Growth isn’t a hunt. It’s a habitat.

There’s a moment in the outbound sales sequence where we feel that familiar sense of dread. Not in the market. Not in the prospect. In the salesperson. In the moment we start to suspect we’re performing for an empty room.

The email was personalised (painstakingly so, with a parenthetical reference to the prospect’s recent LinkedIn post about distributed systems). The follow-up was timed according to the latest research on optimal cadence. The value proposition was crisp. The CTA was low-friction. Everything was correct. And yet, nothing happened.

This isn’t about bad salespeople. It’s about a hunt that’s changed beyond recognition. Something has shifted in how businesses find, choose, and commit to the firms they work with. And the change isn’t where we keep looking for it. It’s buried several layers beneath the sales machine, in the part of the system nobody examines because they’re too busy feeding the machine that sits on top of it.

The myth of the hunt

or: why we built an entire industry around a metaphor that stopped working in quite the way it used to

Buried deep in the operating logic of most services firms is a story so old it feels like fact. Growth is pursuit. Revenue is the reward for effort. The firm that reaches more prospects, sends more proposals, makes more calls, wins more. It’s a story about volume, persistence, and the heroic closer who wrestles the deal across the line.

This story has a name, though nobody uses it. It’s the myth of the hunt.

The hunt is how most firms are structured. Marketing generates “leads” (the language alone is revealing; we speak of prospects as if they’re mineral deposits to be extracted). Sales “pursues” them. Success is measured in pipeline “velocity,” conversion “rates,” and “wins.” The entire lexicon is borrowed from either warfare or predation, which is telling in ways the industry prefers not to examine too closely.

And for decades, it worked. Not because the metaphor was right, but because the conditions favoured it. Information was scarce. Access was controlled. The firm that got in front of the buyer first had a structural advantage. Pursuit was a reasonable response to an environment where visibility equalled viability.

Those conditions no longer exist. And the data is not subtle about it: Gartner’s 2024 survey of B2B buyers found that 61% now prefer a completely rep-free buying experience. Not “less contact with sales.” No contact with sales. Meanwhile, 73% said they actively avoid suppliers who send them irrelevant outreach. Pursuit isn’t becoming redundant. But an operation built on pursuit alone is running out of road.

To be clear: pursuit never goes to zero. It shouldn’t. Even the most magnetic businesses in their markets still show up, still reach out, still work their networks. Nike still has to work hard against Adidas. The question was never whether to pursue. It was always about the ratio.

What actually changed

or: the moment the prey got faster than the predator

The shift didn’t happen all at once. It accumulated. The way water damage accumulates: slowly, then catastrophically, then someone says “the foundation’s gone” and everyone acts surprised.

First, information became free. Not just available (it was always sort of available) but genuinely, absurdly free. The buyer who once needed a salesperson to understand what was possible now arrives at the first conversation already knowing your pricing model, your client list, your Glassdoor reviews, and the blog post your CTO wrote in 2019 that slightly contradicts your current positioning. Research by 6sense found that 85% of B2B buyers have already established their purchase requirements before they ever contact a seller. The buying decision is mostly made before the salesperson opens their mouth. Which rather changes the economics of having a large sales team opening their mouths.

Then trust migrated. Not from firms to other firms, but from firms to networks. Research published in Harvard Business Review found that 84% of B2B buyers now start the purchasing process with a referral. Not a Google search. Not a cold email. A referral. A managing director choosing a technology partner is more likely to message three people they trust than to respond to three hundred emails from people they don’t.

Then AI accelerated the noise. The tools that were supposed to make outreach more efficient made it more abundant, which is not the same thing. When everyone can send a thousand personalised emails a day, “personalised” stops meaning what it used to mean. The inbox became a war zone. The cold channel froze.

And most firms responded by doing more of the thing that was failing. More emails. More sequences. More automation. More “touches.” As if the problem with pursuit was that they simply weren’t pursuing hard enough.

There’s a pattern worth noticing here. When a strategy stops working, the almost universal instinct is to intensify it. This instinct is wrong roughly 100% of the time, but it has the considerable advantage of feeling like action.

What almost nobody did was ask whether the ratio between pursuit and attraction had quietly become the problem.

A tale of two pipelines

or: the parable of the 100% and the shifting ratio

Consider two firms. Both in software services. Both good at what they do. Both founded by people who care about the work.

Firm A operates in pure pursuit mode. Their pipeline depends entirely on outbound. Their sales team is large, busy, and increasingly exhausted. Every quarter begins with a target and a CRM full of contacts to chase. The cost of acquiring a client has been rising steadily for three years. The sales cycle is getting longer. Win rates are declining. Leadership responds by hiring more salespeople.

There’s a momentum to this model. Not the good kind. The kind that pulls everything in one direction: forward, faster, more. The more you pursue, the more you need to pursue, because pursuit alone generates no compound return. Every quarter starts from something close to zero. The team is always running, but the ground beneath them is a treadmill.

Firm B looks different. Not because they stopped pursuing. But because at some point (probably after a particularly bleak quarterly review) they asked a genuinely uncomfortable question: What if the problem isn’t how hard we’re pursuing? What if the problem is that we’re not building anything that draws buyers towards us?

That question changed the ratio. Not immediately. Uncomfortably slowly, in fact. But it set a different logic in motion.

Firm B started with clarity. Not messaging clarity (every firm thinks its messaging is clear; most are wrong). Fundamental clarity about who, specifically, they were the obvious choice for. Not “mid-market enterprises seeking digital transformation” (a phrase that describes approximately forty thousand firms and distinguishes none of them). Something precise enough that the right buyer, encountering it, would think: They’re talking about exactly my problem.

Then they built around that clarity. Their content stopped being about capturing leads and started being about demonstrating thinking. Not thought leadership in the debased LinkedIn sense. Actual thinking, published in public, about the specific problems their specific buyers were wrestling with. The kind of thinking that makes a managing director pause mid-scroll and forward something to their CTO with the note “have you seen this?”

Something shifted in Firm B’s pipeline. The people arriving were different. They’d already read three articles. They’d already sent the website to a colleague. They arrived not at the top of a funnel, but at the middle of a decision they’d already half-made. The sales cycle shortened. Not because Firm B got better at selling, but because the buyers got better at buying.

And crucially, Firm B didn’t stop pursuing. They just pursued differently. With more precision. With more intention. With a clearer sense of who was worth the effort, because they now understood who they were actually for.

If Firm B sounds hypothetical, consider 37signals. For over two decades, the company behind Basecamp operated with no outbound sales machinery. Instead, founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson published books, wrote provocatively, challenged industry orthodoxy, and built an audience that came to them. Not because 37signals never reached out to anyone. But because their ratio had shifted so far towards attraction that pursuit had become a small, targeted, chosen activity rather than an exhausting structural dependency.

The economics of the ratio

or: why attraction compounds and pure pursuit doesn’t

The difference between these two models isn’t philosophical. It’s mathematical.

Pure pursuit is linear. You invest effort, you get a proportional (and declining) return. Every new client requires roughly the same expenditure of energy as the last. There’s no accumulation. No compound effect. The firm that only pursues is, structurally, always starting over.

Attraction compounds. Every piece of thinking published, every clear articulation of who you’re for, every client who arrives pre-convinced and then tells someone else about you. These things stack. The firm that’s been building for two years has a fundamentally different cost structure than the firm that’s been chasing for two years. Not slightly different. Categorically different.

The 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership study (surveying nearly 3,500 decision-makers across seven countries) keeps producing numbers that should give every outbound-dependent firm pause. Seventy-five percent of B2B decision-makers said a piece of thought leadership led them to research a product or service they weren’t previously considering. Nearly three-quarters said they trust an organisation’s thought leadership over its marketing materials when assessing capability. And 60% said they’d pay a premium for a firm that produces genuinely valuable thinking.

The leading indicator of the ratio shifting isn’t a dashboard metric. It’s subtler. It’s the contact you haven’t spoken to in five years reaching out because something you wrote landed at the right moment. It’s being asked to speak somewhere you didn’t pitch. It’s the sales call where the buyer already knows how you think before you’ve said a word.

The goal isn’t to reach a point where pursuit disappears. It’s to reach a point where the pursuit you do is targeted, intentional, and supplementing an attraction engine that’s doing most of the compounding work.

The uncomfortable bit

or: why this is harder than it sounds, and why that’s the point

The catch is that shifting the ratio requires something pure pursuit doesn’t. Pursuit only requires effort. Shifting the ratio requires clarity. And clarity, it turns out, is the thing most firms are unconsciously organised to avoid.

Clarity means choosing. Saying “we’re the obvious choice for X” means, by definition, saying “we’re not the obvious choice for Y.” For a firm that grew by being generalists, that grew by saying yes to whatever walked through the door, this is existential. It feels like shrinking.

It isn’t. But it feels that way. And the feeling is enough to stop most firms from doing it.

What they find on the other side is odd: narrowing who you’re for expands how much you matter to them. The MD of a 200-person software firm doesn’t want a partner who serves everyone. They want a partner who understands their specific world so thoroughly that the first conversation feels like a continuation rather than an introduction.

The question underneath the question

Nobody talks about pursuit versus attraction as though it’s about identity. It’s always framed as marketing strategy. Channels and content and pipeline metrics. And those things matter.

But the real question is what kind of firm you want to be. Whether growth is something you chase exclusively, or something that follows from being uncomfortably clear about who you are – whilst still showing up, still reaching out, still doing the deliberate work of pursuit where it counts.

The ratio question isn’t: should we stop pursuing? It’s: what are we building that means the right buyers can find us before we have to find them?

Most firms will read this and agree with it, intellectually. Then they’ll open their CRM on Monday morning and default back to volume. Because the myth of the hunt is in the walls.

At the start, pursuit is almost everything. That’s fine. That’s right. But something should be building alongside it. Because the firms that compound are the ones who started shifting the ratio earlier than felt comfortable.

The hunt never ends. It just gets smarter.

This is the third in a series exploring strategy for software services firms. The first, “The end of set-and-forget strategy,” examined why firms reward doing over thinking. The second, “Attention is your new strategic advantage,” explored how positioning drift happens invisibly. Both are available in the archive.

If you’re sensing that your ratio is wrong but aren’t sure what shifting it looks like in practice, the conversation is open.