#15 - Adjacent Growth Markets
Veins of Gold Hidden in your ICP
#13 The Strategic Reframe and #14 - Strategic Reframing in Practice focused on strategic reframing: helping the market understand why a company matters, where it matters, and when it matters most.
Adjacent Growth Targets build on that work. Once the company is reframed correctly, new sections of the market become easier to see.
Instead of changing the product, the sales action, or the playbook, the value simply needs to be seen through a different lens.
Take cybersecurity.
Vendors chase the same visible buyers: companies already in active evaluation, already comparing tools, already working through a known buying cycle.
That market is crowded. Standing out requires differentiation and proof.
The cleaner adjacent market may sit one step earlier: companies that already bought the category promise and never received the value. They dealt with long deployments, weak outcomes, noisy tools, low trust, or security work that never became easier.
Those buyers are already committed to solving the pain. Rather than needing education on risk, they are waiting for a reason to believe the next decision will be different.
That creates a separate GTM motion.
Putting them through the same sales playbook will not work. These customers need to understand why the experience with you will exceed their expectations. They need to see what should have been visible before the last purchase: what outcome they should expect, how that outcome will show up, and how your approach makes it easier to judge before they commit.
They need a better way to judge you as the next vendor before the formal evaluation begins.
That is adjacent growth inside the existing market.
The web operations example works the same way.
A company may describe itself around hosting, infrastructure, speed, and uptime. That language naturally sends it toward technical buyers and hosting comparisons.
The stronger adjacent market may sit with brand, marketing operations, and omnichannel teams. These are the people responsible for keeping a company’s digital presence consistent across sites, campaigns, regions, agencies, workflows, and publishing environments.
Their problem is control. Reframing the value means reframing the entry point.
These target adjacent companies are focused on showing up consistently and correctly, everywhere, every time. They need teams to publish without breaking governance. They need digital properties to move fast without creating operational mess.
The same platform supports greater value once it is seen through that pressure.
Instead of competing only for infrastructure budget, the company can help teams protect consistency across a complex digital estate.
That is the heart of adjacent growth.
It is often a better-read section of the current market: buyers who are already close to movement, already feeling pressure, and already carrying a problem the company can solve once the value is framed in their language.