By Zivko Dodovski, Founder & CEO, DoneMaker · Updated September 2026
An ideal customer profile is only real if you can turn it into a search. A job title, an industry, a company size, a city. If a criterion cannot go into a search box, it cannot be used to find anyone, and an ICP that cannot find anyone is a description of a mood rather than a targeting tool.
The test: can you search for it?
Most ICP documents fail one question. Read yours back and ask, line by line, whether you could use that line to produce a list of named companies this afternoon.
“Agency owners in Ontario with ten to fifty staff” passes. You can find those people. “Businesses that value long-term partnerships and are ready to invest in growth” fails, not because it is untrue, but because there is no field anywhere that holds it. Every prospect looks like that from the outside, which means it excludes nobody.
The purpose of an ICP is to leave people out. If yours does not visibly exclude most of the market, it is not finished.
Build it from your client list, not your ambitions
The temptation is to describe the clients you want. The useful version describes the clients you already serve well, because that is the only evidence you have. Five questions against your existing list will get you most of the way.
Which five clients would you take ten more of? Not the biggest. The ones where the work goes well, the relationship is easy and the money arrives. Write the names down.
What do those five have in common that you could put in a search box? Industry, size, location, the title of the person who hired you, how they are structured. Concrete fields only.
What was true about them at the moment they hired you? Usually something had just changed: they had grown past a threshold, lost someone, taken on a contract, started a new year. That trigger is worth more than any attribute, because it tells you when to reach someone rather than just who.
Who actually signed? Not who you talked to. The title of the person with authority, which in a small firm is almost always the owner and in a bigger one often is not.
Which clients went badly, and what did they have in common? This is the most useful question on the list and the one that gets skipped.
The negative profile is usually the sharper tool
Most firms can describe a bad client instantly and have never written it down. Too small to afford the work properly. A committee where nobody owns the decision. An industry whose sales cycle does not fit your model. A buyer who wanted a different service and hoped yours would do.
Write those down as exclusions and apply them to your list before you contact anyone. Removing the wrong companies is faster than finding the right ones, and it protects the thing you cannot get back, which is the time your outreach takes.
Which criteria are actually usable
| Usable, because you can filter on it | Not usable, even when true |
|---|---|
| Industry or vertical | “Values quality and long-term partnership” |
| Company headcount or rough revenue band | “Has a growth mindset” |
| The job title of the person who signs | “Feels the pain of inefficiency” |
| City, region or country | Age and income, which are B2C fields |
| A visible trigger: hiring, new funding, a new office, a tool they just adopted | “Open to new ideas” |
| How they are structured: owner-led, partnership, franchise | “Frustrated with their current provider” |
The right-hand column is not worthless. It belongs in your messaging, where it shapes what you say. It just cannot select who you say it to.
If you do not have enough clients yet
With three or four clients you do not have an ideal customer profile. You have a hypothesis, and it is better to call it that. Patterns across three data points are usually coincidence, and a firm that locks a narrow ICP too early spends a year contacting the wrong market with great discipline.
Write the hypothesis down, contact against it for a couple of months, and let the answers correct it. The people who reply and the people who ignore you will redraw the profile faster than any workshop.
ICP and buyer persona are not the same thing
The ICP describes the company: industry, size, location, structure. The persona describes the human inside it: their title, what they are judged on, what they will get in trouble for.
You need both, and they do different jobs. The ICP decides which companies go on the list. The persona decides what the first message says. Confusing them is how firms end up with a list of the right companies and a message aimed at nobody in particular.
One profile at a time
Multiple ICPs are sold as sophistication and are usually a way of avoiding a decision. Each profile needs its own list, its own message and its own follow-up, and a small team running three of those badly will be beaten by the same team running one properly.
Pick the segment where your evidence is strongest. Add the second when the first is producing conversations without your attention.
How DoneMaker runs it
Every account starts with this, before a single message is written. A strategist goes through your existing clients with you, pulls out the pattern, agrees the exclusions, and turns it into search criteria. An outreach specialist then sends every connection request and every message by hand, every working day, and logs what happens. When the answers say the profile is wrong, the account manager brings that to the weekly call and we change it.
Turning an agreed profile into an actual list is in the targeting blueprint, and where this sits in the wider process is in the B2B sales process for owner-led firms.
DoneMaker by the numbers
As of September 2026:
- Running manual LinkedIn outreach since 2018
- 58+ active client accounts, US and Canada
- Up to 40 connection requests sent per working day, by hand
- 25–30% average connection rate
- 7–11 deal opportunities per account per month
- 4–5 booked calls per account per month
- Clients: accounting, bookkeeping and CFO firms; digital, marketing and advertising agencies; coaches and consultants; B2B services with relationship-driven sales
A deal opportunity is a prospect who expresses clear interest: asks questions, opens an email exchange, or books a call.
That client list is our own ICP, written the way this page describes: industries, company shapes and a buyer who signs without a committee.
How to tell whether the profile is right
Contact against it for a month and look at who engages, not at how the document reads. If the people who answer are consistently smaller, larger or in a different industry than the profile says, the profile is wrong and the market is telling you so. Where the profile sits against the buyer’s own path is in the key steps in the customer journey, and the numbers to judge it by are in measuring ROI from outreach.
Frequently asked questions
What is an ideal customer profile?
A description of the companies you serve best, written in criteria you can filter on: industry, size, location, the title of the person who signs, and any visible trigger. If a line cannot be used to produce a list of named companies, it does not belong in the profile.
How is an ICP different from a buyer persona?
The ICP is the company; the persona is the person inside it. The ICP decides who goes on your list. The persona decides what your first message says.
How many clients do I need before I can build one?
Enough to see a pattern rather than a coincidence. With three or four, write it down as a hypothesis, contact against it, and let the answers correct it rather than committing a year to it.
Can I have more than one ICP?
You can, and most small firms should not. Each profile needs its own list, message and follow-up. Add a second once the first produces conversations without your constant attention.
How often should I update it?
When the evidence changes, not on a calendar. If the people answering you are consistently different from the profile, update it that month. Otherwise leave it alone and let it do its job.
Want to see what this looks like for your firm? Book a call; 20 minutes, and we’ll tell you honestly whether LinkedIn outreach fits your business before anything else. If you’d rather read first, here is how the service works.
