An ICP is only useful if you can find the ideal customers again. "Company in growth" is correct as a characteristic, but useless - you can't search for it. The decisive step between profile and pipeline is therefore the translation of soft characteristics into hard, searchable signals.
Characteristics describe a state: "medium-sized", "growing", "tech-savvy". Signals are the visible traces of this status on the Internet: a press release, a job advertisement, an entry in the commercial register. Only signals can be searched for, counted and automatically analyzed. The trick is to find at least two independent signals for each characteristic - because a single signal is easily deceptive.
A language model is good at systematically running through this translation. It is important that the result is a concrete search instruction - not another list of abstract terms:
Here is our ideal customer profile: [INSERT PROFILE]
Translate each soft feature into at least two
concrete signals that can be researched on the Internet.
Example: 'growing company' becomes 'more than
5 open positions on the careers page' and 'press
press release on new location in the last 6 months'.
Output a table:
Feature | Signal 1 | Signal 2 | Where to find.
Once the signals have been named, they can be poured into precise search queries. The AI takes care of this too - including the search operators that most people never use manually:
Here is my signal table: [INSERT TABLE]
Formulate a Google search query for each signal with
operators (site:, intitle:, inurl:, OR,
quotation marks) that specifically finds companies in the
DACH region with this signal.
Sort the queries by expected hit quality.
What works here for a profile in the chat window reaches a clear limit with dozens of signals and hundreds of companies: manual evaluation becomes a full-time job. This is the point at which automated research such as bloo.research takes over signal checking continuously and on a large scale.
Conclusion: A researchable ICP is the bridge between strategy and day-to-day business. Those who consistently translate characteristics into signals transform a whiteboard statement into a search guide - and lay the foundation for company research in week 2.
In addition to manual research, we have developed automated processes for you:
bloo.research - Find the right B2B companies in minutes
bloo.radar - Find out what your competition will do next
before they do.
If you not only want to understand AI, but also use it in a structured way in your company, then:
👉 Find out more about our AI training:
https://bloo.school
👉 Find out about our Smart Market Fit offers:
https://bloola.com/smf - The Smart Market Fit course
https://bloola.com/smf-system - The Smart Market Fit system for companies
👉 Or find out more about our consulting and automation solutions:
https://bloola.com