Sales isn't hunting

The deer get a vote

Shoutout to my friend & fellow HBS founder Matt Delaney for sending me this topic.

There’s this idea that we need to choose our ideal client profile (ICP) - and go hunting. We can go elephant hunting, deer hunting… you’ve seen the graphic:

But this whole way of thinking is… weird. It - and most of how we’re taught about sales - implies that sales is something we do to customers. They’re out there minding their own business, and WHAM. We come along and GET ‘EM.

This doesn’t work. Why? Because the “deer” in this analogy get a vote. Even if they’re in our crosshairs, they can say, “uh, sorry, this isn’t on my strategic priorities!” And you go home empty-handed.

In other words: We don’t really get to choose our ICP. The ICP emerges based on things we don’t control: Who has a #1 priority we can help with better than their alternatives?

When we ask this question, our option set is quite small. But when we focus on these very few people, they tend to say “hell yes”… when 99.999% of the rest of the world reacts with lukewarm indifference at best.

Your VCs probably don’t understand this. Which is why they ask, “can’t you just go enterprise?” or “can’t you just go downmarket?” or “why not do self-serve?” or “what about entering X vertical?” It would be nice to live in their fairytale world, of course. But we don’t, and never will.

—

PS:

• How to work with me post-paternity leave

• Waffle: Best-practice, SOC2 compliant infrastructure built fast in your AWS account