Getting clear on who you serve best
When I ask a business who their ideal customer is, I usually get broad answers like:
The problem is, those kinds of answers don’t help.
An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn’t about describing everyone you could work with. It’s about getting clear on the businesses that feel the problems you solve the most and what those businesses actually look like.
When you have that clarity, you stop spreading yourself thin. You know who to focus on, what to say to them, and where to find them.
Here’s a simple way to get started.
This is always the starting point.
Don’t describe your product or service. Describe the problem it fixes.
Ask yourself:
Write it in plain English. For example:
If you can’t name the problems clearly, you can’t define your ICP.
Not every business feels the same pain. Some hardly notice it. Others can’t grow because of it. Those are the ones you want.
Think about the kinds of businesses where the problem shows up strongest:
You’re not trying to tick every box. You’re sketching a picture of the kinds of businesses where the problem hurts the most and where not solving it costs too much to ignore.
The types of businesses that feel these problems most often don’t exist in isolation. They tend to cluster in certain industries.
That matters, because it helps you focus.
For example:
Spot the patterns. Whole industries are made up of businesses that fit your profile. That’s where the largest pool of opportunities lives.
When you focus on these industries, you:
That doesn’t mean you can’t win work outside those industries. But it does mean you’ll waste less time chasing businesses that don’t really fit.
When a problem is serious, it rarely stays contained in one part of the business. It creates ripple effects across multiple functions.
For example, inefficiency might create:
The details will differ by business, but the important point is this: the problems you solve are rarely isolated. They cut across the organisation.
This matters because when a problem affects multiple parts of the business, it’s more urgent to fix and those are the businesses where your solutions will be most valued.
The flip side of mapping the problems is defining the improvement.
Ask yourself:
The answers don’t need to be complicated. They just need to show the business-level outcomes that matter most, whether that’s smoother operations, stronger financial performance, or the freedom to focus on growth instead of constant firefighting.
The clearer you are about what changes when the problem is solved, the easier it is to explain the value of what you deliver.
Once you’ve mapped the problems, the types of businesses, the industries, and the impact, bring it together into a short, simple description.
Something like:
“Our ideal customer is a mid-sized service business (100–500 staff) with multiple sites across Australia. They operate in regulated industries such as construction, healthcare, or financial services, where compliance and efficiency challenges directly affect margins and growth. These businesses often find that as they scale, processes break down, costs creep up, and leadership spends too much time firefighting instead of focusing on strategy.”
That’s specific enough to narrow the field, but still broad enough to guide opportunity.
Here’s how the process might look in other contexts:
These examples show how the same process can surface very different ICPs, depending on the problems you solve.
Defining your ICP isn’t about narrowing your world. It’s about focus.
You’ll still find work outside your “ideal.” But you’ll be clearer on where your best opportunities live, who to talk to, and what matters most to them.
And once your ICP is clear, the next step is to go deeper into persona mapping, understanding the different people inside those businesses, how they experience the problems, and what value looks like for them.
Together, ICP mapping and persona mapping give you a complete picture: the right businesses to target, and the right conversations to have once you’re in the room.
The clearer you are on who you serve best, the easier everything else becomes.