The Ideal Customer Profile and the Message

An ICP you can build a list from

An ICP describes the company (or household) most likely to get the job done with you and to stay. Good ICPs have three layers of criteria, each observable from outside.

Firmographic: industry, size band, geography, business model — the filters a database can apply. Situational: the circumstance from your research that puts them in market, expressed as something you can detect — 'recently hired a head of client services', 'announced a new reporting requirement', 'job posts mentioning the spreadsheet you replace'. Behavioural: signs they work the way your product assumes — they already use the two tools you integrate with, or they publish client case studies.

Then add disqualifiers: the attributes that predict a poor fit, long sales cycle or early churn. Disqualifiers are where an ICP earns its keep, because they let an outbound list or an agent skip accounts that look attractive and are not.

Inside the company, name the buyer roles separately: who feels the job, who signs, who can block. A message that persuades the person feeling the pain often fails the person signing, and vice versa.

Value is wider than function

Eric Almquist, John Senior and Nicolas Bloch of Bain argued in their 2016 Harvard Business Review article The Elements of Value that what customers value is psychologically complicated but built from universal elements, and that marketers have historically spent their energy on the price side of the value equation because it is the easier side to manage. The lesson for a message is that value has more dimensions than the feature list — the same point the Jobs to Be Done lens makes when it insists a job has social and emotional sides as well as a functional one.

The practical use is as a checklist when writing pillars. B2B messages tend to default to functional value — saves time, cuts cost — while the buyer is also asking whether choosing you makes them look good, reduces their personal risk and is easy to get through procurement. Interview quotes (Lesson 1.2) tell you which non-functional elements matter in your segment; the message should address the ones that do, with proof.

Buyers decide before they talk to you

6sense's 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report — vendor research based on a survey of nearly 4,000 buyers — found that buyers first contacted a seller about 61% of the way through their journey, earlier than the roughly 69% the firm had reported in prior years. It also found that 94% of buying groups had ranked their shortlist in order of preference before engaging sellers, and that the vendor ranked first at that stage won 77% of the time. Treat vendor survey numbers with appropriate caution, but the direction matches the 95-5 logic from Lesson 1.1: much of the decision is made from what buyers already remember and what they can find without you.

For the message this means two things. Your core claim and its proof must be legible in places you do not control — a peer's description, a review, a search result, an AI-generated answer — so it has to be short, specific and repeatable. And your public material must answer the questions buyers ask while they are still anonymous: what it costs roughly, who it is for, how long it takes to get value.

The message hierarchy, and the claims floor

A message hierarchy has one core claim (the position, compressed to a sentence a buyer could repeat), three supporting pillars (the main reasons to believe, mapped to the value elements your buyers care about), and proof under each pillar (a number, a named customer, a demonstration, a guarantee). Every channel draws from the same hierarchy; a cadence step might use one pillar and one proof point, a homepage all three.

Proof is also a legal requirement, not only a persuasive one. The US Federal Trade Commission's advertising guidance for business states that advertising must be truthful and non-deceptive, that advertisers must have evidence to back up their claims before they make them, and that this applies to implied claims as well as express ones. 'Cuts reporting time by 80%' needs a basis you could show; so does the implication that a logo wall means those firms endorse you. A useful habit is to keep the evidence for each proof point next to it in the hierarchy document, so whoever reuses the claim — person or agent — can see what it rests on.