Choose Hard

There’s a reason choosing the easy option feels so good. Your brain is has become wired for it !

Quick win, little hit of dopamine, then on to the next one. And in 2026, with a screen in your pocket engineered to hand you that feeling on tap, choosing the hard thing has never felt worse.

Here’s the thing though. In Sales, and in pretty much anything worth doing, the hard thing is usually the only thing that works !

I learned this the slow way. Early on, I’d self-generate Pipeline into the accounts that felt nice to prospect. The small ones. The friendly brands that replied quickly & made me feel like I was winning. My Pipeline looked busy, and it felt brilliant. Then I actually added it up, and the Pipeline I’d built wasn’t worth a fraction of the time I’d poured into it.

This is where a lot of AEs get caught, and it comes down to one distinction worth tattooing on your forearm: the difference between your TAM & your ICP.

Your TAM is everyone you could technically sell to. Your ICP is the creme de la creme. The accounts with the pain, the budget, the size, and the genuine urgency to buy something meaningful. They are not the same list, and treating them like they are is how you end up busy & broke.

For me, the key thing is this: any time we spend on non-ICP accounts is a pure waste of time. It feels productive. But it rarely moves you anywhere.

I was on a coaching call last week with an AE doing exactly this. Lovely bloke, brilliant rapport, got on famously with the small independent retail brands he was prospecting. The problem? Their average order value was around £2K. His target was £50K a month !!

Do the maths. On deals that size, he’d need to close 25 of them every single month to hit his number, on rapport alone. He’d built himself a treadmill, and he was running flat out going nowhere.

The accounts that get you to target are almost always the harder ones. Bigger. More stakeholders. More Discovery. More chances to get told no. Winning them means building skills that stretch you: running a Discovery Call that drills into real business-level pain, Multithreading into the Economic Buyer instead of hiding behind a single friendly contact, qualifying hard & walking away from the deals that were never going to close.

Jake, an Enterprise AM at KnowBe4, is a good example. When we started working together, Jake had what a lot of talented sellers have: an over-inflated Pipeline stuffed with weak, comfortable deals. We rebuilt his whole approach around disqualification, MEDDPICC & Multithreading.

He finished H2 at 146% attainment with an average order value north of $500K