Before you identify your list of target accounts, you have to understand which buyers would be good fits for your product or service and which companies would be a waste of time and money. Your first step is to define your ideal customer profile (ICP). Work with your sales leadership, go-to-market teams, and product teams to determine the firmographic benchmarks that constitute your ideal customer. To help identify those benchmarks, look at your existing customer data. Pinpoint customers with the highest annual contract value and find commonalities among them, such as industry, location, headcount, tech stack, and revenue. The more granular you get, the stronger your ICP will be. This will help you identify your target audience (in Stage 2) Without strong data driving your ICP, you’ll miss the mark,” says Hussam AlMukhtar, senior director of strategic marketing at ZoomInfo. “You won’t be able to identify the right accounts and you’ll be back to spraying and praying.