Narrow to Win: Jeanette Renshaw on Target Markets That Actually Convert

Jeanette Renshaw of GrowthX opened the Go-To-Market Summit with a bold truth: most founders aim too wide and sell to the wrong audience. In a high-energy, no-fluff session, Jeanette explained why getting ultra-specific about your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is the most powerful step a startup can take in its go-to-market strategy.

Rather than chase broad categories like “mid-market SaaS” or “enterprise fintech,” Jeanette challenged attendees to get shockingly narrow, as in, 10 to 99 entities narrow. She urged founders to move past surface-level demographics and dig into the behavioral and contextual traits that signal a genuine buyer. For example, it’s not just about targeting “regional banks,” but the subset of banks actively hiring heads of digital innovation or publicly committed to modernizing their infrastructure. That’s how you spot an early adopter.

Jeanette also reframed one of the most common phrases in startup postmortems: “no market need.” According to her, this is often just code for “we ran out of money before we figured out how to sell it.” Most founders do build for a real problem; they just fail to find and engage the right buyer fast enough. That’s what a great ICP helps solve.

She broke product-market fit into four tangible pillars:

1) narrowly defined ICP and use case,

2) sticky customer value (they’d hate to lose it),

3) repeatable sales motion, and

4) metrics that prove efficiency (like CAC to LTV).

But she made one thing clear: early on, your CAC might not be optimized. That’s okay. What matters most is proving that the fire can be lit, and re-lit, with consistency.

In her words, you’re not building a funnel to impress investors. You’re proving that you can build one that works. And that starts with doing the hard, unglamorous work of market research, customer interviews, and narrowing your lens until your outreach feels like a bullseye, not a billboard.

Key Takeaways:

• Your ICP should be startlingly narrow (10–99 entities is a strong benchmark).
• Early product-market fit is about repeatability, not perfection.
• Don’t waste time scaling a sales process that doesn’t work.
• Look for early adopters who already share your worldview.
• Focus on proving your sales motion works, not on vanity funnel metrics.

This session set the tone for the rest of the summit, grounding the audience in the truth that without a clear understanding of who you’re selling to, nothing else matters. Jeanette’s mix of practical frameworks and genuine passion made her one of the day’s standout voices. If you missed this one block out time to rethink your ICP, you’ll thank yourself later.

Session Clips