Sales leadership · 2 min read

Who I Sell To, and Who I Don't

The fastest way to sell more is to stop spending time on buyers who cannot become good customers.

I first encountered the idea of deliberately filtering your target market in Kellogg’s Mastering Sales program. The principle is simple: decide who you are selling to before you start, instead of selling to whoever answers. Here is what that has looked like in practice for me.

Filter on budget first

In 2018 my first reply to a prospect who wanted to advertise on topseos was: “What is the budget and the requested category(ies)?”

A different prospect that year kept asking what results I would guarantee before he would name a number. I would not guarantee anything, and I told him the budget had to come first, because the recommendation depends on it. A buyer with $1,000 a month and a buyer with $7,500 a month should not be offered the same thing.

In 2024 I proposed an arrangement to an agency owner: the #1 position on one of our comparison sites, $15,000 to $25,000 a month of Google Ads run by him, and 15 percent of the deals it closed for us. He told me he did not have anywhere near that budget. My reply:

Call me when you have that kind of money bro! You want to close biz, you have got to invest…

I still got on a call with him the next day. But the filter had done its job: we both knew where the gap was before we spent an hour on it.

Price the buyer, not the form

When a business signed up to advertise on CrowdReviews with the budget left open, my assistant would forward the sign-up and I would set the number. In September 2024 a small software firm came through, and my reply was just:

350

In December 2024 the sign-up was a much larger software company, one I knew and was about to buy from myself. My reply started with an expletive and ended:

this is like a mini-enterprise. 2500/month

Same form, same product, a seven-fold difference in price. The filter is knowing which kind of buyer is in front of you.

Go where the money is already being spent

In 2023 our CrowdReviews team was prospecting software companies listed on Capterra, a larger competitor. I rewrote the rep’s opening message to say so directly:

I just saw your profile on <Capterra>. I would really like the opportunity to work with you and get you folks featured on CrowdReviews.com.

A company already paying to be listed on a comparison site has already decided that this kind of visibility is worth money. You are not selling the category to them, only the alternative.

What I still use

Know the budget before you recommend anything. Price to the buyer in front of you. And prospect where buyers are already spending on what you sell.