---
title: "Describe your ideal customer"
description: "Write your ideal customer profile (ICP) as one sentence: what the companies do, who they sell to, where they are and how big. A fill-in template and examples are below."
canonical_url: "https://openlead.ai/docs/describe-your-icp"
last_updated: "2026-11-10"
type: "how-to"
section: "Search"
---

# Describe your ideal customer

Write your ideal customer profile (ICP) as one sentence: what the companies do, who they sell to, where they are and how big. A fill-in template and examples are below.

Openlead takes your ideal customer profile (ICP) as one sentence in the search box. There are no separate fields for industry, region or size: everything goes in the sentence. Openlead sends your words to a search over company websites as you wrote them, and does not add filters or fill in defaults. The more your sentence says, the more the search has to match.

## 1. Say what the companies do or sell

Start with the kind of company. "B2B SaaS", "Shopify agencies" and "dental practices" all work. Use the words you would use to describe them to a colleague.

## 2. Add who they sell to

If the companies serve a certain customer, say so: "that sell to HR teams", "with B2B clients". This is often the detail that separates the companies you want from the ones that only share an industry.

## 3. Add where and how big

Put the region in plain words ("in the DACH region", "in the Netherlands") and the size as people ("with 20 to 200 people"). These are part of the sentence the search matches, not filters, so a result can still be a near miss. Check the description in the table.

Here is a line to fill in:

```text title="Template"
[What they do or sell] [that sell to / with clients like ...] in [where], with [size] people
```

## 4. Compare with these examples

Sentences that work well:

- B2B SaaS companies in the DACH region with 20 to 200 people that sell to HR teams
- US creative agencies with B2B clients, 10 to 50 people
- AI receptionists for dental practices
- Shopify agencies in the Netherlands

Sentences that return weaker results:

- "Tech companies": it names no product, customer, place or size, so the search has almost nothing to match on.
- "Startups": the same problem, and it says nothing about what they do.
- "Companies that need marketing": it names no industry, place or size.

A sentence needs at least 10 characters to run, or a website address. The longest is 1,000 characters.

## 5. Ask for a number, or skip the people

Openlead reads two things out of your sentence before it searches, and removes those words from what it searches for:

- **How many companies.** Write "find 50 companies", "top 50 companies" or "50 companies". Without a number a search finds 25 companies. The most one search finds is 500, and never more than your month's companies and credits cover (the Free plan has 50 companies a month).
- **Companies without people.** Write "companies only", "just companies", "no people" or "no contacts". The search then skips the people at each company.

> [!NOTE]
> A number right before the word "companies" is read as how many companies to find, wherever it sits in the sentence. If your sentence names a number of companies in some other sense, reword it.

## FAQ

### What is an ICP?

An ideal customer profile: a description of the companies you most want to sell to. In Openlead you write it as one sentence and that sentence is the search.

### Can I search by revenue, funding or technology?

Openlead has no fields for those. You can put them in your sentence in plain words, but they are not applied as filters.

### Can I start from a website instead?

Yes. Paste a website and Openlead writes the sentence for you. See [search from a website](https://openlead.ai/docs/search-from-a-website).

### Where do I see the results?

In a table of companies with a description each. See [results and sources](https://openlead.ai/docs/results-and-sources).