Video
Signs You’ve Outgrown Your Brand—and What to Do Next
Spot when your brand no longer fits your growth, and learn steps to realign story, strategy and decisions for clearer sales and stronger momentum.
Summary
When win rates slide and cycles stretch, the reflex is to push harder on sales or broaden targeting. More often, the issue is an ICP that’s gone static. The turning point is letting dynamic fit steer focus and governance. That’s when conversion improves and margins hold.
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In this video, Preetum Mistry (CEO & Managing Partner) asks: is your ideal customer profile holding back growth?Our Perspective
What this means for leaders navigating growth, change or transformation in their organisation.
The Quiet Drift
Growth rarely falls off a cliff; it drifts. The ideal customer profile (ICP) that once fit perfectly can become tight at the shoulders without anyone noticing. Pipelines look healthy, yet conversion ebbs in familiar segments. Sales cycles elongate as new approvers appear. Meanwhile, product and service teams feel stretched in directions that weren’t on last year’s plan.
What’s changing isn’t just who buys—it’s how they buy, what they value, and how your offer is judged against a shifting set of alternatives. Treating the ICP as fixed turns a nuanced market into a static picture, and your operating model into a guessing game.
Dynamic Fit, Not Dogma
Dynamic fit reframes ICP from a one-off choice to a disciplined, living practice. It’s not a binary decision between defending what works and gambling on a new segment. It’s a sequence: learn fast at the edges, codify what strengthens your core, and redirect the rest. That sequence concentrates resources where they compound.
In our experience with leadership teams at inflection points, dynamic fit creates clarity without shrinking ambition: you protect what’s truly profitable, you explore where value is migrating, and you retire customers you can no longer serve well. The outcome is tempo, not turmoil—tighter targeting, cleaner pricing, and product bets aligned to where your growth is most likely to come from.
Telltale Signals
The signs you’ve outgrown yesterday’s ICP arrive quietly. Watch for patterns, not anecdotes:
- Win rates dip in segments that used to be dependable.
- Sales cycles lengthen and draw in unfamiliar decision-makers.
- Renewals lean on deeper discounting to close.
- Custom work and support load rise, nudging margins down.
None of these alone proves a misfit. Together, they indicate your value story and your buyer have moved out of sync.
Leadership Moves
When signals cluster, elevate the conversation from sales tactics to strategic fit:
- Re-baseline segments using hard indicators monthly: win rate, cycle length, expansion, and discount depth.
- Tier customers with must-haves and red flags, and embed those rules in pipeline stages, content briefs, and pricing tests.
- Align governance so product, pricing, and sales decisions privilege the top tier—and treat misaligned demand as a deliberate “no.”
This isn’t about shrinking your market. It’s about removing noise so your best customers, and the ones you’re earning next, get the focus they deserve.
Evidence And Tempo
Small adjustments, made often, beat big changes made late. Sales Management Association reports that organisations refreshing their ICP quarterly generate about 9.7% more pipeline than those updating annually or less—evidence that cadence compounds. The point isn’t the spreadsheet; it’s the operating rhythm that flows from it.
Keep the ICP dynamic and you tighten the loop between market reality and executive choice. The advantage goes to leaders who treat customer fit as a moving frontier—revisited with discipline as the market redraws the map.
Sources:
- Using customer data for ICP feedback loop — Sales Management Association
Further Resources
Curious how this applies in your market? We’re speaking with leaders across industries every week. Let’s talk.
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