On a first call, founders want to talk about messaging. I want to talk about who is receiving it, and my opening question is always some version of the same one.
Who bought from you in the last twelve months, what did they pay, and who signed it off?
Not who you want to sell to. Who paid. The answers are usually less glamorous than the target market in the pitch deck, and they are the only evidence in the room that is not a theory.
Here is the rest of how I work through it.
Start from your own closed deals
Most targeting goes wrong at the first step, when somebody opens a lead tool and types in the job titles that sound senior.
Go the other way. Pull your past projects and find out who the actual decision-maker was in each one. In IT and software work it is often a VP of IT strategy, a head of IT, a director of IT, sometimes a CTO, and they are not interchangeable across company sizes. Then find companies that look like the ones already paying you, in size, in structure, in what they are trying to fix.
Your closed deals contain targeting information nobody else can copy. Use them before you use anybody's advice, including mine.
Deal size decides everything downstream
Two companies can run the identical campaign and get opposite verdicts on whether outbound works, purely because of what they charge.
Say a quarter of outbound brings you eight new clients. If you sell a $5,000 a month service on annual contracts, each of those clients is worth $60,000, so that quarter produced $480,000 in contracted revenue and you will call it the best decision you made all year.
Now sell $200,000 IT projects instead, which is a normal average in the software and IT consulting work I see. You do not need eight. One extra project a month is twelve a year and $2.4 million, assuming you can actually deliver twelve more projects, and that assumption is its own conversation.
Now go to the bottom of the ladder. If your average deal is $2,000 and nothing renews, those eight clients are $16,000, against a quarter of your sales team's attention and whatever the campaign cost to run. Below a certain deal size the arithmetic stops working, and no amount of clever copy moves that line.
Run this before you choose anything. It tells you how many conversations you need, which tells you how big the market has to be.
Is the market big enough to feed the machine?
This is the check almost nobody runs, and it is pure arithmetic.
Work backwards from calls. In the campaigns I have run, it takes somewhere between 150 and 250 contacted people to produce one booked call, and where you land inside that range depends on the niche, the country and the channel. So a target of 100 sales calls in a year means contacting roughly 20,000 people, and you cannot contact the same person twenty times.
Now go and count your market. If the niche you love contains 900 companies with one plausible buyer in each, you do not have a 20,000-contact market. You have a market you will exhaust in a quarter.
That rarely means walking away. It usually means changing the plan. Small markets need depth instead of width: several decision-makers per company, longer sequences, more patience, and usually a second geography. What you cannot do is run a volume strategy in a market that does not contain the volume.
Your own capacity is the other half of that sum. In one setup, each LinkedIn account we ran contacted about 2,800 people a month, and you add accounts to multiply it. Put the size of your market and your monthly capacity in the same spreadsheet and the decision tends to make itself.
Geography deserves a decision of its own
Two things I have seen repeatedly.
Local beats distant when everything else is equal. Being in the same city as your prospect changes the first message, because there is an implied possibility of meeting in person. For the financial advisory firm we worked with in Australia, that proximity was part of why conversations started at all.
And a second market can double a company without changing the product. For one UK client we targeted the UK and the United States together, and two months produced 144 leads, 59 booked calls and 8 closed deals at an average deal size of $70,000, which came to $560,000 in new revenue with more of the pipeline still open.
The test for adding a geography is whether your proof travels. Case studies from companies your new market recognizes, a time zone your team can hold calls in, and a legal or delivery setup that does not fall apart across a border. If your proof does not travel, you are starting from zero in the new country, and you should price the effort accordingly.
Distance itself is a constraint to plan around, not a wall. That same firm sat most of a working day ahead of my desk in Prague for the entire engagement, and it changed nothing about the results. It changed who took the calls, and when.
How fast the market decides
Two markets with the same size and the same deal value can behave completely differently, and that difference lives in the buying process.
The Australian firm I mentioned added around AUD 16.3 million in assets under management from the leads we generated, and most of it arrived slowly, because in that industry people do not move fast and the pipeline keeps paying out long after the campaign month ends.
Slow markets are perfectly good markets to sell into. They are a cash flow question you should answer before you commit, because you will be judging the campaign in month two while the market is planning to answer you in month five.
The condition underneath all of it
Your market has to want what you sell. Outbound reaches the right people efficiently, and if the offer does not land with them, it reaches them efficiently with an offer that does not land.
I learned this on my own business rather than a client's. For a couple of years I built an audience that could never become clients, and no targeting skill would have fixed that, because the problem was the match between what I sold and who I was talking to. That story is in the three times I aimed at the wrong buyer.
The markets where this works best have a few things in common: the buyer is a company rather than a consumer, the deals are large enough to justify a real sales conversation, and the decision-maker is findable by title. Software development, IT consulting, financial services, industrial and construction firms, and agencies selling to other businesses keep showing up on that list.
A short version you can run this week
Write down your last ten closed deals with the buyer title and the value against each one. Decide how many new clients next year needs to contain, and what that means in booked calls. Multiply the calls by 200 to get the number of people you have to contact. Then count whether your chosen market holds that many companies with that buyer inside them.
If it does not, you have two choices: widen the geography or go deeper per company. Choosing the message is downstream of all of this, which is why founders who start with copy spend so long wondering why it is not working. For the version of this argument about focus rather than size, there is the case for one offer and one audience, and for what happens once the market is chosen, what the first ninety days look like.