A business that wants to grow faces a tempting instinct: reach more people. Cast a wider net. Get the message in front of everyone who could possibly say yes.
It feels like progress. Usually it isn’t.
I worked with a contracting firm whose total addressable market was, almost literally, everything. Every building has electrical work. Every company, every store, every landlord, every institution was a potential client. The owner said it with real and justified pride:
“Every company is our target. That’s what’s so great about us.”
— a partner at a business that could serve almost anyone
He was right about the business. He was describing a trap about the campaign.
”Everyone” is not a target
When you aim a new outreach effort at everyone, you don’t get a little bit of traction everywhere. You get diffuse, weak signal nowhere. A message broad enough to fit every audience is sharp enough for none of them. And when something does work, you can’t tell what worked — which segment, which message, which reason. The result is unreadable, and an unreadable result teaches you nothing.
A first outbound sales motion or B2B go-to-market campaign has one real job: produce a win you understand well enough to repeat. Breadth works directly against that. Focus is what makes a result legible.
Narrow is how you build momentum
So you start narrow — deliberately. Not the biggest market. The one slice where value and winnability are both highest: the customers worth the most, who are also the most likely to say yes.
You concentrate everything there. You win a few times. And those early wins compound in a way a scattershot launch never does — they give you proof, references, a message refined against real responses, and the plain confidence that the thing works. Then you expand, from a position of strength, into the wider market that was never going anywhere.
This isn’t only a sales idea. It’s the same logic as a research prototype proven in one clinical setting before it scales, or a product validated with one user group before it opens to the public. Start concentrated, learn cleanly, expand on evidence. Breadth is a reward you earn, not a setting you choose on day one.
Choosing the slice
In practice, narrowing is a few concrete decisions. Define the first segment by two filters at once — what is most valuable and what is most winnable — and resist widening it just because the wider market looks bigger. It is bigger. That isn’t the question yet. Suppress everyone else, for now, on purpose. And give the focused effort a real, bounded window, so you are measuring one clear thing instead of averaging ten blurry ones.
The wide-open market is a genuine asset. A business that can serve almost anyone has somewhere to grow for years. But “we can reach anyone” is the end of the story, not the start of it. The start is small, sharp, and specific — because the fastest way to earn the whole market is to stop, at first, trying to.
Peppermint Labs is a Toronto-based go-to-market and outbound sales consulting firm. We help B2B founders and established businesses build pipeline systems that are focused enough to learn from and owned enough to last.