Your “ideal customer profile” might be missing the three most important ingredients:

1) the workflow

2) the competitive alternative

3) the problem

Lets look at each:

1) the workflow your prospects are executing

(or considering executing)

All B2B software is in essence workflow software.

People in companies buy software to help them with parts of their job.

This is true whether your software helps a low level employee do a simple task or a C-suite lead a large business process.

And so the most important aspect of an ICP is the actual workflow they would need to be doing to use your product.

To use a tangible example — if you sell cold outbound software, your ICP needs to be doing cold outbound already (or thinking about starting) for them to have even the slightest interest in your product.

Obviously that doesn’t mean you ONLY market to those people (you’ll want to create demand for people who aren’t interesting in cold outbound too)

…but they just aren’t in your ICP… yet!

2) the competitive alternative

(to executing the workflow)

Most ICP definitions do not include the competitive alternative, but it is of crucial importance for one main reason:

→ it determines your differentiation

You cannot differentiate without choosing a competitive alternative, because to be different requires something you’re compared to.

For example, framing ChatGPT’s differentiation against Google is very different than framing it against Claud.

Are you targeting a very immature market that would use a collection of tools or processes to perform the workflow?

Or are you targeting a more mature group that would be using a direct competitor to you?

Either of these will heavily change how you position and market yourself.

3) the problem

(of using the competitive alternative)

This third aspect is incredibly important in framing your value.

If your customer uses a competitive alternative but has no issues with it, they aren’t in your ICP.

Again — you can try to MOVE them into your ICP by making them aware of the problem, convincing them it’s a big deal.

But until you do, they aren’t in your ideal market.

The ideal customer profile buys into the problem as you have framed it.

The amount of money spent on “educating people” of their problem (who will simply never be convinced) is incalculable.

4) bonus segmentation beyond these 3

Obviously, once you have the workflow chosen, the competitive alternative, and the problem, you may want to add ADDITIONAL segmentation.

It can be extremely helpful to narrow to a specific department or a company type in further refining your ICP.