Ideal customer profile
An ideal customer profile is a written description of the kind of company you sell to best — industry, size, location, situation — specific enough to look at a business and say yes or no in a second.
A profile reading "small and medium businesses that want to grow" is not a profile, it is a hope. A usable one names filters you can search on: independent dental clinics with two to six chairs, in cities over 200,000 people, running their own website rather than a chain template.
The test is whether someone else on your team could apply it without asking a question. If they can, it can also be turned into a search — which is the point. Every filter becomes a search term, a location, or a rule for discarding rows.
Profiles are derived, not invented. Take the customers who renewed, stayed happy and needed no hand-holding, and find what they have in common. Companies that skip this step end up describing the customers they wish they had.
Goes deeper: Building a Predictable Lead Pipeline for a Small Agency