An ideal customer profile (ICP) describes the kind of company you sell to, and a buyer persona describes a person who works there. B2B teams use both. Whether positioning is worked out in-house or through go-to-market consulting, the ICP decides which accounts are worth pursuing, and the personas built on top of it decide how you speak to the people inside those accounts.
What goes into an ideal customer profile
An ICP sits at the company level. It lists the traits shared by the customers who get value from the product and stay. A typical one covers:
- Industry or niche, as narrow as your best customers allow
- Company size, by headcount or revenue
- Location and the markets they sell into
- Tools or systems already in place, when your product connects to them
- The event or problem that makes a company a good fit right now, such as a new regulation or a funding round
Sales teams use the ICP to build account lists and score leads. Marketing uses it to set ad targeting and decide which events or publications are worth their time. It also gives everyone a shared way to recognise a poor-fit deal early.
What goes into a buyer persona
A persona sits at the person level. It describes one role inside an ICP account and usually covers:
- The job title and what that person is responsible for
- The problem they feel, written in their own words
- Where they look for information
- The questions they ask on a first call
Good personas come from sales call recordings and customer interviews, so the language in them is the buyer’s own.
Most B2B purchases involve several people, so one ICP usually has a handful of personas attached to it. A finance lead and an IT lead at the same company can care about the same product for very different reasons, and each needs a message that fits their part of the problem. PacedRevenue, a B2B revenue firm, puts the ICP and the message aimed at each buyer’s problem in the same first stage of its framework, since a message works best once you know whose problem it describes.
An example of both working together
Take a company that sells appointment software to dental clinics. Its ICP is independent practices in the UK with between three and ten dentists, already running a practice management system the software connects to.
Inside those practices, two personas come up in most deals. The practice manager runs the diary, takes the calls about missed appointments and wants fewer gaps in the day. The principal dentist owns the practice and watches how many hours each chair is booked. Both are looking at the same product, and each one responds to a message about the part of the problem they deal with.
The main differences
| Ideal customer profile | Buyer persona | |
| Describes | A type of company | A role within that company |
| Built from | Closed deals and retention data | Interviews and call recordings |
| Answers | Which accounts to pursue | What to say to each person |
| How many | Usually one per segment | Several per ICP |
| Mainly used for | Targeting and lead scoring | Messaging and sales conversations |
The two meet in lead scoring. Many teams give a lead points when the account matches the ICP and more points when the contact’s role matches a persona, so sales calls go first to the right person at the right kind of company.
Which one to write first
Start with the ICP. If you have customers, list your ten or twenty best accounts by revenue and renewal, then write down what those companies have in common. Teams that are still pre-revenue can draft one from the companies they have spoken to and update it as deals close.
Personas come next, one for each role that regularly appears in your deals. A useful check is to read a recent call transcript and see whether the persona predicted the questions that person actually asked.
Both documents change as the business does. A new segment usually means a new ICP, and a new ICP brings its own set of personas with it.
