I ask a simple question in almost every Diagnostic call I do: “Who’s your ideal customer?” It’s not a trick question, and I’m not looking for anything clever. I just want to hear it in a sentence or two.
I’m still shocked at how often nobody in the room can answer it – and I don’t just mean the salespeople. I’ve asked owners, presidents, and CEOs, and what I usually get back is either a shrug, a list of everyone they’ve ever sold to, or something so broad it’s useless. “Manufacturers.” “Anybody with a maintenance department.” “Companies that need what we do.” If your definition of an ideal customer is “anybody who might buy,” then you don’t have a definition, you have a hope. And your salespeople are out there every day making decisions about where to spend their time based on that hope, which is exactly why so many of them are busy and broke at the same time.
Why This Matters More Than It Sounds
Defining your Ideal Customer Profile isn’t a marketing exercise, and it isn’t a slide in the deck for the strategic plan that nobody reads. It’s the single decision that determines where your salespeople point their limited hours.
Every salesperson has a fixed amount of time, and every hour spent on a prospect who was never going to be a good customer is an hour stolen from one who would have been – not to mention headaches from selling inappropriate business down the road. When the ICP is fuzzy, salespeople default to whoever answers the phone, whoever seems interested, and whoever is easy to reach – and none of those are the same thing as whoever is actually right for your business. That’s how you end up with a pipeline full of activity and a funnel that doesn’t produce, and it’s how you end up landing customers who are more trouble than they’re worth, which is its own expensive problem.
Most people file this under selling — a Route issue in the Navigator’s Chart, something the reps need to get better at. It isn’t. Defining your ICP is infrastructure. It’s a Vessel issue, and it sits right alongside territory design, activity metrics, and performance standards: a structural decision the company makes once, writes down, and holds people to. You can train questioning skills all day and it won’t fix a salesperson pointed at the wrong companies.
The good news is that this isn’t complicated. For most B2B companies, a real ICP comes down to a handful of variables, and you should be able to say it out loud in a sentence or two.
The Variables That Actually Matter
Start with industry. Not “B2B” or “manufacturing,” but specific enough to be useful. What industries do you genuinely serve better than your competitors do, and where does your experience actually mean something? If you’ve done your best work with commercial printers, say commercial printers. Precision here is a feature, not a limitation.
Then size. Revenue, employee count, number of locations, units of production – whatever measure actually predicts fit in your business. This one matters more than most companies admit, because there’s usually a floor below which the customer can’t afford you or doesn’t need you, and a ceiling above which you can’t serve them well or you’re outgunned by bigger competitors. Know both numbers.
Then location. This is the easiest variable and the one companies get sloppiest about, usually because somebody once landed an account three states away and now nobody wants to draw a line. Draw the line. Your salespeople need to know where they’re supposed to be.
Then position title, and here’s where I want you to be honest with yourself. You’re not looking for whoever will take the meeting. You’re looking for the person who can actually make a decision without having to ask someone else for permission. There’s a world of difference between a friendly contact who likes talking to your rep and a person with the authority to say yes and sign something. If your team is calling on people who can only say no, they’re not prospecting, they’re socializing. In any company, the authority to say no is unlimited. The ability to say yes starts in the corner office and only goes out as far as the person in the corner office wants it to.
And then the last variable, which is really two, and you want at least one of them: attitude or signals.
Attitude means the prospect believes – or is capable of believing – that what you sell contributes to the value of their business rather than being a cost to be minimized. Some companies see your category as a strategic investment, and some see it as a necessary evil to be beaten down on price. You already know which of your customers are which. The ones who see the value are the ones worth pursuing, and the ones who don’t are usually the ones who make your life miserable and leave for a nickel anyway.
Signals mean something has actually happened that indicates a need. A new facility. A key retirement. A regulatory change. A merger. Growth that’s outrunning their current setup. A competitor’s failure. These are the events that move a company from “someday” to “now,” and they’re findable if anyone bothers to look.
Put those together and you should be able to say something like: “Commercial printers between $10 and $50 million in the greater metro area, where we can reach the owner or GM, who view print quality as a competitive advantage rather than a commodity – and especially those who’ve just added capacity.”
That’s an ICP. That’s a target a salesperson can actually aim at.
The ICP Is Not the Prospect
Here’s where I see the second big mistake, which is that companies build a decent ICP and then treat it like a qualified prospect list. It isn’t, and confusing the two will waste as much time as having no ICP at all.
The ICP is a profile. It describes the kind of company that would make a great customer, and it tells your salespeople where to fish. But fitting the profile doesn’t mean the opportunity is real, because a perfect-fit company that isn’t in the market, or won’t engage, or can’t get to a decision, is not a prospect. It’s a name.
What you’re actually looking for is what I call a FRED, and every real opportunity in your pipeline should be one.
Fits Right. The company matches your ICP on the variables that matter – the industry, the size, the location, and the attitude. This is the ICP part, and it’s the price of admission, not the whole ticket.
Engaged. They’re actually in the conversation. They’re answering, they’re asking questions, they’re giving you real information about their situation, and they’re willing to do the work of exploring whether this makes sense. A company that fits your profile perfectly but won’t return a call is not engaged, and no amount of persistence changes that – it just means they haven’t reached a point where they need you, or you haven’t earned the right to their time.
Decisive. They can and will make a decision. This is two things, and both matter. You need to be talking to someone with the authority to decide, and you need a buyer who is actually capable of deciding – because plenty of companies have a decision-maker in the chair who will happily take meetings for a year and never pull the trigger on anything. If there’s no path to a yes or a no, there’s no opportunity, there’s just a hobby.
A FRED is a real opportunity. Everything else in your pipeline is a name, a hope, or a friend.
Say It Out Loud
Here’s your homework, and it’s simple. Sometime this week, ask your salespeople to describe your ideal customer in one or two sentences without looking at anything. Then do it yourself.
If you get five different answers, you’ve found something worth fixing, because your team is out there right now making a hundred small decisions a day about where to spend their time, and every one of those decisions is being made against whatever definition each of them carries around in their own head. Give them a real one, teach them the difference between a name and a FRED, and watch how much less time gets wasted.
Here’s the good news. The odds are that you already have FREDs in your company’s book of business. Figure out who they are, figure out what makes them a FRED, break it down to the characteristics I’ve listed, and now you have a framework. Mirror and match them.
You can’t hit a target you can’t describe. And most companies have never bothered to describe it.
To learn more about how to build your Vessel, attend my July 23 Webinar: It’s Not Your Reps: The 5 Structural Flaws Quietly Killing Your Sales
