icp-to-linkedin-search

ICP to LinkedIn search

Input: "CFOs at Swiss fintechs", a website URL, or a paragraph about the buyer. Output: an ICP card in seven facets, a boolean title string, an exclusion list, and a market-size estimate.

Step 1. Extract the seven facets

Write the ICP as seven plain-word arrays. Only name the facets the user gave you or that follow from the product; leave the rest empty. An empty facet is "any", not "unknown".

Facet	What goes in	Example
titles	every wording of the role, current job only	CFO, Chief Financial Officer, VP Finance, Head of Finance, Finance Director
seniority	owner, cxo, vp, director, manager, senior, entry	cxo, vp, director
languages	the language the buyer posts in	French, English
industries	LinkedIn industry names, plain words are fine	Financial Services, Fintech, Banking
sizes	headcount bands	11-50, 51-200, 201-500
locations	countries, regions, metro areas	Switzerland, Geneva
exclude	never contact, absolute	fractional, freelance, interim, intern, student, recruiter, agency, consultant

Headcount bands: 1-10, 11-50, 51-200, 201-500, 501-1000, 1001-5000, 5001-10000, 10001+. "SMB" is 11 to 200, "mid-market" 201 to 1000, "enterprise" 1001+.

From a website URL, read the pricing page and the customer logos first: the pricing page tells you the size band, the logos tell you the industry, the docs or the integrations page tell you the buyer's function.

Step 2. Normalize titles

A title is a family, not a string. For each role the user names, list:

• the acronym and the long form (CMO, Chief Marketing Officer)
• the VP, Head, Director and Lead variants when the company size makes them the same person (at 11 to 50 employees, the "Head of Marketing" is the CMO)
• the local-language forms for each languages entry (Directeur Marketing, Responsable Marketing)
• the adjacent function that owns the same budget (RevOps for a sales tool, Growth for a marketing tool)

Then the exclusions. Always add to exclude: fractional, freelance, interim, intern, assistant to, student, former, ex-, retired, looking for. Add recruiter, agency, consultant and advisor unless those are the buyer.

Step 3. Write the boolean string

For the current-title field of LinkedIn or Sales Navigator:

("CFO" OR "Chief Financial Officer" OR "VP Finance" OR "Head of Finance" OR "Finance Director")
NOT (fractional OR interim OR freelance OR intern OR assistant)

Rules: quotes around multi-word titles, OR inside a family, NOT for the exclusions, parentheses around each group, at most 15 operators per field (split into two searches past that). Keywords are a separate field: use them for the chore or the tool ("outbound", "HubSpot"), never for the title.

Give the user the string, the facets it came from, and the two or three things LinkedIn cannot filter on (a language, "does their own prospecting", a tech stack). Those get judged per person, not per search.

Step 4. Size it

Before anyone builds a list or a campaign, size the audience. A daily outreach pace of 20 invites needs a few thousand matching companies to run for months; a few hundred is a campaign, not a motion; tens of thousands means the ICP is a market, not a buyer.

By hand, count companies, not people. Titles do not change the company count and people counts double-count the same firm:

• Sales Navigator, account search. Industry, headcount and geography only. The result count is the estimate.
• LinkedIn company search. Filter by industry, location and company size. Less precise (no headcount bands below 11-50 on the free filter), fine for an order of magnitude.

Then iterate on the three company facets: 40 companies, widen the locations; 30,000, add an industry or narrow the size band. Report the count with what you would change, and only then write the people search.

Give the user the string, the facets it came from, and the company count. The facets LinkedIn cannot filter on get judged per person, at reading time, not per search.

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To size the ICP with one call and run the search every day from your own LinkedIn account, the GTM Otto plugin has an icp-to-play skill that takes the same seven facets. It needs a GTM Otto account.