Finding Your Target Customer: How To Define Your ICP

Your decision to go independent starts with you: your unique IP, your goals, and your desired lifestyle. But the success of your business hinges on how well you know your customer. You need to know what motivates them, what they fear, and what they need to be successful in their job. This understanding will inform your strategic positioning, marketing materials, sales pitch, and pricing model. 

Creating an ideal customer profile, or ICP, helps you identify exactly the type of client you’re looking for—one who needs your services, has the budget to pay for them, and has the authority to hire you. By carefully articulating your ICP early in the process of going independent, you can refine your early outreach and find prospects who will be eager to enlist your services.

How to find your ICP

Building a business is a nonlinear process. Identifying your ICP may overlap with some of the work you do to find product-market fit. Expect to run into the classic chicken-or-the-egg conundrum: Your services determine your ICP, but you’ll also use your ICP to determine your services.

Think of it as akin to the scientific process: You have to start somewhere, so you’ll make an educated guess, build a working theory, use that theory to gather data, and refine your assumptions based on what you learn. Working through the following four steps will help you start shaping up your ICP:

1. Articulate the problems you can solve

Start by taking an inventory of your skills and reflecting on the problems this skill set positions you to solve. If you haven’t done so already, check out our guide to identifying your IP to define your most marketable skills. 

Once you’ve identified your skills, think about how those skills translate into services that solve specific customer problems. A product manager, for example, might develop a list of customer problems like this:

• Poor understanding of user needs
• Difficulty integrating and prioritizing product feedback
• Difficulty tailoring product features based on market demand
• Trouble with product pricing and positioning 
• Suboptimal product development processes 
• Challenges articulating product vision
• Trouble aligning stakeholders 
• Inability to keep up with changing marketing conditions

Next, review your list and highlight the problems you most enjoy solving. Say that our product manager specializes in market research and data analysis, likes this work, and enjoys serving the types of customers who tend to struggle in those areas. They might decide to focus on helping clients assess user needs and understand the nuances of the market—and they might remove problems related to development processes and product vision from their list. 

2. Get specific about what people need your services

Once you’ve narrowed down your problem list, identify the types of people who might pay you to solve these problems. Reflect on your professional experience and think of specific colleagues, supervisors, or professional peers who’ve faced these problems. Use that information to extrapolate the types of roles responsible for these problems at other companies. It’s important that these are specific people and not companies, since you’ll always be selling to a specific person.

Make a note of the following:

• They value your skill set. What priorities make someone a fit for your services? If you’re an executive ghostwriter, for example, you’ll focus on business leaders who value high-quality writing that ultimately makes their business more money (and makes them look good in the process). Look for an ICP whose values align closely with the services you provide.
• They have sufficient decision-making authority. Anyone in your ICP must have decision authority relevant to the problem you’ll solve for them. A digital marketing assistant might benefit from your ability to identify the best growth channels for a product launch campaign, for example, but they won’t have the authority to hire you to help. Move up the chain of command to find the role responsible for deciding to hire you.
• They exist in multiple companies. Your ICP will include roles that are relatively consistent across companies. This makes it easier to not only create archetypes, but also tactically search for them. Product Manager, Operations Manager, and CPO are good targets since they’re common roles with standardized responsibilities—Chief Fun Officer and Underwater Basket Weaver aren’t. Typically, you’ll include multiple titles to account for variations across companies, such as CMO, CGO, and Director of Marketing.

3. Define company parameters 

Start by eliminating industries you don’t want to support or business types that don’t interest you. Then take notes on the industry, stage, size, and total revenue markers that suggest a company has the budget for your services, and create a list of those that meet your criteria. There’s some guesswork involved here—and you may revisit your assumptions later on—but you can save yourself time by focusing your research on an ICP likely to have the budget for your services. 

Fill in your ICP with the following company information: 

• Company size: Include number of employees, total revenue, sales volumes, and market cap.
• Growth stage: Indicate the growth stage of companies you’re targeting, e.g., seed-stage, Series A, or preparing for an IPO.
• Geographic location: Identify your geographic criteria, including whether you’ll focus on a particular region or country. 
• Industry: Note industries of focus, such as manufacturing or technology.
• Budget: Define an operating budget range that suggests a company will be able to afford you.

• The types of products they sell: Define the product types your ICP sells, such as SaaS platforms, data management services, or connected devices.
• Technology they use: In some cases, you’ll also focus on customers who use a particular piece of technology. An Asana consultant, for example, would focus on clients who already use the platform. If your services help companies navigate a particular technological shift—such as AI adoption in the workplace—include that information in your ICP.

A lot of this is guesswork, so don’t sweat it if you're not confident in every answer. You’ll double-check your assumptions later on. Because you’ll never have complete data, you do risk getting stuck in analysis paralysis. We’ve been there.

Do your best—this is an iterative process and you’ll update the assumptions you’re making as you learn more about your customer.

4. Complete your ICP with customer personas 

Finally, you’ll build out your customer personas, which are fictionalized representations of people who fit your ICP. Essentially, you’ll choose real people from among your target audience, then anonymize and synthesize their personal information: Describe their background, role, pain points, personality characteristics, motivators, and fears. 

Developing customer personas also allows you to push your assumptions further. You’ll get a better idea of who your customer is, what they need, and the problems they’re facing—all of which will help you position your products and services later on. Here’s an example:

• Name: Christopher Shan
• Job title: Chief Growth Officer
• Age: 44
• Status: Married
• Location: Chicago
• Educational background: BA in Communications
• Personality characteristicssome text
  • Goal-oriented
  • Extroverted
  • Conscientious
  • Confident
  • Opinionated
  • Data-driven
• Motivatorssome text
  • Financial success
  • Pressure to please stakeholders
  • Satisfaction in a job well done
• Company some text
  • Logistics provider specializing in transportation and fleet management 
  • Publicly traded
  • Annual revenue of $300 million
• Goalssome text
  • Grow revenue 
  • Identify new markets 
  • Stay up-to-date with market trends
  • Use technology to drive growth
  • Get a promotion
• Pain pointssome text
  • Pressure to deliver results
  • Stiff competition in the marketplace
  • Limited budget to hire for a specific skillset
  • Need to gather and analyze large amounts of market data
  • Difficulty finding expert support
  • Trouble staying on top of advances in technology and understanding their business and market implications
  • Managing competing priorities; “not enough time in the workday”
• Fears: some text
  • Missing a key market trend or new technology
  • A failed market expansion attempt
  • Losing market share to competitors
• Preferred media sources:some text
  • Legacy news media: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist
  • Research firms: Gartner, Nielsen, Qualtrics, IDC
  • Consultancies: McKinsey & Co., Bain, Deloitte
  • Industry publications: Logistics Management, Logistics Quarterly, Supply & Demand Chain Executives 

Aim to create two or three unique, identifiable customer personas for your ICP. You’ll know you’ve created good ones if a reader can quickly imagine a specific person. When you’re done, you’re ready to move on to customer discovery. 

Keep in mind that your ICP will evolve as your business grows, so this isn’t a one-and-done process. You’ll refine your ICP over time, and you may end up developing new ICPs if your services change or you add a new line of business. 

Expert support with Pollen

Need help identifying your ICP? Pollen’s experts-in-residence and community of independent consultants are here to help. We also provide playbooks, workshops, and sprints designed to help you position your services and build a sales and marketing strategy tailored to your ICP.

‍