$ man icp

ICP

Ideal Customer Profile. The type of company you're targeting. Industry, size, revenue, tech stack, geography, maturity stage. "Who's a fit?"

by Shawn Tenam

If you don't know your ICP, you're guessing. You waste time on companies that will never buy. You burn budget on enrichment and outreach for leads that don't qualify. ICP is the filter that separates signal from noise before you spend a dollar.

Every partner I work with has an icp.md file in their research folder. It defines firmographics (employee count, revenue, industry), qualification criteria (must have Atlassian footprint, must have 1,000-20,000 units under management), and scoring thresholds (8-10 = qualified, 6-7 = needs research, <6 = skip). I use that ICP to build a company qualification prompt in Clay. The prompt evaluates every company against those criteria and outputs a score + reasoning. Only qualified companies move downstream.