Last week, I sat across from a Series B founder who'd just burned through £400k in marketing budget with nothing to show for it. "We're targeting exactly who we should be," he insisted, sliding his ICP document across the table. "Enterprise SaaS companies, 200+ employees, £50M+ revenue."
I pulled up his CRM. Of his 30 paying customers, exactly two matched that profile. Both were his smallest deals. Both took nine months to close. One had already churned.
His real money? Coming from 50-person agencies he'd never bothered to properly target.
This isn't unusual. It's the norm.
After analysing revenue data from over >200 B2B companies, I've found that 80% are chasing an ICP that exists only in their pitch decks. They're generating thousands of leads that will never convert, burning through sales resources, and wondering why growth has stalled.
The brutal truth? Your ICP is probably killing your revenue.
The Comfortable Lie We Tell Ourselves
Here's how most companies build their ICP:
I call this "ICP theatrics"—we're performing for investors, not building for reality.
Three months ago, I worked with a martech founder convinced his ICP was "B2B technology companies, Series A funded, 50-200 employees." Seemed reasonable. Sexy, even. The type of logos that look good on a website.
Except when I analysed his revenue data, his profitable customers were professional services firms with 10-30 employees. Accountants. Law firms. Consultancies. The "unsexy" businesses he'd been actively avoiding in his ICP.
He'd been fishing in the wrong pond for two years because the right pond didn't match his vision of success.
Your Revenue Data Doesn't Lie (But Your Assumptions Do)
Here's the framework I now use with every client—I call it "Customer Archaeology":
Step 1: Excavate Your Best Customers Forget your assumptions. Pull your customer data and rank by:
Your top 20% by these combined metrics? That's your real ICP starting point.
Step 2: Dig Deeper Than Demographics Demographics are lazy thinking. Two 100-person SaaS companies can be completely different businesses. Instead, excavate:
I once discovered that 80% of a client's best customers had one thing in common: they'd just hired their first revenue operations person. That insight transformed their entire go-to-market strategy. No firmographic data would have revealed it.
Step 3: Follow the Money Trails Your P&L tells the truth your ICP document won't:
One client discovered their "enterprise" focus was haemorrhaging money. Support costs were astronomical. Implementation took months. Meanwhile, their SMB customers—the ones they barely serviced—were 3x more profitable and referred like crazy.
The Brutal ICP Reality Check
I run every client through this diagnostic. If you're brave enough, do it yourself:
Why Your Best Customers Aren't Who You Think
Here's what I've learned after analysing hundreds of B2B revenue engines: founders consistently ignore their best customers because they don't match the vision.
Last year, I worked with a sales tech founder who spent three years chasing VP Sales at high-growth startups. Classic ICP thinking. Turns out, his best customers were finance directors at traditional businesses using his tool for commission calculations.
He'd been speaking sales language to sales people, when he should have been speaking efficiency language to finance teams. The product didn't need to change—just the positioning and targeting.
The market had been screaming the answer through his revenue data. He just didn't want to hear it.
Building an ICP from Reality, Not Ambition
Here's my proven process for building an ICP that actually drives revenue:
Week 1: The Honest Audit
Week 2: The Deep Dive
Week 3: The Pattern Hunt
Week 4: The Reality Test
The Lead Generation Transformation
Once you build an honest ICP, everything changes:
Marketing stops wasting budget on impressive logos that'll never buy. Sales stops chasing deals that'll never close. Product builds features for customers who'll actually pay. Customer success supports segments that stick around and expand.
Last quarter, I helped a client rebuild their ICP using customer archaeology. They discovered their best customers weren't "high-growth tech companies" but "traditional businesses hiring their first digital transformation leader."
Results after 90 days:
They generated fewer leads but tripled revenue. Funny how focusing works.
Your ICP Liberation Checklist
Ready to stop living the ICP lie? Here's your action plan:
The Truth Will Set Your Pipeline Free
I get it. Admitting your ICP is fiction feels like failure. You've built campaigns, hired teams, made promises to investors based on this profile. There's sunk cost. There's ego.
But here's what I tell every founder: the market doesn't care about your ICP document. It's already voting with budgets, showing you who desperately needs your solution, who'll pay premium prices, and who'll become evangelists.
You just need to listen.
The founders who scale successfully aren't the ones with the prettiest ICP slides. They're the ones honest enough to serve the customers who actually want them, not the ones they wish they had.
Your conversion rates are telling you something. Your sales cycle is screaming it. Your churn data is spelling it out in neon lights.
The question is: are you brave enough to listen?
Because once you build an ICP from reality instead of ambition, everything changes. Lead quality skyrockets. Sales cycles shrink. Revenue becomes predictable. Growth compounds.
And that fictional ICP? It transforms into a customer profile that actually drives revenue.
Time to do the archaeology. Your real ideal customers are waiting to be discovered.
They're probably not who you think they are. And that's the best news you'll get all year.
Ian Spencer is founder of The Revenue Nomad and Revnuu.io, helping B2B companies uncover their true ideal customers and build revenue engines that scale.