Pilot Buyers in Adjacent Segments—Test Near, Not Far
- Cormac Repman
- 9 hours ago
- 3 min read
Pilot Buyers in Adjacent Segments—Test Near, Not Far
I've spent the last few years building a B2B sales service, and one pattern keeps showing up in our discovery calls: founders and operators tell me their biggest wins come from adjacent markets, not distant ones.
Most expansion strategy looks like this. You nail your core segment. Then you look at your TAM and think bigger. You pick a segment that's far away from where you started—different industry, different buyer type, different use case. It feels like ambition. It usually feels like failure.
What I've learned from actual customer conversations is simpler: buyers evaluate new vendors against the internal benchmarks they already know. When you're adjacent to their world, they have a reference point. When you're distant, they don't.
Recently I spoke with the owner of a medical billing company that has twenty years in the space. Their referral business completely dried up post-COVID, and they need a new lead source urgently. The business is solid, the problem is real, but the vendor decision has hit a wall.
Here's what matters: this buyer was quoted 250 to 500 dollars per meeting by a competitor. We quoted 1000 to 5250 dollars per meeting. The gap is real. It's a blocker.
But here's the insight that kept coming up: the buyer kept asking about one specific angle that our other clients in adjacent fields have already proven works. Revenue recovery. Not just standard billing cleanup, but going after rejected claims and helping doctors recover money they didn't know they lost.
Why does that matter? Because this buyer understands the healthcare ecosystem. They know medical practices. They know the pain of lost revenue. When we position this as a revenue recovery play instead of a billing play, it's not a foreign concept dropped into their world. It's something they already see working in their adjacent ecosystem. It's something their peers are using. It's something they can benchmark against.
If we'd gone to, say, a software company, and tried to pitch them on our lead generation service as a "revenue recovery tool," they'd smile politely and never call back. The context doesn't exist. Their peer group doesn't use it. There's no internal benchmark.
This is where most expansion strategies fail. We test too far away. We think bigger means different. But buyers don't care about bigger. They care about credible.
Credibility for a new vendor comes from one place: can I see this working in a world I understand? Have my peers in a similar business tried it? Do I have an internal reference point?
Adjacent segments give you that. Healthcare providers are different from healthcare billing companies, but they're close enough that billing companies can point to healthcare providers and say, "That's my peer group. That's what works for them." Finance teams understand audit firms. Retail understands quick-serve restaurants. Insurance brokers understand benefits consultants.
Distant segments don't have that bridge. Your nuclear power plant doesn't benchmark against pharmaceutical labs. Your logistics company doesn't look at fashion retail for vendor decisions. The peer groups are different. The problems are different. The internal benchmarks disappear.
So when you're scaling, the move isn't to look further. It's to look next door. Find the adjacent vertical that shares the same buyer psychology, the same peer networks, the same internal reference points. Prove it works there. Then expand outward.
The billing company conversation might work. Might not. But if it does, the next conversation with a revenue cycle consultant becomes a lot easier. And the one after that, with a hospital credentialing team, becomes easier still. Each step is adjacent. Each step has a peer benchmark. Each step is closer than the last.
That's not small thinking. That's smart scaling.
Comments