Aim Small, Miss Small. Then Know When to Ignore It.

I've told reps to walk away from deals that didn't fit our ICP. The best ones didn't listen. They were usually right.

I'm a believer in "aim small, miss small." Keep the ICP tight and your win rate goes up. That discipline is real and it's earned. Most deals that don't fit, don't close.

But every sales org has a story about the deal nobody believed in. Wrong size company. Wrong vertical. Champion with no real power on paper. Every signal said walk. One rep didn't, and eighteen months later it's a reference account.

Ask that rep why they stayed and you rarely get a good answer. Not "the data suggested." Just: there was something there.

Here's the part that matters for this series. Our AEs run their deals through a Claude (Anthropic) coach built against our ICP. It reviews the specific deal they're working, one at a time, and tells them where it lines up with the profile and where it doesn't.

But the coach only knows what we've already seen. Pattern recognition over historical wins and losses. It has no way to spot a use case we've never sold into yet, because there's no pattern for it. That gap is where a rep's instinct earns its keep. "There's a deal here" is how an ICP actually evolves. Not from a model finding a new segment. From a rep sensing one before the data ever could.

And it's not always a perfect fit that wins it. Sometimes the prospect's problem has no clean solution anywhere, and you win by being the best of the bad options. No ICP screen catches that. Only a rep in the room does.

That doesn't mean everyone gets to go hunting outside the profile. You earn that right by making the case, not by being right every time. In our 1:1, if a rep wants to chase a deal the ICP says to skip, they walk me through it first. Why can we win this. What do we have that solves their problem even without a clean fit. That conversation is the whole point, whether the deal closes or not. The only rep who loses my trust is the one who skips the conversation and goes rogue on a hunch nobody heard.

Aim small, miss small still wins more often than it loses. Most reps who skip that conversation aren't sitting on a hidden gem, they're avoiding a hard talk about a deal that isn't there.

But the coach was built to protect you from the bad gut calls. It was never built to protect the good ones, or to find the use case it's never seen before. That's still on the human willing to make the case out loud, chasing the one the profile doesn't cover yet.

Keep the ICP tight. Trust the coach. Then know when to ignore it, and let that be how the ICP grows. Just don't be wrong :)