Ideal customer profile

The narrow description of the companies that buy fastest, pay most and stay longest. Narrow enough to exclude most of the market.

An ICP describes companies, not people: size, industry, stack, stage, and the trigger that makes them ready now. The test of a good one is how much it excludes. "B2B SaaS companies" is not an ICP; "Series A SaaS with 3 to 10 sales reps, using HubSpot, that hired an SDR in the last 90 days" is.

Every list, every sequence and every metric downstream inherits the quality of the ICP. When reply rate is bad, the fix is usually here, not in the copy.