Every solid Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy starts with a clear ideal customer profile (ICP). The ICP clearly defines which companies are the best fit, most valuable, and most likely to buy, allowing you to determine exactly who to target before formulating your perfect strategy. Validating your ICP for a GTM strategy helps you avoid wasted spend, weak pipeline, and poor sales conversion, making it easier to achieve success.
What an ICP Means in GTM
An ICP is the detailed description of the companies that a GTM strategy should prioritise. These target account details can help guide account selection, messaging, channels, sales motions, and pipeline planning to ensure you’re reaching the right audience.
This is different to a target market, which is the overall market segment, and the buyer persona, which defines the individual decision-makers within that market. ICP is more specific than a target market because it focuses on lots of specific details, such as company size, industry, revenue, location, and technology used. Buyer personas are considered whilst developing your ICP.
Why ICP Validation Matters
It’s important to test your ICP against real buyer evidence and data to confirm that you’re targeting accounts that will actually convert. Without ICP validation, you may end up targeting accounts that look good without knowing if they’ll drive revenue.
Ensuring that you target the right accounts helps your marketing and sales teams get on the same page about tactics and opportunities. This alignment helps improve message relevance, campaign performance, and pipeline quality while reducing the risk of scaling GTM activity too early.
Creating your ICP step-by-step is the best way to ensure nothing gets lost during your research and planning.
Step 1: Start with Commercial Goals
When defining your ICP, you first need to ask yourself what your goal is, whether that’s new business, expansion, market entry, enterprise growth, or a new product launch. Then, connect your ICP to revenue targets, deal size, sales capacity, and growth priorities to align with that goal.
Different goals require different target accounts. If your goal is expansion, you may want to target companies that already use your basic tools but may need new technology in new departments. If it’s a product launch, you’ll want to target companies that are lacking the abilities that your product or service provides.
Step 2: Analyse Your Best Customers
Next, you need to determine who the best customers are for your goals. Focus on customers with strong revenue, retention, product fit, expansion potential, and sales efficiency. Look at common patterns in the industry, company size, region, maturity, tech stack, and use case to help you make that decision.
Don’t just look for companies that are recognisable. It’s more important to confirm that the companies are profitable and repeatable.
Step 3: Review Won and Lost Deals
Looking at a company’s patterns can help you decide if they’re the right fit for you. Compare their high-quality wins to closed-lost opportunities to see where your brand might fall for them.
You can understand what they’re looking for better by analysing the reasons for winning, losing, stalling, and discounting. Also, look at sales feedback during your research to determine real buying triggers, objections, and deal blockers for each target account.
Step 4: Define Firmographic and Behavioural Signals
The more details you include in your ICP, the easier it will be to find companies that are actually equipped to buy and use your products. Determine details like company size, industry, location, revenue, growth stage, funding, hiring activity, and market maturity for a comprehensive ICP description.
Consider the ideal account’s behaviours, including intent, engagement, website activity, content interest, and sales conversations. Use all these details to determine if your product is a good fit based on current tools and needs.
Step 5: Identify Buying Triggers
Once you know the key details of your account, consider what actually pushes the company to make a purchase. What moments create urgency to buy? New leadership, market expansion, regulatory change, funding, technology change, transformation projects, poor performance, and competitive pressure could all affect the account’s budget and buying triggers.
Knowing buying triggers can help you adjust the timing, messaging, and outreach of your GTM plan to cater to the account’s needs perfectly.
Step 6: Build the ICP Hypothesis
Once you’ve done all the research to determine the type of account that’s most likely to buy and benefit from your products, put it all together into one clear profile. Include a list of must-have traits, nice-to-have traits, disqualifiers, and priority segments so you can easily narrow down your search.
The ICP should be clearly organised and easy to understand so both sales and marketing can use it without any conflicting tactics. Consider creating a chart or bullet point list to neatly display all ICP details, including pain points, goals, company size, technology used, and what to avoid.
Step 7: Validate the ICP in Market
The only way to know if your ICP is correct is to test it. Use outbound, ABM, paid campaigns, content engagement, events, and/or sales conversations as part of your GTM strategy to reach your ICP. Then, track how many accounts move forward, whether that’s through engagement, meetings, or conversions.
Compare your strategy’s performance across segments, account tiers, and channels. If you’re not seeing progress in opportunities, you might need to adjust your ICP based on the results.
Step 8: Refine and Operationalise the ICP
Even with lots of research beforehand, sometimes assumptions about accounts can be incorrect. An ICP doesn’t have to be complete once your strategy starts. You can continue to change and refine it as you learn more.
Your ICP can help you build target account lists, campaign plans, sales plays, and messaging, which is why it’s important for it to be as specific and current as possible. Even if an ICP works well at first, it may occasionally need adjustments as the market, offer, and customer base change.
Common ICP Mistakes
An ICP is more than just a list of who you want to reach. It needs to be detailed, well-researched, and updated as needed. Avoid these common ICP mistakes when you’re getting started:
- Keeping your ICP too broad
- Building the ICP from assumptions rather than evidence
- Focusing on the total addressable market instead of best-fit customers
- Prioritising well-known companies over conversion potential
- Ignoring sales feedback and closed-lost data
- Not allowing ICP changes after launch
How xGrowth Approaches ICP for GTM
xGrowth understands the importance of fully defining and validating an ICP, so we work hard to help brands prepare that step of their GTM plan. We always start with commercial goals and market context before moving onto customer data, sales insight, market signals, and account-level research.
Once the brand knows the key details of their ICP, xGrowth helps them validate the ICP through real GTM execution, not just internal workshops. Then, we connect the validated ICP to ABM, demand generation, messaging, sales alignment, and pipeline measurement, focusing on the accounts that are most likely to engage, convert, grow, and deliver ROI.
ICP is a huge part of a GTM strategy’s foundation, so xGrowth helps every brand develop a tailored profile that they can refine and rely on as their GTM strategy evolves.