Seven Reasons Building an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Is Harder Than You Think
Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) that are held in high regard by the people who create them seem to be quite rare. Few people tell me their ICP is good, and plenty tell me that their company’s ‘needs a lot of work’.
There are a number of good reasons why excellence in ICP development is so uncommon – they often suffer from the typical challenges most B2B Go to Market tools are afflicted with: being poorly defined, largely static and usually dated.
Let’s start with what we perceive as the two biggest challenges, which are closely related.
1. It’s Not a Target Customer Profile
The first challenge relates to poor definition: many ‘ICPs’ are actually target customer profiles.
A target customer is any customer with an acceptably high propensity to purchase, typically identified through segmentation data and targeting logic. The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) refines this further by adding criteria such as the potential to deliver the highest value to the business—whether in terms of revenue, profitability, strategic alignment, or customer relationship quality. The ICP represents those customers that reflect both high purchase likelihood and mutual long-term benefit.
On our B2B Navigator graphic, product fit is plotted against higher customer value received by the company.
This refinement requires a deep understanding of not just of who may buy but who represents the most valuable relationship for the business. Balancing this focus while still maintaining sufficient market breadth for the economics to work is a common struggle for companies of all sizes.
2. What You Value from Your Customers Changes Over Time
The second related challenge is that the concept of an ideal customer is not static. What constitutes an ideal customer varies depending on the company’s stage of growth, its market, and its strategic goals. Start-ups usually focus on early adopters who are more tolerant of flaws and open to shaping product features. Hence, there is a distinction between an Ideal Customer Profile and an Early Customer Profile.
By way of contrast, scale-ups or established businesses prioritise the early and late majority, whose motivation for adoption includes proven benefits and lower risk. The needs, expectations, and feature preferences of these groups differ, making the definition of “ideal” highly dynamic.
Managing these dynamics is challenging but can be achieved by defining team responsibilities and establishing an operational cadence for the ICP.
3. The ICP Needs to be A Collaborative Effort
As the ICP needs to reflect both the changing needs of the market and the growth stage of the company keeping it up to date requires continuous input from across the revenue team. Sales, Product and Marketing teams each offer distinct and valuable insights, from frontline customer behaviour to product experience and market trends.
Without some skin in the game, adoption by any of these groups is less likely, which is another compelling reason to make this a collaborative effort.
4. You’re Likely to Have Too Little Data – or So Much It’s Hard to Use!
Early-stage businesses typically enter the market with little data and usually start with a hypothesis about their ideal customers, which requires rigorous testing and refinement.
Conversely, mature companies may find themselves overwhelmed by years of accumulated data scattered across systems and teams. Managing data at both extremes—too little or too much—presents a significant challenge to developing a reliable ICP.
At either end of the spectrum, the challenge can be made manageable by establishing a framework for data collection and a cadence for use and updating. The concept of collecting, collating and curating data is reflected in the growth of the containers on the ‘Good Ship Customer Profile’ on the accompanying graphic.
One other data caution comes from ‘Playing to Win’ author Roger Martin, who favours “depth of understanding over statistical rigour” which to him means “getting close to the customers, understanding their world, listening to everything they say, being beware of overly filtering.”
5. The ICP Must Reflect Group Behaviour
A hallmark of good ICP development is that it reflects buying group behaviour. This makes life complicated. Gaining insights into even a single individual’s behaviour is challenging, and group dynamics magnify this! However, focusing on a single contact or excluding behaviour from the ICP severely limits its utility.
An effective ICP needs to capture what’s essential without becoming too convoluted. The concept of the Enterprise Persona, which reflects the most pressing needs and priorities shared across the team, can be very helpful in managing complexity, as can prioritising focus on the most influential buying roles.
6. Narrowing Down Customers Requires Discipline
One of the hardest parts of building an ICP is exercising the discipline required to narrow down customer focus. For many companies, this means rejecting a wide variety of potential customers, even if it feels like they might lead to unexpected wins. The reality is that chasing these so-called “Black Swan” customers – those that are an outlier to your ICP but still buy—can divert focus and resources, ultimately hurting long-term growth. Staying disciplined and adhering to the profile that aligns with your core business objectives is essential but often challenging.
7. Your ICP Needs to be Usable!
Lastly, the ICP needs to be usable, which means it needs a crisp summary. Sharing the form used to collect the data is unlikely to inspire the intended user to pick it up and use it. For more on this, see our article on ‘An Example Ideal Customer Profile – What Does a Great ICP Look Like?’
Conclusion
We need to navigate a host of challenges to create an ICP that genuinely supports the revenue team. The reward for overcoming these obstacles, however, is a sharper go-to-market motion with the promise of both happier customers and faster growth.