Sales wants more leads. They also want better leads. But what does “better” actually mean?
Without a shared definition of what makes an account a good fit, lead quality becomes subjective. Sales may prioritize certain companies while marketing targets others, creating a cycle of misaligned expectations and wasted effort.
A well-defined ideal customer profile (ICP) gives marketing and sales a common understanding of which accounts deserve their attention. It helps teams look beyond lead volume and focus on companies they’re best positioned to win, serve, and grow with.
Your total addressable market (TAM) tells you where opportunity exists. Your ICP helps you decide where to focus. The question is: Of all the companies that could buy from you, which ones should you prioritize?
Why marketing and sales struggle to agree on lead quality
I recently talked with another marketer at a local event. She’d moved from the agency side back into an in-house role, and we started comparing notes on the familiar tension between marketing and sales.
Sales wanted marketing to send more leads but wasn’t always happy with the quality of the ones coming in.
Different salespeople may have different ideas about what makes an account worth pursuing. One might prioritize company size. Another might care more about a company’s technology environment. Someone else might pursue almost any account showing enough interest.
None of those priorities is wrong. But without alignment, marketing can spend a lot of time adjusting targeting and lead scoring without resolving the underlying issue.
It’s a familiar cycle: marketing generates leads, sales questions the quality, marketing adjusts its approach, and the conversation starts again.
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Not every potential customer is an ideal customer
Earlier in my career, I worked with a CEO who regularly challenged sales with a simple question: Are we a good fit for the customer, and is the customer a good fit for us?
That question stuck with me. Sometimes we could technically sell to a company, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was the right decision. Implementation might be unusually complex, the support burden could be too high, or our product simply wasn’t the best fit for what they needed. In those situations, he was willing to walk away from the revenue.
Just because you can sell to an account doesn’t mean you should prioritize it. Some customers are easier to win, onboard, and support, while others offer greater potential for retention, expansion, and profitable growth.
A company can have the budget, be in the right industry, and have a legitimate use case but still not be a good fit.
Implementation might be too complicated. Their technology environment might create unnecessary challenges. Or you’ve seen similar customers struggle to adopt the product, renew, or expand.
These are the kinds of differences your ICP should help identify. Focus on the companies your organization is best positioned to win, serve, and grow with over time.
Industry and company size aren’t enough
A broad ICP is easy to create. The harder part is making sure it helps marketing and sales decide where to focus.
For example, “B2B SaaS companies using HubSpot” might describe a segment, but it doesn’t tell you which companies are most likely to buy, successfully implement, stay, and expand.
A more useful ICP looks at several types of information:
- Firmographics and scale: Industry, revenue, employee count, or operational size.
- Technology and current approach: Systems in use, competitors, in-house solutions, or manual processes.
- Operational and implementation fit: Complexity, integration requirements, or customization needs.
- Relationship and history: Existing customer status, previous opportunities, or cross-sell potential.
- Customer success indicators: Characteristics associated with adoption, retention, and expansion.
A useful ICP should also identify who isn’t a good fit. That might mean companies in unsupported geographies, accounts with incompatible technology, or organizations that require more customization than your team can reasonably support. It could also include companies outside the product’s ideal size range or previous opportunities lost because of fundamental product limitations.
Your ICP should give marketing and sales a clearer understanding of which accounts deserve more attention and which ones don’t.
One ICP score may not be enough
A single company-wide ICP score can hide some important differences. An account might be a great fit for Product A, an average fit for Product B, and a poor fit for Product C.
When we use one score to represent all three, we risk making broad decisions about which accounts to prioritize.
Earlier in my career, I worked with a company that sold two very different products. We built separate automated ICP scores in Salesforce because what made an account a strong fit for one product didn’t necessarily make it a good fit for the other.
We looked at factors like company type and size, technology environment, whether an organization used a competitor or had an in-house solution, previous opportunity history, and whether it was already a customer of the other product.
Those relationship signals were especially valuable. An existing customer might represent a great cross-sell opportunity, while an opportunity lost because of timing should be viewed very differently from one lost because of a fundamental product limitation.
That experience reinforced my preference to define and score ICP at the product level whenever possible.
A general account score tells you whether a company resembles your target market. A product-specific score helps answer a more useful question: How strong is the fit for what we’re actually trying to sell?
That distinction becomes especially important when ICP data starts informing lead scoring, ABM segmentation, sales prioritization, and where marketing invests its time and budget.
Get your ICP out of the strategy deck
A strong ICP has limited value if it lives only in a strategy deck. If we want it to shape demand generation, it needs to become usable data in the CRM and marketing systems our teams work in every day.
For demand generation teams, I separate three signals:
- Account fit: Is this company a strong match for the product?
- Contact fit: Is this person relevant to the buying process?
- Engagement: Are people within the account showing meaningful interest?
Each tells us something different.
A contact can be highly engaged with your content while working at a company that isn’t a good fit. On the other hand, an account that perfectly matches your ICP might not be showing enough interest to warrant a sales conversation yet.
Looking at account fit, contact fit, and engagement together gives marketing a clearer picture of which accounts are worth pursuing and when they may need more attention.
Once those signals become usable data, they inform decisions throughout your demand generation strategy.
Put ICP to work across demand generation
When your ICP becomes usable data, it helps marketing and sales prioritize accounts, interpret engagement, and decide where to invest their time and resources.
Lead and account scoring
Traditional lead scoring often puts a lot of weight on individual behavior. Someone downloads an ebook, attends a webinar, or visits a high-intent page, and their score goes up.
But that engagement doesn’t necessarily mean the company is a good fit.
A highly engaged contact at a poor-fit company shouldn’t automatically rank above a moderately engaged buying group at an account that closely matches your ICP.
Fit gives engagement context. Not every engagement signal should carry the same weight.
MQA thresholds
This is especially useful for marketing qualified account (MQA) models. A strong-fit account may not need the same level of engagement to deserve attention as an account that’s a weaker fit.
For example, an account with an ICP score of 90 showing moderate engagement might be worth a closer look. An account with a score of 45, showing the same activity, may be better suited for continued nurturing.
Fit signals help identify accounts worth pursuing, while behavioral signals help determine when to act — a distinction also explored in sales alignment strategies from ABM leaders at Snowflake, Datadog, and Unisys.
A great-fit account isn’t automatically ready to buy. And a highly engaged account isn’t automatically worth pursuing.
ABM segmentation
Building ICP data into your systems makes ABM much easier to scale.
Instead of asking “Are these the right accounts?” every time you launch a campaign, marketing can start with a defined fit threshold. For example, marketing could target accounts with a Product A ICP score of 70 or higher, a relevant target persona, and a buying signal.
Your team can focus on campaign strategy, messaging, and timing instead of repeatedly determining which accounts belong in the audience.
This connects to something I’ve written about before in my guide to ABM for small B2B marketing teams. Effective ABM starts with a clear understanding of which accounts are worth pursuing.
Sales prioritization
That same data can make your handoffs to sales much more meaningful. Instead of simply telling sales that someone downloaded an ebook or reached a certain lead score, marketing can provide more context. For example, “This is a strong-fit account for Product A, we’re seeing engagement from relevant contacts, and activity across the account is increasing.”
Sales gets more than another lead notification. They get a clearer understanding of why the account deserves their attention.
Campaign and budget prioritization
ICP data can help marketing make smarter decisions about where to invest. Strong-fit accounts can guide paid media audiences, event targeting, content syndication, personalization, and other campaign decisions.
Your ICP goes beyond a targeting exercise. It gives marketing and sales a more consistent way to decide which accounts deserve attention, how much to invest in reaching them, and when engagement signals are meaningful enough to act on.
Use customer outcomes to refine your ICP
Your ICP should evolve as you gather more data about customer performance. Marketing, sales, and customer success should regularly review outcomes and ask:
- Which accounts convert and close?
- Which implement successfully?
- Which retain and expand?
- Which stall, churn, or require more support than expected?
A strong-fit customer is one your business can win, implement, support, retain, and grow with over time.
Each team brings a different perspective. Sales knows which accounts are easier to close, marketing knows which are easier to engage, and customer success knows which customers adopt the product, renew, and expand.
Use those insights to refine your ICP as your product, market, and customer base evolve.
Better leads start with agreement on what ‘better’ means
Improving lead quality starts with getting marketing, sales, and customer success aligned on what makes an account a good fit.
That shared definition helps teams make more consistent decisions about targeting, account scoring, sales prioritization, and where to invest resources.
A strong ICP shifts the focus from companies that could buy to those the business is best positioned to win, serve, and grow with.
