What is an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?
Learn what Ideal Customer Profiles are, how they shape your Goava Score, and how to create new ones from lists or with AI.
What's an ICP?
Your Ideal Customer Profile is just that — a description of the companies that are the best fit for what you sell. In Goava, your ICP is what powers Goava Score, the ranking that helps you spend your time on the right companies instead of guessing.
Good news: you don't have to build one from scratch. Our ICP Agent has already taken a look at your website and customer base, and set up a few starter ICPs for you.
How ICPs actually work in Goava
Every segment you create uses an ICP. That ICP decides what "a good fit" means, and Goava Score uses it to rank every company in the segment - top match at the top, weakest match at the bottom.
So what happens when you switch the ICP on a segment? Quite a lot, actually:
- Recommendations re-rank. The same companies, scored against a different definition of "ideal" - so different ones rise to the top.
- Sort order shifts. When you sort by Goava Score, you're seeing the new ICP's view of the world.
- Analytics update. The Score Profile shows which dimensions - industry, revenue, geography, employee count, technographics - matter most for the active ICP.
A nice way to use this: build one ICP for your enterprise motion and another for SMB, then flip between them on the same segment to see who pops up under each lens.
You can create as many ICPs as you need, share them with your team so everyone's working off the same definition of fit, and turn any ICP into a brand new segment with a single click.
Two ways to create an ICP
1. From a list (or lists)
Have a list of companies that look like your dream customers? Point Goava at it. Either a list inside Goava or one synced from your CRM - and we'll analyze the patterns across industry, revenue, employee size, geography, company type, and technology usage.
This is the move when you have real customer data to learn from.
2. From a text prompt with AI
No list yet? No problem. Just describe your ideal customer in plain text — in whatever language you prefer — and our AI builds the ICP for you. Something like:
"Mid-sized Nordic manufacturing companies with 50–500 employees that use SAP."
Perfect for launching into a new market, testing a hypothesis, or just getting moving before you have enough customer data to model.
Create a Segment from an ICP
You can always click "Create segment with this profile" to easily create a segment from an ICP and have it apply the filters you neeed.