Every company has a document describing its ideal customer. Company size, industry, tech stack, the persona who buys, the trigger that starts the search. It was probably written with real care. It was also probably written a while ago.
Meanwhile the business quietly drifted. A segment opened up because a rep happened to close one, and then closed three more. A vertical you never targeted turned out to have the problem badly. A product change made you viable for smaller teams, or stopped you being viable for them. Nobody updated the document, because updating it isn't anyone's job and nothing breaks visibly when it's wrong.
What breaks where you can't see it
The damage shows up downstream. Ad targeting, list building, messaging, content topics, event choices, all of it inherits the assumptions in that file. You end up spending a year of budget chasing a customer the business has partly moved on from.
The audit takes an afternoon. Export closed-won from the last four to six quarters. Not opportunities, not pipeline. Closed and paying. Then look at the distribution: size, industry, region, how they found you, who signed, and how long the cycle ran.
Run it twice, then compare
Now run it again on the accounts with the best retention and expansion, which is a different list and usually the more interesting one. The customers you keep best tell you more about fit than the ones you closed fastest.
Compare both against the targeting document. Two things usually surface. A segment that clearly works and gets no deliberate attention. And a segment you talk about constantly that converts poorly and churns fast. The second is harder to act on, because someone senior believes in it. That belief was formed when it was still true.
The point isn't to narrow for its own sake. It's to notice that your positioning drifted away from your revenue while everyone was busy hitting targets. Run it once a year, before planning season rather than after the budget is locked.
That lands at 329 words for the body, with the two subheadings added. Want it tighter anywhere, or a different split point for the headings?