Only 6% of Your Market Is Ready to Buy. Build Your ICP for the Rest.
Most ideal customer profiles describe the buyer who is ready to purchase today. That is a small slice of the market. A 6sense and Stein report, cited by 6sense, finds that 60% of potential buyers are out of market but continuously absorbing brand impressions, 34% are actively exploring solutions, and only 6% are ready to make a purchase decision.
An ICP that only describes that 6% keeps your campaigns narrow and your pipeline thin. Chapter 5 of The AI CMO Playbook shows how to use AI to build a richer profile that also covers the buyers who are not ready yet.
Where your buyers are right now
The practical takeaway is that most of your market is a future market. Your ICP should tell you who those buyers are, what they care about, and what they will remember when the need appears.
The buying group is the real customer
6sense reports that the typical B2B buying group has around 10 members. Many are not the day-to-day user: about 40% of buyers say they joined the group as representatives from outside the end-user department. Experience runs deep as well, with 95% of buyers having personal prior experience with at least one vendor they are about to evaluate.
An ICP that describes only a company, such as its industry, size, and region, misses these people. It should also describe the roles in the buying group, what each role needs to see, and which earlier vendor experiences shape their views.
Three layers of an AI-assisted ICP
The Playbook layers three kinds of data to build a profile that is richer and more accurate than a firmographic list.
Layer | What it describes | Example inputs |
Firmographic | Who the company is | Industry, size, growth stage, region, technology stack |
Psychographic | How the buyers think | Priorities, attitudes to risk, the language buyers use to describe the problem |
Behavioral | What the buyers do | Content consumed, intent signals, engagement with your channels, past purchase patterns |
AI helps most at the synthesis step. It can read closed-won and closed-lost notes, call transcripts, survey responses, and review-site language, then propose patterns for a person to test.
From ICP to segments for account-based programs
Once the ICP is clear, split it into segments that justify different messages and different plays. Good segments differ on need, urgency, or buying process, not only on company size. Each segment should have a short profile, a named target account list, and a message hierarchy your team can reuse.
Running an ICP workshop in half the time
The Playbook describes an agency application: running ICP workshops for clients in half the time. Here is a workflow along those lines.
Gather inputs first. Collect won and lost deal notes, customer interviews, CRM exports, and support themes, with sensitive data removed.
Draft with AI. Ask for three to five candidate segments and the evidence behind each.
Challenge in the workshop. Test the drafts with sales, customer success, and leadership.
Validate with buyers. Hold five to ten customer or prospect conversations on the surviving segments.
Document and date it. Write the final ICP on one page and set a review date.
The bottom line
An ICP is a working document, not a slide. Build it for the buying group, layer in behavior as well as company data, and design it for the 94% of the market that is not ready to buy yet. That is how you are remembered when the need appears.
Related reading: 95% of B2B Marketers Use AI. Only 39% See Results.
I work with startup, SaaS, fintech, and ecommerce teams as a fractional CMO and AI systems builder through GrowthBoxx, helping marketing leaders move from AI adoption to AI fluency.
Sources
Statistics are cited as published by each source and reflect the reporting available at the time of writing.
Comments