Strategy · 4 min read
The year I said no to almost every client I could have had.
Trying to serve everyone is not ambition. It is the absence of strategy.
When I started my own consulting business, I sold competitive intelligence services to anyone who would listen: any industry, any company size, any topic. I was hungry for clients. I couldn’t afford to be selective, or so I told myself.
Slowly, I discovered the generalism was costing me more than it earned me. Margins were thin. The cost of winning each project was high, because I was starting from zero in every new context: learning a new industry, building a vocabulary I didn’t have yet, establishing credibility that took time I couldn’t spare. Every pitch was a cold start.
Eventually I made a decision that felt like contraction and turned out to be the opposite. I focused on two sectors: consumer goods, where I sold competitive intelligence through War Games workshops, and financial services, where we built ongoing intelligence services. I stopped chasing everything else.
Two industries, not zero, changed everything.
The effect was almost immediate. By becoming genuinely expert in two industries, I could walk into a sales conversation with a point of view instead of a pitch. I understood their language, their competitive dynamics, their specific anxieties. I could demonstrate real value before we had agreed on terms. We eventually worked with eighty percent of the large financial services companies in South Africa.
80%
Of the large financial services companies in South Africa eventually became clients
70%
Of the content on any given project was consistent across clients, once the approach was codified
There was a second benefit I didn’t see coming. Once we had codified our approach in a focused market, roughly seventy percent of the content on any given project was consistent across clients: the methodology, the frameworks, the industry context. Only thirty percent was truly bespoke. Focus had turned what felt like a custom service business into something that could actually scale.
Narrowing the market didn’t narrow the pipeline. It narrowed the cold start.
The part that surprises most founders
Every new conversation in consumer goods or financial services began from a position of already understanding the person across the table: their pressures, their politics, what a win looked like for them specifically. Nothing had to be relearned. That is not a research advantage. It is a trust advantage, and it compounds.
What “focus” actually buys you.
Most B2B companies don’t lack ambition. They lack a genuine choice about where to compete, and then the discipline to walk away from everything outside it. Saying yes to a lead outside your focus feels like growth. It is usually the opposite: a new industry to relearn, a new set of anxieties to discover from scratch, a new vocabulary to build under deadline, on a deal that will likely never repeat.
The companies that grow sustainably are almost always the ones that made a genuine choice about where to compete, and committed to it fully, even when saying no felt expensive in the moment.
The takeaway
How many of your last ten deals were with buyers whose world you already understood cold?
Versus how many required you to relearn a market from zero?
If it is mostly the second, you don’t have a pipeline problem. You have a focus problem, and it is costing you more than the deals you are winning.
Pipeline full of cold starts? Let’s work out where you actually have the right to win.