ICP Discovery

Find and Rank Your Best Prospects from LinkedIn Connections What this achieves A ranked, scored list of my LinkedIn connections that match my ideal customer profile - not just a headline match, but actual buying signals from what people are posting and doing right now. The deliverable is a table of qualified prospects ranked by how likely they are to buy, with specific notes on why each one scored where they did. Define my ICP Pick 3-4 customer types I'm hunting for. For each one, write a one-sentence description of who belongs and who doesn't. icp buckets Phase 1: Scan my connections Go to my LinkedIn connections page. Scroll deep — I'll need to scan roughly 3x the number of ICP matches I want. If I want target prospect count good prospects, expect to scan about 3x that many. Capture name, headline, and profile link for each one. Phase 2: Sort them into buckets Match each connection to an ICP bucket based on their headline. Use keyword matching but keep it conservative — I'll catch more false positives than false negatives. "Founder" matches VCs and service providers just as easily as solo founders. "Agency" catches corporate governance firms. Err on the side of narrower matches. Give each match a preliminary score from 1 to 10 based on their headline alone. Be skeptical. Most headline scores will drop after I look at actual activity. Phase 3: Enrich with real buying signals This is where the work pays off. For each prospect, visit their LinkedIn recent activity page. Read what they're actually posting and commenting about right now. The headline tells me who they are. Recent activity tells me whether they're ready to buy. What counts as a buying signal, ranked strongest to weakest: Explicit pain. They're posting about something broken: a CRM migration that wrecked their pipeline, proposals taking 3 days because nobody owns the template, reps back on spreadsheets Tool complaints or switching. They're vocal about leaving one tool for another, evaluating options, or frustrated with their current stack Active hiring. Especially sales, GTM, or growth roles. Signals scaling — scaling means budget Using the tools I sell. They're posting about workflows they built, agents they deployed, or automation tricks they discovered. They're a practitioner, not someone selling the same thing as a service Building and launching. Y Combinator, shipping product, seeking a co-founder, running events Explicit asks. "My DMs are open," "looking for recommendations," "anyone using X?" What counts against them — downgrade the score: Every post has a "Book a demo" or "Schedule a call" CTA. They're selling, not buying All content promotes their own company or product. Service provider No posts in dormant threshold months months or more. Dormant profile. Cap score at 5 Only reposts, zero original thoughts. Curator, not buyer Wrong ICP entirely — doesn't fit any of my defined buckets. Score 2-4 Phase 4: Re-rank and review Once every prospect has been enriched, re-sort the full list by final score. The distribution typically looks like this: Score 9-10: Active builders with explicit pain. Best outreach targets — probably 10-20% of the list Score 7-8: Good fit, relevant activity, but no urgent need expressed. Nurture over time Score 5-6: Right headline, wrong reality — dormant, or a service provider with adjacent content. Low priority Score 2-4: Wrong ICP. Headline misled the classifier. Remove or re-bucket Also flag profiles that landed in the wrong bucket. A solo founder posting agency case studies probably belongs in the agency bucket. Someone selling services to the same customers I target doesn't belong in any outreach bucket. The most important distinction: buyer vs. provider About 30% of my headline matches will turn out to be people who sell to the same customers I sell to — Clay partners, HubSpot consultants, fractional CMOs, GTM engineers. They use the right vocabulary. They post about the right problems. But they're looking for clients, not tools. Enrichment must explicitly flag "service provider, not buyer" for each prospect where this applies. These people can be partners or referral sources, but they're not outreach targets. Scoring reference card 10 — Building something. In pain. Hiring or switching tools. Clear buying intent right now 9 — Strong fit, active, engaged. Likely in market within 90 days 8 — Active and relevant, but no urgent need visible yet 7 — Good fit, some activity, no pain signals 6 — Right headline but dormant profile, or service provider with adjacent content 5 — Borderline fit, or completely dormant. Headline-only match 2-4 — Wrong ICP. Remove from outreach list The final deliverable A ranked table of my ICP connections with: name, headline, bucket, score, and a one-sentence note on why they scored that way. The note is the most valuable column — it's what turns a number into a conversation starter.