Cris S. Cubero
Some B2B SaaS founders are terrified of shutting a door. They see five potential markets where their product could work, and their instinct is to hedge their bets by chasing all of them at once. It feels like spreading the risk, but this is often a fatal misunderstanding of how growth works.
In reality, when you try to target three ideal customer profiles (ICPs) in parallel, you aren’t tripling your chances of success; you are simply making the fuzz of your brand louder.
To grow, you have to stop parallelizing and start sequencing.
If you split a limited budget across healthcare, finance, and retail, you will stay below the critical mass threshold in all three. You’ll end up being whisper-quiet in three rooms instead of being the loudest voice in one.
Chasing multiple markets is a form of strategic debt that eventually comes due. To pay it down and regain your velocity, you must move beyond high-level intent and install a specific operating rhythm.
Here is how you transition from parallel noise to sequential signal.
Winning a market is a military operation. You don't win a market by landing in five different countries at once. You win by owning a beachhead. To find yours, you must move beyond gut feeling and use a diagnostic ranking system.
Sit with your team and plot your potential markets on a simple 2x2 matrix:
Your new point of intent is the market in the top-right quadrant—the one with the highest current strength and the lowest friction. Own that neighborhood completely before you even think about moving inland.
A beachhead is a position of strength that allows you to dominate a sub-segment. There are three specific ways this focus accelerates your growth:
The reason a beachhead strategy is so efficient is because of internal resource constraints.
In a B2B SaaS company, your most valuable marketing asset is the unique industry expertise that lives in the heads of your CTO or founder. These are the only people capable of producing the insights that disturb a buyer's status quo.
The problem is that these experts have zero time. You might only get 15 minutes of their attention per week to fuel your entire marketing engine. If you are chasing three different ICPs simultaneously, you are forcing that expert to dilute their limited wisdom across three different industries. Because their focus is split, the resulting content usually comes out as generic, middle-out fluff. It tries to be safe enough for everyone, but as a result, it is relevant to no one.
By sequencing your markets, you allow your expert to go deep on one controversial opinion for one specific neighborhood. It is always more effective to have one sharp, polarizing insight that wins a niche than three bland blogs that the market ignores. When you focus your SME’s limited time on a single point of intent, you produce a higher "rate of signal" that actually moves the needle.
Founders often think focusing is slowing down. In reality, sequencing is mathematically faster. A better approach than 6 months of medium-strength effort is the 30-day sprint.
For 30 days, your entire engine—sales, marketing, and product—focuses on a single ICP.
If, after 30 days, you aren't finding a market that is starving for your solution, move the entire engine to the next ICP on your ranked list. You will reach your winner in 90 days instead of 180, and you will do it with half the burn.
If you learn, you can't lose; every 30-day sequence that doesn't convert is a deposit into your institutional knowledge.
A common concern is whether 30 days is enough time to judge a market, especially if your sales cycle is six months. The goal of the sprint isn't necessarily to close the deal; it’s to confirm the pain.
If you can't get a specific persona to engage with an insight or download a utility-based asset within 30 days of high-intensity focus, the problem isn't your sales cycle—it's your relevance. You aren't abandoning a beachhead; you are validating if the beach is worth the next five months of effort.
Similarly, focusing your product team on a sprint doesn't mean building deep, throwaway features every month. It means prioritizing high-leverage friction-reducers—like a specific integration or a reporting template—that validate if the market will actually use the product.
If you move to a new ICP, these improvements often remain as valuable modular additions rather than half-baked debt.
When your team is trying to execute against three or four different targets, the marketing becomes heavy and expensive. This is execution fuzz. You can spot it by looking at two specific symptoms:
The fastest path to $10M ARR isn't doing more things; it’s doing one thing with enough intensity to actually reach critical mass. This requires the discipline to ensure your intent is crystal clear before you let the execution start.
Sequencing requires a change in how you manage team morale and existing assets. If you switch focus after 30 days, your team might feel like they are "quitting." To prevent this, frame the pivot as a graduation of insight. You haven't failed; you have successfully mapped a minefield.
If you have 200 leads across five industries and pivot to focus on one, you don't let the others rot. You move them into a low-touch, automated nurture track. This keeps the pilot light on for those secondary markets while 100% of your manual, high-energy resources (sales calls and expert content) are directed at the primary beachhead.
Sequencing does not kill your long-term organic authority. In fact, deep, concentrated content in one niche for 30 days builds topical authority faster than sporadic posts across five topics.
While the conversion might happen three months later, your attribution model should track the initial signal of the sprint. When a healthcare lead finally closes in March, you credit the January "healthcare sprint."
Are you spreading your marketing budget across too many targets? In this masterclass, Kalungi Co-founder Stijn Hendrikse explains why sequencing—owning one beachhead at a time—is the fastest path to triple-digit growth.
You’ll learn:
Most SaaS teams lack focus, not ideas. If you're ready to stop parallelizing and start sequencing your path to $10M+ ARR, we invite you to apply for a T2D3 Growth Workshop.
In this focused 1:1 session, we will:
Apply for Your T2D3 Growth Workshop here
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