Where Not to Play – The Power of Strategic Exclusion

For a successful Go To Market, it’s essential to not only decide where to play but also where not to play. This idea is central to the “Playing to Win” framework developed by Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley. It makes perfect sense but is infrequently implemented – at least not consistently and systemically.

The advantages of determining where not to play and determining strategic exclusion or sales ‘no-fly zones’ are clear. 

By excluding specific markets or segments, you can sharpen your focus on the most promising opportunities. A tightly focused approach allows for better customer understanding and more robust competitive positioning, leading to a better win rate.

This helps keep Sales out of trouble and boosts their productivity.  By describing unsuitable use cases that can be qualified out, the forecast will not be cluttered with deals that will either never close or close to a very poor outcome for both you and the customer. 

Being prescriptive about where not to play can also help avoid overextension. The temptation to grow by chasing every potential market opportunity can be overwhelming, but the accompanying drain on energy and resources can, and often does, result in failure.

Implementing Where Not to Play

The question is, how should this best be accomplished? 

It’s actually straightforward and forms part of what we call the Brilliant Basics of a B2B GTM motion. When profiling your ideal customer, look for factors that exclude prospects and incorporate exclude logic in your ICP.

Unacceptable Behaviour

Most of the factors in the table above, particularly firmographics and technographics, are well known, but what about ‘attitudes and behaviours’ – sometimes known as psychographics?

This set of attributes addresses how organizations think about technology and requires the construction of what Gartner has termed an enterprise persona, which ‘reflects the attributes of your ideal target customer — at an organizational level.’  That sounds complex, but it is simply an additional persona constructed from the collective priorities of the buying team. 

In the same research (The Enterprise Persona — Defining Your ICP, 2022), Gartner describes an unacceptable enterprise persona which looks at attributes from the perspective of ‘if this is the case, this is not a good target for us.’, which is of course a Where Not to Play.

Exclusion Factors: Too High, Too, Low Missing.

To implement a successful “where not to play” strategy, consider the following factors, bearing in mind that some factors that are too low can also be missing and vice versa.

Living With Your Choices

Assuming you take the time to identify where not to play, it can be hard to live with because of the strict discipline it requires. It’s easy for your strategic exclusions to fly out of the window with the first big outlier opportunity that presents itself – it is just too tempting. 

However, the long-term consequences can be dire – confused sales, distracted engineers, and overworked support are all distinct possibilities. Worst case, the rogue deal ‘proves’ a Play To Win that is just plain wrong and takes the company on a most unprofitable adventure in the Sea of Strategic Exclusion. This outcome is described in our article The Dangerous Allure of the Black Swan Customer.

Wrap Up

I’ll conclude with three quotes from Roger Martin. The first describes the nature of strategy – which is making choices.  

“Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.”

The second describes the nature of those choices – which include defining Where Not to Play.

“As you work through your choices, recall that where-to-play choices are equally about where not to play. They take options off the table and create try focus for the organization”

 The third, a pithy take on prioritisation, seems an appropriate last word on the subject:

“If everything is a priority, nothing is. There is no point in trying to capture all segments. You can’t. Don’t try.”