Ideal customer profile

Most written profiles fail one test. "Ambitious mid-market teams who value craft" cannot be turned into a filter, so it cannot produce a list, so in practice the list gets built from whatever felt right that morning. A usable profile is a set of attributes with values: employee band, sector, country, funding stage, technologies in use.

The discipline of writing it as a query also exposes the parts nobody agreed on. Two people who both say mid-market often mean 50–200 and 200–1,000, and that disagreement stays invisible until it is written as a number.

The honest source is your own history: which accounts closed fastest, which renewed, which needed the least support. The attributes those share are the profile. Aspirational profiles — the logos you would like — produce lists that generate meetings and no revenue, and they take two quarters to disprove.

Also write the exclusions. Companies that consistently stall, sectors whose procurement takes longer than your runway, sizes below which the product does not pay for itself. An exclusion list saves more time than an inclusion list, because it stops work rather than starting it.

Three different things, routinely conflated. The profile describes the company. The persona describes the person inside it you write to — their function, their seniority, what they are measured on. The account list is the output of running the profile against a data source on a given day.

Keeping them separate matters operationally: the profile changes rarely, the persona changes when the product changes, and the list should be rebuilt continuously, because companies cross in and out of it every month.

Prospect search in SalesShift is faceted rather than free-text: results narrow by seniority — founder, C-suite, VP, director, manager, senior, entry — and by department, so a written profile becomes a saved search you can re-run rather than a paragraph in a document.