Instead of proactively targeting unproven segments, use a 'Yellow' ICP category to test expansion. When prospects adjacent to your core ICP arrive as strong inbound leads, you can selectively engage. This allows the market to pull you into your next profitable segment, as exemplified by Snowflake's organic move into the enterprise.
Related Insights
Instead of random growth, businesses have five clear expansion paths: serve wealthier clients (upmarket), serve a mass market (downmarket), enter a new vertical (adjacent), generalize your solution (broader), or hyper-specialize (narrower). This provides a strategic map for growth.
Instead of a single, rigid ICP, define three tiers. Green: Your core target, for outbound efforts. Red: Accounts you refuse to sell to. Yellow: The periphery where you sell opportunistically (e.g., inbounds), allowing you to test and learn before formally expanding your ICP.
When moving beyond your initial niche, target adjacent verticals. For example, a company serving realtors should target mortgage brokers next, not an unrelated field like lawn maintenance. This strategy maximizes the transfer of product features, market knowledge, and potential word-of-mouth.
When an unexpected opportunity in an adjacent vertical arises, dedicate a small amount of effort (e.g., 5%) to explore it, even if it's not on the immediate roadmap. This low-cost probe provides invaluable market feedback on your product's readiness for future expansion without derailing current priorities.
Instead of waiting for intent, Demandbase proactively builds future pipeline by scoring cold accounts. They create lookalike models based on their best customers and invest marketing spend against high-scoring cold accounts, anticipating they will enter a buying cycle in 9-12 months.
Growth isn't random; it can be planned along five vectors. From your current market, you can target higher-paying clients (upmarket), a larger volume of smaller clients (downmarket), different industries (adjacent), a wider category (broader), or a more focused sub-niche (narrower).
Instead of maximizing the volume of prospects at the top of the funnel, strategically narrow your focus to fewer, high-potential accounts. This 'martini glass' approach prioritizes depth and engagement over sheer productivity, leading to better quality opportunities.
Disruptive infrastructure products shouldn't target customers for migration. The key go-to-market strategy is to capture developers at the precise moment they begin building a new application and are evaluating their tech stack. These first inbound users then define the use cases for future outbound sales.
Define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) in three tiers. 'Green' is your core target for outbound efforts. 'Red' are customers you cannot serve. 'Yellow' is a periphery zone for strong inbound leads or clear-fit opportunities, allowing structured exploration and expansion into adjacent markets without derailing focus.
The best initial segment to target isn't always the biggest. It's the one with the richest, most structured public data available. This data allows you to create a "demonstrable" value proposition, connecting a specific pain point to your solution with near-perfect information before you send a message.
