Note: This article is based on a lightly edited transcript of a video conversation. The language has been kept conversational to preserve the speaker’s original tone and flow.
In this blog, we will take you through a six-step process to understand and develop your ideal customer profile (ICP), a critical part of any effective sales ICP framework.
Now, you may be thinking this is a topic typically associated with the marketing team, something they focus on when trying to generate awareness of your brand. And you’re right. However, working with top-performing teams and delivering sales training courses at our sales academy, the best businesses and sales organisations proactively contribute to this process.
Why? Because if marketing works in isolation and generically targets a certain type of company or buyer, the quality of leads that sales receives often falls short.
When sales and marketing align—especially through shared involvement in ICP development and buyer persona creation—the quality of those leads improves significantly. That’s why having sales involved in creating a B2C or a B2B ideal customer profile is so important for consistent B2C or B2B lead qualification.
Essentially, your ICP for sales becomes the foundation for identifying and reaching the buyers and organisations you genuinely want to work with.
This includes understanding both firmographics vs demographics, the roles of different B2B buyer personas, and even applying psychographic segmentation for deeper insight into customer behaviour.
In a startup, you might begin with a broader or scattergun approach. But in an established business, it becomes vital to narrow in on the right customer segmentation strategy—identifying not just the organisations but the ideal buyer profiles within them.
Knowing how to create a customer persona, based on real buyer roles by industry, supports smarter sales strategies and more successful outreach.
At the end of the day, this isn’t just a marketing task; it’s core to sales leaders training and a critical component we emphasise in every high-impact sales training academy or business.
Six-Step Process for Developing ICPs
The ideal buyers are within those businesses as well. So the first step of creating an ICP for sales is really understanding who your best customers are today.
You will have a database of your existing customers and a CRM system. You know what types of roles are buying your products, services, and solutions.
You will also have an idea of what industry they come from. And by industry, the job title might vary. So, this step is also about considering how to create a customer persona.
1. Analyse Existing Customer Data to identify Common Traits of Loyal Customers
The first step of developing a sales ICP framework involves evaluating the data available to you, analysing it, and looking for trends.
What you’re trying to understand is: who do we provide exceptional value and service for? Who do we enjoy working with, and who gains real value from our services, solutions, and products?
The key questions to consider are:
- Who are your top-performing customers today?
- Who gets the biggest value from you, renews every year, refers you, and organically expands the relationship over time?
- What characteristics do these customers share?
2. Distinguish Between Firmographics (B2B) and Demographics (B2C)
Now, firmographics are characteristics used to understand and segment at an organisational level.
When you’re working with B2B (business-to-business) companies, these are essential at a high level. Why are they essential? Because generally speaking, most organisations, products, and services can support and service multiple industries. Hence, the reason why segmentation is essential.
In the food industry, we might be working with marketing teams or research and development teams. But in financial services, we might be working with strategy teams.
And in advertising agencies, we might be working with insight teams. While they perform similar functions, their profiles are slightly different. The way they do their work and who they report to is also slightly different.
Hence, the better the quality of your segmentation and your understanding of firmographics vs demographics at an organisational level, the easier it is for you to develop your ideal customer profile.
That said, it is equally important, if you are targeting B2C, to understand demographic data as well. This includes age, income level, gender, where they live, where they work, lifestyle traits, and so on. So, it isn’t just a case of firmographics or demographics.
At a high level, first and foremost, it is about firmographics. Then you start thinking more granularly about demographics.
The key goal here is to identify those external qualifiers that describe your ideal customer profile.
Marketing generally takes the lead on this first step. However, sales must be involved in this process because sales already have lots of customers.
They know what those customers look like, what they like, and what they dislike. So it’s important that sales plays a key role and contributes to this process.
Now, taking this a step further and looking at understanding your audience and your focus, from a B2B perspective, it is really about logic. It is a longer process that brings with it a certain set of criteria.
On the B2C side, it is generally about one person making the decision. That one person may buy based on emotion as opposed to logic.
From a B2B perspective, sales cycles are longer. Generally, the bigger the organisation, the more people are involved. The likelihood is that there will be a committee making the decision.
Because of that, when you work with B2B organisations, you need to add another layer to your profiling. That layer is about knowing who the different types of buyers are within the organisation you are serving.
Generally speaking, there are five buying roles you need to consider.
The most important is the economic buyer — the person who will sign the contract and make the ultimate decision on whether or not to take your product or service.
Before that happens, there are other profiles you also need to proactively manage and understand. By proactively managing and understanding, you might be selling at the organisational level, and yes, the economic buyer makes the ultimate decision, but other profiles like the value buyer, the technical buyer, the user buyer, and the influencer buyer all have a vested interest in the process. You need to create profiles for each of these characters in parallel.
Going back to the market research example: in a finance organisation, someone buying market research could be in strategy, while the economic decision maker might sit in a completely different area.
You might have to go through a procurement team as well, and the users could be someone else entirely. Understanding how information flows within those organisations, the role each person plays, and having a profile for each buyer type is super important. This will vary organisation to organisation and industry to industry, which is why it’s important to break this down by industry.
This is the second layer you need. Once you understand who those different profiles and buyers are, you can move to the third step.
3. Understand Psychographics, Behaviours, and Attitudes Driving Buyer Decisions
The goal here is really about understanding what drives and motivates those profiles and buyers to act. That is one of the most important goals in buyer persona development.
What is it that will make the difference for them to say yes to your product, service, or solution?
Essentially, we’re looking at psychographics, behaviours, and attitudes. Let me explain what psychographics are. Psychographics is the study of consumers based on their activities, attitudes, interests, and opinions. Generally, it goes beyond demographic data.
What we’re trying to do is add a level of understanding around the cognitive factors that drive their decisions and behaviours. Psychographic information includes things like personality traits, communication preferences, lifestyle choices, principles, beliefs, and more.
On your screen, you can see examples of the types of information we want to collect. For me, one of the most important aspects is understanding their problems and challenges.
This will differ by role. The way a user looks at a problem is completely different from how their manager sees it, and that differs again from how a director or department head, who might hold the budget, views it.
For example, if you’re selling software or a platform to improve productivity, the user might instantly see the value: “Great, I’ll save 15 minutes every hour with this solution.” The manager might think, “If we save that time, we can get through other tasks and ensure they’re done.”
But the decision maker sees it differently, they have a holistic overview of competing priorities and other factors to consider. That’s why you need to go through this exercise at multiple levels and for all buyers involved in the process.
This is all about understanding their motivations—business goals, personal goals, values, and beliefs that influence their decision-making process. Where do they go for information? These criteria are really important.
Of course, in your business, there may be specific elements to add to this process.
The six factors I’ve provided here are examples—a fantastic starting point to get you thinking about what you need to do and how.
Remember, the motivation for each profile will be subtly different. At the user level, it might be about saving time. From a manager’s perspective, it might be about accomplishing more.
Higher up, it might be about profitability or revenue generation. By the way, these examples are business motivations, but there will also be personal motivations.
For instance, the person making the decision might have aspirations for another role in the future.
So, this isn’t a one-dimensional view. It’s about understanding the profiles, how they evolve, adapt, and what they might be aiming for in the future.
4. Identify Triggers and Buying Signals Indicating Readiness to Engage
The fourth step is about identifying the triggers and buying signals. The goal here is to understand and list the signs or indicators that your ideal customer or profile is ready to buy, ready to engage you in the buying process.
They might have done their research, but now they come to you, ready for you to guide them through the buying journey.
The key thing is to understand their compelling reason to act. What events or conditions need to be met for this to happen?
For example, we worked with a managed service provider. In that space, the point at which a provider is engaged by an organisation can differ greatly from when the organisation actually decided to review its services.
In the example of this managed service provider, generally, before a customer engaged with them, the process started about nine to twelve months before their existing contract or agreement came up for renewal.
They would start exploring the idea of switching services, collate information, do due diligence, and research.
It would probably be four or five months into that process when they actually engaged other companies to review whether they wanted to switch providers.
Sometimes, this process started even up to two years in advance—especially when a change management process was complex or required a significant transition, naturally extending the timeline.
So, you need to understand:
- The compelling reason to act
- The timing
- The behavioural patterns
- The explicit needs that drive this process
For each type of organisation and industry, this will be slightly different. That’s why it’s important to break this down depending on the industries, profiles, and customers you are selling to and supporting.
5. Recognise Red Flags and Wrong Personas to Avoid Wasting Resources
The fifth step might sound trivial, but it’s something most organisations don’t do: understand the red flags or the wrong personas. What personas don’t you want to work with? What types of organisations are not a good fit for you?
This goes back to reviewing all your historical data. Who have you had bad experiences with? Sometimes it sounds like a great idea initially to work with certain types of organisations, but in reality, you’re just not well set up to serve them.
For example, we worked with an insurance company that realised it didn’t want to work with organisations that used an RFP (Request for Proposal) or RFQ (Request for Quotation) process.
This process involves receiving a detailed document, filling it out, sending it back, and then waiting for procurement to decide if you’re successful.
This insurance company knew that its best sales came from adding value through conversations and relationships—not by responding to complex, time-consuming RFPs.
So, whenever they received an RFP, they’d review it but politely decline about nine out of ten times, knowing their approach wasn’t suited for that process.
Other examples include organisations that refuse to work with governments due to convoluted processes, or those unwilling to work with large enterprise clients because of regulations and compliance requirements.
It’s crucial to make a list and criteria of the types of companies you don’t want to work with. This list is just as important as the one for companies you do want to work with.
When qualifying leads or opportunities, you can use this list to disqualify unsuitable organisations early, or at least manage their expectations upfront, so you don’t waste time and resources on the wrong type of opportunity.
Struggling to find and convert the right buyers? A clear, well-defined ICP is the foundation of focused, high-performing sales.
At LSOS Academy, you’ll learn how to:
✅ Identify and prioritise your best-fit customers
✅ Develop precise ICPs that guide sales and marketing
6. Continuously Validate and Iterate on Profiles with New Evidence
The final, all-important step in this process is validation and iteration. Essentially, this means consistently refining your buyer profiles with new evidence.
Every year, as you generate sales and collect information, you should validate your profiles. What’s changing? Are things stable? Do you still maintain the same relationships, or do you need to build new personas or adjust existing ones?
Business development professionals are fantastic at what they do, but sometimes they aren’t great at reporting back successes to the business.
Good business developers will find adjacent markets to target. Adjacent markets might have completely different personas and industries. When this happens, those profiles need to be recreated.
They might get some success initially, but to achieve more and ensure marketing targets the right personas, you need to create new profiles and understand the criteria and buyers within those new segments.
It’s important not only to review and validate your existing profiles and buyers but also to look at adjacent profiles and personas for new sectors or industries you might target.
Research shows that the larger the organisation, the more people are involved in the buying process—often around 10 people or more. That’s why understanding profiles is so critical.
When an organisation decides on a platform or software, it’s no longer just about the business unit or department using it.
There’s usually:
- IT, to check compliance, support, and regulations
- Legal, sometimes for GDPR or other requirements
- HR, if relevant
- Procurement, to ensure contracts are sound and manageable
- And the department that actually needs the software
Because of this, many stakeholders are involved in the decision-making process. Hence, consistently validating and iterating on your profiles is crucial.
A great practice is to give each buyer profile a name and maintain an ideal customer profile (ICP) canvas for each, including thermographics, demographics, and any other specific criteria. Add a picture and create a visual to bring it to life for your team.
This ongoing work helps ensure you stay on track.
For example, at the London School of Sales, when we started, we created a high-level ICP focusing on company size, turnover, and challenges. Later, we validated and refined it by buyer types and stakeholders.
Pay close attention to the adjectives, descriptors, and emotions in the profiles—they help communicate and identify your target audience.
There is no silver bullet here. This is an iterative process, and you must constantly review, adapt, and adjust because markets move—and if you don’t move with them, you get left behind.
For instance, we worked in an industry where R&D was once the key decision maker. But the industry shifted, and R&D responsibilities moved to marketing. Overnight, decision-making shifted from the R&D director to the CMO. You must capture these types of changes in your ICPs and personas.
Key Takeaways
1. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. The more precise your persona and profile, the easier it is to target, personalise messaging, and qualify leads. Focus on who benefits most and who is most likely to buy and engage.
2. It’s not just about industry, size, or location. Understand your ICP’s goals, challenges, buying triggers, and values. Psychographic and behavioural insights help you connect deeply and influence decisions. Go beyond thermographics.
3. Proactively use your ICP to say no. A strong ICP guides marketing and sales on who not to pursue, saving time and money, improving conversion rates, and strengthening positioning. Identify red flags and wrong personas early.
Great salespeople aren’t born, they’re trained. Whether you’re building your pipeline, leading a team, or refining your strategy, LSOS Academy gives you the tools to grow with purpose.
– CPD-certified, flexible online courses
– Live masterclasses grounded in real sales challenges
– Instant access to a growing library of on-demand sessions
