ChiefOSby ConversintStart free
Menu
← Back to the library
Research and business strategy

Ideal customer profile

Research and recommend an ideal customer profile, target segment, buying group, jobs to be done, exclusions, and validation plan. Use for ICP, target account criteria, who to target first, buyer profile, anti-ICP, segment prioritization, or go-to-market focus. Produces a cited decision artifact; it does not generate a prospect list or launch outreach.

Works with the context you provideVersion 3.0.0Historical revision

# Ideal customer profile

Use this method to answer which customers to pursue first and why. It may produce an internal strategy memo or a client-ready research artifact, but it keeps evidence, assumptions, and confidential inputs appropriate to the selected audience.

Scope

Use this method for target-segment decisions. Route broad market size, competitive structure, or pricing power questions to their respective methods; use vendor methods for a technology or supplier decision. Do not convert public research into a named-account list or claim that public evidence alone validates demand.

Method

  1. State the offer, decision, candidate segments, geography, and audience for the artifact. Use supplied first-party evidence as private context unless its use in the output is authorized.
  2. Build an evidence plan covering population, organizations, buyer/workflow evidence, buying ecosystem, alternatives, and timing signals. Gather first-party material and dated public primary sources where available.
  3. Compare two or three candidate segments against the same qualitative criteria: problem intensity, ability to pay, reachability, fit with the offer and proof, buying complexity, and timing. Mark each `Strong`, `Mixed`, `Weak`, or `Unknown`; do not manufacture a weighted score.
  4. Recommend a primary ICP only when the evidence clears the stated gates. Otherwise return a partial result and the smallest validation action that can resolve the limiting gap.
  5. For the leading segment, map the economic buyer, champion, users, blockers, job to be done, alternatives, decision stages, and observable timing signals.
  6. Define exclusions and anti-ICP conditions as clearly as inclusions.
  7. Turn every material uncertainty into a practical validation: first-party data cut, win/loss review, customer interview, buyer conversation, or bounded message test.

Evidence rules

  • Capture source URLs while researching, cite non-trivial external claims inline, list sources with short descriptors, and re-check claim-to-source pairing before finalizing.
  • Keep first-party provenance at source-type and date level unless the audience has approved more detail.
  • Distinguish `Hypothesis`, `Supported`, `Validated`, and `Partial`. Public research alone is not `Validated`.

Output

```markdown # [Offer or market] ideal customer profile ## Decision summary ## Scope and evidence coverage ## Candidate comparison ## Primary ICP card ## Secondary hypothesis ## Anti-ICP and exclusions ## Jobs to be done and buying group ## Timing signals ## Validation plan ## Evidence ledger ## Sources ```

Before a durable or client-facing write, present the proposed recommendation, limitations, exclusions, and validation plan for confirmation. Do not write to CRM, outreach, or another system of record; return a proposed handoff where a host workflow owns it.