ICP template for SaaS
A fillable ICP with 22 fields across firmographic, technographic, behavioural and trigger criteria, plus a negative ICP and two completed examples at different ACVs.
On this page 7 sections
- The 22 fields, grouped and sourced
- The scoring model and the three routing tiers
- The negative ICP, which saves more money than the positive one
- Two completed examples at different ACVs
- Where each field’s data actually comes from
- Wiring it in, which is where most ICPs stop
- Keeping it current
- Frequently asked questions
The short answer
A working SaaS ICP has 22 fields across four groups: firmographic (7), technographic (4), behavioural (6) and trigger (5). Each field carries a data source and a weight, and the weights produce an account fit score from 0 to 100 that lead routing and ad audiences read directly. Add a negative ICP listing the account types you refuse. Refresh it quarterly from closed won and churn analysis, not from opinion.
Key points before you start
Most ICP documents are a slide with four bullets: mid-market, North America, ops teams, 50 to 500 employees. That definition matches roughly 400,000 companies, which makes it useless for routing a lead and worse than useless for building an ad audience.
The version below is a working document with 22 fields, a source for each one, and a scoring model that outputs a number your CRM can read. It ends with the operational steps, because an ICP that never reaches lead routing or a paid audience does nothing except make people feel organised.
The 22 fields, grouped and sourced
Each field has an instruction line and a data source. Fields marked with a weight feed the scoring model in the next section. If you cannot populate a field from an existing source within a week, either find a proxy or delete the field.
Firmographic (7 fields)
| Field | Instruction | Source | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Employee band | State a floor and a ceiling, not a midpoint | Closed won analysis | 10 |
| Revenue band | Use it only if your pricing scales with revenue | Enrichment | 4 |
| Industry or vertical | Name the two or three that win fastest, not ten that are possible | Closed won win rate by SIC | 10 |
| Geography | Include the markets you can legally and practically support | Contract and support data | 5 |
| Funding or ownership | Venture backed, PE owned, bootstrapped, public | Crunchbase or enrichment | 3 |
| Owning team exists | Is there a named team that owns this workflow today? | Sales call notes | 8 |
| Procurement threshold | Below what deal size does their process stay simple? | Won deal cycle time analysis | 4 |
Technographic (4 fields)
| Field | Instruction | Source | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| System of record | The tool you must integrate with to be usable | Integration usage data | 8 |
| Adjacent stack | Two or three tools whose presence predicts fit | Enrichment plus win analysis | 5 |
| Integration requirement | Which integration is a hard gate in evaluation? | Lost deal reasons | 4 |
| Data maturity | Do they already have the data your product needs? | Onboarding time by account | 3 |
Behavioural and operational (6 fields)
| Field | Instruction | Source | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Volume metric | The unit that makes your product worth paying for, with a floor | Product usage by account | 12 |
| People in the workflow | Minimum number of humans touching the process | Seat count at renewal | 6 |
| Workflow frequency | Daily, weekly or monthly, and why that matters to retention | Usage frequency by cohort | 5 |
| Current solution | Spreadsheet, in house build, or a named competitor | Discovery call tagging | 4 |
| Budget owner seniority | Which title signs, and at what amount | Won deal signatory analysis | 3 |
| Security review depth | SOC 2 only, or full vendor assessment with a questionnaire | Deal cycle audit | 3 |
Trigger (5 fields)
| Field | Instruction | Source | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| New hire in owning role | The title whose arrival starts an evaluation | Job posting monitoring | 2 |
| Funding event | Round size and recency that correlates with buying | Funding alerts | 1 |
| Compliance or regulatory deadline | Named regulation with a date | Industry calendar | 2 |
| Incumbent renewal window | When their current contract expires | Discovery questions | 2 |
| Headcount growth rate | Growth threshold that breaks their current process | Enrichment deltas | 2 |
Weights total 100. The volume metric carries the heaviest weight on purpose, because in every SaaS ICP audit we have run it predicts both win rate and retention better than employee count does. For the conceptual background, see ideal customer profile (ICP), and for the market sizing that sits upstream of this document, read how to define your SaaS target market.
Editable working copy
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The scoring model and the three routing tiers
Score each field 0, 3 or 5, multiply by its weight, then divide by 5 to land on a 0 to 100 scale. Three tiers come out of it, and each tier gets a different treatment.
| Tier | Score | Routing | Marketing treatment |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 80 to 100 | Straight to an AE, SLA of 4 working hours | Named account ads, direct mail, event invites |
| B | 55 to 79 | Nurture with the fit gap recorded on the record | Content nurture, retargeting, no outbound spend |
| C | Under 55 | Self serve only, no sales touch | Excluded from paid audiences entirely |
Check the thresholds rather than trusting them. If tier A accounts win at 31% and tier B at 27%, your weights are not discriminating and the model needs work. A healthy split usually shows tier A winning at two to three times the tier B rate. The marketing qualified lead definition should reference this score directly, otherwise you end up with two competing definitions of a good lead and a permanent argument with sales.
The negative ICP, which saves more money than the positive one
List the account types you refuse, with a reason and an enforcement mechanism. This section is short and it will be the most argued over.
Typical negative ICP entries
0 of 6 done
Enforcement matters more than the list. Every entry needs a mechanism: an exclusion list in the ad platform, a disqualification reason in the CRM, a form field that routes the account away. Without that, the negative ICP is advisory and gets ignored the first time a rep spots a logo they want.
Two completed examples at different ACVs
The same template produces very different documents depending on price point. Both examples below are composites built from real accounts.
| Field | Self serve, $6K ACV | Mid-market, $75K ACV |
|---|---|---|
| Employee band | 10 to 120 | 400 to 3,000 |
| Industry | Digital agencies and studios | Financial services and healthcare |
| Volume metric | 25+ active client projects | 8,000+ monthly transactions |
| System of record | Slack and Notion | Salesforce and Workday |
| Owning team exists | Not required, one ops generalist is enough | Required, a named compliance or ops function |
| Budget owner | Founder or head of ops, card payment | VP or director, procurement involved above $50K |
| Security review | None expected | Full vendor assessment, SOC 2 Type II plus questionnaire |
| Primary trigger | Headcount passing 20 | Regulatory deadline or incumbent renewal |
| Sales motion | No sales touch below 15 seats | AE led, 90 to 120 day cycle |
Notice how little the two share. If your company runs both motions, write two ICP documents and two scoring models. Merging them produces a blended definition that describes neither, which is the most common failure we find when running the SaaS marketing audit checklist at companies with a hybrid motion.
Where the first version comes from
Pull your 20 highest value closed won accounts from the last 18 months and your 15 most recent churned accounts. Find the fields where the two groups differ most. That difference is your ICP. A workshop full of opinions produces a document that flatters the product rather than describing the market.
Editable CSV worksheet
SaaS benchmark evaluation worksheet
Record the source, date, cohort and metric definition before comparing your numbers with a benchmark.
Where each field’s data actually comes from
Four sources cover almost every field. Closed won analysis, exported from your CRM with product usage joined on, gives you firmographics, volume metrics and win rates by band. Churn analysis gives you retention predictors, which the acquisition focused version of an ICP always misses.
Call recordings give you the behavioural fields. Search Gong or your recording tool for the phrase your best customers use to describe the problem, then count how often it appears in won versus lost deals. Enrichment tools such as Clearbit, Apollo or Clay fill technographic and firmographic gaps at scale, though their accuracy on employee count in the 50 to 200 band is mediocre and worth spot checking against LinkedIn.
The trigger fields need monitoring rather than analysis. Job posting alerts for the owning role, funding alerts, and a discovery question that captures renewal dates are enough to populate them without buying an intent data product.
Wiring it in, which is where most ICPs stop
Five operational steps turn the document into something that changes spend. Skip any of them and you have a nicer poster.
Operationalising the ICP
- Add the fit score as a CRM field
A numeric field on the account object, recalculated nightly. Sales can see it on every record and it appears in pipeline reports.
- Rewrite routing rules
Tier A gets a four hour SLA, tier C never reaches a rep. Confirm it worked by checking that tier C lead assignment drops to zero within a week.
- Rebuild paid audiences
Upload tier A and B account lists to LinkedIn and Google as customer match audiences, and add the negative ICP as an exclusion list.
- Update form and enrichment logic
Capture the volume metric field on the demo request form. It is the single highest weighted field and no enrichment vendor sells it.
- Report pipeline by tier
Split the pipeline report by fit tier at the next quarterly review. If tier C is more than 15% of pipeline, routing is leaking.
Keeping it current
Book a 90 minute quarterly refresh. Rerun the closed won and churn queries, check win rate by tier against the thresholds, update trigger fields, and record what changed with a date. Anything older than two quarters should be treated as a hypothesis rather than a definition.
Feed the refreshed version straight into your SaaS marketing plan template and your SaaS marketing budget template, because a tightened ICP usually implies a channel change and sometimes a budget cut. For the strategic detail behind these fields, read the longer B2B SaaS ideal customer profile guide, pair it with the matching buyer persona work, and see how it connects to everything else on the SaaS marketing hub.
Editable working copy
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Save an editable working copy of the framework on this page. Add your own owners, evidence and decisions.
Frequently asked questions
What is an ideal customer profile in SaaS?
An ICP describes the company you sell to, not the person. It combines firmographic, technographic, behavioural and trigger criteria into a definition specific enough to accept or reject an account. In SaaS it should predict retention as well as acquisition, since an account that buys and churns in seven months is a worse outcome than one you never won.
What is the difference between an ICP and a buyer persona?
The ICP is the account, the persona is the human inside it. You target the ICP with account selection, ad audiences and routing rules. You target the persona with messaging, channel choice and content format. Both are needed, and confusing them produces campaigns aimed at a job title inside companies that could never buy the product.
How many fields should an ICP have?
Around 20 to 25 is the working range. Fewer than 15 and the definition is too loose to route against, more than 30 and nobody maintains it. The 22 field version here splits into seven firmographic, four technographic, six behavioural and five trigger fields, with each field carrying a stated data source so it can actually be populated.
What is a negative ICP?
A written list of the account types you refuse, with the reason. Typical entries include single seat buyers, agencies reselling under their own brand, companies below a headcount threshold, and industries whose procurement cycle exceeds your runway. It exists to stop the sales team chasing revenue that churns and to stop marketing paying for clicks that cannot convert.
How do you score accounts against an ICP?
Assign each field a weight totalling 100, then score each field 0, 3 or 5 and normalise. Accounts above 80 route straight to an account executive, 55 to 79 go to nurture with a fit reason attached, and below 55 stay self serve only. Review the thresholds every quarter against actual win rates by band.
How often should you update your ICP?
Trigger fields monthly, everything else quarterly, with a full rebuild annually or whenever ACV moves more than 25%. The quarterly pass reruns closed won and churn analysis and checks whether the highest scoring band still wins at the rate the model assumes. Most ICPs drift because the product changed and nobody told marketing.
Do PLG companies need an ICP?
Yes, and often two. Product led companies need a signup level ICP for self serve fit and a separate expansion ICP describing which accounts justify a sales touch. The criteria differ sharply: self serve fit is about time to value and single user utility, while expansion fit is about seat count, budget authority and security review capacity.
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Published September 11, 2026. Last updated .