Grow 10x by saying no more often

Grow 10x by saying no more often

One of our favourite questions to ask in a first meeting with a new client is this:

What decision are we making today so that, ten years from now, Netflix makes a series about your company’s extraordinary growth?

The answer is almost never: serve as many different customers as possible, chase every opportunity that might make money, launch a new service the moment someone asks for it. Nor is it: make sure you never have to turn anyone away.

The answer is almost always**: focus.**

Doing what you’re genuinely good at. Getting even better at it. Specialising. Pointing your marketing at it. And making sure that, for a particular group of customers or a specific problem, you become the first name that comes to mind.

Which also means saying no more often.

TL;DR

Try to be everything to everyone, and you end up being nobody’s obvious choice. Specialisation helps you learn faster, get better, explain more clearly why customers should choose you, and charge higher prices. It also makes marketing and sales a great deal simpler. Growth demands clarity about what you do. But deciding what you’ll no longer do is at least as important.

The lure of revenue

Say you run a software company that’s doing very well in logistics. Out of the blue, a large healthcare organisation gets in touch. They’d love to use your product, but it will need a few changes. Sounds like a nice piece of business from a client who’ll definitely pay. Why would you say no?

Because that one project may cost you far more than the hours you put into it. Your developers have to build functionality your other customers don’t need. Your account manager has to get up to speed on a new market. You’re building new knowledge, but it doesn’t make you any better in the market where you’re already successful.

Specialisation makes you better

Solve the same kind of problem a hundred times and you’ll be better at it than a company that has solved it five times while doing twenty other things. You recognise situations faster, you know where projects tend to go wrong, you have better examples to point to, your processes get more efficient, and your product or service fits your customers more closely with every project. That kind of accumulated experience is hard to copy.

It creates a flywheel: because you’re specialised, you attract more customers like the ones you already have. That gives you more experience and makes you better at what you do, which in turn makes it easier and easier to win new customers.

Customers would rather buy from a specialist

Imagine you’re a manufacturer with a tricky problem on a specific machine. Who do you call? A general engineering consultancy that “helps organisations improve their technical performance”? Or the company that specialises in exactly that type of machine and can tell you: “We’ve solved this problem at 28 other plants over the past three years”?

Probably the second one.

That holds true in almost every B2B market. The more specific and important the problem, the more attractive proven experience becomes.

It also shortens the sales cycle. You need less time to convince a prospect that you understand their world, because your website, case studies and references have already done that for you.

Specialists can charge more

Specialisation also makes price less important. A client isn’t just paying for your hours. They’re paying for the likelihood that you’ll solve the problem quickly and properly.

A generalist can say: “We think we can help you with this.”

A specialist can say: “We know this problem. We know why it happens, and we’ve solved it many times before.”

That difference is worth real money.

The bigger the problem, the more proven expertise outweighs the lowest hourly rate.

After all, nobody goes looking for the cheapest heart surgeon.

Marketing gets a lot easier, too

Focus has one more benefit: it makes marketing much simpler.

Compare these two messages:

“We help companies grow with innovative solutions.”

versus:

“We help European bicycle manufacturers reduce unplanned production downtime.”

With the second one, you know instantly who the company works for and what problem it solves.

That makes almost everything easier. You know which topics to write about. Which case studies to publish. Which search terms matter. Which events to attend. Which companies to approach. And, just as importantly, which ones you can safely ignore.

Instead of spreading your marketing budget thinly across ten markets, you use it to become more and more visible in one.

Focus makes sales more scalable, too

The same goes for sales. If every new customer needs a different story, different knowledge and a different approach, selling stays labour-intensive. Every opportunity starts almost from scratch.

With a sharp focus, things start to repeat. The same problems come up. The same objections. The same competitors. The same questions. The same examples that prove your solution works.

That doesn’t just make you better at selling; it also makes it much easier to onboard new salespeople. You end up with a sales machine that keeps perfecting one trick, rather than a group of smart people who have to work out from scratch, every single time, how to close a deal.

Saying no hurts

The hard thing about focus is that, in the short term, it often feels wrong.

You’re turning down a customer who wants to pay you. You’re walking away from a market that looks attractive. A competitor may well land a deal you deliberately passed on.

But strategy isn’t just about choosing what you’ll do. Above all, it’s about deciding what you won’t do.

That’s the real test.

Any organisation can say it wants to focus on three markets. It only gets serious when a fourth market comes knocking with an attractive deal, and you still say no.

So what’s your Netflix series about?

Let’s go back to that first question.

Imagine your company is ten times bigger ten years from now. Netflix really is making a series about it. What’s the story?

At Marketing is Mensenwerk, we help companies make those choices with real clarity. Because before you decide which campaigns, content or channels you need, you first have to be clear about what you want to be known for, and by whom. Only then does it make sense to turn up the marketing volume.   Frequently asked questions

Does focus mean you can only offer one product or service?

No. What matters is that there’s a clear common thread. Several services can sit side by side perfectly well, as long as they help the same audience with closely related problems.

Won’t specialising cost you revenue?

Sometimes, in the short term. After all, you’ll be deliberately letting go of work that doesn’t fit your chosen direction. The idea is that it pays you back over the longer term: a stronger position, better-fit customers, more efficient marketing and sales, room for higher prices and, ultimately, more revenue.

How do you know what to focus on?

Look for where three things overlap: what you’re demonstrably good at, which customers get a lot of value from it, and where there’s a big enough market. Pay particular attention to your best existing customers and projects. A large part of the answer is often already there.

Can you broaden your focus later?

Absolutely. Focus doesn’t mean serving the same market forever. From a strong position, you can certainly expand into adjacent markets, countries or services. The difference is that you’re expanding from strength, rather than trying to keep ten plates spinning from day one.