Business Growth

Your ICP Should Tell Sales Who Not to Chase

A bigger market does not always create a better growth opportunity.

By Fred Soller · 2026-10-07

Our family loves Chick-fil-A.  It is one of those rare places everyone can agree on, whether we are grabbing breakfast, dinner or trying to feed everybody on a road trip.  Unless it is Sunday.

Like millions of people, we have pulled into a Chick-fil-A parking lot on a Sunday only to remember that it is closed. From a purely financial standpoint, the decision seems almost irrational.  The company deliberately gives up an entire day of potential revenue every week.  This potential revenue is estimated to be $1.2B per year in revenue.

The decision is rooted in Chick-fil-A’s values, not its ideal customer profile.  But it demonstrates something many growth companies struggle to do say no, even when saying yes could produce more revenue.  

The lesson is not that every company should copy Chick-fil-A.  It is that focus only becomes real when it costs you something.

The same should be true of your ideal customer profile.

Most ICPs Describe a Market Instead of Making a Choice

Most companies define their ICP by describing who could buy: companies of a certain size, in a handful of industries, with a particular technology stack or set of problems. Then they hand that definition to sales and say, “Go build pipeline.”

The problem is that the ICP usually includes so many potential customers that it provides almost no practical direction. It tells sales where they are allowed to hunt, but it does not tell them where to aim, or when to walk away.

A useful ICP should identify the customers most likely to buy, succeed, stay and expand. Just as importantly, it should tell sales who not to chase.

If your ICP does not exclude anyone, you have not made a strategic choice.  You have simply described the market.

We Can Sell to Them Is Not a Strategy

When we ask companies to describe their ideal customer, we often hear some version of this: “We can serve almost any company with more than 500 employees.”  Maybe you can.  But should you?

Your product may legitimately solve problems across healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, retail, logistics and another 20 industries.  That proves the product is versatile.  It does not prove those markets are equally attractive, that the problems are equally urgent or that you have the resources to compete effectively in all of them.

Every additional market brings different buyers, terminology, competitors, regulations, use cases and proof points.  Salespeople have to understand another business environment.  Marketing has to create another story.  Product encounters another set of requirements. Customer success inherits another kind of implementation.

Before long, the website says a little about everything, the sales team chases every shiny object, and nobody can explain where the company wins at the highest rate. You may become relevant everywhere but differentiated nowhere.  

Focus Has Built Some Remarkable Companies

Some of the strongest software businesses were built by making a much narrower choice than their technology might have allowed.

HubSpot provides one of the clearest examples. It did not begin by trying to become everything to every sales and marketing organization. It focused on helping small and midsized businesses attract customers through inbound marketing. That gave HubSpot a specific audience, a specific problem and a distinct point of view. It built authority and a community around that position before expanding into the broader customer platform it offers today.

Toast made a similar choice with restaurants. Rather than creating a point-of-sale system for every kind of merchant, it built around restaurant operations—the front of the house, the kitchen, online ordering, payments, labor and guest engagement. That specialization gave Toast a strong answer to the question every buyer eventually asks: Do you really understand my business?

Procore could have positioned itself as another project-management platform. Instead, it built specifically for construction: its projects, participants, workflows and economics. The company did not ask contractors to imagine how generic software might be adapted to their world. It showed them a platform built around how construction gets done.

These companies did not succeed because they chose small markets. They succeeded because they became extraordinarily relevant to clearly defined ones.  Their focus didn’t limit their growth.  It gave them a place to succeed.

Need Alone Does Not Make Someone an Ideal Customer

A company can have the exact problem you solve and still be a terrible prospect.  This bears repeating.  A company can have the exact problem you solve and still be a terrible prospect.

The problem may not be important enough to fund. The person experiencing it may not be able to buy. The organization may be committed to building internally. Procurement may take 18 months. The opportunity may require integrations you do not support or customization that destroys the economics.

Or perhaps the company will buy but never become a good customer. It will consume implementation resources, resist adoption, decline to serve as a reference and eventually churn. You won the revenue and lost everywhere else.

A strong ICP must account for more than theoretical need. It should reflect which customers recognize the problem, consider it urgent and have the authority and budget to act.  It should also account for whether you can win efficiently, deliver value predictably and retain the customer profitably.

The goal is not to identify every company that could use the product. It is to identify the customers worth acquiring.

Exclusion Is Where the ICP Becomes Useful

Most ICP documents are full of inclusion criteria and nearly empty of exclusions. That is where they fail.

Sales teams operate under pressure. When pipeline is light, almost every account begins to look qualified. A recognizable logo enters the funnel, a large potential contract value gets attached to it and everyone finds reasons to keep pursuing it. The opportunity survives because it is big, not because it is likely.

Six months later, the company has spent sales hours, executive attention, product resources and solution-engineering capacity chasing a deal it was never positioned to win. There may be no compelling event, no executive sponsor or no realistic path through procurement. The prospect may require capabilities outside the core product. But nobody wants to disqualify it because the logo would look terrific on the website.

Big logos create their own gravity. Normal qualification standards disappear. Product considers roadmap changes. Executives join and get energized by the weekly calls. The forecast begins assuming some portion of the revenue. At some point, the company stops evaluating the opportunity and starts pandering for it.

Sometimes a strategic pursuit is worth that investment. It may open a market, create an important reference or materially change the business.  But call it what it is: a strategic bet.  Do not pretend it fits the core sales motion when it requires a different product, different economics and an extraordinary amount of organizational attention.  Yes, a large customer can still be a bad deal.  Revenue quality matters.

Build the ICP From Evidence Instead of Aspiration

An ICP should not be created in a conference room based on where leadership hopes the company can sell. Start with the evidence already inside the business.

Where are win rates highest?  Which customers move through the sales process fastest?  Where is discounting lowest?  Which customers reach value quickly?  Who renews, expands and refers you to others?  Where are implementations most repeatable and margins strongest?

Then look at the other side. Which opportunities repeatedly stall?  Where do deals demand heavy customization?  Which customers consume the most support?  Where is adoption weak?  Which segments churn?  Where does the sales team spend the most time for the least return?

Your best-fit market is often hiding in those patterns.

This is also why the ICP cannot belong exclusively to marketing or sales. Sales knows which opportunities move. Marketing knows which audiences respond.  Product knows where requirements begin pulling the roadmap off course.  Customer success knows which customers achieve value.  Finance knows which revenue is profitable.

An effective ICP brings those perspectives together.  It does not simply ask, “Who will buy?” It asks, “Who becomes a good customer?”

Make the ICP Operational

The ICP should change daily decisions, not sit in a sales folder.  It should help a business development representative decide whether an account deserves research.  It should help an account executive qualify an opportunity before pulling in executives and technical resources.  It should help marketing choose where to spend.  It should help product recognize when a requested feature serves the market and when it pulls the company away from it.

That requires more than a list of industries and revenue bands. The company needs to define positive signals and disqualifiers.  Positive signals might include a specific operating environment, a business event, a measurable pain, an executive sponsor or evidence that the organization can implement the change.  Disqualifiers might include unsupported use cases, company sizes, excessive customization, weak urgency, no path to the buyer, or customer profiles historically associated with poor adoption and churn.

The criteria do not need to be perfect.  They need to be clear enough that two sellers looking at the same account are likely to reach the same conclusion.

And they need governance.  If every exception is approved because the potential contract is large, the ICP is not guiding the business.  It is merely offering suggestions.

Focus Improves the Entire Growth Engine

A tighter ICP does more than improve prospecting. Marketing builds a sharper message around a specific set of problems. Salespeople develop real expertise instead of learning a new industry for every call.  Customer references become more relevant. Implementations become more repeatable.  Product receives clearer feedback. Customer success starts recognizing familiar adoption patterns.

Every win makes the next one a little easier.  That is how a company builds density in a market, and density is far more valuable than scattered success.  I would rather be an assassin in one or two verticals than a jack of all trades and master of none.

That does not mean a company must remain narrow forever.  HubSpot expanded from inbound marketing into a broader customer platform.  Toast extended its reach across more of the restaurant operation.  Procore expanded across the construction lifecycle. But each broadened from a position of strength. 

Focus first. Earn the right to broaden later.

Saying No Is a Growth Strategy

Companies resist narrowing their ICP because it feels like they are shrinking the opportunity.  They are not.  They are deciding where to invest limited time, talent and capital.    

Sales capacity is finite.  Marketing dollars are finite.  Product resources are finite.  Executive attention may be the most limited resource of all. Every hour spent chasing a poor-fit opportunity is an hour not spent pursuing a customer more likely to buy, succeed and stay.

That is the hidden cost of a weak ICP.  It does not just create bad pipeline.  It steals resources from good pipeline.  The visible cost is running out of cash.

A useful ICP should make some people inside the company uncomfortable.  It should force choices.  It should remove accounts someone wants to pursue.  It should occasionally require saying no to potential revenue.

Chick-fil-A’s Sunday closure is real because the company continues to honor it even when the restaurants are busy and customers are ready to buy.  The decision costs something.

Your ICP should have the same kind of consequence.  If every customer, market and opportunity remains available, you have not established focus.  You have expressed a preference.

Know Where You Win

At Big Wheel Performance, we help companies turn broad market assumptions into focused, evidence-based growth systems.  We examine where they win, which customers create long-term value and where the business is wasting resources on opportunities that were never truly qualified.

Because better growth does not always begin with adding more pipeline.  Sometimes it begins by removing the pipeline you never should have chased.

Know where you win. Know where you do not. Then build the discipline to act accordingly.

Company references: Chick-fil-A  |  HubSpot  |  Toast  |  Procore

Fred Soller is a Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Big Wheel Performance. He helps enterprise and mid-market companies build and scale global revenue organizations by driving GTM alignment, execution discipline, and exit readiness.