ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

What most people mean

“A description of your best customer.” Usually a spreadsheet of firmographic attributes: industry, company size, revenue band, job title, geography. The standard exercise: look at your top 10 customers, find what they have in common demographically, and call that your ICP.

Sales teams use it to filter leads. Marketing teams use it to target ads. Everyone pretends it’s strategy.

Where the definition breaks

Most ICPs describe the surface and miss the substance.

When I do this exercise with clients, I ask them to tell me everything they can about each person whom they consider to be a great customer. I want to hear their story: who they are, why they like them, how they met. I’m not interested in the traditional demographic information like their age, their job title, or the name of their last pet.

So what if folks are not in the same industry? So what if they’re not all Gen Z? So what if the decision-makers don’t have the same job title? All those attributes are arbitrary. A segment, and by extension your ICP, is built on shared struggles, not superficial differences.

LatinUs Beauty’s customers ranged from 17 to 57, spanning four generations. If the founders had built their ICP around demographics, they would have fragmented their audience into meaningless slices. The thing that united their customers wasn’t age or income. It was frizzy hair in humid weather.

How we define it at STFO

Start with the people you enjoy working with the most. They just get it and don’t drain your soul.

Then evaluate potential segments using the RAGE framework:

• Revenue: prioritise customers who spend a significant portion of their disposable income in your category, regardless of overall income. A teenager who spends most of her pocket money photographing woodpeckers is more valuable than a multimillionaire who couldn’t care less about wild birds.
• Access: can you actually reach the people in this segment? Can you pick up the phone and call 50 of them today? This is where dreams of standing the f*ck out typically go to die.
• Growth: is this segment expanding, stagnating, or shrinking?
• Enjoyment: forget “target audience.” We’re talking about humans here. Humans you actually like. To pick a segment you’re happy and confident about, aim to find people who bring you joy.

The output isn’t a persona document. It’s a short sentence that contains the attributes linked to the struggles and the context in which those struggles occur.

What it is NOT

• Not a demographic profile (industry + role + company size tells you nothing about motivation)
• Not a buyer persona (Marketer Mary, 41, Scorpio ascendant, is fiction)
• Not reverse-engineering your current customer list (that tells you who bought, not who should buy)
• Not a static document (struggles and contexts change)
• Not something sales should use as a rigid filter (human judgement beats checkbox qualification)