The ICP lists nine attributes. The best customers share two.

Most ideal customer profiles describe the customers a business already has. Very few explain why those customers turned out well, and the difference costs real money in targeting.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for The ICP lists nine attributes. The best customers share two.

Somewhere in most go-to-market decks there is a slide headed “Ideal Customer Profile”. It has nine bullets. Revenue band, headcount, sector, geography, tech stack, growth stage, buying committee shape, a named job title, and something aspirational about culture or ambition. It reads like a portrait. It was probably assembled in a workshop. Then someone runs the list against the actual book, the customers with the best gross margin, the longest tenure, the fewest escalations, and finds that two of the nine attributes hold consistently. The rest are noise, or worse,…

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