In short
Many SMEs have a sales target. It fits into a twenty-slide presentation, it has been signed off in a meeting, and it makes no difference to who gets a message on Monday morning. A target that is not used to sort a list is not an ICP. It is an intention.
Quick test: can you say your ideal customer out loud, in one sentence, without reading it? And would your sales manager say the same sentence? If the two differ, the business does not have an ICP yet.
What a vague target costs
A broad target feels safe: more prospects, more chances. The opposite happens, for three reasons.
It forces you to write messages that have to suit everyone, so they speak to no one. It swells the list with profiles that will not reply, which drags down the reply rate. And it makes the figures unreadable: you cannot tell whether a message failed because it was bad or because it was aimed at the wrong person.
On LinkedIn, there is also a volume constraint. An account tolerates around 100 invitations per week. Every invitation sent off target comes out of a quota you cannot increase. The full calculation is in how many prospects to contact on LinkedIn.
The formula
We help [who, precisely] to [measurable result] when [trigger].
Each part has a job.
[Who] must be verifiable on a profile or in a register. "SMEs" is not a who. "Food-processing sites with 50 to 250 employees" is.
[Result] must be measurable by the client, not by you. "Becoming more efficient" cannot be measured. "Reducing unplanned line stoppages" can.
[Trigger] is the part almost everyone forgets, and it is the most useful. It says when your offer becomes urgent: a new production line, a change of manager, a recruitment drive, a new site. It is what separates a good prospect from a good prospect to contact now.
An example, made up for illustration, for an industrial maintenance company:
We help food-processing sites with 50 to 250 employees to reduce unplanned line stoppages, when they launch a new line or change maintenance manager.
The competitor test
Could your main competitor sign the sentence as it stands? If so, it is still too broad. Tighten it until it becomes slightly uncomfortable: that is the sign it is starting to exclude, and therefore to be useful.
Excluding worries a managing director who needs revenue. But what the sentence excludes is mostly companies that would not have bought, and that you would have written to anyway.
From words to criteria: five columns
A sentence does not sort anything on its own. You have to turn it into observable criteria. Five are enough:
| Criterion | What you look at | Scored 1 when | |---|---|---| | Size | Company headcount | Within your range | | Sector | Actual activity, not the label | Within your target | | Role | The contact's function | They decide on your subject | | Time in post | How long they have held the role | Settled enough to commit a budget | | Activity | Recent posts or comments | Active in the last 90 days |
Each criterion gets a score between 0 and 1, and the average gives a fit score. Nothing sophisticated: one more column in your file, which lets you rank the list from best to worst fit.
For a French company, size and activity can be checked in the public registers (headcount band, activity code). In Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg, allow for a manual check in the relevant national register. Going from these registers to a list of around a hundred named accounts is explained in building a target account list from public registers.
Time in post and recent activity are the two most underrated criteria. Someone who joined three weeks ago often does not yet control a budget; someone who has not posted or commented for a year will rarely read your message.
The threshold: below 0.40, you do not write
This is the rule that is hardest to apply and that pays off most. Below a fit score of around 0.40, you do not write a message: you take the prospect off the list.
Three reasons. The message costs time and an invitation. The reply, if it comes, leads to a meeting that will go nowhere, which is the subject of qualifying before you accept a meeting. And every off-target send skews your statistics, and therefore your ability to know what works.
Three common confusions
ICP and persona. A persona describes a fictional person and their motivations; it helps you write. An ICP describes verifiable criteria; it helps you sort. The second is the one most often missing.
ICP and sector. "We target manufacturing" does not distinguish a workshop of eight people from a group of two thousand employees. Company size and the contact's role carry more weight than the sector. A consulting firm, for example, does better writing one sentence per problem it solves rather than per sector, as shown in no longer depending on word of mouth.
An ICP written once and for all. Reread it every quarter in the light of the clients you have actually signed, not the ones you would have liked to sign.
A single sentence does not simplify your sales strategy: it makes it usable. Without it, no message can be genuinely personalised and no figure means very much. That is why the guide to LinkedIn prospecting makes it the first step.