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Look closely at almost any B2B company's account base and an uncomfortable pattern can emerge: some of the biggest and most prestigious customers are also among the least profitable. They take more effort to win, require more resources to service and, because of their size and negotiating power, can make demands that smaller customers simply cannot.
That creates a problem for the traditional Ideal Customer Profile. If the accounts that look most impressive on paper aren't necessarily the accounts that create the most value, what exactly makes them “ideal”?
That's the question at the center of Episode 5 of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners, where Liam Moroney and Dale W. Harrison take a closer look at the ICP and argue that B2B companies often define their ideal customers from the wrong direction.
The guru who couldn't define his own term
The episode opens with a story about a well-known marketing commentator who, on a recent podcast, confidently dismissed the use of an ICP while calling it an “ideal customer portrait” and struggling to define what the term actually meant.
It's a small anecdote, but it points to a broader problem. ICP has become common language in B2B marketing, yet the term is often used without much thought about what makes a customer genuinely ideal. Company size, industry, revenue and logo recognition can all find their way into an ICP because they look like sensible indicators of value, even when the company's own sales history tells a different story.
Why the B2C playbook breaks in B2B
The distinction becomes clearer when you compare B2B with consumer markets.
If someone buys a box of laundry detergent, the relationship between buyer and seller is relatively straightforward. The product either meets the consumer's needs or it doesn't. The buyer's ability to purchase it isn't determined by whether the detergent company has the right enterprise infrastructure to serve them.
B2B purchases are different. The buyer isn't simply deciding whether they want the product. They are deciding whether they trust a particular company to deliver it, support it and stand behind it. The seller is making a corresponding judgment about whether it can successfully serve that customer.
That makes some of the models borrowed from consumer marketing difficult to apply directly to B2B. A list of the largest companies in a market may look like an obvious target list, but size alone doesn't tell you whether those companies are actually good prospects for your business.
Dale illustrates the problem with a deliberately simple analogy: a person's dream partner might be a Swedish supermodel, but that doesn't mean the supermodel is looking for them. The important question isn't simply who you would most like to sell to. It's who is likely to choose you.
Large enterprises tend to have established buying preferences, particularly when the purchase carries significant operational or reputational risk. Market leaders therefore have a structural advantage. Salesforce, for example, holds a far larger share of the Fortune 1000 CRM market than smaller competitors such as HubSpot. A smaller company can have an excellent product and still find that many of the accounts it most wants to win have little reason to put it on their shortlist.
Buyer-seller fit is a two-way street
This is where Dale's idea of Buyer-Seller Fit becomes important.
A useful ICP has to account for both sides of the relationship. The buyer needs to be the kind of organization that could benefit from the product, but the seller also needs to be capable of winning and serving that type of customer.
Sales teams develop those capabilities over time, often in surprisingly specific ways. Dale compares it to going to the gym: for many sales organizations, every day ends up being “leg day” or “arm day.” They become very good at selling to certain types of accounts because that is where their experience has accumulated.
A salesperson who has spent years selling into government, for example, may have developed a deep understanding of bureaucratic procurement processes, stakeholder management and the practical requirements of those deals. Put that same person into an industrial sales environment and the results may be very different.
Dale gives two examples of how pronounced this specialization can become. At one startup, a salesperson had quietly become the company's strongest performer because they had been assigned to the finance vertical. When the company tried moving other people into the territory, they couldn't reproduce the same results.
At a lab-equipment distributor, another salesperson consistently exceeded quota selling refrigerators and little else. When Dale suggested moving her onto different accounts, the regional VP's response was straightforward: "she's the best performer we have, and if all she wants to do is sell refrigerators, I'm not telling her to stop."
The lesson is that sales capability is itself part of the ICP calculation. Historical success isn't just a record of what the company has sold. It is evidence of where the company knows how to win.
You can't hire your way into a new market
That makes the common strategy of hiring experienced enterprise sellers more complicated than it first appears.
When a company wants to move into a new market, the instinct is often to assume that the missing ingredient is a salesperson with the right contacts. But selling successfully into a new segment can require an entire supporting infrastructure: implementation resources, customer support, compliance expertise, procurement experience and the ability to absorb the costs of winning and servicing those accounts.
Dale points to Salesforce's experience winning a major oil and gas account. The company was able to commit a large team to the customer, establish a presence at its headquarters and invest heavily in migration, training and usage monitoring. A smaller competitor could hire an experienced salesperson and still be unable to provide the same level of support.
That matters because large customers aren't always choosing the product they believe is marginally better. In many enterprise purchases, they are also considering the risk associated with choosing the vendor. A market leader can offer reassurance that a smaller competitor may struggle to match.
The same principle appears in one of the more unexpected examples in B2B history: the Apollo spacesuit was ultimately developed by Playtex, the company better known for making bras. Its expertise in bonding flexible latex to fabric proved valuable because traditional aerospace contractors struggled to produce a suit flexible enough for astronauts to move around on the lunar surface.
Playtex could solve the product problem, but it wasn't equipped to navigate the complexities of government procurement. NASA's solution was to bring Playtex together with Hamilton, an aerospace company that understood that side of the business. The result combined two different kinds of fit: the company that could build the product and the company that knew how to sell and deliver it into that market.
The clear takeaway is that "fit" has to work on both sides, or the deal doesn't happen – no matter how good the product is.
A working framework, layer by layer
By the end of the episode, the argument connects back to the qualification framework developed throughout the series:
- Broad ICP fit – are they the kind of company that ever buys this category at all?
- In-market fit – are they actually buying right now?
- Consideration set eligibility – are they willing to consider a company that looks like you?
- Conditional win probability – are you actually equipped to beat the competition for them?
- And finally a CLTV-based tiebreaker – for when two leads score identically everywhere else
The important point is that none of these factors creates certainty. They help establish where the probability of winning – and the potential value of that win – is strongest.
That also changes how an ICP should be built. Rather than starting with the accounts a company would most like to have and working backwards, the more useful approach is to examine the customers it has actually been able to win and retain successfully. Which types of buyers choose the company? Where does the sales team consistently outperform? Which accounts generate strong long-term value relative to the effort required to win and serve them?
The answers may produce an ICP that looks very different from the one on the boardroom wish list.
Next, Dale goes deeper into the mechanics behind that idea, exploring what it actually takes to build a scoring model around these probabilities rather than simply assigning points to a list of attributes.
