Most companies define their ICP by looking at who they’ve already sold to.

That’s a smart place to start. But a dangerous place to stop.

Our easiest wins aren’t always our true ideal customers. And our ICP isn’t something we define once based on closed-won reports, CRM filters, or assumptions.

Brady Jensen, CEO of Clear Go-To-Market, argues that our ICP is something we discover through direct conversations with the people we’re trying to sell to. Not just our best customers. Not just the people already in our pipeline. But the prospects who match our criteria and haven’t yet bought.

Brady recently sat down with us on The GTM Science Podcast to unpack his approach to validating ICP, and how getting this right can be the difference between scaling and stagnating.

In this newsletter, we’re breaking down all of the key points discussed in our 50-minute interview:

• How to define ICP
• How to validate ICP
• How to enforce ICP definitions

Listen to the full podcast episode on Spotify here or Apple podcasts here.

Defining Our ICP the Right Way

The first step in defining our ICP isn’t building a persona, it’s building a hypothesis.

Brady recommends starting with the patterns we can already see in our customer base: which companies buy fastest, expand the most, and stay the longest. That’s our initial signal. But instead of freezing that pattern into a static profile, he urges teams to treat it as a living assumption that must be tested against the market.

“ICP, in a lot of ways, gets defined for you,” he explains. “You can go the one direction of saying, ‘we’re going to build this thing and it’s gonna be for this exact audience and they’re gonna use it this specific way’… but as Mike Tyson said, ‘Every plan is great till you get punched in the face’.”

Once we have a starting point, the goal is to look for common denominators that go beyond firmographics. Brady encourages teams to analyze not just who the customer is, but how they operate:

• What kinds of problems are they trying to solve?
• What past solutions have they tried and abandoned?
• What triggers them to start evaluating new solutions?
• Who inside the organization feels the pain most acutely?

“What we’re looking for,” Brady says, “is to make sure that all the people represented in your ICP have the best shot of being similar. Similar in the way they operate, similar in what problems they face, similar in what sorts of things they may have tried to solve the problem.”

That similarity is what makes our go-to-market engine scalable. It allows marketing to write content that resonates, sales to qualify consistently, and RevOps to prioritize accounts that truly fit our motion.

Validating ICP Through Buyer Conversations

Once we’ve formed a hypothesis about our ICP, the next step is pressure-testing it in the real world.

Brady’s approach is straightforward: talk to the people we think are a good fit, but haven’t yet bought. The goal isn’t to pitch. It’s to listen. We’re looking for friction, disinterest, rejection, and the patterns hiding inside those outcomes.

“You have the ability to learn a ton from people saying ‘no’,” Brady explains. “And oftentimes, the ‘no’ is not, ‘I don’t like your product.’ It’s ‘I don’t believe I have the problem you say I have,’ or ‘I don’t think it’s worth solving.’”

Brady believes the outbound motion also works as a discovery tool.

He puts it simply: “If your outbound motion doesn’t work… you either have a message problem or an audience problem.”

That feedback loop between our ICP hypothesis and the market’s response is where high-leverage refinement happens. It’s how we avoid building strategy around people who look right on paper, but aren’t our ideal customers in practice.

And it’s why Brady believes ICP work isn’t complete until it’s validated with live market resistance.

Knowing When to Say No

One of the biggest signs of ICP immaturity is desperation.

Brady sees it all the time: companies get smarter about who they want to sell to, but don’t have the discipline to actually follow through. So they end up making exceptions. Stretching their messaging. Building for the wrong customers. And eventually, struggling to deliver the product they promised.

“The problem that we often see in organizations is they’ll just sell to everybody,” Brady explains. “And then they have a bunch of unhappy customers, and they’re like, ‘I don’t know why they’re unhappy.’ Well, because they were never a good fit.”

The impact isn’t just felt in the sales cycle. It trickles down through the entire organization into product, CS, onboarding, renewals, and team morale.

Here’s what he recommends:

• Don’t chase every logo. Pursuing every potential customer dilutes our focus and leads to poor ICP fit that hurts long-term success.
• Watch for edge-case selling. If we need to overly customize our sales process for one deal, it’s likely not a scalable or ideal customer.
• Don’t confuse revenue with progress. Just because a deal closes doesn’t mean it’s good business if the customer isn’t set up to succeed.
• Be honest about post-sale reality. If a customer will cause friction across onboarding, CS, and product, they were probably the wrong fit to begin with.

“You’ve got to be willing to say no to people,” Brady says.

The Last Word on ICP

Real GTM clarity comes from pairing data with direct customer conversations.

“You have to have conversations to validate the assumptions that you’re making,” he says. “When you understand them really well, you can build a business that serves them really well.”

That’s why getting ICP right matters.

Because everything downstream depends on it.

• The focus of our sales motion
• The precision of our messaging
• The clarity of our GTM execution
• The structure of our product roadmap

Define ICP in a vacuum, or with confirmation bias, and we’re leaving revenue on the table. Discover ICP through direct, ongoing, real-world validation, and we’re laying the foundation to scale GTM.

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