How we turned our ICP into a $230M growth engine

What if your ideal customer profile (ICP) did more than sit in a forgotten Google Doc?

For many organizations, the ICP is a static positioning exercise that sales ignores and marketing rarely updates, but with 53% of product marketers now responsible for generating new revenue, proper targeting is more vital than ever.

At Simpro Group, we transformed our ICP from a dusty two-page document into a prioritization engine that helped us grow from $80 million to $230 million in just 18 months – and in this article, I’ll show you how. 

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• How Simpro’s ICP evolved from an unused two-page doc into a company-wide prioritization engine
• The three unexpected insights our ICP work uncovered – and how they reshaped our entire strategy
• The four operational pillars that turn ICPs into a growth system
• Five steps to build your own ICP growth system

The evolution of Simpro’s ICP

“Our ICP is outdated.”

“It isn’t driving growth.” 

“What’s an ICP, again?”

I’ve heard every one of those comments. When I joined Simpro Group, ICPs were fairly new to me, as well. When I arrived, we had four companies that were essentially former competitors, bought for market share. The sales teams didn’t have pitch decks, our marketing content was outdated, and we didn’t have clean customer data yet

I chose the ICP as our starting point because it is the most fundamental building block of a go-to-market strategy. I knew that to scale, we needed a much better understanding of our customers.

The journey wasn’t an overnight success; it was a series of iterative shifts, taking us from a basic “gut feel” to a highly structured, data-backed operational system.

July 2023: The starting point

When we first sat down to define our ICP, we were working with what we had. We focused on the basics: trade businesses with a commercial focus, a size of 10+ employees, and revenue between $5 million and $50 million USD. 

At this point, our ICP was a simple Google Doc, perhaps two or three pages long. It was enough to get the CMO to sign off, but it didn’t change how anyone worked.

September 2023: The BDR filter

We soon learned that our BDR (business development representative) team was approaching our ICP as a qualification tool. They’d even created a grid – ICP, PCP (Potential Customer Profile), and NCP (Non-ICP) – to help them decide who to call. 

This was progress, but we had to be careful. You never want to tell sales not to sell to someone. Instead, the ICP should find the people most likely to buy, retain, and grow.

October 2023: Collaboration

A month later, we pulled in leadership from customer success, digital marketing, product, implementation, and engineering. Everyone pitched in to build our first real customer profile, with input from sales, so they were bought in. 

The first proper version was two beautifully color-coded pages. We agreed to revisit it quarterly, which I’d recommend to anyone. Treat it the way demand gen treats their funnel. Go back, look at it, ask whether it’s shifted, and realign.

October 2024: The 25-page strategic deck

A year later, we’d moved from a Google Doc to a 25-page deck scaled across all four products – going beyond firmographics to digital maturity and operational mindset, with deep dives into sub-verticals.

As we built this out, we discovered that 66% of our MRR was coming from just 8% of our customers. This was a huge wake-up call. We had a massive number of small businesses that would buy quickly, but didn’t represent our best growth path. This told us exactly where to focus and where to pull back.

January 2025: The group-wide prioritization engine

By January 2025, our ICP had expanded across the entire Simpro Group, with every customer-facing employee trained on it. Everyone from the C-suite to the newest BDR hire is now speaking the same language. 

It shapes which accounts get investment, which verticals get custom content, and which features the product team builds. It’s no longer just a marketing document. It’s our prioritization engine.

What our ICP exposed: Three unexpected insights

As we dug deeper into our ICP data, we uncovered three business-altering insights we didn’t see coming:

1. The revenue reality of pipeline leakage