ICP (ideal customer profile)
Definition
The customer type that closes fastest and stays longest, described precisely enough to say no to the rest. An ICP describes an account; a persona describes a person inside it.
How you recognize it
The real one comes out of your own records. Pull the closed-won deals and rank them by sales cycle and by how long they stayed; pull the churned accounts and note what they had in common. What survives is a description in two parts: firmographics you can filter a database on, and a situation you can hear in the first call. The test is exclusion. An ICP that excludes no real prospect is a description of your market, and a market cannot be prioritized. Done properly, it decides where ad budget goes and which inbound lead sales calls first.
What to watch for
Ask which specific deals the ICP was derived from; a profile nobody can trace to closed business is a wish list. Count how many of your current customers fit it: if nearly all do, it is too wide to steer budget, and if nearly none do, someone wrote down the customers they would prefer. A document with a first name and a photo describing frustrations is a persona, and it cannot tell an SDR which accounts to work. And check the date on it; an ICP older than your last pricing or product shift needs rebuilding from the newer deals.
The question you ask
“Which real prospects does this profile exclude?”