# Define your ideal customer profile

URL: https://useembers.com/help/getting-started/define-your-icp/
Category: Getting started
Updated: 2026-11-04
Last verified: 2026-11-04

> Give Embers a website or a description of your buyer, and it builds the structured ICP that decides which engagers become leads and how they rank.

Your ideal customer profile (ICP) decides which of the people engaging with what you watch become leads, and it moves the score of the ones who do. There is one per workspace: every watched profile and keyword in it is matched against the same buyer. During onboarding Embers drafts it from your website or your description, and you confirm it before the first scan.

## What you give it

Embers needs at least one of two inputs:

- **A company website.** Embers researches the public site (homepage, pricing, case studies, about page) to work out what you sell, who you sell it to, your pricing, your use cases, your category, and your stage.
- **A description of your ideal buyer.** Free text, up to 4,000 characters. Job titles, industries, company stage, and pain points all help.

Give both if you can: the website supplies product context, the description the buyer you actually want, which is not always the buyer the website implies.

During setup Embers also asks **Where are your buyers?** The answer is optional. Pick the countries or regions you sell to, up to 10, and they become your ICP's locations exactly as you gave them. Because you set them, a lead based outside all of them is not a match. **Anywhere** means no location filter: no lead is ruled out for where they are.

Skip the question and Embers works the locations out from evidence: your description, what your website says about its market, where its named customers are, and its language, currency, phone numbers, and office addresses. Your home country is included unless the evidence says you sell only abroad, and with no evidence at all the location is Global. Locations worked out this way only count against a lead, never rule one out, until you edit them on the ICP page.

## What Embers builds from it

Embers turns your answer into structured criteria that every later decision reads. The ICP page (`/icp`) shows them in two cards:

| Card | Field | What it holds |
| --- | --- | --- |
| People criteria | Job titles | The roles you sell to |
| People criteria | Departments | Where those people sit: Sales, Marketing, Engineering, and so on |
| People criteria | Locations | Where your buyers are |
| People criteria | Buying signals | Short phrases that would appear in a profile when someone is a fit |
| People criteria | Exclude titles | Roles that are never a lead |
| Company criteria | Company size | Headcount bands |
| Company criteria | Industries | The industries that count |
| Company criteria | Exclude industries | Industries that are never a lead |
| Company criteria | Customers you have | Named customers that anchor the match |

Each value is a chip you can remove with its **×**. The colour tells you what a list means. Everything that counts toward a match (job titles, departments, locations, buying signals, industries, and customers you have) is a light blue chip, the same blue a company size turns when you switch it on. Excluded titles and industries are plain grey chips with a small minus before the name, so the list reads as "never" without looking like an error. The fields you type into, such as "Add a title" and "Add an industry to exclude", stay white with a dashed edge in both. The setup step that asks you to confirm your ICP uses the same light blue chips.

A one-paragraph summary sits above them. If Embers reads you as a service business, it fills the exclusions with your peers (agency-side roles and your own category) so your competitors do not arrive as leads.

## How it affects matching and scoring

Every person an agent finds is judged against the ICP, with the way they engaged as context. The verdict weighs these dimensions, most important first:

1. **Job title.**
2. **Industry.**
3. **Department** and **buying signals**, equally.
4. **Company.**
5. **Location.**

Three rules override the weights:

- **Exclusions veto.** A hit on an excluded title or industry makes someone a non-match whatever else fits.
- **Peers and competitors are vetoed**, and so is anyone who works at your own company or sells to your buyers rather than being one.
- **Missing data is neutral.** A blank field never counts against someone.

Fixed checks then run over the verdict. They can turn a match into a non-match when an exclusion literally applies, never the other way round.

The verdict then feeds the score. ICP fit multiplies the engagement score rather than adding to it, and a confidence factor discounts uncertain verdicts, which is why two people with identical engagement can rank far apart. [How scoring works](/help/leads/how-scoring-works/) has the full formula, and [read and correct an ICP match](/help/leads/icp-matching-and-feedback/) covers one verdict.

> **Note: Match, then send**
>
> A destination such as Slack, HubSpot, or a webhook only receives a lead that scored above zero, matched your ICP (or was marked a lead by hand), and is not on your [company blocklist](/help/leads/company-blocklist/). [Delivery rules](/help/integrations/delivery-rules/) can narrow that further per destination.

## Refine your ICP

Expect to correct the first version. Editing on the ICP page needs Solo or above, and any member of the workspace can do it; on Free the page is read-only.

### Edit the criteria

Open **ICP** in the sidebar (`/icp`), headed "ICP & scoring". Add or remove chips in either card, then choose **Save changes**.

Embers checks your current leads against the edit before saving anything. The **Review this ICP change** dialog shows how many leads match before and after, and lists who your edit makes **Leave** and **Join**, each marked as decided by a rule or by the AI. Tick **Keep** on any lead that would leave and you want to hold on to, then choose **Apply changes**. The toast offers **Undo** for a few seconds, and **Undo last change** in the **Change history** card stays available until your next save. [Change your ICP safely](/help/leads/change-your-icp/) covers the whole flow.

To start again, use **Regenerate from your website** in the page menu. It accepts a website, a description, or both, replaces the criteria straight away without a preview, and can be undone from **Change history**.

### Mark individual leads

Open a lead and answer **Is this a lead?** with **Yes** or **No** in the ICP fit section. Your answer pins that person's verdict, whatever the classifier says next time.

It is about that one person. Embers also uses recent answers as examples when it judges a near-identical profile (same role, seniority, and kind of company), but they never change your ICP. To rule a whole role or industry in or out, edit the criteria instead.

The same page carries **Signal weighting**: six sliders for [how strongly each kind of behaviour counts](/help/leads/how-scoring-works/#tune-signal-weighting), from a repost of your post to a reaction on a watched post. Moving only the sliders saves without the review dialog, because no match changes.

**In one paragraph** says who you sell to, then lists who is **Left out**: the people Embers excludes, such as peers and competitors. Under it, **Who your leads are** shows who actually matched: your qualified leads split **By role**, **Location**, or **Industry**, the four largest groups as a share of leads with that detail on file. The catch-all "Other" industry is left out of the rows. Use it to check your criteria against the people Embers found.

## Related

- [Change your ICP safely](/help/leads/change-your-icp/): Preview an edit on real leads, keep the ones you want, and undo.

- [Read and correct an ICP match](/help/leads/icp-matching-and-feedback/): How a verdict is reached and how to override it.

- [Choose your agents](/help/getting-started/choose-your-agents/): Decide what Embers watches for the people it will match.

- [Company blocklist](/help/leads/company-blocklist/): Keep whole companies out of the queue.

## Frequently asked questions

**Do I have to fill in every field by hand?**

No. Embers builds the structured ICP from your website, your description, or both. Every field is editable afterwards if you disagree with it.

**Does editing my ICP delete leads?**

No. Leads and engagement history are kept, but Embers judges them again against the new criteria, so some can stop matching. Save changes shows who would move before anything is applied, and Undo last change reverses the last save.

**Can a member edit the ICP, or only an administrator?**

Any member of the workspace can edit it. What gates editing is the plan, Solo and above. On Free the ICP page is read-only.

**Can I have a different ICP for each watched profile?**

No. The ICP belongs to the workspace, so every watched profile and keyword in it is matched against the same buyer. Agency client workspaces each have their own.