How to write an ICP from your website
Your pricing page, your customers and your own homepage already describe your buyer. How to turn them into an ideal customer profile an agent can search with and how FOUND drafts one from your site before you pay.
On this page 8 sections
Quick answer: Your pricing page, your customers and your homepage already describe your buyer. Turn them into a filter, not a persona: the job titles that sign, the kinds, sizes and places of company you serve and the people to leave out. That filter is what an outbound agent searches with.
An ideal customer profile for outbound isn't a persona with a name and a coffee order. It's a filter: the job titles, companies and places an agent searches for and the people it must leave out. Get it wrong and every message after it is aimed at the wrong person, however well it's written.
The good news is that you've already written most of it. Your website says who you sell to, what problem you solve and who has bought. This guide shows how to read it back out, in the same order FOUND's Setup does when you paste your website in.
The six parts of an ICP an agent can use
- Who decides. Three to six job titles of the people who decide to buy, not the people who use the product.
- Industries. Three to five, named the way LinkedIn names them.
- Company size. Headcount bands: 1-10, 11-50, 51-200, 201-500 and so on up to 10,001 and more.
- Company type. Private, startup, public, nonprofit or agency, if it matters to you.
- Where. The countries or regions you can sell to and serve.
- Who is out. Your competitors, your own company and anyone who sells rather than buys: service providers, freelancers, consultants and people who are looking for a job.
Each part is a filter someone can fail. That's the point: a profile that nobody fails finds everybody, which is the same as finding nobody.
Read your own site in this order
FOUND reads your landing page and follows up to three of its links to your about, pricing, product, solutions, customers or platform pages. Of those, the pricing page usually says the most, because a pricing page names the buyer more precisely than any hero section. Read them by hand in this order.
| Page | What it tells you | Goes into |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Who pays, how many seats or users a plan assumes and whether a sales call is needed | Company size, who decides |
| Customers and case studies | The industries and company sizes that have already bought and the job titles quoted | Industries, size, titles |
| Homepage headline | The problem you solve, often in the buyer's own words | The words they post, below |
| Product or solutions | Which team uses it every day and which team owns the budget | Who decides, versus who uses |
| About | Where you are, who you serve and the names your competitors might use for the same thing | Where, who is out |
If your site is thin, built so that a reader sees nothing without scripts or blocks readers altogether, FOUND comes back with a blank brief on purpose and asks you to write five lines. A guessed description of a product you don't sell would sit behind every message the agent ever writes.
Titles: the people who decide, not the people who use it
The most common ICP error is listing your users. If your product is used by sales reps, your buyer is whoever owns the sales budget: a head of sales, a VP of sales, a founder at a small company. Reps, account executives and analysts are exactly who an agent should skip and FOUND's first check throws them out.
- Widen with more roles, never vaguer ones. "Head of Sales" and "Head of Revenue Operations", not "sales professional".
- Three to six titles. Fewer misses people; more usually means two different buyers, which is what a second agent is for.
- Seniority is in the title. Founder, owner, C-level, VP, head or director of the function: those are the people with authority to buy.
The words your buyer posts
An ICP says who. Signals need one more thing: what those people write about when they have the problem you solve. These become the topics an agent watches on LinkedIn and they should be problem words and workflow words, not the name of your category.
Good: pipeline reviews, rev ops automation, outbound reply rates. Too broad to find anyone useful and never among FOUND's own suggestions: sales, marketing, AI, growth, SaaS, B2B, startup, business, technology, software, leads, prospecting, revenue, automation, data, cloud, digital, innovation, strategy.
How each kind of signal uses them is in our guide to the seven signal families.
A worked example: FOUND's own
FOUND has an agent of its own, looking for FOUND's buyers. This is the buyer it looks for, as its Sources tab shows it, under Who it looks for:
| Who decides | VP of Sales, Head of Revenue Operations |
| Industry | Software development |
| Company size | 51-200 people |
| A topic it watches | rev ops automation |
| Who is out | The defaults: service providers, freelancers, consultants and people open to work |
Every lead it brought came with its match in words, Strong, Good or Possible and the reason it was there. Where a lead sat near the next band, the tick on its bar showed it, which is the screen telling you where the buyer's edge is. How the match is worked out is in how FOUND scores a LinkedIn lead.
Test it before you pay
An ICP on paper is a guess. The test is who it finds. In FOUND, you paste your website, correct the brief it reads and pick your signals and before you pay you see up to five companies in your market that just raised money and could buy what you sell. You connect LinkedIn after you start and the first leads arrive that day. Payment comes after that screen, not before.
If fewer than five companies come back, the profile is narrow. That tells you something about your market and you still haven't paid. Widen it with more industries or places rather than vaguer ones and once your leads arrive, use the three buttons on each one to teach it what you meant.
Five mistakes to leave out
- Listing users as buyers. They'll reply, like the product and have no budget.
- Category words as topics. "SaaS" and "sales" match everyone, so they find no one.
- "Technology" as an industry. Name the kind of company you sell to, as LinkedIn does.
- Forgetting your competitors. Their staff and partners are the loudest people around your topic and none of them will buy.
- Writing it once. The first leads tell you where the edge is. Mark them and look again after a week.
Questions
What's the difference between an ICP and a buyer persona?
An ICP is who you target: titles, companies, places and who is out. A persona is why that person cares: their problems and the words they use. An agent searches with the first and writes with the second.
How many job titles should I list?
Three to six. If you need more, you probably have two different buyers and each deserves its own agent with its own signals.
What if FOUND can't read my website?
It comes back blank on purpose rather than guessing and asks you to write the brief yourself. Five lines is enough to start: what you sell, to whom and what changes for them.
What if the buyer FOUND drafts is wrong?
You see it on the agent's Sources tab, under Who it looks for and in the leads it brings. Teach it from the leads with More like this and Fewer like this and if the buyer itself is off, change it in the app under Agent, Sources, Edit buyer: roles, industries, locations, company size and how strict it is.