ICPs: the kind of company you target
An ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is your description of the kind of company you sell to. It is the foundation everything else is built on: who is worth your time, who isn't, and why.
An ICP captures the shape of a company worth pursuing:
- Industry: the markets you serve
- Revenue and company size: how big they are
- Location: where they operate
- Growth stage: early, scaling, established
- The tools they already use: a signal that they're a match
- Notes: anything else worth knowing, written in plain language so your AI Agent can reason about it
You can also add qualification rules to an ICP: the checks the AI runs against each company, using the facts the Researcher gathered. See How Qualification Works to set them up.
The life of an ICP
An ICP moves through four simple states that you control:
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Draft | You're still shaping it. Not in play yet. |
| Active | Live and in use. Your AI Agent qualifies companies against it. |
| Paused | On hold. You haven't given up on it: the verdicts it already produced stay, but no new ones are made against it. |
| Discontinued | Retired. Kept for history, but no longer used. |
Behind the scenes, the product also tracks whether an ICP is being validated or has been validated / invalidated as you gather real evidence from prospects. You don't set those by hand. They shift on their own as you learn.
Pausing an ICP, and why you'd want to
Running two ICPs at once splits your attention, and every ICP you keep live counts against your plan. Pause is how you put one down without throwing away what you've learned, or the verdicts you've already paid for.
While an ICP is paused, no new verdicts are made against it, whether you ask for one or your AI Agent does. No new companies or contacts are qualified against it, no contacts are found for its companies, and no messages are drafted automatically for its people. It also stops counting towards the active ICPs on your plan, so pausing one frees a slot for another. Just ask your AI Agent ("pause the fintech ICP") or click the status badge on the ICP.
Everything it already found stays. Companies and people it qualified keep their verdicts, and on a contact's page that verdict is still there, marked paused. You can keep working those people too: research them, write them a message and send it. Messages already queued still go out.
If you try to qualify someone whose company matches a paused ICP, nothing runs and nothing is charged. The contact's page tells you why instead, and gives you a way forward:
- Resume followed by the ICP's name (for example Resume Fintech scale-ups), when your plan has a free active ICP slot. One click puts it back in play, and you can qualify them straight away.
- Add an active ICP or Pause another ICP, when every active ICP slot on your plan is in use. Only admins can add capacity; everyone else sees Your admin can add capacity.
When you're ready, set it back to Active. If that ICP had already sent messages, it returns to Validating instead, because its definition stays locked and its evidence still counts.
Reach for Discontinued only when you're done with an ICP for good. Paused says "not now"; discontinued says "not ever".
What happens to your verdicts when an ICP retires
Discontinuing an ICP never throws away work you've already done. Every company and person it qualified stays Qualified, and you can keep researching them and writing to them. On their page the ICP still shows, marked Discontinued, so you always know why they're in your pipeline.
What changes is that no new verdicts are made against it. If you later re-qualify one of those companies, it's judged against the ICPs you have in play today, and that new verdict is the one that counts.
Two rules to know
1. An ICP can't go active without an active persona. An ICP describes a company, but you sell to people. Until you have at least one active persona inside it, the ICP stays in draft.
2. Once an ICP is active, its definition locks. You can no longer change the core targeting (industry, size, location, and so on) or the qualification rules. This keeps your evidence honest: you can't quietly move the goalposts. You can still rename it and edit its notes.
Want to experiment? Clone it
Because an active ICP is locked, the way to try a variation is to clone it. You get a fresh copy you can tweak freely and run as its own separate experiment, without disturbing the original or its history. This is how you test a hunch ("what if we went up-market?") side by side with what is working today.
Where to find them
Your ICPs list shows everything at a glance. Open any one to reach the ICP detail view, which has:
- Overview: the basic filters plus your qualification rules
- Personas: the buying roles inside this ICP
- Notes: free-form context for your AI Agent
ICPs are shared team knowledge: everyone on your team can see them, but only admins can edit them. See Ownership & permissions.