Most ICP discussions revolve around who you want to win. The underestimated half is the question of who to deliberately avoid. A negative ICP - the profile of the bad customer - often saves more time than the positive profile because it sorts out expensive dead ends early on.
Bad customers are rarely recognizable by their sector. They show up in patterns: long decision-making processes without a deal, constant price pressure, high support costs with a low margin, poor payment behavior. These patterns can be found in your own data - in lost deals and terminated contracts.
Similar to the positive ICP, a profile can be distilled from the problematic cases. It is important to honestly include your own mistakes - customers that, in retrospect, you should never have accepted:
I'll give you a list of customers and deals that
were a mistake in retrospect: lost deals,
terminated contracts, unprofitable clients.
Per entry: industry, size, what went wrong.
Work out:
1. what warning signs show up repeatedly?
2. which of these could we have recognized BEFORE the deal
could have recognized?
3. formulate a 5-point negative profile ('Hands off,
if ...').
Data: [INSERT LIST]
The real benefit arises when the warning signs become a quick preliminary check. In this way, every new company can be checked against the negative profile in seconds before you invest any research time:
Here is our negative profile:
[PROFILE].
And here is a company we are considering:
[COMPANY INFO].
Check if any of our warning signs apply. Give a
clear recommendation (follow up / with caution /
sort out) plus a one-line justification.
Conclusion: If you know who you don't want, you'll get to those you do want more quickly. The negative ICP is a filter that protects the most expensive resource in sales: time. In week 2, we apply positive and negative profiles to real company research.
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