What is an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?
The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) describes the characteristics of the profitable customers. It does this by looking both at how hard and costly the customer will be to acquire and how valuable the customer will be once signed up. An ICP covers both the type of company and the persons at the company to approach, and more specifically looks not only at general characteristics, but also on situational characteristics.
The company can best be described by firmographics, type, size, industry, etc. and the combination of people at the company to approach has to cover all four aspects of the BANT framework:
- Budget: Has budget to make the purchase.
- Authority: Is the decision-maker for this type of product.
- Need: Has a problem solved by our product.
- Time: Is urgently looking to solve this problem.
The Ideal Customer Profile is a core part of the work on positioning and marketing mix done in the strategy part of the product management process.
