ICP is actually pretty easy - but it's what comes next that counts

The Unlock

The Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP, is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in the world of B2B. And for good reason. In theory, it’s a pretty powerful unlock. If you can just figure out who your ideal customer is—who they are, what they need, and what makes them tick—then everything else should just sort of fall into place. You build them the perfect product, craft the perfect pitch, and then just sit back as your ideal customers all line up and throw money at you.

Simple, right?

Except, of course, that it isn’t.

“Build an Ideal Customer Profile” is one the of the most widely-offered pieces of business advice out there. Spend any time at all around or inside a B2B sales, marketing, or product organization, and I guarantee you’ll hear it from everybody at least once - board members, consultants, executives, and investors.

But despite this seemingly-universal consensus, most companies really struggle to make this ICP thing work for them.

And I’ve been doing some thinking about why that is.

How To Build a Bad ICP

One of the reasons businesses struggle with the ICP concept is that they begin badly. Here are a couple of ways that the exercise of building an Ideal Customer Profile goes astray.

Created then Forgotten

This one is the classic tale of corporate amnesia. The leadership team gets together and decides they’re going to get serious about targeting the right customers. They spend hours in a room all hopped up on catered sandwiches and whiteboard marker fumes, and they hash out exactly who they think their Ideal Customer is. They feel pretty good about it. Then they all get on the plane, fly home, and promptly forget everything they just did. The ICP? It was a great idea for about five minutes. Then come Monday, it’s back to chasing the string of random deals that come their way, whether or not they’re with the kind of customer they actually want.

Not Specific Enough

This is the one where the leadership team decides their Ideal Customer = “Any company with money,” or something equally vague. You can almost hear the enthusiasm: “We focus on manufacturing companies with more than $5M of revenue in North America.” Great! Except there are about a million of those, and your marketing message now becomes so watered down that it might as well be printed on a soggy napkin. “We help manufacturing companies increase their efficiency.” Awesome. But how? Why? What kind of manufacturing companies? Do you help them increase efficiency by making their employees work harder? By replacing them with robots? No one knows. Because by defining your bullseye so broadly, your message has ceased to be meaningful.

Built for the Board

This is the pretty one in the group. It’s typically presented on a beautifully formatted slide with all the boxes neatly aligned just so. But it’s not an operational document - it’s a diplomatic one. It’s designed to make the board and investors happy, to provide evidence that the company knows exactly who they’re targeting. And then after the board meeting, it arrives at its final resting place in a drawer somewhere, never to be seen again. It doesn’t guide product decisions, it doesn’t inform sales pitches, and it certainly doesn’t get updated based on feedback from customers. But hey, it looked freaking great on that PowerPoint slide! That’s something, right?

Making It A Thing

Good news. There is a better, easier way to build a proper ICP. I won’t go into a ton of detail here about the step-by-step process in this article. I’ve written a longer, more detailed piece about how I do this with my companies before. If you’re still in the building/exploring stage I definitely recommend you check it out.

Instead, I want to focus on what to do after you’ve created an ICP.

Or to put it another way, how you make use of an ICP.

Because that’s what an ICP is supposed to be: Useful. It’s not just for decoration, and it’s not just a box to check during an offsite. It’s a tool to help you decide which customers to go after and which ones to ignore. It’s a compass that should guide your product development, your marketing, and your sales strategy.

But that only happens if you actually use it—if you make it a real, living part of your business DNA.

In other words, you’ve got to make it a thing.

And making it a thing means turning your ICP into a practice—something you do, not just something you have.

That word—“practice”—is one of my favorite words. And it’s a central concept in one of my favorite books. A book I think every serious businessperson needs to read.

A while back, an ex-Marine named Steven Pressfield wrote a short book called “Turning Pro.” It’s about what high-performers in writing, sports, business, and art do differently than everyone else. But it’s more than a book about habits. It’s a book about the journey from the amateur life to the professional life - and the practices that separate the two.

Here’s my favorite quote from the book:

“A practice implies engagement in a ritual.”

Why bring this up? Because high-performing companies don’t just write down their ICP and then forget about it.

They build a practice around it—a practice grounded in very specific rituals.

The Rituals of the ICP-Focused Company

The way I see it, there are three important rituals that companies who build strong ICPs and then actually use them do better than everyone else.

1. The Ritual of Building Your List

This is the part where you actually figure out who your Ideal Customers are and put them on a list. Not just any customers though. The right ones. The ones who need what you’re selling and are willing to pay for it. This ritual is your go-to-market mise en place, like an expert chef setting out all their ingredients before the cooking ever begins. Without this careful preparation, you’re not crafting something you can be proud of—you’re just hoping something edible comes out of the chaos.

What good looks like: A well-crafted list is more than just names on a spreadsheet; it’s an expression of your concentration of force. These are the people you’re going to nurture, impress, and eventually convert. And here’s the kicker: this list isn’t infinite. It’s finite, it’s in a system of record (like a CRM), it’s divvied up and assigned to people (we’re talking sales territories here), and it’s tracked so you can easily tell when you’re staying in front of them—and when you’re not. These are the people who are going to know who you are, what you do, and why you matter, because you’ve made it your business to stay on their radar. And here they are, right here on this screen, organized in a list, just waiting for that next nudge.

2. The Ritual of Picking Your Battles

Not every deal is worth pursuing. Some customers are more trouble than they’re worth, especially when it comes to those big, shiny deals—the 6- and 7-figure monsters that can make a huge difference to your topline. But here’s the catch: they often come with an invisible tax. They can derail your product roadmap, lock up engineering resources, and ultimately increase your churn rate. This ritual is designed to help you know when to walk away. If a customer doesn’t fit your ICP, maybe they’re not worth the effort. Don’t do pipeline gymnastics trying to win deals that don’t align with your product, your strategy, or the way you like to work with customers. It’s a waste of time, and it’s likely going to cost you in the long run.

What good looks like: True discipline in your sales process means being willing to say no, even when the numbers look tempting. It’s about focusing your energy on the customers who align with your ICP—those who not only fit your product but are also likely to become long-term partners without derailing your entire operation. When you pick your battles wisely, you protect your team, preserve your product vision, and build a customer base that’s both profitable and sustainable.

3. The Ritual of Getting To Know Your Customers

How do you start building a go-to-market strategy? By talking to customers. But which customers you choose to talk to matters. A lot. This isn’t about gathering mountains of data on just anyone who shows a passing interest in your product. No, this ritual is about doing the work to understand and catalog the challenges, buying processes, options, and current strategies of your best customers—the ones likely to stick with you, grow with your product, and, ideally, not drive your customer success team to tears in the process. It’s easy to get sidetracked by passionately-expressed tidbits from customers outside your ICP, but that’s just noise. And noise isn’t going to help you build a growth strategy; it’s going to get you and your team lost in the weeds.

What good looks like: Effective customer research is laser-focused on your ICP. It’s about diving deep into what triggers those people to buy your product, understanding what they were doing before that, and pinpointing the exact moment they realized you were the right fit. It’s also about being okay with not paying as much attention to everyone else. When done right, this research doesn’t just inform your product development—it rewires your sales-and-marketing motion so thoroughly that your customers can’t help but think you’re reading their minds.

Final Thoughts

An Ideal Customer Profile isn’t just an offsite exercise. It’s not a beautifully formatted slide that gets the board off your back, and it’s definitely not a broad, catch-all expression of your TAM that leaves you chasing everyone and landing no one.

An ICP is an expression of who your company is naturally built to serve and who you should focus on to increase your chances of winning. It’s a powerful tool. But it’s not a tool meant to be admired. It’s a tool meant to be put to work.

A good ICP can unlock your growth, but only if you commit to building rituals around it. Rituals like building your list, interrogating your pipeline, and choosing which customers you listen most closely to.

These rituals are what can transform your ICP from an abstract concept into a concrete practice.

These rituals are what can transform your ICP from an abstract concept into a concrete practice.

You know, practice: the thing that sets professionals apart from everybody else.