“Mid-market SaaS companies” is not an ICP, it is a starting point. Before any lead sourcing begins, we translate your target market into a structured filter with specific, searchable criteria that a data platform can actually query against.
What Goes Into the ICP Document
- Job title and seniority level, including the specific title variations your buyers actually use
- Industry and sub-industry, using the classification systems Apollo and similar tools search against
- Company size range, by employee count and often by revenue band as a secondary filter
- Geography, down to country or region depending on your compliance and timezone needs
- Technology stack signals, when relevant, using tools like BuiltWith data to find companies using complementary or competing software
- Buying-signal criteria, such as recent funding, hiring patterns, or leadership changes that indicate active buying windows
Why Precision at This Stage Matters Most
Every downstream step, enrichment, validation, scoring, inherits whatever precision or imprecision exists in the initial search. A loosely defined ICP means enrichment burns budget verifying contacts who were never going to buy, and your sales team spends time on calls that were never going to close. Getting this filter right is the highest-leverage step in the entire lead generation process.
How We Build It
We start from your existing best customers, the accounts that closed fastest and expanded most, and reverse-engineer the shared characteristics across them. This is combined with your stated target market to produce a filter that is both aspirational and grounded in who actually buys from you today.
Output
A documented ICP filter ready to load directly into Apollo’s search, plus a short list of “near-fit” secondary criteria for expansion once the primary segment is exhausted.