Most ICP templates you can download are persona worksheets with a company name on top: a stock photo, a job title, a box for pain points, a favorite podcast. None of it can be checked against a company you have never spoken to, so none of it tells you which account to call first. An ideal customer profile template B2B sales teams can actually use has eight fields, and each one is a fact you can look up for any company: business model, industry, headcount, geography, stage, tech stack, recent triggers, and disqualifiers. Buyer roles sit beside it, because they describe the person and not the company.
Below is the blank template, the same template filled in for an invented company, the questions that complete each field, and the steps that turn it into a score on every account. If scoring is new to you, start with how lead scoring models work, since an ICP fit score is one half of most models.
To score your own list as you read, paste your template into a free workspace and run it on a sample.
The ideal customer profile template B2B teams can copy
Copy this into a doc and fill it in from your customer records. One fact per line.
Two rules decide whether it works. Every line has to be checkable from outside the company, by someone with a browser or by an enrichment. And every line has to describe customers you already have, not the customer you wish you had.
Here it is filled in. Say you sell time tracking and invoicing to agencies and consultancies.
Field | What to write | Filled in for an agency billing tool |
|---|---|---|
Business model and who they sell to | How they make money, and whether they sell to businesses or consumers | Services firm that bills clients by the hour or on retainer; sells to businesses |
Industry | The two or three industries your best customers share, by name | Design, brand, and marketing agencies; management consultancies |
Headcount | The range your closed-won accounts actually sit in | 10 to 80 employees |
Geography | Where you can sell, invoice, and support | US, UK, and Canada |
Stage or revenue | A proxy for budget that you can look up | Founder-owned, trading for 3 years or more |
Tech stack | Tools that make you easy to adopt, or the tool you replace | Job posts name a CRM and an accounting tool, and no time tracker |
Triggers | An event that makes this quarter the moment | Hiring a project manager or operations lead; opened a second office |
Disqualifiers | What rules an account out however well it fits | Under 5 people; an in-house team inside a larger company |
The first five lines are firmographics, the company version of demographics. They do most of the filtering. The tech stack line does something different: it tells you which accounts can adopt you this month and which would need a migration project first. Triggers carry the timing, and they go stale fastest, which is why the template asks for the last 90 days.
"Sales comes down to timing and to having the right data, and most of that data is already online. Years of building web scraping infrastructure showed me that."
Utku Zihnioglu, CEO of Oneprofile
The buyer roles for the same example are short, and they belong to the persona rather than the ICP (how an ICP and a persona differ):
Signs the contract: the founder or managing partner.
Uses it every day: project managers and the people logging hours.
Can block the deal: whoever runs finance, because invoicing touches their books.
One opinion about persona names, while we are on roles. "Agency Annie" with her favorite podcast is a fine tool for a content team writing blog posts. She does nothing for a prospect list, because no enrichment returns a podcast preference, and a field you cannot fill for a stranger is a field you cannot score.
Ideal customer profile questions that fill in each field
Fill the template from records, not from a workshop. Pull your closed-won accounts from the last 12 to 18 months, plus the ones that churned and the deals that died with no decision. Then ask these ideal customer profile questions, and note which line of the template each answer fills:
Which ten customers would you clone tomorrow? Their industry and headcount become your first two lines. If the ten disagree on industry, you may have two ICPs, not one.
Which customers churned in their first year, and what do they share? The answer usually becomes a disqualifier. It is the most valuable question on the list. An account that fits on paper and leaves inside a year took a full sales cycle and paid back a fraction of it.
What did they use before you? This fills the tech stack line, both what they run and what you replace.
What happened at the company in the 90 days before the first call? A new hire, a funding round, a second office, a price change of their own. Patterns here become triggers.
Where could you not sell, invoice, or support? That is your geography line, and it is often a legal or tax answer rather than a sales one.
Which deals closed fastest, and which dragged? Fast deals show the stage and size where you are an easy yes.
Who signed, who used it daily, and who nearly killed the deal? Three names per account give you the buyer roles. The full buying group is bigger, as Harvard Business Review's piece on the growing number of stakeholders in each B2B purchase argues, but the template needs these three.
Which accounts did sales love that never bought? The second source of disqualifiers, and the one teams skip because it is uncomfortable.
Then test every answer. If a line says "values innovation" or "forward-thinking leadership", nobody can check it, so it cannot filter a list. Rewrite it until a stranger could verify it from a website or a job board. "Forward-thinking" usually turns out to mean something concrete, like "hired a head of operations in the last six months".
Disqualifiers: the line most templates leave out
Most versions of an ideal customer profile template B2B teams download describe who fits and stop. That leaves a long tail of accounts that match on two lines, miss on three, and still end up in a sequence because nothing said no.
The disqualifier line carries more weight than its size suggests. Emails to accounts that were never going to buy get few replies, and a run of low reply rates drags down your inbox placement for the accounts that would have. Write two kinds:
Hard disqualifiers end the conversation: a company too small to pay, a market you cannot serve, a business model you do not support.
Soft disqualifiers push an account down without removing it: a competitor already in place, a contract renewal a year away.
Keep the list short. Five hard disqualifiers is usually plenty, and every one should trace back to a churned account or a lost deal you can name.
Score accounts with the ideal customer profile template B2B teams build
A filled-in template is a document. It starts paying for itself when every account on your list is measured against it the same way. In Oneprofile the template becomes the standard the ICP scorer holds each account to, and most of the setup is copying.
Put the template in your business context. Under Settings, Business context has six sections. Paste the firmographics, tech stack, and disqualifiers under Ideal customer profile, the buyer roles under Ideal buyer personas, and the triggers under Interest signals. Each section is a bullet list, one fact per bullet. To start from a draft, type your domain into the AI Assistant card and click Generate: it researches your site and drafts all six sections in up to about 3 minutes. Review each section with Keep current or Use new, click Apply, then correct the ICP with your answers from the questions above.
Enrich the accounts with the facts the template asks for. Enrich company from domain returns industry, size, location, and a description, for up to 15 credits a company. Find technology stack reads what the website runs on, for up to 5.8 credits. A company lookup that finds nothing costs nothing. For triggers, the Hiring signal finder and the News finder each research a company's open roles or its biggest recent event, such as a funding round, for 5 credits a company.
Add the ICP scorer. Map the company domain, which it requires, plus every input from the table below that you have. It costs 3 credits an account.
Read the band, the score, and the reasons. Each account comes back strong (70 or above), possible (40 to 69), or poor (under 40), with a 0 to 100 score and the two or three facts that drove it, each naming the field it came from. An account with too little to judge gets no band and a list of what was missing, never a poor.
The scorer judges against the whole profile, but only on the facts you map into it. A template line with no matching input is a line it cannot check, and the built-in version has inputs for three of the eight company lines, plus job title for the buyer roles:
Template line | What the built-in ICP scorer reads | How to get it in |
|---|---|---|
Business model and who they sell to | Company type and Sells to | The Company researcher returns both |
Industry and headcount | Industry and Employees | Enrich company from domain |
Geography | No input of its own | Add HQ country from Enrich company from domain |
Stage or revenue | No input of its own | Add Founded or Revenue from the same lookup |
Tech stack | No input of its own | Add the Find technology stack result |
Triggers | No input of its own | Add the Hiring signal finder or News finder result |
Buyer roles | Job title, on a list of people | The title you imported or found |
To add the missing four, open See all templates on Agents, apply the ICP scorer, click Save, and use Add input in your copy. Disqualifiers need no input of their own. They sit in your business context, and the scorer tests them against whatever you mapped, so "under 5 people" works from the start while "already runs a time tracker" needs the tech stack result. The scores and reasons then write back to your CRM through the same export as any other field, covered step by step in ICP scoring with AI.
Then go back to the template itself. The reasons name the field each fact came from, so when an account you would happily close lands in possible, the reason usually points at the line that held it back. Change that line in the doc and in your business context together, then score the same accounts again. The free plan renews 200 credits a month, with 3 tables and 100 rows per table, so you can score a real sample of your list against your template before paying anything.
