What We're Seeing

The ICP Evolution

In a rapidly changing market, an ICP isn't something you define once and put in a slide deck. It's something you continuously validate.

By Eric Snyder · 2026-10-30

One of the things we're seeing more lately is customers and prospects stretching their Ideal Customer Profile in search of growth.

Pipeline is harder to create. Buying cycles are longer. Differentiation is increasingly fleeting. Budgets are more scrutinized. When your market is not producing at the same rate, the natural pressure is to look for more places to sell. My seasoned board at Concora regularly and rightfully asked the same questions.

A new industry. A smaller customer. A larger enterprise. An adjacent use case.

Sometimes that expansion identifies an attractive market.

Sometimes it makes the ICP murky.

At the same time, many companies are still operating from an ICP that was defined several years ago despite changes to the product or their market.

That is the tension we are seeing.

Companies need to be willing to explore where the next source of growth may come from without treating a few new wins as proof that they have found the right customers.

An ICP isn't something you define once and put in a slide deck.

It is a hypothesis you continuously validate.

Early success can be misleading

One of the more dangerous signals is success.

A young company wins several customers in a particular segment and naturally concludes: this must be where we should focus.

Sometimes they are right.

Sometimes they have found the easiest customers to acquire.

I have seen this firsthand. At one company, we had meaningful success in a particular segment. On the surface, it looked like validation. We could sell there, customers understood the value proposition, and we won.

But over time, those customers were the most likely to churn.

What initially looked like strong product-market fit was more complicated. We had identified a segment that was relatively easy to acquire, but not one where we were best positioned to create sustained value.

Your best ICP is not simply the customer you can sell to.

It is the customer you can win, serve successfully, retain, and grow.

Your ICP should become more precise over time

Early in a company’s growth, the ICP is often intentionally broad.

That makes sense. You are still learning where the product resonates and where to invest scarce development resources.

But as the company gains experience, the ICP should become more informed by evidence.

Something else we're seeing is that most companies can describe their best customers anecdotally. They know which segments seem easier to sell to, which customers are harder to support, and where they have had success.

Far fewer young or smaller companies can support those observations with decision-grade data.

Some of the insight sits in the heads of sales, product, services, and customer success leaders. The rest is scattered across systems that were never designed to give you an integrated view of customer fit.

Which customers reach value fastest?

Which have the highest retention?

Where are expansion rates strongest?

Where does the sales cycle move naturally versus requiring extraordinary effort?

The goal is to make the ICP more accurate.

Turn intuition into evidence

Most experienced leaders already know the signals.

They know when a customer required unusual discounting to win. When product made commitments it would not normally make. When implementation needed a different model. When customer success is spending too much time keeping an account healthy. Or when a customer has been rotating through platforms every year or two trying to solve a problem that may not actually be a technology problem.

The challenge is turning those observations into something the company can measure and use consistently.

Too often, those signals stay in people's heads, meeting notes, Slack conversations, or separate systems. People may know the issues, but those signals never make their way back into decisions about the ICP.

You do not need a perfect metric for every signal. But recurring exceptions should be visible enough to identify patterns.

Sales needs permission to say no

A good ICP does more than tell sales who to pursue.

It should also tell them who not to pursue.

That becomes particularly difficult in a slower market.

When pipeline is harder to build, every opportunity feels more valuable. Salespeople sell.

But every poor-fit opportunity consumes resources you could be using on better-fit customers.

Leadership has to support the organization when it walks away from business that falls outside the profile.

Otherwise the ICP is not really a strategy. It is just a PE presentation.

Keep validating the hypothesis

We like to say the best companies treat their ICP as a living hypothesis.

And the validation cannot stop when the deal closes.

One area companies often underweight is post-sale economics. What did it actually cost to implement, support, retain, and grow the customer?

A segment may look attractive from a bookings perspective and look very different once you account for implementation effort, services capacity, support requirements, product demands, and the management attention required to keep the customer successful.

That does not mean the ICP needs to change every quarter.

It means the assumptions behind it should keep being tested.

Because the question is not simply:

Who can we sell to?

It is:

Where are we uniquely positioned to win and create sustained value?

That answer will evolve.

Your ICP should too.

Eric Snyder is a Partner at Big Wheel Performance. He helps SaaS and technology-enabled services companies drive turnarounds and global revenue transformations by leading scale initiatives and overseeing P&Ls exceeding $250M.