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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 cannot.
That creates a problem for the traditional Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). If the accounts that look most impressive on paper aren't necessarily those 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 build on the previous episode's discussion of market conditions to examine another factor shaping a company's chances of winning: the fit between buyer and seller.
What actually makes a customer ideal?
The episode opens with a story about a well-known marketing commentator who, on a recent podcast, dismissed the use of an ICP while calling it an “ideal customer portrait” and struggling to define what the term meant.
It's a small anecdote, but it points to a broader issue. 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 a company's sales history tells a different story.
Why the B2C model doesn't translate to B2B
In consumer markets, the relationship between buyer and seller is relatively straightforward. If someone buys a box of laundry detergent, the product either meets their needs or it doesn't. The buyer's ability to purchase it isn't determined by whether the manufacturer has the infrastructure to serve that particular customer.
B2B purchases are different. The buyer needs to trust the seller to deliver, support and stand behind its product, while the seller needs to be capable of winning and serving that customer.
That makes an ICP based on company size or industry alone potentially misleading. A list of the largest companies in a market may look like an attractive target audience, but size doesn't tell you whether those companies are good prospects for your business.
Dale illustrates this with a deliberately simple analogy: someone's dream partner might be a Swedish supermodel, but that doesn't mean the supermodel is looking for them. The question isn't just 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 purchases carry 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 its most desirable accounts have little reason to put it on their shortlist.
Buyer–Seller Fit works in both directions
This is where Dale's concept of Buyer–Seller Fit becomes important.
A useful ICP needs to account for both sides of the relationship. The buyer must be the kind of organization that could benefit from the product, while the seller must have the capabilities to win and serve that type of customer.
Why sales experience shapes where you can win
Sales teams develop their strengths 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 particularly good at selling to certain accounts because that's where their experience has accumulated.
A salesperson who has spent years selling into government, for example, may understand complex procurement processes and stakeholder requirements. 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 become the company's strongest performer after being 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 assigning her 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.”
Sales capability is therefore part of the ICP calculation. Historical success isn't just a record of what a company has sold. It's evidence of where it knows how to win.
Why you can't simply hire your way into a new market
When a company wants to enter a new market, the instinct is often to hire an experienced salesperson with the right contacts. But succeeding in a new segment can require much more: 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 could 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 struggle to provide the same support.
Large customers aren't always choosing the product they believe is marginally better. They're also considering the risk of choosing a particular vendor. An established market leader can provide reassurance that a smaller competitor may struggle to match.
A more unexpected example comes from the Apollo program. The spacesuit was developed by Playtex, better known for making bras, because its expertise in bonding flexible latex to fabric helped solve a problem traditional aerospace contractors had struggled with.
But Playtex wasn't equipped to navigate complex government procurement. NASA brought it together with Hamilton, an aerospace company with the necessary experience. The resulting partnership combined the ability to build the product with the ability to sell and deliver it into that market.
Both examples illustrate why entering a new segment requires more than an attractive product or a well-connected salesperson. The seller needs the capabilities to win the business and deliver what the buyer expects.
Building a more useful ICP
By the end of the episode, the argument connects back to the five qualification questions explored in Episode 2. Together, they offer a broader way to assess where sales effort is most likely to pay off:
- Broad ICP fit: Is this the kind of company that could realistically buy the product?
- In-market fit: Is there an active buying process underway?
- Consideration set eligibility: Would the buyer consider a company like yours?
- Conditional win probability: How likely is your sales organization to win?
- Customer lifetime value (CLTV) fit: How valuable would the resulting customer be?
None of these factors creates certainty. Together, they help identify where the probability of winning and the potential value of that win are strongest.
That changes how an ICP should be built. Rather than starting with the accounts a company would most like to win, the more useful approach is to examine the customers it has successfully won and retained. Which buyers consistently choose the company? Where does its sales team 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 of the Next-Gen MQL in Episode 6, exploring how these probabilities can inform a scoring model rather than relying on points assigned to a list of attributes.
