Two companies look identical on paper. Same industry. Same headcount. Same
revenue. Same tech stack.

In a firmographic world, they receive the same treatment. This is a common reason
demand gen stalls across the industry and why Sales and Marketing alignment can
be harder to maintain than it needs to be.

While one company is quietly building a business case, the other is mid-contract and
will not look at your category for another year. A firmographic-only Ideal Customer
Profile (ICP) cannot tell the difference. It is a snapshot in time that reveals nothing
about urgency, internal alignment or active evaluation.

The shift to readiness

Timing lives in behavior, not in company attributes. The move to a behavioral, signal-
driven ICP is the practical response to how modern B2B buying works.

An effective ICP integrates two distinct dimensions:

• Fit (firmographics): Defines if they could buy. These are table stakes like size, industry and geography.
• Readiness (behavior): Defines if they should buy now. This is the evidence of active evaluation and urgency drivers.

The signal stack

Separating curiosity from true readiness requires stacking signals from three
buckets. Platforms like Demandbase, 6sense or ZoomInfo can aggregate these into
an account score, but the logic remains the same.

• First-party signals: Repeat visits to pricing, integration docs, and product tours. These are essential for high-priority routing. 6sense reports that buyers are deep into the process before they engage sellers, which makes early digital behavior your clearest window into real deals (6sense, 2025).
• Third-party signals: Category research surges and review site activity. These add valuable context. The Forrester Wave evaluation of B2B intent data providers found that vendors differ in signal collection and accuracy, which is why calibration matters (Forrester, 2025).
• Operational signals: New leadership hires or system changes that create immediate urgency.

Making it operational

To make this work as an operating system rather than a one-time exercise,
consistency matters.

When Sales trusts what Marketing routes, the whole system scales. A behavioral
ICP builds that trust by separating fit from readiness, then putting a weekly
calibration loop around routing so signal quality improves over time.

• Define your non-negotiables: Start with 4 to 6 rigid criteria for fit and add 2 to 4
  disqualifiers (example: recent implementation of a competitor) to keep the list
  focused.
• Weight first-party depth heavily: A single visit to a blog post is awareness. Multiple
  stakeholders from the same domain hitting technical docs in a short window is
  evaluation behavior. Buying groups are also larger than most teams plan for, which
  is one reason multi-stakeholder engagement is a stronger readiness signal than
  single-person activity (6sense, 2025).
• Enforce the feedback loop: Every week, review 10 to 20 accounts with Sales. If an account was labeled ready but turned out to be a false positive, use that insight to refine the model.

Example: A 2,000-person logistics company matches your firmographic ICP. In a
static model, it gets the same priority as every other mid-market logo. Add behavior:
three people from the same domain hit your integration docs and security page
within 48 hours, then a fourth revisits pricing twice the following week. Same fit, but
now you have evidence of a live evaluation. That is the difference between a target
list and a prioritized plan.

The bottom line

Static profiles were valuable when alternatives were limited. Today, there is an
opportunity to go further. Behavioral signals help you see timing, focus effort, and
strengthen alignment between Sales and Marketing.

If your current ICP tells you who could buy but does not yet show who is ready to
buy, that is an opportunity to sharpen the model and drive stronger results.