---
name: icp-definition
description: Define and validate an Ideal Customer Profile with fit criteria, buyer roles, disqualifiers, account scoring, and a validation plan.
---

# ICP Definition

## Boundary

Own the sales ICP: account fit, buyer roles, disqualifiers, and validation. Do not invent market evidence, map keywords, select channels, or treat a scoring model as truth.

## Required Inputs

- Best and worst current customers, if any
- Product, price, sales motion, and delivery constraints
- Observed pains, triggers, outcomes, and buying roles
- Available win, loss, retention, and expansion evidence

## Workflow

1. Separate observed customer evidence from hypotheses.
2. Define firmographic, operational, behavioral, and trigger-based fit criteria. Gate each criterion on a circumstance that requires the product, not one that merely prefers it, and on a real segment that typifies it.
3. Define the economic buyer, champion, user, blocker, and their evidence-backed concerns.
4. Write an anti-ICP with explicit disqualifiers and costly edge cases. Separate hard disqualifiers from friction that only costs comparison points, and mark each buying trigger observed or hypothesized.
5. Build a simple scorecard. Explain each weight and keep unknowns visible.
6. Tier accounts by fit and evidence, then choose a small validation sample.
7. Specify interviews, list tests, or campaign tests with pass, revise, and reject criteria.

## Output

1. **ICP statement and evidence status**
2. **Fit criteria, anti-ICP, and buyer-role table**
3. **Scoring and account-tiering model**
4. **Validation plan with owners and decision criteria**

## Quality Gate

- Every criterion changes a targeting decision.
- Claims distinguish observed evidence from hypotheses.
- Weights are adjustable judgments, not universal truth.
- Conflicting segments force a primary choice; they are never averaged.
- The result can be used without another installed skill.

## Reference

Use the account-tiering worksheet in [account-tiering.md](references/account-tiering.md) when a scored account list is needed. Use [evidence-gates.md](references/evidence-gates.md) to separate real fit criteria from table stakes, friction, and untested trigger guesses.