A 100-point scorecard with explicit scoring guidance and tier thresholds. Built for agency sales teams who need an ICP that operates instead of one that lives on a slide.
Every agency has an ideal customer profile somewhere. I bet yours lives in a Google Doc that hasn't been opened since the day it was written. It describes a fluffy, overly broad version of a potential client (“growth-stage SaaS companies that value strategic partnership”). That Google Doc is wallpaper in your GTM war room when it ought to be an active tool that gives you a YES or NO and sometimes a maybe.
A real ICP is a meaningful description of firmographics (vertical, size), likely buying committee members (who makes and influences the purchase decision), desired attributes (tech stack, funding status), and most importantly a scoring rubric. The scoring rubric is how you and your sales team decide to swipe right or not.
A rubric is a tool the sales team uses to rate every prospect on the same scale, with the same criteria, in under five minutes. The output is a tier (A, B, C, D, or F) and a number that tells you what to do next. The rubric makes the ICP operational, and that changes it from wallpaper to a GTM machine.
“Growth-stage B2B SaaS companies with marketing teams that value strategic partnership over execution.” Every word is true. None of it helps a sales rep decide whether the prospect in Apollo really fits the criteria. Purely qualitative ICPs feel sophisticated but are mostly vibes.
Lists of 15 attributes the ideal customer should have are common. Real prospects might match only 6, sometimes 10, and once every millennium all 15. With so many criteria, every prospect kind of fits and every prospect kind of doesn't, so the ICP stops pointing the team at the best opportunities.
Even when the criteria are good, there's no way to combine them into a decision. Is a prospect that matches on industry but not on size better or worse than one that matches on size but not on industry? Without weights and thresholds, the team defaults to gut feel, and gut feel collapses at 500 prospects per quarter.
This rubric fixes all three by giving you five criteria, explicit weights, and tier thresholds that turn the score into a recommended action.
The rubric scores every prospect on five criteria, each worth up to 20 points. Five is the right number because each criterion is independently meaningful and the combination produces a reliable signal. More criteria add complexity without adding signal. Fewer criteria miss patterns that predict whether you'll win the deal and whether you'll deliver well if you do.
Does the prospect operate in your target vertical?
Is the prospect in your revenue and team-size sweet spot?
Is the prospect growing, flat, or declining?
Does the prospect show signals of being in market right now?
Can you actually help them with your current offer and capability?
That requires explicit scoring guidance per criterion. Vague guidance produces vague scores.
Exact target vertical, ideal sub-segment within it. You have at least two case studies that match.
Target vertical, adjacent sub-segment. You have at least one case study that's similar.
Adjacent vertical with transferable patterns. Your work applies but the language and reference points are different.
Outside your verticals, but the shape of the problem is familiar.
Wrong vertical entirely, no transferable patterns. The work you do doesn't translate.
In your revenue sweet spot, optimal team size for your delivery model. You've delivered for companies this size before and the engagement structure works.
Adjacent to your sweet spot. A small adjustment to your engagement model lets you fit.
Smaller or larger than ideal, but workable with effort.
Significantly outside your ideal size. The engagement will require structural changes to fit.
Too small to afford your work, or too large to make you the right buyer.
Clearly scaling, well-funded, accelerating. Public signals (funding, hiring, expansion) confirm the growth.
Growing steadily, healthy fundamentals, no distress signals.
Flat or modest growth. Stable but not expanding rapidly.
Declining or restructuring. Possible recovery, but requires meaningful change.
In active distress, layoffs, bankruptcy risk. Engagement is high-risk.
Active mandate, new leader in the last 12 months, recent budget event (funding round, fiscal year start, M&A activity). They are buying now.
Clear intent signals, actively exploring options, multiple touchpoints with your category in the last 90 days.
Problem-aware but no urgency. They know they need help eventually.
Not currently in market. Long-term watch.
No signal of intent, no budget visibility, no urgency. Cold prospect.
Their problem matches your strongest case study and your core offer. You can deliver excellent work and produce a reference-quality outcome.
Their problem maps to your offer with minor adjustment. You'll need to flex, but the work is well within capability.
Their problem requires you to stretch your delivery. You can do the work, but it won't be your best.
Their problem is outside your core competence. You'd be learning while you deliver.
You cannot help them succeed with your current capability. The honest answer is to refer them elsewhere.
Founder-level outreach if you sell into founder accounts, senior-rep outreach otherwise. These are your highest-priority deals.
Pursue with normal effort. Prioritize in the pipeline review. These deals close at strong rates when worked consistently.
Qualify before investing time. Light-touch nurture. Move to A or B only if signals strengthen.
Monitor for changes in size, growth, or buying readiness. Do not invest active selling time.
Document why for future reference. The rubric is calibrated when F-tier prospects rarely show up in inbound, because the rubric tells you what to filter out at the top of the funnel.
Three real-shape prospects (anonymized), scored through the rubric for the same hypothetical agency: a paid social shop that specializes in DTC brands between $5M and $50M.
Founder-level outreach. Their problem is the exact problem your strongest case study solved.
Tempting because of size, but industry and delivery fit are wrong. You'd be selling work you can't excellently deliver.
Industry and intent are right. Financial pressure is a real risk that needs to be evaluated before you commit selling effort.
The rubric template will be wrong for your specific agency on the first pass. Calibration is the work that makes it accurate.
Run the rubric against your last 30 closed-won deals. If your average won-deal score is below 75, your thresholds are too high or your criteria are too strict. If your average won-deal score is above 90, your thresholds are too low and the rubric isn't differentiating between good deals and great ones.
Run the rubric against your last 30 closed-lost deals. If lost deals are scoring as high as won deals, the rubric is not predictive and you need to revise the criteria.
The pattern you're looking for is simple. Won deals cluster in A and B tiers. Lost deals cluster in C and D tiers. When you see that pattern, the rubric is calibrated and you can use it for decisions about real pipeline.
Calibration takes an afternoon. The output is a scoring system you can hand to a new sales hire on day one and know they'll apply it the same way you do. That's the difference between an ICP that lives on a slide and an ICP that operates.
Drop your name and email and we'll send the full rubric over. Print it, share it with your sales team, and start scoring prospects today. You'll also get the occasional note from Tim with practical agency growth ideas. Unsubscribe anytime.
The rubric is one piece of the larger sales operating system. For the entire system, including the scoring framework the rubric supports and the AI scoring prompt for running this at scale, see SalesOS.
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