You're probably leaving money on the table right now. Not because you're bad at sales - but because you've drawn a line around your ideal customer profile that's way too tight.
This happens to most service businesses and agencies. You nail down who your "perfect" customer is, and then you only go after that person. It feels smart. It feels focused. But it's actually costing you deals every single month.
Let's say you're a B2B marketing agency, and you've decided your ICP is "mid-market SaaS companies with 50-200 employees in the growth stage." Sounds reasonable, right?
Here's what happens next: your lead list shrinks. Your pipeline shrinks. Your sales team sits around waiting for the perfect prospect instead of having real conversations with people who might actually buy.
The real issue is that you're confusing "who we work best with" with "who we can help." Those aren't the same thing.
Your ideal customer might be a mid-market SaaS company - fine. But that doesn't mean an early-stage startup, a larger enterprise, or a non-SaaS company can't benefit from what you do. They just might benefit in a different way.
When your ICP is too narrow, a few things happen:
The companies that grow fastest don't have narrow ICPs. They have a core ICP - the one that buys easiest and generates the most profit - and then they expand outward into adjacent segments that can also benefit from what they sell.
The key is to stay true to what you're actually good at while being realistic about who can use your services.
Look at the clients you have right now. Not just the ones you wanted - the ones you actually signed. What do they have in common? Write that down. That's closer to your real ICP than whatever you imagined.
If your core customer is "mid-market SaaS in growth stage," who else benefits from the problem you solve?
You don't need all of them. Pick two or three that make sense.
Run 50-100 emails to a new segment before deciding it's not worth it. One or two rejections doesn't mean the segment is bad - it means your angle was off.
A lot of agencies give up on a segment after minimal testing. Then they complain they can't find enough prospects. The problem wasn't the segment - it was the test.
Your core offer might stay the same, but the way you talk about it changes by segment. A problem that matters urgently to a startup might matter strategically to an enterprise. Lead with what matters to them.
Let's use a concrete example. Say you're a web design agency and your ICP is "e-commerce companies doing $2-10M in revenue." That's your sweet spot - you know how to build them stores that convert.
But you're only hitting 8-10 new clients per month, and you need 15. Here's how you expand without losing focus:
Now your addressable market just tripled. Your messaging changes slightly for each segment, but you're still selling the same core service. Your pipeline goes from dry to healthy.
Your ICP should guide your focus, not restrict your market. It's supposed to help you say yes to the right deals and no to the wrong ones - not eliminate 95% of potential customers.
If you're constantly hitting your ICP targeting and running out of prospects, that's not a sign you need to go deeper. It's a sign your ICP is too narrow.
The businesses that scale fastest have ICPs that are specific enough to focus their messaging but broad enough to keep their pipeline full. They know who they work best with, but they're not religious about it.
If you're doing cold email and you want to hit consistent client targets every month, you need a pipeline deep enough to support it. A narrow ICP doesn't give you that.
Expanding your ICP takes work. You need to test new segments, refine messaging for each one, and actually execute the outreach. Most teams don't do this because it feels easier to just tighten the targeting on their existing narrow ICP.
It's not easier. It's just slower growth.
If you want to expand your ICP and run consistent cold email campaigns to multiple segments without doing all the infrastructure and testing work yourself, that's exactly what we help service businesses and agencies do at BEC Growth. We build out your lead lists across your core ICP and adjacent segments, handle all the messaging strategy, run the campaigns, and manage replies. The result is usually 5-20+ new clients per month without you having to learn all the technical stuff or experiment on your own dime.
But whether you work with someone or do it yourself - stop letting a narrow ICP hold you back.
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