How to choose a target market and ICP
Start narrow. Most of a market isn't buying at any moment, so aim at the accounts that fit and have a reason to act now.
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Define the buyer, the problem and the trigger
Write down the role you sell to, the problem they own and the event that makes now the right time. Industry and size say who could buy; the problem and the trigger say who should hear from you this month.
Example: Broad: "SaaS companies with 50 to 500 employees." Precise: "Heads of RevOps at 50 to 500 person SaaS companies that posted SDR roles in the last 90 days."
Expect most of the market to be out of market
If companies switch providers about every five years, only about 5% of them are ready in a given quarter. Signals help you find that share now, so don't treat silence from the rest as a final no.
Source: Dawes, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for the LinkedIn B2B Institute, 2021
Lead with signals you can check
Hiring for a role you support, new funding, a leadership change or a launch gives you a true reason to write. Reach out early: in 6sense's survey, the eventual winner was on the buyer's first shortlist 95% of the time. Company-specific emails tripled replies from directors and above in Gong's data. A new chief executive can unsettle existing suppliers: in one study, suppliers lost substantial sales after a customer replaced its CEO, mostly when the successor sold off parts of the business.
Sources: Gong Labs, 30,000+ emails, 2023; 6sense Buyer Experience Report, about 4,000 buyers, 2025; Intintoli, Serfling and Shaikh, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2017
Plan for the whole buying group
A B2B purchase involves 5 to 16 people across up to four functions, and groups that reach agreement are 2.5 times as likely to report a high-quality deal. Name the roles that must agree in each ICP: the person who feels the problem, the one who owns the budget and anyone who can block it.
Give each segment its own ICP
Split segments that buy for different reasons, such as agencies and in-house teams, into separate ICPs. Each one then gets its own message and its own row in Analytics, so you can see which segment responds.
Say who to leave out
Name the customers, competitors, regions and company sizes you can't serve. 73% of B2B buyers say they actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach, so a wrong-fit message costs more than a missed one.
Source: Gartner, survey of 632 B2B buyers on rep-free buying, 2025
Change an ICP from results, not hunches
Once about 100 companies per ICP have finished the sequence, compare ICPs in Analytics. Keep the ones that earn positive replies, tighten the ones that are close, and change or archive the ones with none. Results explains why 100 is enough to spot a miss but not to pick a winner.
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