Targeting without a documented ICP: the field method
Most early-stage teams don’t have a documented ICP. The ones that do often wrote it in a meeting, before the first customers, and the document ages badly. Our first customers at Ubic didn’t look exactly like what we had imagined at the start, and we learned it on the phone.
Start from what has already worked
Take your last ten or twenty won deals. If you don’t have enough deals yet, take the serious conversations, the ones where the person asked questions about price or rollout. For each one, note the industry, the size, the role of the person who said yes, and what was going on in the company at that moment.
The useful common thread is rarely demographic. It’s more often a trigger: a sales team that’s hiring, a CRM change, new pressure on the pipeline. When you find that trigger, you’ve got your real target, even if it cuts across several industries.
Translate it into an operational target
A useful ICP fits in one sentence an SDR can apply while building a list. For example: French companies with 20 to 200 people, a team that prospects by phone, target role CEO or head of sales. If your sentence contains “innovative” or “going through digital transformation”, it filters nothing.
Then build one list per segment and compare them on the same indicators: pick-up rate, average conversation length, what happened next. Two segments separate themselves within a week or two of calling. That’s also why reports in Ubic are read list by list: comparing segments is the real use.
When to evolve the target
A few reliable signals: polite but short conversations, the same misunderstanding coming back (“oh, I thought you did something else”), demos accepted and then never attended. These are usually not script problems. They’re targeting problems.
No need to redo the exercise every month. Redo it when something changes: a new use case, an unexpected segment that buys, a market opening up. A healthy ICP is simply the summary of your last few weeks of calls.
