Market strategy
How to define an ICP your team can actually use
Separate company fit, buying roles, market size, and timing signals to build a practical B2B growth strategy.
An ideal customer profile should help your team make decisions. Which companies are worth understanding? Which problems can you solve well? What makes an account a poor fit? A list of industries and employee counts is a starting point, not the whole answer.
At Bottle Rocket Growth (BRG), we can help turn those questions into market research, account selection rules, and a practical plan for reaching the right people. The depth depends on the client. A team entering a new market may need a full build. Another may need to test one assumption in an existing strategy.
Separate four different questions
- Company fit
- Which organizations have a problem your offer can solve, with economics and operating conditions that make the relationship workable? This is the ICP.
- Buying roles
- Who experiences the problem, influences the decision, owns the budget, evaluates the solution, and approves it? These are people and responsibilities, not interchangeable job titles.
- Market size
- How large is the opportunity under explicit assumptions? Total addressable market, or TAM, is an estimate of the full potential market. It is not the same as a contact database, a reachable account list, or next quarter's pipeline.
- Timing
- What has changed that might make a conversation useful now? A signal can strengthen a timing hypothesis without proving someone wants to buy.
Start with evidence, including the uncomfortable parts
Review available wins, losses, retention, expansion, sales-cycle length, and delivery effort. Look for customers who get value and are economically sensible to serve, not just recognizable logos. Use interviews and frontline feedback to explain the patterns. If the historical sample is small, label the profile a hypothesis.
Document inclusion rules, exclusions, and unresolved questions. A company can fit the industry and still be unsuitable because of geography, implementation requirements, budget, or the cost of serving it. Avoid automatically excluding a segment because a single deal was lost.
Use technology data with context
Technology requirements matter when they affect integration, migration, or how the customer operates. A job posting asking for experience with a platform is evidence to investigate, not proof of a current deployment or a purchase plan. TheirStack's documentation also makes clear that job data reflects published hiring, not all hiring. Source: TheirStack coverage documentation.
Map who, where, what, when, and how
- Who: the accounts and buying roles, with evidence for why they belong.
- Where: relevant communities, events, partners, and permitted contact routes.
- What: the problem, offer, and useful proof for each audience.
- When: observable changes, existing relationships, and a reason to act or wait.
- How: a realistic motion, with an owner, next step, and capacity to follow through.
Turn the profile into an operating decision
Keep fit, timing, evidence quality, and relationship status visible rather than hiding them inside one unexplained score. Prioritize according to the client's objectives and constraints. There is no universal allocation of accounts across tiers.
Test whether the rules produce useful conversations, qualified opportunities, wins, retention, and manageable delivery. Compare similar groups and record the sample size. Revisit the profile when evidence changes, not just because a calendar reminder arrives.
The output may be a concise decision guide, a researched market map, a CRM qualification structure, or a larger growth plan. The right deliverable is the one the team can use.