Counter Sales Seasonality: Expand Into Adjacent ICPs
- Cormac Repman
- 16 hours ago
- 3 min read
I noticed our pipeline followed a predictable pattern: strong in spring and summer, then a cliff in late fall. Talking to my team, we realized why. Our core customers were in finance and tax operations. Their buying cycles stopped the moment they closed their books for the year.
That was a problem we couldn't solve with better sales technique. We had to expand.
The insight was simple: find industries with opposite seasonal patterns. So we started testing adjacent ICPs where budget cycles peak exactly when ours die. Supply chain teams, for example, make major platform decisions after their Q4 inventory close. Same with audit operations teams who spend heavily in January through March.
Here's what we learned from actually running this experiment.
First, you need the right technical hook to reach these adjacent buyers. We shifted our targeting from the original profile to companies under 200 employees with 10+ engineers. Smaller companies make faster decisions and don't get bogged down in procurement theater. The engineers become our champions. We weren't pitching the CFO anymore. We were showing engineers exactly what they could build.
This meant everything upstream had to change. Our website had zero credibility with this new audience. They'd search our company and find mixed online reviews, skepticism from people who'd never actually used the product. We couldn't out-talk that. We needed proof.
We started stacking video case studies and testimonials directly on our core value pages. Not as an afterthought. Embedded. First thing you see. This audience doesn't trust marketing fluff. They trust engineers talking to engineers about real workflows.
The second unexpected win was content depth. We'd been making short tactical videos. For this new market, we shifted to longer format content: 30 to 60-minute deep dives on specific technical problems they actually solve. We measured YouTube directly and saw a 37.5x return on ad spend. That's not vanity metric territory. That meant the content was actually reaching the right people and moving them.
But here's the practical part: we didn't abandon our seasonal market. We sandbagged the large enterprise deals for Q1 when their budget resets anyway. Meanwhile, the smaller technical buyers we were now reaching bought consistently year-round. The net result was smoother quarterly revenue instead of the dramatic swings we'd lived with before.
The math works because these markets are genuinely inverse. Finance teams close their books in November and December. Supply chain teams are in full capital allocation mode. There's no overlap. You're not competing with yourself for the same budget dollars. You're filling a void in your pipeline with a market that has opposite seasonality.
The hard part wasn't strategy. It was execution. Targeting smaller companies meant different qualification criteria. Sales cycles were shorter but more numerous. We needed higher-conviction social proof because these teams self-educate heavily before they even take a call. Our messaging had to shift from "enterprise reliability" to "technical flexibility and speed."
We're six months into this test. The seasonal cliff is real but flatter now. We've taken maybe 35-40% of the revenue that would have come during Q3 Q4 and redistributed it across the year. Pipeline velocity stayed consistent instead of dropping forty percent.
The insight isn't complicated: if your market is seasonal, find a market with opposite seasonality and test if you can genuinely serve it. Don't force it just to fill a gap. But if there's a real problem you solve for an adjacent buyer with a different buy cycle, you've just solved your seasonality problem without fighting your original market.
Comments