Be Maniacal About Knowing Where You Win (And Where You Don’t)

Average sales teams chase the market. Elite sales teams chase their market – the narrow slice where they have unfair advantage. While most companies attempt to sell broadly (“anyone who could use us”), top performing revenue teams define a surgical ICP:

• Which use case creates the strongest pull
• Which segments show the highest close rate
• Which pain points they solve better than anyone else
• Which customer attributes produce the fastest cycles

This clarity is where leveraged growth comes from. Because the moment you know where you actually win, you also know:

• Where you lose
• Where deals stall
• Which deals are distractions
• Which parts of the market should be ignored

And you can stop wasting time and cycles there. One CRO I worked with put it bluntly – and perfectly:

“The fastest way to increase close rates is to stop chasing bad deals.”

But top revenue teams don’t just know where they win and lose with precision.  They operationalize that knowledge. 

Find Your Killer Use Case

Every elite revenue team I’ve worked with – across thousands of organizations – eventually identifies what I call their killer use case: The single problem they solve so powerfully that buyers feel irrational not moving forward.

It’s the use case that produces:

• The highest emotional intensity
• The shortest sales cycle
• The strongest internal alignment
• The deepest customer conviction
• The fastest payback
• The most repeatable wins

And once they find it, everything orbits around it:

• Product roadmap
• Narrative and messaging
• Qualification criteria
• Pipeline scoring
• Deal coaching
• Forecast methodology
• Marketing programs

This is the first pattern of elite teams: They don’t just know where they win. They run their business according to where they win.

A Ruthless Example

A few years ago, I met a new CRO named Tim. He had just stepped into leading an LMS (learning management system) company. 

The LMS market is one of the most competitive, commoditized categories in all of B2B technology. There are hundreds, potentially a thousand or more LMS providers. And they range all the way from big companies that have cornered big sections of the market, to small startups that have a disruptive take. Feature parity, buyer confusion, and price pressure are the norm.

When Tim stepped into the role, the company had been sitting at $16M in ARR, and only growing 10% year over year. They weren’t dying. But they were stuck, and the founders couldn’t figure it out. That’s what Tim was hired to do.

After spending a few months observing the situation, Tim came to a shrewd conclusion:

The biggest growth constraint was that his company was trying to win everywhere. Every market segment, every use case, every buyer persona were all on the table, pursued, and sold to. The company sold to HR teams just as eagerly as they sold to enablement teams. They sold to employee training use cases just as eager as they sold to external customer training use cases. 

The result of this unconscious “we’re for everyone” mentality?

The product roadmap was slow, inefficient, and all over the place. Since they were trying to win everywhere, they were making almost no meaningful progress in any use case. In trying to serve everyone a little, they fully served no one.

Marketing programs had no resonance. Because they weren’t speaking to a narrowly declined ideal customer profile, they attempted to speak to everyone. As a result, they were invisible, and demand creation was nothing more than a lucky trickle.

Sales efforts were incredibly inefficient. The status quo was that AEs (account executives) were chasing bad deals that looked like they could close, but almost never did. Win rates were below 14%. AEs were characterized with hope, but forecasting accuracy was the worst Tim had ever seen.

This is the price revenue teams pay when they aren’t ruthlessly clear about where they win, and where they lose. In fact, the word “ruthless” best describes what Tim did next. He did something that was uncomfortable, politically difficult, yet highly successful. He forced the company to narrowly define a single segment, use case, and buyer persona where they had an outsize win rate and ruthlessly focused the company on winning that single segment – while ignoring every other part of the market (at least, for now).

Here’s what Tim did:

First, he discovered the company won disproportionately when they sold to an external customer training use case. In other words, their best customers were not buying an LMS to train their own employees. They were buying it to train their own customers on their product.

That was the first signal and ruthless decision: 

• SDRs and marketing stopped targeting employee training use cases
• Product stopped building for them.
• AEs were instructed to disqualify those prospects immediately

Everyone, from AEs, to SDRs, to the company founders were uncomfortable and reluctant with this approach. But they ultimately followed suit with some healthy, ongoing change management from Tim and his leaders.

But he didn’t stop the narrowing there. He then discovered the next pattern: that they also won disproportionately when the buyer used Hubspot as their CRM. Now this became part of their qualification criteria and narrowed their focus even further.

Again, Tim was met with resistance and discomfort from everyone involved, but ultimately pushed this agenda. But now they had a clear ICP:

• Fast growing technology companies
• Who use Hubspot as their CRM, and
• Need an LMS to train their own customers

They focused the product roadmap on that single use case. And as a result, product development progress rapidly accelerated. 

They refined their marketing message to attract that buyer – knowing they’d repel everyone else. And their rate of pipeline generation started growing like they had never seen before. They built a deep partnership with Hubspot knowing that’s where their money lives. 

And AEs now had clarity on which deals to overinvest in, and which deals to disqualify.

But the real unlock came next.

Operationalize Your ICP

Tim didn’t just teach the organization who their ICP was. He operationalized the pipeline management process around it. Every opportunity was scored against their ideal customer profile attributes: 

• Green: Ideal customer profile.
• Yellow: Close, but with 1-2 deviations
• Red: Smoke prospects—tempting, noisy, but ultimately losing opportunities

Then sales managers rebuilt their pipeline inspection cadence around this reality.

Deal boards in Gong were color-coded green, yellow, and red. 

Green deals should be loud with deal activity.  Lots of meetings and calls. Lots of back and forth email. The next meeting always scheduled. Managers wanted to make sure the deal boards for “green” deals were lit up like a Christmas tree with sales activity and customer responses.

Yellow deals should be deliberate.  They expected activity. But if yellow deals were consistently “louder,” then a reps’ green deals, something was off.

Red deals should be qualified out.

They discovered something uncomfortable – and immediately actionable.

Reps were often over-investing in yellow and red deals while neglecting green ones. “Green” deals were often underinvested in. Yellow deals often had relentless follow up with only trickles of response (for them, a sign of misdirected effort). And red deals were pursued far often than they should have been.

This empowered managers to perform some of the highest leverage coaching of their career: overinvest in green deals, pursue yellow deals cautiously, and get the hell out of red deals, as uncomfortable as that may be.

Tim’s tenure started with an uncomfortable realization and ended with a legendary outcome.

Within just a few years, the company crossed $50M in ARR (up from $16M), growing 40–50% year over year (up from just 10%) in one of the most competitive SaaS categories that exists.  And it never would have happened without maniacal focus on where they win, and pruning where they lose.

Law 1 of Revenue Excellence: Stated Clearly

Elite revenue teams are maniacal about knowing exactly where they win—and exactly where they don’t. Most teams can describe their market.  Very few can focus their efforts as narrowly as Tim was willing to.

Revenue excellence always begins with subtraction before addition.

If you don’t define where you win:

• Sales chases “interesting” instead of probable
• Marketing attracts noise instead of signal
• Product builds for edge cases
• Coaching becomes reactive instead of strategic

The fastest way to increase close rates is to stop chasing bad deals.