How to Tell If Your ICP Is Too Broad (Before You Waste Budget)
Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is the foundation of your entire go-to-market strategy. Get it right, and your messaging resonates, your outreach converts, and your sales cycles are short. Get it wrong, and you waste thousands of dollars on marketing and sales efforts that target people who will never buy. The most common mistake is creating an ICP that is far too broad. "We sell to B2B SaaS companies" is not an ICP; it is a wish list.
A fishing net with a huge mesh size, letting all the valuable fish (leads) swim through.
The Symptoms of a Broad ICP
How do you know if your ICP is too broad? The symptoms are usually clear and painful.
- Low Reply Rates: Your outreach emails are met with silence because your message is too generic to resonate with anyone in particular.
- Inconsistent Discovery Calls: When you do get meetings, the prospect's pain points are all over the map. There is no consistent problem you are solving.
- Long Sales Cycles and "No Decision": Deals stall because you cannot create urgency. The problem you solve is a "nice-to-have" for most of your broad audience, not a "must-have."
- Your Messaging Is Full of Vague Buzzwords: You are forced to use generic language like "drive efficiency" and "optimize workflows" because you cannot speak to a specific, tangible pain point.
The Litmus Test: The Trigger Event
A truly great ICP is not just about firmographics (company size, industry). It is about timing. It is defined by a "trigger event"—a specific circumstance that makes a company need your solution *right now*. Without a trigger event, your ICP is too broad.
Broad ICP: "US-based tech companies with 100-500 employees."
Specific ICP: "US-based tech companies with 100-500 employees that just hired a new VP of Sales and are using Salesforce."
The second ICP is powerful because it is built around trigger events. A new VP of Sales will want to change things in their first 90 days. Their use of Salesforce tells you about their technical maturity. This allows you to craft a hyper-relevant message about a predictable problem.
How to Refine Your ICP
The best way to refine your ICP is to work backward from your best customers. Look at your last 10 closed-won deals. What did they have in common right before they became a customer? Did they just raise money? Did they hire for a specific role? Were they using a specific competitor's product? These patterns are the building blocks of a specific, high-converting ICP.
Stop trying to be everything to everyone. Get painfully specific about who you serve and why they need you now. A smaller, more targeted pond is much easier to fish in.