Ideal Customer Profile vs Buyer Persona: What's the Difference?

An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) describes the characteristics of the company that's the best fit for a product - firmographics like industry, company size, revenue, and tech stack - used to decide which accounts are worth pursuing in the first place.

A buyer persona describes the individual people involved in a purchase decision - their role, goals, challenges, and how they make decisions - used to decide how to reach and sell to the people inside an account once it's been identified as a fit.

The two operate at different levels and answer different questions. ICP works at the account level: it tells a B2B team which companies to target, filtering out accounts that will never be a good fit regardless of how well they're pitched. Buyer persona works at the individual level: within an account that already matches the ICP, different people - a department head, a budget owner, an end user - have different priorities and need to be approached differently, and personas capture those differences. In practice the two are used in sequence rather than as alternatives: ICP narrows the universe of companies down to the ones worth pursuing, and buyer personas then guide how to actually reach and convince the specific people inside those companies who influence or make the buying decision.