The Deer Hunter
Method.
Most growing firms are hunting the wrong animal. Here's how to figure out which one you've been chasing — and how to start landing the clients you actually built your firm to serve.
Mark Suster's Rabbits,
Deer, and Elephants.
A nod to venture capitalist and writer Mark Suster, whose framework on hunting the right-sized client is one of the most useful things ever written about B2B sales strategy.
Suster's idea is simple: every business has a natural prey size. The mistake most firms make is hunting the wrong one — either chasing clients so small they barely cover costs, or swinging at clients so large the sales cycle drags on for a year and still dies in procurement.
He breaks it down into three categories. Rabbits are small, fast, and easy to catch — but you have to catch a lot of them to survive, and the chase never stops. Elephants are enormous and a single kill could feed you for a year — but they're slow to move, require a small army to bring down, and most firms don't have the infrastructure to handle one if they actually land it.
Deer are the sweet spot. Big enough to matter. Attainable with the right approach. And if you build your firm to hunt deer consistently, you stop running on a hamster wheel and start building something that compounds.
Rabbits
Small, fast-moving clients with low contract values. Easy to close, but you need a lot of them — and the chase never ends.
Deer
Mid-to-large clients with meaningful contract values. Require real positioning and a deliberate approach — but they're closeable, and they compound.
Elephants
Enterprise-level clients with massive potential — and massive complexity. Most firms aren't built to close or service them, even if they could get in the room.
You know you should be
hunting deer. But your
whole operation is built for rabbits.
This isn't a criticism. It's how almost every firm gets built. You started with whoever would say yes. You refined your offer around the clients you could actually close. You built a content strategy, a sales process, and a messaging system around the buyer who was showing up — not the one you wanted to attract.
And it worked. You grew. You built a team. You have a real business.
"The problem isn't that you can't close deer. The problem is that your messaging is still calling rabbits — and deer don't respond to rabbit calls."
The senior decision-maker with a real budget and a real problem doesn't see themselves in your content. Your email sequences were written for someone three levels below them. Your LinkedIn presence speaks to practitioners, not the people who hire them. And so the deer walk past — not because you're not good enough, but because you're not speaking their language.
Four steps to shift
who walks through your door.
This is the process we run with every Upmarket Authority client. In order. Because the order matters.
Rework the Ideal Client Profile
We start by identifying who your deer actually is — not who you've been attracting, but the senior decision-maker you're built to serve. We build their precise profile: their title, their budget authority, their internal pressures, and the exact language they use when they're describing the problem you solve. Most firms have never done this rigorously. It changes everything downstream.
Rework the Offer
Once we know who the deer is, we look at how your offer is positioned. Often the underlying service is exactly right — but it's packaged and priced for a rabbit buyer. We reframe the offer around the outcomes your deer actually cares about, at a price point that signals the right tier of engagement. This isn't about raising prices arbitrarily. It's about making sure the offer reads as peer-level to the buyer you want.
Shift the LinkedIn Messaging
LinkedIn is where your deer spends time. But most firms' LinkedIn presence is built for the practitioner audience — the end-user, not the buyer. We overhaul the content strategy, the profile positioning, and the outreach language to speak directly to the decision-maker. Every post, every comment, every connection request is aimed at the same target: making the right person think 'this is exactly what I've been looking for.'
Upgrade the Email Marketing
Email is where the relationship deepens. Most firms' sequences were written when the ICP was different — and they show it. We audit and rewrite the sequences that matter most: the nurture sequence, the re-engagement sequence, and the outbound sequence for warm prospects. Then we build a weekly email rhythm that keeps your deer warm, demonstrates authority, and creates the conditions for an inbound conversation.
Same firm. Same expertise.
Different buyer. Different result.
When the ICP is right, the offer is positioned correctly, the LinkedIn content speaks to the decision-maker, and the email sequences are aimed at the right tier — the pipeline doesn't just grow. It changes shape.
The calls that come in are from people who already understand what you do, who it's for, and roughly what it costs. The sales cycle shortens because the buyer is already pre-sold on the category. The close rate improves because you're not trying to convince someone who was never a fit.
You stop chasing rabbits. You start hunting deer. And the firm you've been building starts to look like the one you had in mind when you started.
If you know you're built
for a better client,
let's go find them.
The application takes 5 minutes. If it's a fit, you'll hear from Jeff personally within 1–2 business days.