Guide · Targeting
How to define your ICP and personas
A useful ICP is not a flattering portrait of your customers. It is a filter you can run against a database and that returns a finite number of companies.
Updated 2026-10-05
In short
An ICP (ideal customer profile) describes the companies that get the most value from your offer: industry, size, location, situation. Personas describe the people to contact inside them: role, seniority, problem. A good ICP starts from your best current customers, translates into filterable criteria and is checked by counting the market it points to.
ICP and persona: two different levels
The ICP describes a company: its industry, headcount, geography, business model, and the situation that makes your offer relevant. A persona describes a person inside that company: their role, seniority, what they are accountable for and what keeps them up at night.
The two combine. A payroll software vendor might target companies with 50 to 500 employees in the UK (ICP) and contact the CFO, the payroll manager and the HR director (three personas). One message will not fit all three: the CFO cares about cost and risk, the payroll manager about time and errors, the HR director about employee experience.
Mixing up the two levels causes the most common failures: a list of “sales directors” with no company criteria, or a list of perfect-fit companies where you write to the wrong person.
The method in six steps
1. Start from your best customers
List your ten to twenty best customers, not the biggest: the ones who signed fast, stay long, refer you and pay without haggling over every line. For each, note industry, headcount, location, who signed and why they chose you.
2. Look for observable patterns
Keep the criteria you can read from the outside: industry code, headcount band, region, the presence of a function (a procurement team, a data team), technology in use. “An innovation culture” cannot be filtered; “hiring data engineers” can.
3. Write down the trigger
What makes a company in your ICP need you now rather than in two years? A new executive, a funding round, a hiring spree, a regulation, a new site. This is what turns targeting into signal-based prospecting.
4. Define two or three personas
For each persona: real job titles (with variants), seniority, role in the decision (decision-maker, influencer, user), main problem, likely objection. Beyond three, your messages turn generic.
5. Size the market
Run your criteria against a company and contact database. If the result is a few dozen accounts, the ICP is too narrow for a campaign; if it is more than you could handle carefully in a year, split it into segments.
6. Test and revise
Launch one segment, look at who replies positively and who says “not for us”. Revise the ICP every quarter based on replies, not opinions.
ICP template
Fill in one sheet per segment. Values in brackets are examples to replace.
| Field | Question to ask | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Industry | Which activities, exactly? | [Food manufacturing] |
| Headcount | Which band, and why? | [50 to 250 employees: big enough to have the problem, too small for an in-house team] |
| Geography | Where can you deliver? | [UK and Ireland] |
| Situation | What context makes the offer relevant? | [Several production sites, ageing ERP] |
| Trigger | What event creates urgency? | [New operations director, new plant] |
| Exclusions | Who must never be contacted? | [Current customers, competitors, listed groups] |
| Personas | Who to contact, in what order? | [Operations director, then CFO] |
Persona template
| Field | Example |
|---|---|
| Job titles | [Operations director, VP operations, plant director, COO] |
| Seniority | [Executive committee] |
| Role in the decision | [Decision-maker for production] |
| Main problem | [Unplanned downtime, multi-site visibility] |
| What they read and attend | [Trade press, industry events] |
| Likely objection | [“We built our own tool”] |
| Message angle | [Compare with a similar site, don’t talk technology] |
The most common mistakes
- An aspirational ICP: describing the customers you would like to have (prestigious enterprise logos) instead of the ones who actually buy.
- Invisible criteria: maturity, culture, ambition. They matter, but you cannot filter on them; use them to qualify in the meeting, not to target.
- A single job title: “Sales Director” misses “Head of Sales”, “VP Sales”, “Chief Revenue Officer”. List the variants, in every language you prospect in.
- Too many personas: six personas for one segment produce six lukewarm messages. Start with the most likely decision-maker.
- Forgetting exclusions: emailing a current customer or a competitor damages the relationship and your reputation.
- Never counting: an ICP that has not met a database is a hypothesis. Counting shows at once whether it is too broad or empty.
- Freezing it: markets move and your replies tell you who buys. An ICP gets revised.
Example: from best customer to list
Take a fictional consulting firm, [Firm], specialised in operations improvement. Its five best customers share three traits: they are manufacturers with 80 to 300 employees, they run at least two production sites, and the project was started by an operations director who had joined less than a year earlier. None is a subsidiary of a large group: there, decisions are made at headquarters.
The ICP becomes: manufacturing, 80 to 300 employees, UK, at least two sites, excluding group subsidiaries. Primary persona: operations director or plant director; secondary persona: managing director, who controls budget at that size. Trigger: a recent appointment of the operations director.
Counting returns a few hundred companies: enough for a campaign over several months, not enough to afford a generic message. The firm splits it into two segments, food and engineering, because customer examples and vocabulary differ. Each segment’s first message cites a case from the same industry, and the trigger serves as the opener when there is one.
Three months later, replies show that companies under 120 employees rarely answer: they have no operations director separate from the owner. The firm raises the threshold to 120 and adds the managing director as the first persona for the lower band. That loop, hypothesis, count, test, revise, is what makes an ICP useful.
What The Sales Engine does
On the platform, you describe a target (industries, roles, size, geography) and it counts the reachable companies and decision-makers before you spend anything. Each target carries its personas, and proposed prospects come with a fit score: you approve them one by one before the first message. Buying signals then attach to the target to tell you when to write.
Frequently asked questions
How many ICP segments should I start with?
One or two. A well-counted segment with a message written for it beats five segments sharing the same copy. Add more once the first has produced enough replies to judge it.
What is the difference between ICP and TAM?
TAM (total addressable market) measures the whole possible market. The ICP is the part where you win most often. Counting your ICP gives a subset of the TAM, the one to focus prospecting on.
Do I need a different ICP per country?
Often, yes: job titles, company sizes and language change. Keep the same logic, but check titles and headcount bands locally.
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