Do you know where your next 10 customers are going to come from? What are they going to look like? How will they use the product?

Founders and sales leaders often try to over-complicate the sales process by looking for new marketing channels or partnerships that unlocks a revenue layer for the business. We do this because it’s more fun to chase the “new” thing than it is to do the same thing over and over again.

How do we get more customers? Do something innovative, right?! Wrong. The simple, boring answer is usually the right answer for the business.

Your next 10 customers look like your last 10 customers.

‍The new customers are going to come from the same channels as the current customers. Those new customers are going to have the same firmographic characteristics, they are going to have the same pains, they are going to want the same products, and they are going to have the same objections.

This is a key insight for early-stage companies who are trying to make a big swing at the market. When you need to grow revenue 100%+ in a year, it feels frivolous to focus only on the next 10 customers. But you have to get the next 10 customers to get your next 100 customers.

You can’t get these stages mixed up. Once you have found a path to get your first 10 customers, go get another 10 in the same exact way. Do that over and over again until you have a clear path to getting 100 more customers, then you have the luxury of adding a new channel or finding a new revenue layer.

There’s a time and place to do the strategic work, but you have to earn the flexibility to focus on strategy. That flexibility comes from finding a core sales motion that works and repeating the process until you know how to scale it. Your leverage comes from having a strong core selling motion.

Let’s walk through the steps of getting your core sales motion in focus.

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‍Size Up The Market: TAM, SAM, SOM

Every business needs to know how many companies are in the market fo their product or services. How many total customers are there in the world that would buy your product at any scale. It’s OK if you aren’t ready to service some of those customers yet. The market size is meant to capture all segments of the market that you could ever serve.

Think through all future versions of the product and companies that are likely to spend money in your product’s category. We call this the Total Addressable Market (TAM). This is the total market size and spend that would be available to you if you were to consume 100% of the market share.

For example, if your product is an SMB product in the accounting and bookkeeping space, but you plan to move up-market to service enterprise customers eventually, then you would include all companies who spend money on accounting and bookkeeping. That’s probably a huge number, and that’s a good thing.

Understanding your TAM is helpful for your strategic planning. Having a big TAM is much better than having a small TAM. You can plan your product roadmap based on the part of the market that you want to pursue next. You can identify partners who help you cross-sell into the market. You need to understand TAM intimately if you are going to raise venture-capital to fund your business.

Sizing up your TAM is important, but it will not help you get your next 10 customers. There are two more layers sitting within your market that help you define your selling motion, and each is key to driving your revenue forward.

‍Serviceable Available Market (SAM) is the section of your TAM that you can sell to based on your current business model. This includes all the customers that are a fit for your product as it is today. These are the total number of customers that you could potentially sell to if you didn’t change your product at all.

The next two years of grow (and possibly more) come from closing the customers in your SAM. Your product messaging is targeted at this part of the market, and your core selling motion converts these prospects into happy customers. All of your demand generation should be targeted at your SAM to pull potential buyers into your marketing funnel.

‍Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) is the most important part of your TAM because this is what drives your revenue in the near-term. Your sales team is 100% focused on your SOM. These are the companies that you have put into your CRM, found the contact information, and are actively prospecting to turn into sales opportunities. These are the active lists of leads that the team is nurturing and pulling through the sales funnel.

Your SOM should only include companies that fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), the companies that have the pain that you are uniquely qualified to solve Your sales messaging is aligned with these prospects. You have referenceable customers and anecdotes that you can share with these prospects to help them see you as an authority in the space. You want to book demos with these prospects and earn their business.

Hubspot has a great visual to help you understand these three parts of your market:

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Define Your Ideal Customer Profile and Buyer Personas

You know that you need to have a clear understanding of your SOM, which requires you to define your ICP. Every company has an ideal customer profile in the early-stage. This is the original customer that you built your product to serve.

As the company scales, you may service other market-segments, but your ICP remains a core part of the business forever. Your ICP is the specific niche of the market that needs and is willing to pay for your products or services. The more specific you can make your ICP, the better.

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Here’s an example of a bad ICP: "We sell marketing services to small businesses."

Why is it bad? The product description is too broad and the market is too big. “Marketing services” could mean anything from SEO, to building websites, to field marketing. In the same way, “small businesses” could be family-owned restaurants, franchise car-washes, or your local accounting firm.

You cannot be all things to all people. You must have a position in the customer's mind. What do they think of when they think of your business? One of my favorite books on this topic is Positioning: The Batte for Your Mind. In the book Al Ries argues “The most difficult part of positioning is selecting that one specific concept to hang your hat on. Yet you must, if you want to cut through the prospect's wall of indifference.”

A “wall of indifference”. That’s the market. They do not care about you or your product or your brand. They only care about what you can do for your business. So help yourself out by narrowing your focus on what part of the market you really serve.

‍Here’s an example of a good ICP: "We are an outsourced-SEO agency that drives organic traffic and order volume for direct-to-consumer e-commerce companies with $5MM - $25MM in annual revenue."

Why is it good? You know exactly what this company does and who it serves. More importantly, you know what the company does NOT do and who it does NOT serve.

If you are an e-commerce company with more than $25MM in revenue, this is not the company for you.

Similarly, if you are a $10MM direct-to-consumer e-commerce company that needs someone to run the Advertising spend for a good ROI, this is not the company for you.

When you write your ICP, it’s good to exclude market segments that you could serve but that are not an exact match. You can still sell to these companies when they enter your sales funnel, but you should not include them when designing your GTM motion.

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How to define your Ideal Customer Profile

Select the core attributes that are relevant to your customer:

• Industry, industry-segment (be hyper-specific here)
• Geographic Location
• Annual revenue
• Employee headcount
• Current pains
• Current solutions for their pains
• Key filters (e.g. technologies used, recent funding, etc.)

Note: When writing down your ICP, it’s important to use the language that your customer uses. Always communicate with customers how they communicate within their business.

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How to choose your Buyer Personas

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Companies are made up of humans. Humans make decisions about what to buy for their business. It is not enough to only understand which companies you should sell to. You must also understand who the buyer is at the company.

Who makes the final decision? Who signs the check? Are there multiple people involved? These are the questions you must answer when building your core selling motion.

You should have at least two personas outlined for your ICP:
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The Economic Buyer - this is usually the owner or an executive at the company. This person has P&L responsibility and cares about delivering outcomes for the business. They are not involved in the day-to-day of using your product or services, but they have a material interest in the outcomes that your product or services deliver. They are going to be writing the check and serving as a sponsor for the successful implementation of the product.

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The Champion - this is the person takes the initiative to implement your product or service. This person goes through extraordinary effort to get the product purchased and implemented, usually fighting through entrenched internal resistance to deliver the solution for the business.

‍The champion is the most important person in every sales conversation.

For each persona, you want to understand:

- Business Title (LinkedIn Titles, for prospecting)

- Key Challenges

- What they do

- What they care about

- Key materials (sales and marketing collateral) that is relevant to the persona

- Benefits that the person (not the company) will experience by using your product or service

- Benefits that the company (not the person) will experience by using your product or service

- The Critical Event that will drive this customer to purchase the product.

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Pick Your Go-To-Market Approach

Now that you have your market sized-up, you understand your ICP, and you have chosen your buyer personas. It’s time to get in front of your customer and start selling.

There are many ways to approach the market, but make sure your market approach matches how your buyer wants to purchase your product. Some of the many ways to structure your GTM include:

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Outbound direct sales - the cold, outbound sales method. You are reaching out directly to good-fit prospects. This will put you on the exact customers you want, but your conversion rate will be low.

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Inbound direct sales - produce valuable content or build a community to drive eyeballs to your website. Use that website to pull prospects into your sales funnel. This will pull some good fit and some bad fit prospects into your funnel, but your conversion rate will be higher than outbound sales.

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Product-led sales - create free or low costs products that can be adopted easily at the end-user level of your ICP. Drive more product usage and upgrade customers to more expensive products. Use a sales team to call the most active users and convert them to paying customers. This is the hardest to build, but the conversion rate is high when it works.

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Channel sales - sell indirectly through channel partners or qualified resellers. Using channel sales makes your GTM more scalable, but you have less control over the sales motion and the messaging. Proceed with caution.

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As you grow your business, you will likely employ two or three of these selling motions. None of these options are necessarily better than the others, it’s all about what makes sense for your business and for your customer. So test what feels most natural until you find something that works.

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Find What Works and Do It Again

Once you find something that works and you can repeat it, the only thing to focus on is doing it again and again. Some companies are able to use a single core selling motion to get their first $10MM or $20MM in revenue. Seriously.

What’s most important is that you pick one GTM motion and you commit to it. Commit for at least 6 months without distraction. You have to really invest in making the selling motion work. You should start to see green chutes or signs of success early. Even if you aren’t getting a “yes” from your prospects, but you are having real sales conversations and you are getting good product feedback, this is a sign to keep pushing.

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When you start closing customers, that’s when you know you have something you can build on. So keep selling in the same way until you get your next 10 customers, and the next 10 after that. Don’t stop until you have the sales motion so thoroughly understood that you can hand it off to someone else to run it. Then train that person on the sales motion until they are as efficient as the founder or sales leader.

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Growing revenue doesn’t have to be fancy or innovative. In most businesses, it is the simple and boring work that drives the best outcomes for the business.