🎧 Listen to the full episode here.
Your ideal customer profile (ICP) is hidden in your past project data. Look for clients where the scope expanded after delivery, where you got access to leadership, and where the real problem differed from what they originally asked for. Cluster by situation, not sector, and a pattern will emerge.
An ICP is a detailed description of the type of client your business is best positioned to serve and who you do your best work for. It clarifies how you qualify leads, what you write about, and how you talk about your work to partners and prospects.
The challenge is that most companies never get around to it, because defining it feels like closing doors. Most companies we speak with don't have a clearly defined ICP. They've thought about it, but defining it might feel like saying no to customers willing to pay and turning down revenue. We know this because we didn't have an ICP either, for longer than we'd like to admit.
On an earlier episode of The Open Podcast, Sander Mangel, solutions architect and founder of Open Commerce sat down with Katy Wilson, partnerships consultant, and built one live. The outcome felt logical, almost obvious, just never put on paper. The answers were already there.
What is the data you already have
Before thinking about target personas or firmographics, the more useful exercise is going back through past projects and looking through the ones where something actually changed for the client.
Where did your involvement go beyond delivery? Which relationships grew after the project ended? Which clients gave you access to leadership and treated you as a sounding board rather than a vendor?
When Sander did this, the pattern that emerged wasn't about industry or platform. It was about the type of situation: businesses that were stuck, not sure what was actually wrong, and needed someone embedded in their team to help them think before they started building.
“What really stood out for me is always being the trusted advisor for a client and being able to work embedded. Not just having one contact person, but if one of our team needs to talk to the CEO or the CMO or even someone working in the warehouse, they can do that.”
Is there a gap between what clients ask for and what you actually solve?
Clients rarely come in with the real problem. They come in with a symptom. For example, “we need to replatform.” What's usually underneath is a business that has grown around the limitations of a system it should have outgrown years ago, and nobody has had the time or the outside perspective to separate the platform constraints from the actual business process.
As Sander puts it: “They come in tech-led, it transitions to business-led. They often need time to crystallize out the final direction , even though they might make fast decisions. They might even come back from those. The process ends up feeling slow because it's just all so complex and they're not sure what to do, or what the options even are.”
If you look at your project history and notice a consistent gap between what a client said they needed and what you actually helped them with, then that gap is probably where your real value is. It's also the thing your ICP should be built around.
For Open Commerce, we aim to have clients leave with more clarity about their processes and roadmap than the platform question they came in with.
What the signals in your data actually look like
Sentiment is unreliable. The projects you enjoyed aren't always the ones where you created the most lasting value. It's worth looking at some harder signals.
Did clients come back, or expand the scope after the initial engagement? A small discovery that grew into a retainer is one of the clearest signs a client understood what you were actually offering.
Were you given access to leadership? Being in a board meeting or speaking directly to a CTO doesn't happen by accident. It reflects a specific kind of trust, and it's usually a sign you were operating as a partner rather than a supplier. As Sander noted, “having access to board meetings or speaking to the right C-level people really helps us understand what the company is actually indexing on, not just what they're saying they are.”
Situation over sector
Industry vertical matters less than organizational context. The sector wasn't what made a project work well. What mattered was whether the company had internal teams that needed direction rather than replacement, and whether they were at a moment where the old way of doing things had genuinely stopped working.
Katy put it well: “They know something's wrong, but they're not quite sure what it is. It's not necessarily because of politics; they're lacking clarity on the options, or confidence in what to do next.”
When you cluster your past clients by situation rather than sector, you often find they don't share a market. They share a stage: a particular combination of scale, internal capability and problem type that put them in a position where your kind of involvement actually mattered.
What this tells you about positioning
Once you've done this honestly, your ICP stops being a description of your target client and starts being a description of what you actually are.
That's the part that makes it useful. It tells you what to write about, how to qualify a lead before you spend two hours on a call, and what to say when a partner asks who they should be sending your way. It also tells you who isn't a good fit, which is often more valuable.
Defining the ICP can be difficult, not because you don’t know the answer, but because broad questions invite broad answers.
As Sander says at the end of the episode: “If someone asks you a broad question like 'what's your ICP' or 'what are you good at', it just becomes an exercise in listing off everything you're good at and not making actual choices. That was the biggest challenge for me.”
Having someone ask the right questions and having real project data to point at does the work that no template can.
If you want to explore this for your business, we're happy to have that conversation. You can find more about how we work at opencommerce.agency or read more in our insights section.
