Glossary
Ideal customer profile
An ideal customer profile is a written description of the company worth talking to: what kind, what size, where, and what has to be true about it for a conversation to be worth anyone's time.
Nothing is searched until the profile is written down. It becomes a document under version control, and every company in the base is scored against it. When someone asks why a company got a message, the answer is the profile and the score.
A good profile is specific enough to exclude. Plant managers at automotive suppliers in one state is a profile. Decision makers in manufacturing is a wish. The first can be found, scored and written to; the second produces a list that fits nobody.
The profile is the first screen of a program and the first thing asked on the plan. It is also what the price of a program is sized from, because it decides how large the base is and how many mailboxes it needs.
Questions
Can the profile change mid-program?
Yes, and the change is versioned. A new profile produces a new base and new scores, and the readings from the old segment stay attributed to it.
Related terms and pages
This term belongs to the outbound engineering glossary. The practice is defined on the category page.
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