Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Worksheet

An Ideal Customer Profile is not a persona document. ICPs are often confused with buyer personas, but they serve different purposes. A persona describes the individual human you're selling to. An ICP describes the type of company most likely to become a long-term, high-value customer.

For B2B startups, the ICP comes first. If you pick the wrong company profile to target, it doesn't matter how well-defined your buyer persona is — you'll be selling to companies that will churn, negotiate your price down, or never fully adopt your product.

This worksheet helps you build a rigorous ICP from your existing customer data (if you have it) or from first-principles reasoning (if you're earlier stage).

Why ICP Precision Matters

A well-defined ICP makes every downstream decision faster and better:

• Content marketing: You know exactly what your ICP reads, searches for, and cares about
• Paid acquisition: You can target precisely on LinkedIn, Meta, and programmatic channels
• Sales: Your team stops pursuing companies that will never close
• Product: You know which features to build vs. decline
• Customer success: You set expectations aligned with ICP reality, reducing churn

Most startup problems that look like marketing problems or sales problems are actually ICP problems — the company is trying to serve everyone and serving no one particularly well.

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Part 1: Build From Your Best Customers

If you have customers, start here. If you're pre-revenue, skip to Part 2.

Step 1: Identify Your Top Customers

List your top 10 customers by one of these criteria (choose the one that best reflects your business health):

• Highest ARR / LTV
• Lowest churn / longest tenure
• Best expansion revenue (grew from initial purchase)
• Highest NPS (9-10 scores)
• Lowest support burden (high value, low cost to serve)

Customer Name	ARR	Tenure	NPS	Notes (why they're great)
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10.

Step 2: Look for Patterns Across Your Best Customers

Answer these questions by looking across your top 10 list:

Company size: Most commonly between ___ and ___ employees

Revenue range: Most commonly between $___ and $___ in ARR/revenue

Industry vertical: Most common industries:

1. ---

2. ---

3. ---

Geography: Most common locations:

1. ---

2. ---

Business model: B2B / B2C / B2B2C / D2C / marketplace / other: ___

Funding stage: Bootstrapped / Seed / Series A / Series B+ / Profitable SMB / Enterprise

Tech stack indicators (what tools they commonly use alongside yours):

• ---

• ---

• ---

Use case: What are your best customers primarily using your product for?

1. ---

2. ---

3. ---

Common "trigger event" (what happened before they bought?):

• ---

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Part 2: ICP Firmographic Profile

Complete this section based on your Part 1 analysis (or first-principles reasoning if pre-revenue).

Company Characteristics

Company size (employees):

• Too small (not ready for your product): under ___ employees
• In our ICP range: ___ to ___ employees
• Too large (different needs, different procurement): over ___ employees

Revenue or ARR:

• Minimum threshold: $___
• Ideal range: $___ to $___
• Upper limit (becomes enterprise sales with different dynamics): $___

Industry / vertical: Primary: _______________________________________________ Secondary: _______________________________________________ Explicitly excluded: _______________________________________________

Business model:

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Funding stage:

• Best fit: _______________________________________________
• Acceptable: _______________________________________________
• Avoid: _______________________________________________

Geography: Primary markets: _______________________________________________ Secondary markets: _______________________________________________ Currently excluded: _______________________________________________

Company growth stage descriptor (circle one or combine):

• Pre-product-market fit / Finding PMF / Scaling / Optimizing / Enterprise

Organizational Indicators

Who owns the budget for your category?

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Department that uses your product primarily:

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Does the company need to have [specific function/team] for your product to work?

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Tech stack requirements (what must they have for your product to work?): Required: _______________________________________________ Preferred: _______________________________________________ Deal-killer: _______________________________________________

Current process maturity: Do your best customers tend to have an existing process for [your category] that they're replacing, or are they building from scratch?

• Replacing existing: ___% of best customers
• Building from scratch: ___% of best customers

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Part 3: Situational Triggers — What Makes a Company Enter Your Market

The most underutilized part of an ICP is the trigger event — the specific situation, event, or pain that makes a company urgently seek a solution like yours. Companies in your ICP don't all need your product at the same time; triggers make them need it now.

Common Trigger Events (Check All That Apply)

Growth triggers:

• Company grew past ___ employees and their current solution can't scale
• Recently raised a funding round (new resources, new standards expected)
• Opened a new office or market
• Hired a new leader in [relevant department]
• Revenue grew past $___

Pain triggers:

• Current tool sunset or significantly changed pricing
• Lost a deal because of a problem your product solves
• Had a compliance/security/performance incident
• Team is overwhelmed with manual work in [your category]

Strategic triggers:

• Company shifted strategy to prioritize [outcome your product enables]
• Competitive pressure requires faster [capability your product provides]
• Board or investors mandated improvement in [your category]

Market triggers:

• Macro trend (remote work, AI adoption, regulatory change) made their old approach insufficient
• A competitor of theirs adopted your type of solution

Your Most Common Trigger Events

Based on customer conversations and sales call notes, what triggers most commonly precede a purchase?

1. Trigger: _______________________________________________ Signal you can detect: _______________________________________________ (e.g., a new LinkedIn hire, a funding announcement, a job posting for a specific role)

2. Trigger: _______________________________________________ Signal you can detect: _______________________________________________

3. Trigger: _______________________________________________ Signal you can detect: _______________________________________________

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Part 4: Goals, Pains, and Decision Criteria

What Your ICP Company Is Trying to Achieve

Primary business goal (the North Star metric your ICP cares most about):

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Secondary goals (what they optimize for in addition to the primary):

1. ---

2. ---

3. ---

The Pains That Drive Urgency

What is your ICP company experiencing that makes them seek a solution? Be specific about the operational, financial, and emotional dimensions of the pain.

Operational pain (what they're doing manually, what takes too long, what breaks):

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Financial pain (what the problem is costing them in dollars or missed revenue):

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Emotional pain (what the leader responsible for this problem feels: stressed? embarrassed? stuck?):

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Status quo pain (what happens if they do nothing for another year?):

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What They Want From a Solution

Table stakes (minimum requirements to be considered — all vendors must have these):

• ---

• ---

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Differentiators (the factors that determine which vendor wins):

• ---

• ---

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Nice-to-haves (desired but not decisive):

• ---

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Deal-killers (reasons they won't buy despite everything else being good):

• ---

• ---

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Part 5: Negative ICP — Companies That Are NOT a Fit

Defining who you're not for is as important as defining who you are for. Negative ICPs save sales time, reduce churn, and help your marketing team avoid attracting the wrong leads.

Company Profiles to Avoid

Disqualifying Trait	Why They're a Bad Fit	Sales Signal to Watch For
Under ___ employees	Not enough [resource/process maturity]	Company size filter in prospecting
In [industry] vertical	[Specific regulatory/structural reason]	Industry filter
Using [specific competing tool] as core stack	Deeply embedded, switching cost too high	Job postings, LinkedIn tech stack data
Requires [feature you don't have]	We can't serve them today	First discovery call questions

The "We've Gotten Burned By" List

What types of customers have churned, demanded refunds, been extremely difficult to serve, or never achieved the outcomes your product promises? These are your hard-won negative ICP learnings.

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2. ---

3. ---

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Part 6: ICP Summary Card

Synthesize everything into a one-page summary for easy distribution to sales, marketing, and product teams.

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[Your Company] Ideal Customer Profile

One-line ICP description: We sell to [type of company] in [industry/vertical] with [size range], typically when they're [trigger event], who want to [achieve goal] without [main pain].

Firmographic profile:

• Size: _____ employees
• Revenue/ARR: $_____
• Industry: _____
• Stage: _____
• Geography: _____

Technical profile:

• Must have: _____
• Typically uses: _____

Best fit use case: _____

Common trigger events:

1. ---

2. ---

Key pains we solve:

1. ---

2. ---

3. ---

Negative ICP (we are NOT a fit for):

• ---

• ---

ICP confidence level: High / Medium / Working hypothesis (update as you learn more)

Last updated: _______________

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Further Reading

• build your ICPs with a step-by-step playbook
• persona snapshot generator tool
• AI-driven account-based marketing strategies for B2B
• Averi's Strategy Map to make your ICP the anchor for every content and campaign decision

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I have one ICP or multiple?

Start with one. Companies that try to define multiple ICPs simultaneously usually end up with a vague "priority order" that doesn't actually constrain anyone's behavior. Get your first ICP to 80% confidence, execute against it for 6-12 months, and then evaluate whether a second ICP segment makes sense.

How do I build an ICP if I'm pre-revenue?

Use hypothesis-driven reasoning: Who do you believe has the problem you're solving, severely enough to pay for a solution? Document your assumptions explicitly and label them as hypotheses. Run 20-30 discovery conversations with people in your hypothesized ICP. Update the worksheet with what you learn. Your first ICP will be wrong in some ways — that's expected. The worksheet helps you track how your understanding evolves.

How often should I update my ICP?

Revisit it quarterly, update formally every 6-12 months or whenever something changes significantly (you enter a new market, you discover a new trigger event, a new segment of customers is churning unexpectedly). ICPs aren't permanent — they should evolve as you learn more about your market.

What's the difference between ICP and buyer persona?

ICP = the company (firmographic profile, business situation, trigger events, organizational characteristics). Buyer persona = the individual human within that company (title, goals, day-to-day challenges, decision-making role, communication preferences). You need both, but ICP comes first — it determines which companies you target, and buyer persona determines how you communicate with the people inside them.

How do I use the ICP in content marketing?

Your ICP drives your content strategy in two ways: (1) keyword and topic selection — what does this type of company search for when they have the problems you solve? (2) Tone and framing — how does this type of company think about their work? What vocabulary do they use? What do they care about that's adjacent to your product? When you use a tool like Averi, your ICP settings inform every brief and draft the platform generates, keeping all content targeted to the right reader.