Glossary
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
The narrow description of the customer who derives the most value from your product, used to focus marketing, sales, and product investment.
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is the specific description of the customer segment that benefits most from your product. ICP narrowness varies — for an early-stage SaaS, ICP might be a sub-segment of a vertical ("Series A B2B SaaS companies with 5-15 person marketing teams"). For a mature company, ICP might be broader.
Three reasons ICP matters in competitive contexts:
- Competitive overlap shifts by ICP. Two products with overlapping features can be non-competitive if their ICPs don't overlap. Conversely, two products with very different features can be direct competitors if they target the same ICP.
- Repositioning often happens through ICP shifts. When a competitor changes their stated target customer, they're repositioning. A move from "for enterprises" to "for fast-growing startups" indicates a major strategic shift.
- Resource allocation follows ICP. Marketing dollars, sales hires, product features — all flow to the ICP. Watching where a competitor's ICP is moving reveals where their next round of investment will go.
Example
A team noticed their competitor changed homepage language from "for marketing leaders" to "for revenue teams" over a two-month period. Three new case studies featured Chief Revenue Officers as the buyer. Pricing pages added a "VP of Sales" persona. All three signals together indicated a deliberate ICP expansion from marketing buyers to sales buyers — meaning the competitor was now coming for sales-org budget the team hadn't previously had to defend.
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