Your best fit accounts have no reason to buy

This week I spoke with the chair of a SaaS company, with a bit of AI in the mix, sitting a little under £9m in ARR. The call came off the back of their board meeting, which is usually what prompts these conversations. And I have had a few of them recently that run the same way. A win rate problem through 2025 as inbound ICP buyers thinned out. A narrowing of the ICP in 2026, with an ABM or outbound motion built to reach the best fit companies. And now, going into H2, not enough pipeline and weak engagement from the very accounts everything was rebuilt around.

It all looked good on paper. The numbers are not working.

I keep seeing the same two reactions to the same problem. There are fewer in-market buyers than the commercial model was built for, and the number still has to be hit.

The first reaction is to go broader. The company takes funding. The revenue target goes up, the sales target follows, and the spend on Marketing and Sales goes up with them. To create more pipeline, they go after more companies. New markets. New segments. New sizes of business. If fewer buyers are in market, find more markets to fish in.

The second reaction is to narrow. These are the companies whose inbound engine has carried them for years. An established product category and a capital-efficient motion built to capture demand: paid, organic, making sure the buyers who are in market and inside the ICP find you, land on the website, and ask for a demo or pricing. That engine is producing less. So the company studies its best customers, works out where conversion has been strongest, and tightens the ICP around them.

The second reaction is the smarter one. Understanding who gets the best value from you is entirely valid work. I would do the same.

Then comes the assumption that breaks it. The commercial model still has to hit the numbers. So the plan quietly assumes that ICP prospects who are not in market, who have not decided to change anything, will convert at the same rate as the buyers who were in market and had.

They won’t.

Narrowing the ICP was the right call.

Believing a better solution is enough to make them buy is the trap.

Better is not a reason to change

Underneath the narrowed ICP sits a belief that feels too obvious to examine: we improve their situation, so they will buy. It fails in one of two ways.

The first is not realising how much better you have to be. In a mature market you are replacing an incumbent, and the question is not whether you are better. You probably are. The question is by how much. Kunal Shah’s Delta 4 framework puts a number on it: people only commit to a change when the new way is at least four out of ten better than what they run today. A little better gets you the meeting. It is relevant, they will happily speak to you. It does not get you the change.

The second is misjudging the prospect’s current situation. From where you sit, their setup looks intolerable. You can see everything wrong with it. The prospect rates it a six out of ten. Not perfect. They would like it to be better. But it is not visceral pain, and a six does not clear the maths of change.

A few years ago I sat in a deal review with one of my Account Executives. Her largest opportunity for the next quarter was Condé Nast, and she was excited. Great engagement across the account, strongest with the Champion, but the Economic Buyer was in the room too. The feedback was positive. They liked the product and were convinced it was the best solution for them. Then I read the transcript from the last call and my heart dropped. “I wish this had been available two years ago.” Two years ago was when they bought their current solution. It sounds like a compliment. It is an obituary. As we dug into the deal, the pain and the consequence were not strong enough. They were interested in better, but their situation was not bad enough to turn interest into a commitment to change. The opportunity dropped out of the quarter, then out of the pipeline.

And a six does not become a two on its own. Something happens. A negative event. Someone new comes into the business. Regulation lands. An event moves the problem from tolerable, or invisible, to something they have to fix. Without one, a best fit account is just a company that resembles your customer base and has no reason to act. The accounts worth creating demand in are the ones already sitting at a two or a three, because there the job is getting in front of them and showing it.

This is where low converting pipeline comes from. Slow moving deals. Commercial drag. Not from targeting the wrong companies, but from never qualifying whether the prospect’s own view of their current setup is bad enough for them to want out of it.

Meanwhile the blame loop starts inside the building. Marketing says the segment is engaged. Sales says these are not strong enough leads. Both are right. The segment is engaged and not committed to change. Engagement without urgency is what moving from capturing demand to creating demand looks like when you keep the old motion.

The Delta Four ICP

The fix is not to abandon the narrowing. It is to finish it.

An ICP is not a firmographic profile. It is three things: the profile, the trigger, and the current setup. A best fit account on paper, with no trigger and a six out of ten incumbent, is not in your ICP. It is in your TAM.

I think of the finished version as the Delta Four ICP, applying Shah’s test to how you define the segment in the first place: the sub-segment or situation where a four out of ten improvement is actually true, and can be shown. It might be defined by the current technical setup. It might be a regulatory position. It might be a sub-segment where the incumbent is known to be weak. The work is identifying what needs to be true for the delta to exist, then building the motion around finding it. Four moves.

1. Qualify the setup, not just the fit. This is discovery doing real work. Ask the prospect to rate their current situation out of ten, and why. Ask them to describe what four out of ten better would look like. Ask what their current priority challenges are, the ones they are actively making a change on. Then run the answers through Alex Hormozi’s value equation: is this a priority challenge for them, will it deliver enough value, will they actually see that value, what is the probability they get there, and what effort and time will it take. If the answers add up to tolerable, you have learned early that you cannot take them on the journey. That is the qualification working, not failing.

2. Map the triggers, then hunt them. When someone chooses to change, it is because something happened. Work out which events do that in your narrowed ICP. Negative events. New leadership. Regulation. Then build your targeting around identifying the situations and events that are much more likely to lead to a change, rather than just hoping them to be the case. This is what makes demand creation a system instead of a wish.

3. Sell the change, not the selection. With a prospect who is pain unaware, or simply passive, the job is not helping them select your product. It is helping them buy into making a change and carrying that change through their organisation. That needs a different sales approach, different materials, and salespeople who are consultatively helping rather than just qualifying. It also needs altitude. Speak to the economic buyer, the person with the P&L impact who can sign off the budget without going for further approval. The risk with passive accounts is Sales going junior, into a champion who sees a better life but cannot buy your product.

4. Make closed lost tell the truth. Outside a genuine shock, the whole buying team let go, an economic freeze, a loss is either qualification or execution. No longer a priority and no budget mean the same thing: the conviction to change was never built, or was never there to build and the deal was qualified anyway. If your closed lost reasons read as a list of reasons it is not your fault, they are cover, not data.

What better converting pipeline actually is

The pipeline gets smaller. It also starts moving. Every deal in it has a trigger you can name, a setup you have scored, and an economic buyer in the room. And if you are a Chief Revenue Officer or a sales or marketing leader, the discipline pays off where it hurts most: you stop filling the system with deals that sit unresponsive for two quarters and then clear out when the prospect decides they have not changed after all. Deliver the sale, deliver the value, retain the customer. That is the test any pipeline has to pass, and it is set before the first meeting happens, not after.

The search for better converting pipeline does not start with a tighter account list. It starts with the question your firmographics cannot answer: what has to be true for this company to change?

Anyone who sees a better life will take a meeting.

Only someone who has to change will buy.

The rest is pipe dreams.

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