Ultimate Ideal Customer Profile Template: How to Guide

This ICP Template is free, fully automated, and ready to use immediately. It pulls data from Sapiengraph with one click.

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Starting a business without an ideal customer profile (ICP) is like throwing spaghetti at a wall and waiting to see what sticks. Something is going to stick eventually, but that’s a serious waste of good spaghetti!

Instead of infuriating the Italians and wasting food, serve your product to the people who actually need and want it. Don’t spend thousands of dollars on sales and marketing outreach unless you’re sure that you’re selling to the right people. After all, nobody goes to a premium car dealership to buy the latest Macbook.

That said, you’re here because you want to build an ideal customer profile for your business and make your business stand out. Good news, there’s no easier way to do it than using Sapiengraph’s Ultimate ICP template.

The Ultimate ICP Template

One of the first things you learn about ICPs is that firmographic data is important. 

What’s firmographic data? It’s details about a company that you use to divide them into segments.

Location

Most products have a specific geographic region where they do better. 

For example, the company Quality Food Equipment manufactures restaurant equipment, like industrial ovens, industrial fryers, and full kitchen ranges. Since they’re located in Oklahoma and their products are often large and bulky, it makes more sense for them to market their products to restaurants and cafes in Oklahoma and the surrounding areas like Arkansas, Texas, and Kansas to keep shipping costs low. 

While people in other countries like Spain or Italy are also looking for restaurant equipment, they’re less likely to purchase from a manufacturer in Oklahoma because the process of importing such a large item would involve a lot of paperwork from customs and taxes. 

So Quality Food Equipment’s sales and marketing efforts would work better if they were focused in the USA instead of in Europe.

Industry

Some products fit into a variety of industries. Others only suit a few. Companies that focus on HR and payroll will have a wider pool of prospects simply because every medium to large size company will need some form of human resource management and payroll processing. In contrast, a manufacturer of personal protection equipment is only suited to a handful of industries like healthcare, hard science, construction, or emergency services. It wouldn’t make sense for a manufacturer of gloves and medical scrubs to approach a restaurant. 

Size

The nature and cost of your products will determine who can use them. Size may not always be a determining factor as some small companies easily clear millions in annual revenue. 

However, the truth is a small business with 2-10 employees cannot afford and doesn’t need payroll software designed to handle 500 employees for $1000 a month.  Multimillion-dollar multinational companies, however,  might take a look at your software and decide it’s not a perfect fit because they have 1000s of employees and your software only handles 500 at a time. 

Funding

How much can they spend? This is a good question when it comes to your target audience, both in terms of funding rounds, and the amount raised. 

The funding round gives you an idea of where they are in their journey.he amount raised tells you how much they might be willing to spend. 

A company that has just completed a venture round is probably looking for cheap solutions to get their startup off the ground. But if they’ve got a substantial amount raised, they may see the value in getting a pricier option provided it can scale as they grow. 

Company Type

Company types matter. The two most common ones that you’ll see are public companies and private ownership. 

Public companies are those that have stocks that are traded in the stock market. Anyone who has money can buy a share. This means that they have a lot of stakeholders. Generally, they tend to be bigger, and more careful about what they do with their money because they need to make sure all their stakeholders will be satisfied. 

Meanwhile, private companies aren’t traded on the stock market. You have educational institutions like schools and universities, and partnerships that are typically owned by two or more people who share the profit and responsibilities. 

All of these company types usually have different bottom lines and different financial capabilities. If an organization is educational or governmental in nature, chances are they are more cognizant of strict policies and require your product to be compliant across the board. 

Specialties

Similar to industries, specialties indicate the areas where a company or business excels or focuses its efforts. When you’re tailoring your ICP, you have to ensure that these specialties can use your product. 

Companies that are focused on certain specialties usually have specific pain points. For example, if you’re a data storage company. It’s highly likely that the companies in your ICP will have something tech-related in their specialties. Not necessarily, but highly likely. 

So if a business or organization specializes in “internet technology”, they’re more likely to fit your ICP even if they’re in a different country, as compared to one who specializes in cooling systems for cars.

Company Age

While this isn’t a dealbreaker, it does give you an idea of where your business starts to provide solutions. We can calculate a company’s age by subtracting the founding year from the current year. 

Companies under 3 years old are likely startups. They probably have limited budgets and are wary of signing onto something with long contracts and large subscription fees because most startups don’t want to take the risk of agreeing to something that isn’t going to benefit them in the long run. 

As a result, you may see a lower chance of sales if your product requires a long contract at higher prices. All these combined can create an idea of your ideal customers. 

Who should be using the Ultimate ICP Template?

You. 

If you fall into any of these categories.

• Small medium enterprises
• Startups
• Business owners
• Marketing professionals
• People who don’t like having to download/learn new programs
• People who really like spreadsheets
• Companies with smaller budgets

Sounds like you? Well, make a copy of our Ultimate ICP Template, and let’s get started.

Getting Started with the ICP Template

Step 1: Make a copy of the Ultimate Ideal Customer Profile Template

Click on our ICP Template. Go to the File tab, and hit make a copy. 

Make sure that you see this Apps Script File! It’s the one with all the good stuff inside!

Step 2. Create Sapiengraph account

The ICP Template runs off our custom Google Sheets formulas and will help you retrieve the data you need. And since you need a Sapiengraph account to access these formulas, just go ahead and create one. You get 100 free credits to start so go ahead and make a Sapiengraph account.

Step 3. Install Sapiengraph Extension

The custom formulas also require our Sapiengraph Extension! Remember to enable the extension before you continue!

Step 4: Launch Sapiengraph Extension

Now that you have both a Sapiengraph account and the extension, head back to the sheet and then launch the extension! This will make sure all the following scripts are able to use the custom Google Sheets formulas. 

Once you’ve done all that, you can use the template easily.

Features and Benefits of our ICP Template

There are six (6) different sheets. 

1. ICP_ Dashboard: A dashboard to show you what are the top attributes of your current clients
2. Attribute_Ranking: A ranking page to show you the top ten attributes for each data set
3. CurrentClients: A sheet for your current clients
4. Reverse_Company_Lookup: A reverse company finder if you don’t know where your client works
5. Prospector: A prospector sheet to help you companies in your ICP
6. Prospect_Scoring: A prospect scoring sheet to see if the companies you get in your search really fit your ICP 

ICP dashboard: Overview of top attributes

The ICP dashboard is the first thing you see. It’s meant to give you a bird’s eye view of your current top everything.

For example in the location section, the number of clients from the US is by far the highest, which is reflected in the geographic chart where the US is lit up in green. 

In the industry section, we can see that most of the existing clients are from IT Services and IT Consulting. 

Automated data visualization

This sheet updates automatically as you add client information in your Current Clients sheet so don’t worry if it’s blank at the moment! Just update the sheet with information and the charts will update accordingly. 

Current Clients: Database of current clients

This is where you fill in the details of your current clients. All the columns correspond to the chart in the ICP dashboard i.e. location, industry, company size, funding type, money raised, company type, specialties, and company age. 

If you already have a spreadsheet with the relevant information, arrange them in that order, and then just copy-paste the data you have into the sheet. 

What if there are gaps in your customer information? There’s a script to fill in the blanks.

Enrich missing data for current clients

To retrieve all available information about your client, you’ll need one of the following

• Company LinkedIn Profile
• Company Name & Location 

Sapiengraph formulas pull data based on public LinkedIn profiles and Crunchbase data. If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, we also have a formula that will look up a company’s LinkedIn profile based on their name and country. 

As long as you have these, we’ll do the rest. 

Check the box in column A. 

Hit the button that says enrich at the top.

If this is the first time you’re running a script in the sheet, it will ask you for a couple of permissions. Click ok, refresh the sheet, and then enrich again.

The script will look for blank spaces in your row and attempt to run Sapiengraph formulas in them. This takes a little bit of time so please be patient!

When it’s done, you’ll see a pop that says “All fillable blanks have been filled!”.

While Sapiengraph can run a lot of requests at a time, I suggest that you fill in ten rows at a time to make sure that you don’t accidentally consume too many credits, and because there’s a rate limit. If you exceed the rate limit, Sapiengraph is likely to timeout and give you blanks. 

You can do it for all your current clients, or just a segment of your highest-earning clients. Either way, I’ve made this as automated as it can be, so you don’t need to think so hard about formulas. 

Reverse Company Lookup: Find companies through their emails

Say you networked with someone and they left you with only an email address, and nothing else. Now all you have are emails and individual names, but no company profiles? That’s what the reverse company lookup page is for!

You don’t even need their names, just their emails. Stick the emails in column C, check the boxes in column A, and hit ‘Find Company’.

This uses Sapiengraph’s reverse email lookup function =SG_REVERSE_EMAIL_LOOKUP(EMAIL) to find the personal LinkedIn profile associated with that address, then uses  =SG_PERSON_WORK(URL, COMPANY_LINKEDIN_PROFILE_URL) to look up the individual’s current place of work.

I’ve also included a handy little tool where you can check the boxes on the right-hand side and hit ‘Import Profiles’ to transport all the found companies to the Current Clients sheet.

Attribute Ranking: View most common attributes among current clients

Similar to the ICP dashboard, but without the charts, the Attribute Ranking sheet gives you a quick and simple look at all the top ten attributes for each data point.

From here, we can see that the majority of the clients in this sheet are from the US, are in the IT Services and IT Consulting industry, have a size of around 51 to 200 people, are funded by seed rounds, raised anywhere from 10001 to 3809000 in their last round, are privately held, are around 10-14 years old, and specialize machine learning.

You can now use this information to prospect for new clients. 

Prospector: Search for companies with similar attributes

Alright now that you’ve gotten your ideal customer profile, we can start prospecting. 

You can use Sapiengraph’s new prospector (beta) to do this, or you can head over to the Prospector page. Fill out the details on the left, then click ‘Run Search’. 

The script uses Sapiengraph’s Company Search function =SG_COMPANY_SEARCH(COUNTRY, [MAX_RESULT],...) to retrieve companies that fulfill your criteria. The formula requires the ‘Country’ cell to be filled, but all others are optional.

Then after you find a few companies that you like, you can go ahead and tick those checkboxes and hit ‘Import Profiles’. If you want a prospector that isn’t constrained by Country like this one, check out our

Sapiengraph Prospector. It has access to 500M+ profiles as well as 44 data filters, all easily accessible from your Sapiengraph dashboard. 

This will immediately import the profiles you’ve checked to the Prospect Scoring sheet. 

Prospect Scoring: Automated lead scoring to match prospects to ICP

Links that you import from the prospector sheet will appear in the first available empty slot of Column D. To get information about the company and score it, all you need to do is check the box and hit ‘Enrich’. 

The sheet will automatically use the SG_COMPANY(URL, Attribute) formulas to fill out all available information in columns E to N, then calculate a score based on the rankings generated in the Attribute Ranking sheet.

As much as I love spreadsheets, I understand that sometimes looking at rows and rows of data is not it. So I also included an automatically updated bar chart and score in columns B and C. A score of 80-100 is highlighted in green. From 60 to 79, it returns as yellow. Anything under 59 shows up as red. 

For the most accurate score, it’s ideal to get as much information as possible. 

This is a good starting point for marketing professionals and SMEs because you can easily see where to focus your energy. Companies with green bar charts are those that are closer to your ICP because they score higher. So you can focus your energy on approaching them. Next are those in yellow, followed by red. 

Sapiengraph’s database is always updating, so feel free to come back and re-enrich blank spots to get a more comprehensive profile. If you want super fresh profiles, make sure to enable fresh profile scraping in your dashboard. 

If you got stuck here, not really sure how to approach these potential clients, feel free to consult our blog on 6 approaches to increase sales. 

I don’t have a customer base, what do I do?

But what if you’re a super super brand new startup that doesn’t have an existing customer base? What on earth can you do?

You can create one based on your competitor’s customer base. 

Step 1: Identifying competitors

Who else does the same thing? Or if there’s no one, who’s doing the most similar thing? Who addresses the same pain point? That’s a good place to start. 

The simplest way is to search for other companies in your niche.

If you’re marketing a project management software, you can simply search “project management software” online. You’ll find lists like ‘15 best project management software’. 

If you run a professional cleaning service for commercial buildings, you can search “Professional Office Cleaning” and set the location to where you are. 

More often than not, you’ll get a few suggestions about companies that offer similar services. You can then begin to analyze their customers. 

Step 2: Identifying competitor’s customers

Okay, so you’ve got a list of companies in your same niche. 

Look up their company websites

You can get an idea of your competitor’s customers by looking up their websites. A lot of companies list their biggest customers on their web pages for some measure of credibility. I mean, if Bill Gates decided to contract your services, you’d brag about it too. Right? 

Sometimes, you’ll find all these lists about a company’s biggest customers and we can use that list about the biggest companies to see what they have in common. 

Searching on social media

You can also search for keywords or pain points on social media like Reddit. People frequently ask for recommendations there and sometimes the customers of a business will jump in to tell a poster about their experience. 

Positive recommendations give you an idea of what your competitors are doing right, while negative ones will tell you what you shouldn’t be doing!

You can take those customers and put them in the ‘CurrentClients’ sheet in order to get an idea of who is currently a patron of your competitors.

How to optimize your ICPs

Big or small, all companies should be optimizing their ICPs on a frequent basis. I’m not talking about once every couple of years. I’m talking about once every couple of months. You don’t have to keep a super close eye on it every single day, but you should at least be aware of who your most loyal and highest-paying customers are. The ideal customer changes as you grow and upscale your own business. 

Pivot your pain points

Your business solves pain points for certain people, but you might not realize that you’re benefiting others as well. Slack originally targeted tech companies as a quick and easy communication tool. But they soon discovered that non-tech sectors like education and healthcare were also in need of a platform for collaboration and organization. 

Slack repositioned itself as an efficient tool for internal communication for all sorts of companies and swiftly grew into the giant it now is.

Similarly, Airbnb started out as an easy way to make use of that extra room in your house so that you could earn some extra income. But it swiftly turned into a short-term rental solution for people who wanted the comfort of a home away from home.

There’s nothing wrong if you want to stick with your single niche, but be open to switching things up as your company evolves. 

Align and personalize sales outreach

With an ICP, you can easily align and personalize your sales and marketing efforts. Take the example shown in my screenshots as an example. 

Letterman Inc (fictional company) has an ideal customer profile that looks like this:

• IT Services & IT Consulting industry
• 51-200 people
• Funded by a seed round
• Raised around 10001 to 3809000
• Privately held
• 10-14 years old (founded before 2014)
• Specializes in machine learning (and also probably related businesses)

Based on this profile, we can guess that their ideal customer is a business that is still growing. They’re probably budget-conscious but not overly so, and are looking for something scalable. As a tech company, they probably face issues like server problems, downtime, keeping up with compliance, and data security. 

Letterman Inc can then address these issues in their marketing strategy and sales efforts, writing campaigns about how Letterman Inc’s project management software updates regularly, is 100% compliant with local laws, and has the best security. They can offer plans with lower prices and longer contract terms since the client likely wants to scale. They can also assure the potential customer that Letterman Inc has all sorts of integration capabilities and that they can effectively help their customers track and document performance metrics. 

Sapiengraph - 5-minute growth tools

Now, what is Sapiengraph? 

Sapiengraph is the home of 5-minute growth tools. We know how hard it is being in the B2B market. We know that sales and marketing tools can get expensive, eat up your time, or require a lot of tech know-how to set-up. (Trust me I’ve done enough research on 18 Clearbit Competitors to know that long integrations are the bane of everyone’s existence). That’s why we made it our mission to make growth super easy.

Right now, we have a Sales Prospector (beta), custom Google Sheets formulas, and a Job Change monitor that can help you boost your business. We also have a lot of free templates that you can copy to your drive. 

Including this one. The Ultimate Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Template.

Nail your ICP with our Ideal Customer Profile Template

A well-crafted ICP is a powerful tool that can increase sales and enhance your understanding of your own product’s market fit. However, you shouldn’t be spending too much time on it. 

The Ultimate ICP Template I made for you should simplify and streamline the process. Take a moment to make a copy and put it to the test!