The majority of startups don't include THE MOST IMPORTANT ELEMENT when defining their ICP.

Most ICPs look something like this...

→ companies in the U.S.

→ doing $50m in revenue

→ with 500-1000 employees

While these firmographics are important, they don't capture the main reason companies shop for software:

→ Will the software support the activities that a company needs it to support?

At the most basic level...

workers in companies...

do work.

And they buy SOFTWARE to help with that work.

And so THE MOST CRITICAL aspect of a target segment is the unit of work being done... i.e. does the company even do (or plan on doing) the activities that your product would support?

If you make software that supports outbound sales, your ICP must necessarily include companies "doing outbound sales" or "thinking about starting outbound sales" as the primary use case.

If a company has no interest in doing outbound sales (perhaps because they get all their prospects from inbound marketing), then they are not in your target market... full stop.

It doesn't matter if they meet every other aspect of your ICP.

If they aren't doing the work that your product supports (or CONSIDERING doing the work your product supports), they simply will not buy.

(Side note: This insight was first codified in the jobs-to-be-done theory, though this has its own issues since half of jobs practitioners consider a desired outcome as a "job," rather than the functional activities being a "job").

Does that mean companies not doing those activities (i.e. the use case) can never become a part of your target ICP?

Of course not!

That's the entire reason for "demand gen."

Take Mac Reddin 🦕's company Commsor 🦕.

He uses LinkedIn thought leadership (among other channels) to help push people from saying, "I've never thought about leveraging my network to get leads," to saying, "I want to see how we might leverage our network to get leads."

When they are in the former stage, they simply aren't a part of Mac's ICP.

And if he can't convince them that "go-to-network" is an extremely powerful way to do business development...

...they will simply never buy.

Once you have the key use case figured out, you can layer on additional elements in order to further refine the segment (i.e. things like specific problems they are running into, competitive alternatives they might be considering, and other department or firmographic details).

Another note — use cases DON'T need to be hyper-narrow.

In fact, most product categories themselves are simply mature use cases.

Companies shopping for "CRMs" are looking for software that supports the "customer relationship management" use case.

Similarly, companies shopping for "BI tools" are looking for software that supports the "business intelligence" use case.