How to define your ICP before you start LinkedIn outreach

Most ICP documents describe a person nobody can find. Marketing Mary is 35, likes coffee and feels overwhelmed by reporting. None of that exists in a search bar. LinkedIn only knows what someone put on their profile and what they posted in public.

Work backwards instead. Name the last three customers who renewed without a fight, or the three you wish you had. Write down what was true about them on the day they first replied: their title, the size of their company, the thing that had just changed. That list of true things is your ICP.

If you have no customers yet, start from the problem. Who feels it every week? What is their job title when they write about it? Which team owns the budget for fixing it? Answer those and you have the raw material for filters.

LinkedIn search runs on a fixed set of fields: job title, company, industry, company size, location, connections and a few others. Your ICP has to be expressed in those fields or it isn't usable for outreach.

Use LinkedIn's own industry names, not your internal categories. If you sell to fintech, check whether your buyers sit under Financial Services, Software Development or IT Services. Pick the tag that returns people you recognise, then read the first page by hand before you trust it.

Titles are the messiest field. The same job gets called Head of Growth, Growth Lead, VP Marketing and Marketing Manager at different companies. List the variations, then run each one separately so you can see which phrasing returns better people.

An ICP that only says who to include is half a document. The exclusions do more work, because they stop you spending invites on people who will never buy.

The usual exclusions: agencies and consultancies if you sell to in-house teams, companies past the size where procurement takes over, students and job seekers, and any country you can't invoice. Write them as rules, not feelings.

LinkedIn search won't always let you exclude cleanly, so skim the first page of results and drop the obvious misses before you save the list. If you keep seeing the same wrong company type, the problem is a filter, not the leads.

Filters get you the right person. A trigger gets them to read the message. A trigger is something public that happened recently and makes your offer relevant this month rather than any month.

Good triggers: a post about a problem you solve, a comment on a competitor's launch, a job ad for a role your product replaces, a funding round, a new title. Weak triggers: the company exists, the person has a title, it's Tuesday.

Pick one trigger type per campaign. If you mix funding news with hiring posts and competitor comments in the same sequence, the message has to hedge, and the hedge is what makes it read like a template.

An ICP that lives in your head drifts after two weeks. Write it as a single page with four parts: the filters, the exclusions, the trigger, and the sentence you use to open. Anyone running outreach for you should be able to read it and build the same list.

Fifty leads is enough to see whether your filters return real people and whether your trigger line gets a reply. It's small enough to read every profile by hand, which is the point.

Kinlead takes the profile you just wrote and turns it into scored leads. Describe the customer or paste your website, and each lead gets a score from 0 to 100 against that profile. Leads below your fit line are dropped, so the list you work from is the ICP rather than a keyword dump. Lead search uses LinkedIn's standard search, so a Sales Navigator seat isn't required.

For triggers, the Steal Customers agent watches competitor company pages and any founder or employee profiles you add. It reads the comments on their recent posts and turns commenters who look like buyers into leads. Each lead keeps the post URL, what the post was about and what they commented, which is usually enough for a first line.

Outreach sends from your own LinkedIn account at one action every 5 minutes, inside whatever invite and message limits you set and inside a send window in the lead's time zone. Connection notes can carry an AI-written line under 200 characters that opens with why that person became a lead, and queued messages can be read and edited on the Actions page before they go. More on lead groups and scoring.