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Eric: "What if I turned off the spigot on one of our markets and pointed everybody on our sales & marketing team at the other?"
My answer was yes. I told him it was the exact thing I'd planned to write about this weekend, but he went on to make his case for the move anyway:
Eric: "We've got sixty clients in one industry and two in the other. People know us in the first one. We've got referrals. If a prospect questions anything, I can hand them ten references from the same industry."
He's got a $6M MSP, has a sales rep in one of our sales accelerators, and was asking what I thought about his options. I've changed his name and left the industries out because his specific targeting strategy isn't mine to advertise.
But the decision he was wrestling with is one every business owner faces at some point or another. And it has a massive impact on your ability to get any traction with outbound sales and marketing.
What He Already Had
He's been in that first market close to ten years, and the references he has are just one of the assets he's built by being there.
His newest salesperson, who we're coaching, came straight out of that industry and walked in with about 1,000 contacts from a decade of business cards. His new rep is friends with outside salespeople at other companies in the industry. They're already recommending him, and they let him ride along on their sales calls to pitch his IT services to their customers.
All of it came from referrals and trade shows, where his new rep is reconnecting with people he knows. He hasn't bought a list of companies or run a single campaign, and he's got more than $50K in monthly recurring revenue in pipeline that is forecasted to close in the next 45 days.
A few weeks ago, his appointment setter was working a generic regional list, and the one company that said "yeah, I want a meeting" turned out to be in that first market. That was the first appointment she set.
While we were on the call, I ran a quick AI search: "Who's the best IT provider for a company in this industry?" They showed up first.
The second market he was going after has two clients and a decent local search ranking. But all the work of establishing a name in that space, building social proof, showing up in web & AI searches as the go-to provider, and becoming the IT provider of choice in the space is still ahead of him there.
And he felt it. He'd just spoken at an event focused on that second market he doesn’t have a ton of traction in. He didn't know anyone there and generated no business from it.
Eric: "It felt like starting over. I kept thinking, do I have to put in another ten years here to get where I already am in the other one?"
What I told him:
Me: "Right now you're searching in another niche for something you already have in one."
What Compounds When You Stop Splitting the Team
I see this from the other side every week. We've got about 65 SDRs doing outbound for MSPs across the country and a dozen full-cycle reps we manage in different markets. The companies getting the most traction have one thing in common: they know exactly who they're selling to.
The ones struggling usually think they do. When I ask, I hear "we have a 15-user minimum," or "we specialize in five verticals," or "small businesses in our area."
That's a filter, not a target market.
The other thing I hear is, "We tried targeting a vertical and it didn't work." When I dig in, targeting meant buying a list from ZoomInfo, mailing and calling it for 30 or 60 days, and moving on to the next vertical when nothing closed.
Look, you don’t need to concentrate in a market for 10-years like Eric has. But 30-60 days is a campaign. And campaigns end before any of the benefits below have time to accumulate. What I'm talking about is a decision you make as the owner to play a longer game.
When you direct all of your time, money, and people at one audience for 6-9 months, benefits start accumulating that you just don't experience when you're spread across half a dozen markets:
Your salespeople learn the language — which title to ask for when they're calling, how prospects describe the problem, who really makes the decision, how to build rapport quickly.
Your list becomes an incredibly valuable asset to the business — because it gets cleaned and refined over time instead of replaced every 90 days with a new, cold list that's 30% garbage.
Your messaging gets tighter, because the more you talk to the same group of people, the more you learn — what problems they have, what software they use — and you incorporate all of that into your marketing and scripting.
Your social proof is more impactful — prospects can see themselves in the testimonials and case studies, and may even know or recognize the people they're from.
And that's just the start.
The point is, you create advantages you simply can't get any other way. Then you build a moat. Any generalist who wants to pick off a company in that space once in a while doesn't stand a chance against someone who's at every event and on every referral list.
Hell, I've experienced it myself. Having coached and consulted in the MSP space for eight years, I know where many of the events are, who the big players are, and how the problems we can help with are usually described. That helps in the design and delivery of services as much as it does in marketing and selling them.
You Can Still Take the Referral
The pushback I usually get on "pick a market and focus" is all the business you'd have to turn away.
Eric had already worked through that before he brought it to me. He still ranks locally in the second market. Referrals still come in. He'll take every good-fit one that shows up. He just won't allocate his sales and marketing resources towards it.
You don't have to fire your customers and rebuild your entire website to decide who your salesperson should call on Monday. Who you're willing to serve and who you actively pursue don't have to be the same-sized group.
He was taking it to his team the same afternoon: one market, everybody on it.
A lot of owners I talk to are debating these same decisions right now: "Should I focus on a specific market? And if so, who should I focus on?"
Start With What You Already Have
To the first question: yes. Focus. The advantages above don't show up any other way.
To the second: most owners start by looking for a market that seems attractive from the outside. Start instead with where you already have an edge. Eric had built his without ever calling it a strategy.
Look for:
A concentration of clients you've already sold
Results you can point to — case studies, testimonials, numbers
Knowledge of or expertise in an industry your competitors don't have
Relationships that open doors — a rep from the space, a partner, customers who'll make introductions
Once you've got a candidate or two, run each one through four checks. We use a framework called PAID.
Pain. Do they have an urgent or expensive problem you solve?
Ability to pay. Is there money in this market? If you're picking the bottom rung, you'd better be planning to win on price and volume.
Identifiable. Can you find them from the outside — by vertical, by title, by some visible sign they have the problem? If you can't build a list of them, you can't point a team at them.
Delivery fit. Can you deliver what you're promising to this audience, well enough that the referrals start?
If a market clears all four and you've already got an edge there, you're done deciding. The next 6-9 months are about working it.
Adios,
Ray
Picked your market? Let's put a sales team on it.
Choosing the market is the decision. The compounding starts when someone works it every day.
At MSP Sales Partners, my team recruits, trains, and co-manages SDRs and full-cycle sales reps. We build the playbook, oversee the sales process, and coach the reps making calls and closing deals.
Tell us who you're going after and where sales is getting stuck. We'll tell you whether we're a fit.