The ICP playbook.
A tight, opinionated guide to defining an Ideal Customer Profile sharp enough that a machine — and your reps — can act on it.
01 Start from who you have won
Do not theorize. List your last 20–30 closed-won accounts and look for what they share: industry, size band, motion, and the trigger that opened the door. Your best ICP is a pattern you have already lived.
Rule of thumb: if you cannot name five real companies that fit your ICP, it is still a guess, not a profile.
02 Separate firmographics from signals
Firmographics say who an account is — industry, headcount, region, revenue band. Signals say what it is doing — hiring, raising, migrating, expanding. A strong ICP names both.
- Firmographic bar: the non-negotiables an account must match.
- Signal triggers: the events that move an account to the top of the list.
- Exclusions: the traits that disqualify, no matter how good the rest looks.
03 Write the qualification bar
Turn the profile into a checklist a stranger could apply. “Mid-market B2B SaaS, 50–500 staff, hiring SDRs in the last 60 days, no incumbent CRM” is a bar. “Companies that need us” is not.
04 Let outcomes tune it
An ICP is a hypothesis. Feed every closed-won and closed-lost back into it and watch which criteria actually predict revenue. The definition should get sharper every quarter.
In Arete, your closed deals feed straight back into the fit model, so “qualified” keeps narrowing to what really converts for you. See how the engine works →
Put your ICP to work.
Define it once — Arete sources and qualifies against it automatically.