I recently had the pleasure of joining Alex Gluz, CEO and Founder of T.A. Monroe and host of The Revenue Engine Podcast, to dive deep into unlocking revenue growth. We discussed sales leadership, subscription models, and what it takes to succeed in today’s SaaS landscape.

The episode zeroed in on a topic I’m passionate about — your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). If you’re not crystal clear on who you’re built to serve, you’ll never scale revenue in a way that maximizes efficiency. Your team will be working twice as hard to close half as much.

At Recurly, real traction didn’t come from rewriting the playbook. We sharpened our focus on fit. Now, our revenue engine aligns with the right customer profile.

Your market will tell you before your team does

When I joined Recurly, I didn’t walk in with a mandate to shake things up. Instead, I observed. I spent time listening to sales calls, reviewing the pipeline, and talking to customers. What I discovered was both encouraging and revealing: we were consistently winning with larger brands that had more complex subscription businesses.

Our sales team and messaging were designed for velocity. We had tools and talent aimed at small and medium-based businesses (SMB), but we were clearly resonating upmarket. That’s when it clicked: our ICP had shifted, but our sales motion hadn’t.

It wasn’t about the product not being ready. It was about the structure, team, and story around it needing to evolve to match the opportunity.

ICP isn’t just a description. It’s a strategic operating system

Once we saw the disconnect, the next move wasn’t simply updating a slide deck. It was operationalizing it.

We redesigned territories to match customer segments more precisely. Our sales development representative (SDR) team began focusing on accounts that fit our ICP attributes in their outreach strategy. Sales enablement created new messaging tracks. They also developed objection handling for more sophisticated buyers.

We adjusted how we reviewed our pipeline, less about raw volume, more about strategic fit. Forecast reviews became more about which deals should close, not just which deals were farthest along.

This work made our sales process more honest. And a lot more effective.

Every hour you spend outside your ICP is a lost opportunity

There’s no way around it: time is the most valuable asset your sales team has. When reps are chasing accounts outside your ICP, they’re not just wasting time, they’re burning energy and confidence.

Deals drag. Conversions drop. Post-sale friction creeps in. Even if you win the wrong logos, you risk churn later. That’s why staying disciplined on ICP isn’t just a good strategy, it's good math.

Your top performers want clarity. ICP is how you give it to them.

Cross-functional alignment starts with shared ownership

A clean ICP doesn’t just help sales — it aligns the entire business. But you can’t expect that to happen on its own.

At Recurly, revenue is a shared responsibility — we ensure that every function participates in the conversation. Forecast calls include product, customer success, and ops because we win together, not in silos. Company-wide meetings, which we call Showcase, spotlight which product features helped close key deals, reinforcing cross-functional impact.

We’ve also hardwired recognition into our culture. When a win comes in, our sales Slack channel doesn’t just highlight the account executive, it names the engineers, onboarding team, and marketing folks who made it possible.

This isn’t fluff. It’s what accountability looks like in a modern revenue organization.

Subscription businesses win on flexibility and personalization

In today’s market, your ICP isn’t just defined by industry or revenue. Expectations define it. And in the subscription economy, expectations are high.

Customers want frictionless sign-ups, personalized bundles, flexible billing, and self-serve upgrades. They want subscriptions that fit their lives, not just products that renew.

The companies we work with — the ones growing fastest — understand this. They’re obsessed with lifetime value and retention, not just acquisition. And we’re building at Recurly to support that — because personalization and flexibility are now the baseline.

Don’t set it and forget it

Here’s the most important thing: your ICP isn’t static. It evolves as your product evolves, as your market matures, and as your team levels up.

We run formal ICP evaluations twice a year. But we also dig into performance data monthly — looking at win rates, sales velocity, deal size, and churn trends by segment.

If the data tells us we’re trending up or down consistently in a certain vertical or stage, we investigate and pivot as necessary. Staying close to this information helps us make micro adjustments before they turn into big problems.

Final thoughts

In a crowded market, it’s tempting to chase anything that looks like revenue. But real growth doesn’t come from chasing. It comes from focus.

Know your ICP. Build around it. Align your people to it. Revisit it often.

Want to check out the full conversation? Listen to the episode of Revenue Engine Podcast here.