How to write an ICP that survives contact with reality
Most ICP documents read like wishlists. Here's the four-question test we use to turn a vague target market into a definition your sales team can actually use.
Every founder who walks in for a discovery call has an ICP. Almost none of them have one a salesperson can actually use.
The dead giveaway: it's a list of attributes. "Mid-market SaaS in fintech, 50–500 employees, headquartered in Singapore, with a CFO." That's a filter, not an ICP. A filter tells you who's eligible. An ICP tells you who's winnable.
The four questions
Before we touch a list or write a single email, we make the client answer these four — out loud, on a call, with examples:
1. Who's bought from you in the last 12 months and renewed?
Not "who's our biggest deal." Who renewed. Renewal is the only signal that survives the honeymoon. If you don't have renewals yet, use customers who expanded. If you don't have either, you don't have an ICP — you have a hypothesis. That's fine, just say so.
2. Among those, what was the trigger event?
Almost every closed-won deal has one. New hire in the buyer role. New funding. A regulation change. An incumbent contract ending. If you can name the trigger, you can find the next 50 prospects who just hit it.
3. Who was not the right fit, and why?
The "not us" list is more valuable than the "us" list. We ask clients to name 3 deals that closed but became painful, and 3 that stalled at proposal. Patterns emerge fast — usually in two dimensions: company size and buying-committee complexity.
4. What's the one thing they all said in their words?
Buyers don't describe pain the way your marketing team does. We pull this from gong recordings, sales notes, and Slack #wins. The verbatim phrase becomes the anchor of the outreach copy — not a product feature.
What good output looks like
Here's what we ship back to clients after this exercise — for a recent logistics SaaS working SEA mid-market:
ICP: Singapore- and HK-headquartered freight forwarders, 50–250 employees, multi-branch, currently using a mix of Excel and a legacy WMS, where the COO or Head of Operations has been in role <18 months and the company has either added a branch or signed a new enterprise client in the last 6 months.
Trigger we listen for: a new branch opening, a press release about a major client win, or a new COO/Head of Ops on LinkedIn.
What they say: "Our ops team is drowning in WhatsApp and spreadsheets. I can't see what's happening in the other branch."
Disqualifiers: single-branch, family-run with founder still in operations, or already on a global TMS like CargoWise.
That's a paragraph. It's also a complete brief for an outbound campaign — it tells you who to target, what trigger to monitor, what message to lead with, and who to skip.
The test
If your ICP doesn't let your SDR look at a LinkedIn profile and say "yes" or "no" in 30 seconds, it's not an ICP yet. Iterate until it does.
Want a second pair of eyes on yours? Send it over — we'll mark it up and send back what we'd actually use to build a target list.