The Ideal Client Profile: A Reframe
"The ICP chooses the startup, Mr. Potter..."
I have a growing sense that most business advice either misunderstands what demand is, or totally disregards it, and as a result gets everything backwards.
Take the Ideal Client Profile, or the ICP.
The ICP is one of the most theoretically useful concepts - it’s your criteria for the kinds of customers you’re going after. It narrows your focus, so you stop boiling the ocean trying to sell to and build for everyone.
That’s the theory. In practice, when you read any advice on picking your ICP, it gets the whole damn thing backwards and sends you straight to your doom.
The ideal client profile is *not* about us specifying who we want to sell to. The ICP is about figuring out who would be weird *not* to buy when they hear about us. In other words:
“The ICP chooses the startup, Mr. Potter. That much has always been clear to those of us who have studied demand-lore.”
The inverse-causality here - thinking we decide our ICP - causes us to diligently fill out ICP worksheets with people who all could benefit from our product. And we sure would like to sell to them. But we are setting ourselves up to PUSH - because for most people, most of the time, it would be weird if they bought our product, given what’s on their to-do list.
Imagine you had the following task: Define your ICP such that when you meet with someone in your ICP, they would be weird NOT to buy from you given what’s on their to do list, and as a result they convert ~75%+ of the time and are satisfied post-sale 95%+ of the time without you having to push or persuade at all.
That prompt determines your REAL ICP. Your answer almost always needs to include two factors:
A certain kind of person…
…in a certain kind of situation where they have a particular project on their to-do list and bad options (such that they would be weird not to buy our product)
When we don’t include the second part - the demand situation - we wind up in a WORLD of pain:
We sell to people who don’t really have demand, and feel like we need to PUSH
We think their indifference / lack of demand means we need to make our product better, add more features etc. (Making more supply almost never solves a demand issue.)
We think we need to hire more salespeople, who often have been successful in situations where there was clear demand. They struggle selling our product, because we have a demand-side issue, not a sales skills issue.
We think we need to drive more urgency in the sales process… or renovate our sales process. This is downstream of figuring out demand, and won’t work.
I have made all of these mistakes, and always felt off when I was making them. Only now can I explain why they were mistakes, and what I should have done: Stop thinking about my ICP - and how to build a startup - backwards!
-Rob
PS:
Finding Pull is FULL! If you want me to review a few of your sales calls, rewrite your sales pitch, or just grab an hour of my time, check here (got bandwidth for ~2 startups in June)
The idea of a person/role in a specific context is in line with what I know of JTBD, Running Lean etc. But the reframing "would be weird not to buy when they hear about us" really brings it to life. We move from "why would they switch to our new way?" to "what would stop them when it makes so much sense?" I actually put your prompt into my custom GPT and it brought out the elements that would have to be true for someone to fit the "weird not to" ICP. Great stuff.
Great post. You don't get to decide who your customer is.