How to Define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
For business-to-business (B2B) companies, taking time to develop your ideal customer profile is an important step in ensuring your sales and marketing resources are focused in the right area.
But where do you get started with this? Whether you’re starting from scratch, or simply refining an existing ICP, we’ll walk you through the essentials in defining that perfect customer — and showcase how a number of our clients use Beauhurst to find new opportunities.
What is an ideal customer profile?
An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a representation of the type of organisation that would most benefit from your product or service.
For B2B companies, this customer profile reflects both the type of customer that would gain genuine value from your services and the type of company your salespeople would ideally sell to, in order to bring in most lifetime value to the business.
You’ll likely already have an idea of this from your product development roadmap, where your team will have outlined the key target audience(s) your product or service is aimed at and the pain points it solves. However, formalising this into an ICP your commercial team can use is a vital step in shaping how you promote your product or service.
What about buyer personas?
Whilst they share similarities, it’s important not to confuse buyer personas with ICPs. Buyer personas refer to types of decision makers that sales teams could come across when approaching your ICP businesses.
For example, you may conclude that your ICPs are early-stage fintech businesses, and base your buying personas within those organisations on individual attributes, such as job titles and demographics.
Buyer personas are a way of building up some context around the people who make up your ICP.
Why should you create ideal customer profiles?
ICPs are a net benefit for your business in the long run. They form a key part of a more focused sales strategy that will ultimately cut costs associated with wasted time and outreach — and bring in more revenue as a result.
Here are a handful of practical reasons why creating an ICP can benefit your company’s outreach efforts:
Understanding your customer base will focus marketing messaging
Establishing an ICP will help with earlier-stage lead generation.
By better understanding your target audience, you can tailor your marketing campaigns to attract the right business demographics. For example, by creating material geared towards your ICP instead of producing general content on your product’s features, you can focus your messaging around specific pain points in those industries, company sizes, and other metrics that define this ideal customer.
This can generate a far healthier pipeline for your sales team.
Targeted sales processes are more efficient
Similar to the way in which targeted content marketing improves lead generation efforts, it’s no secret that time and energy are valuable resources to sales teams. This is especially true for B2B companies where sales cycles tend to be longer and potential customers require more attention from sales reps than in a B2C transaction.
Focusing on high-quality leads that are more likely to convert into sales saves a huge amount of your team’s resources. And this will save money otherwise spent on cold leads that are unlikely to convert into revenue.
If successful, a sales strategy geared towards companies fitting your ICP will generate more revenue and reduce costs on average — which means higher profits to stakeholders.
Your best customers can become evangelists for your business
Apart from the main effect on a company’s revenue, identifying ICPs and selling to businesses that most resemble them can result in a cohort of customers that are eager to become evangelists for your product.
Customers getting genuine value from your product will either formally (thorough testimonials or case studies) or informally (via word of mouth) vouch for the quality offered by your business.
Getting your customer base to resemble your ideal customer profile is also likely to result in returning customers, and thus a higher lifetime value derived from those businesses.
Simply put, it’s cheaper to retain a customer than to win over a new one.
Identifying your ideal customer profile can inform future product development
Finding your ICP can also be of great help to product teams. It makes sense to tailor your product to the needs of a specific customer type that you know will make use of new developments.
And once your customer base starts to resemble your ICP, you can go directly to the source and adopt a more user-led product development strategy, by taking in direct feedback from your clients.
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Your step-by-step guide to building an ideal customer profile
Step 1: Analyse your existing customers
Firstly, it’s worth looking at your existing customer base and drawing up the key metrics.
- Which companies have the highest contract value?
- Which have the highest satisfaction levels?
- Which engage most with your product?
- Which have the best retention rates?
It’s important to consider which customer segments benefit most from your services, and what those benefits are. And fortunately, there’s a really simple way to do this — just ask!
Is your product or service reducing their costs? And if so, to what extent? Is it helping them streamline previously lengthy, manual processes? If so, how much time have they saved?
These are just a couple of questions that your team can ask in training sessions, surveys, or polls. Not only do they give you vital market research, but they also help the customer realise just how valuable your offering is to them, so they’re more likely to buy again.
Step 2: Find common denominators
The next step is to process this information on your existing customers, and look for common trends. Make a list of these, and try to group them into broader themes. You might be surprised by the results.
For example, you might realise that most of your startup consumer base is primarily VC-backed, or that they’re all currently operating at similar sizes or stages of evolution.
This exercise is gold dust for your future marketing strategy, as you’ll be able to focus your messaging on specific solutions for your ICP.
Step 3: Sourcing new leads using your ICP
Once you’ve found your target customer through auditing your client list, you can now make use of your ICP to source new leads.
The Beauhurst platform allows you to search through our database of over 5.6m UK companies and 2.8m German companies, to generate lists of high-quality leads that fit your criteria.
Our wide range of filters makes it easy to narrow your search and focus on those companies best-suited to your product or services. All these potential leads can be saved into a Collection, to be approached at the right time, using the right outreach strategy.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them
Even with the best intentions, businesses often fall into a few common traps when defining their ICP. Here are a handful of common mistakes to watch out for — and some tips on how to get it right.
Defining your ICP too broadly (or too narrowly)
Your ICP should be a refined target, not a catch-all audience. If it’s too broad, you’ll waste time and resources chasing prospects who won’t convert. Whilst if it’s too narrow, you risk overlooking high-potential companies that fall outside of your fixed criteria.
How to address it
- Use business demographic, financial, and behavioural data to identify patterns among your best customers.
- Test and refine by tracking conversion rates — if your ICP isn’t producing high-value leads, adjust accordingly.
- With Beauhurst, you can filter and segment companies based on real-time market activity, ensuring your ICP remains specific but still flexible.
Relying on assumptions instead of data-driven insights
It’s easy to fall into the trap of assumptions and confirmation bias — and without hard data, you could be targeting companies that aren’t actually the best fit.
How to address it
- Start with your existing high-value customers — who’s driving the most revenue and engagement?
- Use platforms like Beauhurst to analyse themes — what do these companies have in common? Do they share a similar funding stage, growth trajectory, or industry focus?
- Regularly test your ICP against real-world outcomes, and continue to refine it as you gather more data.
Failing to update your ICP as markets evolve
It’s easy to fall into the trap of assumptions and confirmation bias — and without hard data, you could be targeting companies that aren’t actually the best fit.
How to address it
- Review and update your ICP regularly, depending on the rate of change in your industry.
- Track market movements — investment trends, competitor shifts, and sector growth. Beauhurst’s real-time data can help identify when new companies or industries start fitting your ICP criteria.
- Look for early-stage signals such as funding rounds, expansion plans, or new hires. These can indicate whether a company is ready to do business with you.
How Beauhurst helps find ICPs
Now we’ll walk through an example using the Beauhurst platform.
Imagine you work in sales for an IT security software provider that specialises in serving new fintech companies and banks. Here’s how you would use the Beauhurst platform to find new clients.
Define your search criteria
The first step is setting up a search that reflects your ICP. Here’s how:
Active companies only — Begin by filtering for companies that have an active status on Companies House. This removes dissolved or inactive businesses from your results.
Location-based filtering — Since you’re selling in the UK, narrow the search to only include companies based in the UK. You can be more granular than this, all the way down to postcode radius, if you wish.
Industry and sector targeting — On the Beauhurst platform, you can filter by both industries and buzzwords, making it easy to pinpoint niche sectors like fintech and banking.
Refine by growth stage
Since your security software is ideal for relatively new fintech companies, you can further narrow down the list by:
Company size – Set a filter for businesses with a maximum of 20 employees, ensuring you’re targeting early-stage companies rather than larger, established firms.
Funding stage – To avoid companies that have already scaled beyond your ICP, filter for those that have raised equity funding but no more than £1m. This helps you find fintech startups that are growing but still early enough to need your solution.
Save your ICP as a Collection
Now that you’ve created a search that aligns with your ICP, the next step is saving it as a Collection within Beauhurst.
Collections allow you to
- Monitor the companies that fit your ICP over time.
- Quickly revisit and refine your prospect list as new businesses emerge.
- Collaborate with your team by sharing relevant lists.
We won’t walk through the full Collection process in this post, but you can find out how to create a Collection in our latest guide.
Expand your prospect list
Once you’ve built a Collection, you can use it to discover even more high-potential companies by layering it into the Beauhurst platform’s Advanced Search tool.
This enables you to:
- Identify lookalike companies in different locations or industries
- Expand your search into new target demographics
- Spot emerging fintech businesses that match your ICP
This process ensures that you’re not just finding ideal-fit companies once, but continuously uncovering new, high-value prospects as your ICP evolves.
By regularly updating your Collections and using tools like industry filters, investment tracking, and company monitoring, you can ensure your ICP remains precise, relevant, and actionable.
See how to do all of the above in our handy how-to video below.
Build your ideal customer profile with Beauhurst
By using accurate, real-time data, you can refine your target market, avoid wasted outreach, and consistently connect with the right companies at the right time.
Beauhurst makes this process seamless by tracking the UK’s fastest-growing businesses — enabling our clients and their ICPs to be as dynamic as the market itself.
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