ICP

An ICP is the single reference point that lets a B2B company align every go-to-market decision. A persona describes the human inside the deal — say, a 35-year-old marketing manager. The ICP describes the company they work in: revenue band, headcount, industry, tech stack, growth stage, region, billing model. Two prospects with identical personas but different ICPs are different customers entirely.

The first job a sharp ICP does is to make rejection clear. 'We work with both SMB and enterprise' paralyses sales and marketing. A useful ICP looks like 'KRW 10-50B revenue, SaaS or fintech, post-Series B, growth team of five plus'. Drawing that boundary is what lets content topics, ad targeting, sales prioritisation and pricing all point the same direction. The classic Korean failure mode is refusing to draw the line at all — and the predictable result is longer sales cycles and lower win rates.

The most practical way to build an ICP is to reverse-engineer your last 12-24 months of best customers. Pull the ten or twenty accounts that hit value fastest, scored highest on NPS, and renewed or expanded the most aggressively. The shared attributes you find will be far more concrete than anything you could brainstorm. Repeat the exercise quarterly — markets shift, your 'best customer' shifts with them, and an ICP doc that sat on a shelf for a year is almost always out of step with reality.

AI search makes the ICP definition extend further than it used to. The new question is: when a decision-maker inside your ICP types a category-level prompt into ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude, does your brand show up in the answer? A 'Series-B B2B SaaS' ICP company should care whether prompts like 'PMF measurement tools popular with Series-B SaaS' cite their product.

An ICP that does not feed account-based marketing, positioning and pricing stays a document, not a tool. Live ICP work goes the other way: define the ICP, extract a target account list from it, run content where those accounts read, and have sales push outbound with the same message. Companies where the ICP is alive can recite the ICP sentence across marketing, sales, product and customer success. Companies where it is dead have each function imagining a different customer. That gap is exactly the gap between efficient and inefficient GTM.