When Spear flags your ICP as "too limited," it means the filters you've set are too restrictive for the system to consistently find and suggest quality prospects. This article explains what causes it and how to open up your ICP without sacrificing relevance.
What does "ICP too limited" mean?
Your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) defines who Spear looks for. When it's too narrow, the system has a small pool to work with, and that creates three problems:
Fewer prospects surfaced: fewer filter combinations mean fewer matching companies and contacts
Lower match quality: over-filtering can exclude relevant profiles and blur what a "good fit" actually looks like
Slower AI learning: the system learns and improves from a broad sample; a limited ICP slows that process down
Common causes
Company lookalikes added too early: Lookalikes reduce the available prospect pool significantly. Start without them. If you do add lookalikes, add around 10 at once; adding only 1 or 2 makes the ICP too narrow without any real benefit.
Including industries instead of excluding: Selecting specific industries to include automatically excludes all others, even ones you'd want. At the start, avoid including industries entirely. Only use the industry filter to exclude what you never target.
Location filters too specific: Tight geography cuts volume fast. Keep location as broad as possible. Only exclude countries that are completely irrelevant to your offer.
Job title + decision maker + seniority all stacked: Using all three at once triple-constrains your pool. Use broad title keywords (e.g. "Security", "Cloud", "SRE") combined with a seniority filter (Director / Head / VP).
Headcount range too narrow: Remove the headcount filter entirely, or keep it wide. Only narrow it if company size is truly essential to your offer.
How to fix it
Start broad, only add filters that are truly essential at launch, and refine as results come in
Exclude noise as it appears (irrelevant industries, countries, or niches) rather than pre-filtering everything upfront
Use job title keywords + seniority instead of long lists of exact titles
Check your ICPPC score, aim to keep it in the green range
If you use lookalikes, add several at once, never just 1 or 2