You built your Ideal Client Profile (ICP). You identified the right industry, the right revenue range, the right title. Your team is calling, emailing, connecting on LinkedIn, following up. First meetings are happening. And not much is closing. Something in the recipe is wrong but you’re not sure what. You tell your sales team to fix it. But if they knew what was wrong, they would have fixed it by now.
As the leader, strategy is your responsibility.
Consider this. Your ICP probably describes who could buy from you. It may not describe who will buy from you in the timeframe that you need. Your team has likely been spending much of their business development time on the “coulds” not the “wills.” What can you do about it?
Look for right fit target segments in unusual places, places where most don’t think to look.
The Variable Most ICPs Ignore
The variable that predicts whether a prospect will take a first meeting, engage seriously, and move through a sales cycle at a reasonable pace is urgency. Urgency is not in a database. You cannot filter for it on LinkedIn Sales Navigator or find it with Intent Data. But it is findable if you know where to look.
Here is one example (but there are many) of urgency that surprises most leaders. The prospects with the highest urgency right now are not always the ones everyone in your industry is targeting. They are one industry over.
Think about industries that are booming due to disruption. These are the ones your competitors are targeting. Decision Maker inboxes are flooded with (very poor) outreach which is, lately, written by AI and delivered by a bot. There is so much opportunity with this category of Decision Makers when outreach is done well (by a human who wants to connect in a respectful, meaningful way with another human) but that’s a subject for a different article. This article focuses on finding opportunity in unusual places.
Here we are focusing on an entire group of companies experiencing changes that your competitors are not thinking about. They are companies that did not cause the disruption happening in their market but are living inside the consequences of it. And they need solutions fast.
(If the idea of a too-broad ICP is new to you, start with Is Your ICP Killing Your Sales Success? And then come back to this article. This article picks up where that one leaves off.)
Stay With Me Here
When GLP-1 medications like Ozempic went mainstream and millions of people began losing significant weight, every competitor and analyst was watching the healthcare industry. Obvious story. Expected targets. But in my opinion the real news was what was happening with demand one industry over.
Clothing retailers had customers who needed entirely new wardrobes in smaller sizes. Tailors and seamstresses saw a surge in major alteration work, not a simple hem, but full reconstructions of expensive garments people were not ready to give away. Photographers experienced a boom in headshots and family portraits. Personal trainers and nutritionists had newly motivated clients walking in. People were now buying products like crepe correctors (for saggy skin) and having plastic surgery to remove extra skin as a result of weight loss. Conversely, plus-size clothing companies were watching to see how this would affect their core market.
None of those businesses were in healthcare. None of them caused the disruption. But all of them were forced to make fast decisions about capacity, staffing, vendor relationships, and new service offerings because of what was happening in an adjacent industry. Their world changed and so did their needs. Their urgency to solve new problems made them more open to new solutions. They needed to figure out solutions before their competitors did. All of that translates to opportunity for those who recognize it.
Why Adjacent Targets Are More Reachable
Here is the counterintuitive part. The companies at the center of disruption, the ones everyone in your space is targeting, are managing chaos and receiving crappy emails from every vendor in your category. The companies one step removed, those ones who serve this group, are often overlooked from a targeting perspective, despite their needs. Your competitors are not looking there.
These prospects have real, urgent problems they were not expecting to have. They have not been overwhelmed with outreach yet. They are motivated, not casually interested, actually motivated, to find solutions quickly because their window to respond is narrow and they know it. They engage more seriously, and they become the kind of clients who refer you because you showed up with solutions when it mattered most.
How To Find Them
When you see a major shift hitting a sector, a regulatory change, a technology disruption, a cultural shift like a blockbuster drug category, immediately ask: Who supplies them, who competes for the same customers, and who suddenly has a problem they did not have six months ago?
That is your adjacent target list. Set Google Alerts on industries your best clients live in. Search for articles and information about what is happening in the industry one sector over. When you see disruption, don’t just watch and comment on it, teach your team how to hunt for the ripple effect.
The Real Cost of Getting This Wrong
If your pipeline looks busy but your close rate tells a different story, if your sales cycles keep stretching, if you keep hearing “we love you but the timing isn’t right,” you may not have a sales conversion problem, you more likely have a targeting strategy problem at the front end of your sales funnel.
And, as I mentioned earlier, strategy is the leader’s responsibility.
A targeting strategy problem will not be fixed with more activity. Your sales team needs guidance from leadership and leadership may may need guidance from the outside to get this right.
When we build a Door Opener client’s outbound strategy at Kopp Consulting, finding prospect groups with urgency is one of the first things we do. Focus, focus, focus. More meetings only matter if they are the right meetings.
There is likely a window of adjacent disruption going on in your market right now. What will you do to be creative about finding it before your competitors do?
Contact Kopp Consulting at koppconsultingusa.com. Let’s make sure the time your team spends prospecting turns into the meetings, and the clients, you really want.