orbis://guides/ideal-customer-profile
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$ orbis --guide icp
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How to build an ideal customer profile (ICP)
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An ideal customer profile is the shortest honest description of the accounts that buy fastest, stay longest and complain least. It is not a persona, not a wish list, and not a market-size slide. Done properly it decides who you contact, what you say, and which replies you chase.
SEC.01
What an ICP is
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An ICP describes an account. A persona describes a person inside that account. You need both, but in that order: the ICP filters the list, the persona picks the inbox. Teams that skip the ICP end up sending well-written emails to companies that were never going to buy.
definitions.md
- ICP
- the account you should sell to
- persona
- the role inside that account you should email
- trigger
- the reason to email them this week rather than next quarter
SEC.02
Start from evidence
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Build the first version from customers you already have, not from the market you would like. Export closed-won accounts, then split them by revenue retained after twelve months and by sales-cycle length. The overlap between fast to close and slow to churn is your ICP seed.
-List your best 20 accounts by retained revenue, not by logo
-Note what was true about each one before they bought
-Strip out anything you cannot observe from the outside — that is intuition, not a filter
-Keep only attributes shared by at least half the set
no customers yet?
Use lost deals and discovery calls instead. The accounts that engaged fastest tell you almost as much as the ones that signed.
SEC.03
The four signal layers
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A usable ICP stacks four layers of signal. Each one narrows the list; together they turn a market into a send list.
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Firmographic
Industry, headcount band, revenue band, geography, ownership. The coarse filter — cheap to apply, weak on its own.
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Technographic and operational
The tools, processes or licences that imply your problem exists. A company without the workflow cannot have the pain.
03
Behavioural
Hiring for the role you serve, publishing about the problem, expanding into a market that creates it.
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Trigger
A dated event: funding, a new executive, an office opening, a compliance deadline. Triggers set timing, and timing sets reply rate.
SEC.04
Write it down
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An ICP that lives in someone's head cannot be tested. Write it as filters a stranger could apply, with an explicit exclusion list — the exclusions usually improve results more than the inclusions.
icp.example.md
- industry
- specialty commercial services
- size
- 25–250 employees
- geography
- United States
- operational signal
- runs a field team and quotes per job
- trigger
- opened a second location in the last 6 months
- exclude
- franchises, agencies, sub-25 headcount
- persona
- owner, VP operations, head of revenue
SEC.05
Turn it into a list
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An ICP only earns its keep when it produces contactable people. That means resolving accounts to named humans, finding deliverable addresses for them, and refreshing the set as roles change — most B2B contact data decays double digits a year.
-Resolve each account to two or three named roles, not a generic info@ address
-Verify every address before the first send — bounces cost domain reputation, not just credits
-Re-check the list quarterly; people move and titles change
-Track reply rate by ICP attribute so the profile keeps sharpening
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Orbis does this step for you: it reads your website, infers the profile, matches it against its own US contact database, verifies deliverability and starts sending — no seed list required. See why Orbis or the AI SDR.
SEC.06
Common mistakes
✕Describing the market instead of the buyer — 'US SMBs' is not an ICP
✕Filters nobody can observe from outside the company
✕One ICP for products that solve two different problems
✕Never revisiting it after the first ten customers
✕Widening the profile when reply rates fall, instead of tightening it
the test
Hand your ICP to someone who has never sold your product. If they can build the same list you would, it is written well enough.
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Next: cold email deliverability.
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