Ideal customer profile

An ideal customer profile is a description of the account that is worth pursuing now: the situation, the constraint they already feel, and the reason your offer is a plausible answer. It is not a list of industries you would accept revenue from.

A broad ICP feels safer and teaches less. Replies, meetings, and lost deals get mixed together, so the team cannot tell whether the offer, the message, or the follow-up failed. A tighter profile creates a feedback loop. You can see which accounts respond, which conversations are real, and which segments should wait.

ICP work shows up inside a growth diagnostic and inside fractional leadership, because a channel problem is often a targeting problem in disguise. It is commercial judgement, not a finance exercise. Steven is not a fractional CFO.