Some of you will be lucky to remember the earlier days of road trips, where physical maps were king. They came in a book for the entire country or a zoomed-in version for a specific region. They were kicked about, dog-eared and often missing your favourite part of the country. Those early road trips have parallels with a company's ideal customer profile (ICP).

You may feel it’s a tenuous link but consider this: most B2B organisations have them, but if you ask to see the documentation, to be walked through the scoring logic behind it, or to explain how it’s used to filter which accounts get pursued, people get uncomfortable. As uncomfortable as when your map all of a sudden makes absolutely no sense. "Where the heck did that roundabout come from?"

That gap between believing you have an ICP and actually operating on one is more common, and more costly, than most companies realise. Unless it’s a continually recalibrating part of your company, much like a real-time sat nav, you’ll find yourself left high and dry with marketing and sales alignment veering off the nearest cliff.

Most teams overestimate how well-defined their ICP really is

According to ForgeX's 2025 State of ABM report, only 40% of organisations describe their ICP as "very well-defined". Another 47% call theirs "somewhat well-defined", and a further 10% admit it's "somewhat poorly defined".¹ In other words, roughly six in ten B2B firms are running their go-to-market motion on an ICP they themselves would describe as incomplete.

That same research found a direct link between ICP clarity and performance: organisations with a well-defined ICP tend to see stronger returns from their account-based programmes, particularly in 1:1 and 1:few ABM, while unclear or incomplete ICPs tend to produce weaker account selection, diluted engagement, and incongruence between sales and marketing.¹ A "somewhat well-defined" ICP is a structural drag on everything downstream of it: who gets prospected, what messaging gets built, and which accounts sales spends its limited time on.

The cost of a fuzzy ICP is rising

Forrester's State of Business Buying, 2026 report found that the typical B2B purchase decision now involves 13 internal stakeholders and 9 external influencers, with that number rising for more complex purchases.² Organisations aren’t targeting a single buyer, but rather an entire buying network, spanning departments, seniority levels, and external voices, all of whom need to see relevance in how a vendor shows up. Simply put, the travel map needs a lot more roundabouts adding since you bought it.

Larger buying groups aren't inherently a problem, as Forrester found that 94% of buyers in groups of six or more report benefits, including broader perspectives and stronger internal validation of a purchase decision.² But for the seller, a larger buying group means a wider surface for a poorly targeted account: more people to misjudge, more roles to misunderstand, and more opportunities for a generic pitch to fall flat with someone who has real influence over the deal.

An ICP built on broad firmographics such as industry, headcount and revenue band was arguably good enough when a purchase decision sat with a few people, but that's no longer the case when the decision sits with a distributed network of stakeholders who each bring their own priorities, risk tolerance, and definition of value to the table. In other words, you wouldn’t trust a five year old travel map with England’s new smart motorway network.

Why the gap persists

Companies aren’t starting from scratch here, since most have some version of an ICP (a workshop, a slide, a set of firmographic filters in their CRM or sales intelligence platform). The gap shows up when the ICP becomes a static relic, when it should be a living model built on data and insight, and it needs to be revisited as the market, buying group, and product evolve. Where it breaks down is in three places:

  • It was built once and never revisited: Markets shift, product lines expand, and the accounts that converted two years ago may look nothing like the firms converting today.
  • It stops at the company level: Firmographics tell you which companies might fit, but say nothing about who inside those businesses needs to be convinced, or what would persuade them.
  • It isn't operationalised: If your ICP lives in slides rather than in scoring criteria, prospecting filters, and sales enablement material, then it isn't really driving decisions, it's a reference document nobody checks.

Closing the gap

If you want to pull ahead, move from an academic ICP framework to one that's connected to ongoing work: revisit it as the buying group evolves, translate it into concrete account scoring rather than a static description, and pressure-test it against how deals are actually won and lost. It’s the difference between second-guessing at every junction and a live system that recalculates the route the moment something changes.

A well-defined ICP is part of your core foundations, because it sits in front of everything else that account-based go-to-market (targeting, messaging, resourcing, prioritisation) is built on. Given how much more complex the modern buying group has become and continues to evolve, it’s worth confirming your route, rather than assuming it still holds.

 

Sources: 1. ForgeX, 2025 State of ABM Report: The Rise of Account-Based GTM. 2. Forrester's 2026 Buyer Insights: GenAI Is Upending B2B Buying As Leaders Face Mounting Pressure To Justify Every Dollar Spent.