icp-scoring

ICP scoring

An ideal customer profile is a falsifiable claim: these attributes predict that a deal closes, expands, and renews. Most ICPs are not that. They are a description of the customers a company already has, written after the fact, and they cannot be wrong because they never predicted anything.

This skill builds the falsifiable kind, then scores against it with an engine that separates two things everyone else conflates: how well an account fits and how much you actually know about it.

Why coverage is the whole point

Every scoring model quietly treats missing data as bad data. An account with no headcount on file scores like an account known to be tiny. That one behavior has misdirected more territory plans than any modeling error, because it systematically buries the accounts nobody has researched yet — which are, by definition, the ones with the most upside left in them.

So the scorer reports two numbers per record. An account at 82% fit on 40% coverage is not a good account; it is an unresearched one, and it is held out of the ranking entirely rather than placed above a fully-diligenced peer.

When you present results, never show fit without coverage next to it.

Building the rubric

1. Start from outcomes, not attributes

Do not begin by listing what your good customers look like. Begin by asking which accounts actually produced good outcomes, then work backwards to what distinguished them.

Ask the user for whichever of these they can get:

• Closed-won and closed-lost from the last 12–18 months, with deal size
• Renewal and churn outcomes, with reasons
• Expansion history
• Time-to-close by segment

If they have none of it, the rubric you build together is a hypothesis, and you should label it that way in the output. A hypothesis is fine. A hypothesis presented as a finding is not.

2. Pick criteria that could be wrong

A good criterion divides the population and predicts something. Test each candidate against two questions:

Does it discriminate? If 95% of the market has it, it is table stakes, not a criterion. It will add weight without adding signal.

Is it observable before the deal? "Has an engaged executive sponsor" predicts outcomes beautifully and is useless for prospecting, because you learn it after you are already in the deal. Separate prospecting criteria (observable from outside) from qualification criteria (learned in the process). Build two rubrics rather than one muddled one.

Criteria generally worth testing:

Type	Examples	Notes
Firmographic	Headcount, revenue, geography, industry	Easy to source, weak on their own
Operational	Volume of the thing your product acts on	Usually the strongest predictor — it drives the value case
Technographic	Systems you integrate with	Strong when integration is a real barrier
Behavioral	Hiring for the role, published commitments	Best timing signal, worst durability
Structural	Whether the buying center exists at all	Often the real disqualifier

The operational row deserves the most weight in most B2B models. It is the same number that drives the value case, which is not a coincidence: accounts where the math works are accounts that buy.

3. Write disqualifiers separately from scores

A disqualifier is not a low score. It is a reason the account cannot be sold to at all — no data residency, below the volume where the ROI clears, a competitor you have never displaced. Modeling these as low scores lets a strong-elsewhere account float into your top tier on the strength of criteria that no longer matter.

Every disqualifier requires a stated reason. A record removed without one looks like a bug to whoever reviews the list, and they will override it.

4. Weight by predictive strength, not by importance

Weights are commonly assigned by how important something feels. Assign them by how much the criterion moved the outcome in the data you have. When you have no data, distribute weight evenly across a small number of criteria and say so — false precision in weights is worse than admitted ignorance.

Running it

Rubric format is documented in references/rubric-format.md. Records can be CSV or JSON.

PYTHONPATH="${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}" python3 -m gtmkit.scoring \
  --rubric rubric.json --records accounts.csv --name-field name

# Machine-readable, for feeding a CRM update or a further pass:
PYTHONPATH="${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}" python3 -m gtmkit.scoring \
  --rubric rubric.json --records accounts.csv --format json

The engine handles three criterion types — numeric with bands, boolean, and categorical with a map — and treats blanks, unknown, n/a, and - as missing rather than as zero.

Reading the output

The UNKNOWN tier is a work queue, not a failure. Records below the coverage threshold are listed separately with exactly which fields are missing. That list is the highest-leverage research task available to the team, and it is usually shorter than people expect.

Tier boundaries are decisions, not discoveries. The default A/B/C/D cuts are arbitrary. Set them where the user's actual capacity falls: if the team can work 40 accounts this quarter, the A tier should hold roughly 40 accounts. A tiering model that produces 300 A-accounts has not prioritized anything.

Check what the rubric does to your existing best customers. Score the current top ten. If the model ranks them poorly, the model is wrong — this is the single most useful validation available and it takes five minutes.

Common failures

Scoring the market you wish you had. If the rubric's A tier contains almost nobody, it is describing an aspiration. Either the product is not ready for that segment or the criteria are too strict.

Confusing fit with intent. ICP fit says an account should buy. It says nothing about whether they will buy now. Timing signals belong in a separate score; blending them produces a number that means neither thing.

Letting the rubric ossify. Re-score against closed-won and closed-lost quarterly. A rubric that has never been revised has never been tested.

Presenting rank without coverage. Covered above, and worth repeating, because it is the thing most likely to be dropped when the output gets pasted into a deck.

Reference material

• references/rubric-format.md — the full rubric schema with every field.
• references/criteria-library.md — candidate criteria by business model (PLG, enterprise sales, marketplace), with notes on what each actually predicts and where each tends to mislead.

A worked rubric and account list live in examples/icp/.