By John Barrows | June 13, 2026 | 5 min read
Your ideal customer profile in sales isn’t a one-time exercise. When the market shifts, your ICP has to shift with it. The reps and leaders who figure that out fast are the ones who get ahead of a stalled pipeline. The ones who don’t are still prospecting into a world that doesn’t exist anymore.
When the pipeline disappears
Q1 was really good for me. I was traveling to different onsite sessions for training and keynotes, my pipeline was healthy, deals were moving, and things felt like they were clicking.
Then I got back from Q1 travels and my Q2 and Q3 pipeline seemed to disappear in front of my eyes.
And it’s not just me. Almost every sales leader and rep I’m talking to right now is seeing the same thing. They’re doing everything right: problem identified, impact quantified, stakeholders aligned, executive engagement, the whole playbook. And deals are still stalling. People are pushing out decisions or changing priorities almost daily.
AI has thrown such a wrench into how companies buy that the rules are shifting faster than anyone can keep up. This is what it looks like when that hits your pipeline. I’ve written before about why storytellling in sales is one of the few skills AI can’t replace. But even the best storyteller loses if they’re talking to the wrong room.
When this happens, I do the same thing every time. I go into full prospecting mode and research mode simultaneously. I start setting up meetings with everybody and anybody: prospects, partners, former clients, people I haven’t talked to in years. Not because I have something to pitch. Because I need to learn what people are actually dealing with so I can figure out where I fit, where I can help the most, and where the market is headed next.
And one of the first things I reanalyze every time is my ideal customer profile.
Why your ICP in sales needs constant attention
Most people treat ICP like a one-time exercise. You pick an industry, a company size, a title, and you move on.
That’s a mistake.
Your ideal customer profile in sales should be something you revisit constantly, especially when the market is moving this fast. If you’re running the same ICP you built in 2024, you’re prospecting into a world that doesn’t exist anymore.
I learned this the hard way in 2023.
What I did when SVB collapsed
When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, it took the majority of my client base with it. Almost all of my customers were in SaaS and tech, and everyone was telling me to get out of the industry entirely because it was too volatile. But I’d spent years building my reputation in SaaS and didn’t want to start over somewhere nobody knew my name.
So instead of abandoning SaaS, I reanalyzed which SaaS companies I should be targeting.
I not only revisited my ICP, I also looked at my ICP’s ICP. I went back through my clients and found a pattern. The SaaS companies that sold outside of SaaS and tech, into retail, finance, and manufacturing, were doing far better than the SaaS companies that mainly sold to other SaaS companies.
With a small adjustment to my ICP, I started gaining traction again.
How AI makes ICP work faster
The same thing is happening now, and I’m using AI to figure it out way faster than before.
I fed my entire client history into Claude Cowork and had it build a heat map of every customer I’ve worked with, broken out by industry, deal size, and results. It helped me identify a strong cluster of manufacturing clients where I’ve done great work and seen real results. That became a new target market. I refined the messaging, built a targeted sequence, and started executing in that market to test what sticks.
That whole analysis took minutes, not days.
I built an AI prompt pack that walks you through the exact ICP exercise I run. It goes way deeper than industry and company size. It forces you to analyze your actual client data, find the patterns, and pressure-test your assumptions about who you should be targeting.
Watch the ICP Prompt Pack walkthrough here.
What to do once your ICP is tight
Once you know who you should be targeting, the next question is how you approach each tier.
Your Tier 1 accounts should get high-quality, personalized, and relevant outreach. Not a template with a first name dropped in. Real research, real relevance, real reason to reach out.
For Tier 2 accounts, you can run more volume, but in a targeted way. Find the commonalities in your ICP characteristics and create messaging that’s relevant to those shared attributes, even if it isn’t personalized to each individual.
Tier 3 is where you practice and sharpen your approach.
None of that tiering works if your data is a mess. Your ICP accounts, personas, trigger events, and pipeline stages all need to live in one system so you can execute on them. Not in a spreadsheet. Not in your head.
ICP isn’t a box you check. It’s the foundation that every part of your prospecting system is built on. Your personas, trigger events, messaging, and contact strategy all depend on getting it right first. Skip it or phone it in, and everything downstream falls apart.
The market is going to do whatever it’s going to do. What you can control is your effort and your approach.
Let’s make it happen.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an ideal customer profile in sales?
An ideal customer profile in sales is a detailed description of the type of company most likely to buy from you, succeed with your solution, and generate repeat business. It goes beyond industry and company size to include factors like revenue model, growth stage, buying process, and the specific problems your solution solves best.
How often should you update your ICP?
At minimum, revisit your ICP whenever the market shifts significantly: after a major industry disruption, when your win rate drops, when deal cycles start lengthening for no clear reason, or when a new competitive dynamic emerges. The reps and leaders who treat ICP as a living document consistently outperform those who set it once and forget it.
How can AI help you build or reset your ICP?
Feed your actual client history, deal outcomes, and industry data into an AI tool and ask it to identify patterns in your wins. Which industries, company sizes, personas, and trigger events correlate with your best outcomes? What do your top 20% of customers have in common? AI can run that analysis in minutes and surface patterns that would take days to find manually.
What is a tiered prospecting approach?
A tiered prospecting approach segments your target accounts by the level of effort and personalization they warrant. Tier 1 accounts get highly personalized outreach grounded in deep research. Tier 2 accounts get targeted messaging built around shared ICP characteristics. Tier 3 accounts are where you test and refine your approach before scaling it. The tier structure only works if your ICP is accurate, because tiering is built on top of your targeting, not instead of it.
What should you do when your pipeline stalls?
Go into prospecting and research mode simultaneously. Start conversations with prospects, partners, former clients, and people you haven’t spoken to in a while, not to pitch, but to learn what the market is actually dealing with. Then reanalyze your ICP against your current client base and win data to make sure you’re targeting the right companies for where the market is right now, not where it was 12 months ago.
John Barrows helps sales leaders decide whether to replace or rebuild their teams for the AI era. For 25+ years he has worked with the world’s most demanding sales organizations, including Salesforce, LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, and Okta, building the frameworks that became Filling the Funnel and Driving to Close. Today he advises CROs and VPs of Sales on AI readiness, team restructuring, and go-to-market strategy, drawing on exposure to every type of B2B sales organization over that span. John believes sales is a science, not a personality contest. His training focuses on the fundamentals that hold up regardless of what the market or the technology does next. He is the host of Make It Happen Mondays, author of I Want to Be in Sales When I Grow Up, and an LP at GTMfund.
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