If you don’t know exactlywho you’re building for, every decision is difficult—a gamble that could easily backfire. It’s one of the big early-stage mistakes founders make, and it can grind your product development and marketing strategy to a halt.
Two tools that can save the day are Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP) and Buyer Personas.
When you see ‘ICP vs buyer persona,’ it can appear like they are in direct competition, or that one is better than the other. However, they serve two very distinct and important purposes, and are best used together in your quest to create an effective GTM (Go-to-Market) strategy.
This blog will outline the difference between ICP and buyer persona, and why you need both for real product-market clarity. You’ll also find a clear, practical framework to use the tools to sell to the right companies and speak to the right people.
Let’s get started.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): the company-level filter
First, let’s define an ideal customer profile. An ICP is the type of company that would derive the most value from your product. So, they must have the means (and interest) to buy it and also potentially see lots of success using it. This maximizes ROI for both your customer and your business.
An ICP identifies and describes your ideal market segment based on a range of factors like industry, company size, and existing tech stack. These data points create the profile.
It’s important to note that this profile is a hypothetical description of a ‘best kind’ of company, not a single, real one you can target.
To recap, an ICP should:
- Be the easiest to sell to
- Get maximum value from your product
- Drive the highest lifetime value
What questions does an ICP answer?
You can’t be everything to everyone. The ICP gives you critical insights about your target audience, aka the types of companies that really need and will thrive with your product.
For early-stage startups, targeting the right companies is transformative. You won’t end up wasting a huge chunk of your marketing and sales on customers who simply aren’t a good fit, even if they’ve shown initial interest.
The ICP focuses minds by answering:
- Which company characteristics predict success?An ICP analyzes the traits of companies that are achieving strong outcomes with your products. By digging into factors like industries, growth stages, existing tools, ways of working, you can predict which companies are most likely to succeed.
- What are the firmographic criteria? An ICP uncovers the firmographics (descriptive data points) that truly matter. These act as measurable filters that define product market fit and let you prioritize companies that match your proven success profile.
Let’s look at these data points in more detail.
Core ICP data points
There are multiple key attributes and characteristics that make up an ICP. Again, a running theme: you don’t want to cast your net too wide. Ideally, hone in on three or four data points that make the most sense for your business. Any more and things become too unwieldy.
Here are a few data points to reference when creating your ICP:
- Industry—Identify sectors where your product succeeds (tech, ecommerce, retail, etc.)
- Company size—Look at employee ranges to target companies with the right capacity and budget (10-50 employees, 50-1,000 employees, 1,000-5,000 employees, etc.)
- Revenue range and funding status—Understand if companies have the finances to invest in your product and which range is most valuable
- Tech stack and existing tools—Determine if there any specific tech or integrations that work best (e.g, uses HubSpot, integrates with Slack)
- Geographic location —Consider regions where your product performs better and market conditions are more favorable
Using these data points to put together an ICP at the company level will define yourquintessential, “high -value” customer. This will help:
- Marketing to target the right accounts
- Sales to engage prospects with genuine potential
- Product teams to understand who they’re building for
But we can go even deeper! With buyer personas, you can zero in on individuals within these ideal companies.
Buyer Persona: the individual-level map
Identifying a perfect company to sell to is great, but you can’t really approach this big, broad organization with sales and marketing messages. You need a more granular level of focus to cut through and engage actual people, like senior executives, managers, brand champions, decision makers.
This is where buyer personas come in.
Buyer personas target the right person within the company. They are semi-fictional representations of the individual who actually buys or uses your product at the ICP company you’ve just outlined.
Personas help you understand all the deeper stuff: goals, pain points, motivations. Basically, the things that resonate on a human level, so you can tailor your messaging and approach.
What the Buyer Persona brings to the table
Here’s the thing: you ultimately need to sell to people, not companies. Personas flesh out and give identity to the B2B buyers that’ll get the most value from your product. These are the people you will pitch to and try and engage, and the insights from personas help you create messages that truly resonate with customers.
A strong persona will answer the pressing questions your team needs to know:
- Whois the specific individual making the decision or using the product?
- What motivates them? What are their goals, pressures, pain points?
- Howdo they evaluate options and move through the buying process?
These will be answered using different data points, which are used to flesh out richer personas. These will give you a really detailed picture of a ‘perfect’ customer.
Core Buyer Persona data points
To create your semi-fictional profiles, you must research and gather lots of details that are typically categorized as either demographics, job details, or behavioral information.
All these elements are not supposed to be superficial data points. They should all come together to help you understand not just who your buyers are, but how they think and what motivates their decisions.
The data points include:
- Job title/role—Look at the popular job titles in target companies and list their roles and responsibilities
- Demographics—Collect basic information like age, education and professional education to further narrow it down
- Goals and responsibilities—Understand what they are measured on and what success looks like their roles
- Aspirations—A big one that lots of startups miss. Based on their goals, what job process are buyers trying to improve, and how could your product help?
- Pain points—Identify the challenges and frustrations they are currently experiencing
- Buying behavior—Map how they go about researching and evaluating potential solutions. Are there any content formats they prefer or specific decision-making triggers?
You can use all these data points to create a detailed persona matrix or grid.
Try and steer clear of creating clichéd personas like ‘tech-savvy Tristan’ with a limited set of challenges and goals. The more detail the better; just make sure it’s relevant and targeted.
You can gather all this info through:
- Data analytics (website and socials)
- Social listening
- Surveys
- Customer support team reports
- Interviews
The law of the land: ICP first, Persona second
Now, how do you use ICP and buyer persona together? This is the most important part.
They shouldn’t be conflated or used in isolation. Instead, the two concepts should flow naturally from one to the other, so you know exactly who to serve and how to target them. So, it goes like this: ICP first, then persona.
The funnel analogy
An excellent way to visualize this is with a simple funnel. At the top of the funnel, there’s the ICP. This is the starting point; the first stage or ‘gate’ that points your sales and marketing teams in the right direction. The core data points that make up the ICP clearly outline the companies that you need to prospect.
It’s a form of market segmentation. This filters and narrows the field from an entire market to the organizations that are most likely to buy your product or service and generate long-term value for your business.
Once that’s established, you can move onto the next stage: The buyer persona.
This sits at the bottom of the funnel as the conversion mechanism. It’s the bridge between those perfect companies (your ICP) and the people within them who will buy from you. It’s what turns awareness into action.
The cost of confusion
The two concepts should work in tandem, with one (ICP) forming the foundation for the other (persona) to flourish. Confusing the two or immediately jumping to the wrong stage in the funnel runs the risk of creating campaigns that simply don’twork.
You might, for example, attract interest from companies that were never the right fit in the first place. Worse, you can alienate ideal customers by speaking to the wrong demographics or pain points.
This can lead to very poor business outcomes.
- Failing to define your ICP → Targeting the wrong companies. When you don’t solve core problems, this results in low retention and high churn rates.
- Failing to create personas → Neuters your messaging, even if you’re targeting the right companies. This leads to lost sales opportunities and a poor user experience that’s disconnected from what people actually want.
Clarity between the two brings alignment and certainty that your marketing, sales, and product teams are rowing in the same direction.
How except friday helps founders define their target
Startups move fast, but careering in the wrong direction costs incredibly valuable time and money. That’s why we don’t work on guesswork and assumptions. We understand the value of bringing data-backed clarity to a startup’s go-to-market strategy—right from the beginning.
We help founders define exactly who they’re building for and how to reach them.
Here’s how.
Strategic discovery
Founders usually have a gut feeling about who their product is for. We turn that instinct into insight with a comprehensive strategic discovery process that includes ICP workshops, buyer persona interviews and consumer feedback, and data-driven insights.
All of this is then funneled into product development, bridging strategy with execution.
Product alignment
When we’ve defined your ICP and Buyer Personas, we’ll make sure your minimum viable product (MVP) actually reflects real user’s pain points and priorities. We do this by mapping out the features that actually matter versus those that are nice to have, based on our buyer persona research. Then, we make sure we design and build for the actual people using your product, so you’ll have confidence your app doesn’t just work, but works for your target customers.
Book a strategy session with our product development experts today to define your ICP and buyer personas and start building something that truly fits your market.
