Your first customer chooses your market
In the blog ‘The paradox of entrepreneurial selling’ you saw that the easiest first customer often takes you the least far. This is the other side of that same coin. Your first customers do not only decide whether you survive, they decide who you become. So choose them the way you choose a co-pilot: they help set your course.
Your start leaves a lasting imprint
Researchers call it imprinting: the conditions in which you begin leave a lasting stamp on what your company becomes (Marquis and Tilcsik 2013). Your first customers help shape your offer, your language, the sector in which you are heard. What began as one chance assignment quietly becomes your specialisation. That is not a disaster, as long as you are aware of it. Anyone who chooses their first customer only because that customer is willing lets chance decide their market.
Choose the well-connected customer, not merely the willing one
For a young company the first customer is not a goal but a gateway to a network full of further customers. A reference within a dense part of your market is worth more than several quiet deals at its edges (Granovetter 1973). So the question for every candidate is twofold: can I win them, and who will they introduce me to? Prefer the customer who introduces you to twenty others.
Your first customers do not only decide whether you survive, they decide who you become.
Turn early customers into co-developers and references
The strongest first customers are the ones who help build. Let them shape your offer and lend you their credibility. An early customer who becomes your reference, or even your advocate, opens more doors than any campaign. So treat those first collaborations not as a sale but as a partnership: you deliver value, and in return you get shape, trust and access.
Use the knowledge ecosystem you already have
Do not underestimate the nodes that lie close by. Universities, colleges, incubators and professional communities are often the strongest first links, especially in a region like Flanders with a strong knowledge ecosystem but a thinner business ecosystem (Clarysse et al. 2014). Where the business world does not yet hand you customers, the knowledge network brings you to the right first conversations. Start where you are already credible.
In practice: make a short list of your possible first customers. For each one note not only how likely the deal is, but also which network it opens and which market it imposes on you. Deliberately choose the customer who fits the company you want to become, not just next month’s revenue.
References
- Clarysse, Bart, Mike Wright, Johan Bruneel, and Aarti Mahajan. 2014. “Creating Value in Ecosystems: Crossing the Chasm between Knowledge and Business Ecosystems.” Research Policy 43 (7): 1164–1176.
- Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78 (6): 1360–1380.
- Marquis, Christopher, and András Tilcsik. 2013. “Imprinting: Toward a Multilevel Theory.” Academy of Management Annals 7 (1): 195–245.
Series · From first customer to ecosystem · Add Business
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The 1-2-3 method in action
In an earlier piece I described the 1-2-3 method: five deliberate choices per week, three steps, upstream. Here I make it concrete, using one segment I approach myself: accountants. Not by chance. The accountant is the sharpest example of the shift from my first blog. Their artefact, the annual accounts, is precisely what automation and AI are taking over. And so their entire value shifts to the conversation.
Why now: the accountant beyond the numbers
Digitalisation, automation and AI are changing the accountancy sector at record speed. Productivity rises, administration fades into the background. But the client is no longer satisfied with an explained set of annual accounts or a dashboard that looks nice and says nothing. They have already seen those numbers themselves, and an AI summarises them just as well. What they are looking for is someone who helps them understand what the numbers mean, and what they now need to decide.
Jeroen Meens calls it the great unbundling: no sudden disruption, but a thousand small threads, technology, platforms, standardisation, that together pull apart the integrated role of the accountant (Meens 2025). Anyone who wants to keep creating value has to get beyond the numbers. In a classic annual-accounts conversation, only about thirty minutes actually go to the numbers themselves; the rest is about tax, the future and strategy. That is exactly where the growth lies, in that conversation. And that is exactly where most firms are weakest.
The job-to-be-done: valuable conversations, not another tool
If you ask the accountant what they really need, the answer is rarely ‘another tool’. Their actual task, their job-to-be-done (Christensen and Raynor 2003), is this: enabling themselves and their staff to have valuable conversations, from but above all beyond the numbers. That is the lens through which I select and write. Not ‘which accountant can use my service?’, but ‘which accountant feels this task most acutely?’.
Step 0: selection, digitally mature because that is the tipping point
Five accountants per week, deliberately chosen. My most important criterion is digital maturity. That seems counter-intuitive, but it is precisely where the tension sits. A firm that has not yet digitalised does not feel the problem yet: it is still busy with the administration. A firm that is fully digitalised and satisfied does not move. But the digitally mature firm sits at the tipping point: the efficiency has been won, the time has been freed up, and that is exactly where the question forces itself in: what now? That is the moment when my message lands.
Besides maturity, the same two criteria apply as in the generic method: the sweet spot of shared connections (Granovetter 1973; Burt 1992) and real context. I read what a firm says publicly, how it is structured, what drives it. Only once I know something real about them do I earn their attention.
Step 1: the tailored letter, with two reasons, and the postcard
Step 1 is a physical package: a personal, handwritten letter with a postcard. The letter never opens about me. It opens with two reasons why I am contacting this particular firm, reasons that fit no other firm. The first is what I recognise in who they are: their structure, a statement, their ambition. The second is the tension I see: the next step, beyond efficiency, has not yet been taken. This is what such a letter looks like.
Sample letter
Dear [name],
‘Automation is an aid, not a solution in itself’, you said publicly not long ago. So you know exactly where the limit lies. The efficiency has been won. The next step has not yet been taken, and it does not lie in better tools. It lies in better conversations.
Value emerges in conversations. Not in your strategy, not in your tools, not in your software. But in the conversation you have with clients. From and beyond the numbers: not presenting the annual accounts, but asking what they mean for the client, where he wants to go, what is holding him back.
Not every client deserves your best conversation. That question forces another: who are you yourselves, and what firm do you want to be five years from now?
Soon I will send you a LinkedIn connection request. Accept? Then I will gladly call. Do not accept? Keep this card. The moment will probably come.
Marc Neyrinck · neyrinckneirynck.be
The postcard does something different from the letter. It makes the value of the conversation tangible in a single image. The front carries one sentence that captures the tipping point. The back points to neyrinckneirynck.be, which as a landing page answers the question ‘what is this about?’ before I call. Not a sales page, but a verification screen: who is this Marc, and is this worth my time?
Postcard concept
Front: “Your annual accounts are done. Now the conversation begins.” (alternative: “From numbers house to co-pilot.”)
Back: a short line plus QR code to neyrinckneirynck.be. “Two engines, one mission: the COCKPIT method for the conversation, ClariTalk to make it measurable.”
Step 2: the connection, they choose
I do not push. The letter ends with a choice, and the recipient makes it themselves: accept the LinkedIn connection request, or keep the card for later. That is not a politeness formula, it is the principle from my first blog put into practice. The accountant stands on equal footing and is in the driver’s seat. Whoever chooses to connect enters the conversation as an equal, not as prey. Scarcity instead of volume: someone who feels they were deliberately chosen responds differently (Cialdini 1984).
Step 3: the conversation, about them
If they accept the connection, I call for a conversation. No pitch. A conversation about them: their firm, their clients, their challenges. I lead with questions, not with an offer (Rackham 1988): what is changing in your world, where do you want to be in five years, which client deserves your best conversation? It is exactly the conversation I teach them to have with their own clients, from and beyond the numbers. I do what I sell. That is the strongest demonstration there is.
In my very first contact I already do what I teach them: a conversation that has value.
Why this works on equal footing
Every step follows from the first blog. The accountant is the professional whose artefact, the annual accounts, lost its self-evident value. Their answer is the conversation beyond the expertise. My approach respects that from beginning to end: I select whoever feels the task most acutely, I open with what I understand of them, I let them choose, and I have a conversation that is sensemaking (Adamson 2022), not a sales pitch, because value emerges in the interaction, not in what you show (Vargo and Lusch 2004). A handwritten letter instead of yet another email, five names instead of two hundred. That is how you approach a sector that already knows everything: not by selling harder, but by showing in your very first contact how a valuable conversation feels.
In practice: five firms per week. For each: digitally mature, two real reasons, one handwritten letter with a postcard, and then waiting until they choose. No campaign, no bulk. Instead, week after week, a handful of conversations that ripen at the right moment. From and beyond the numbers, exactly as I teach it to them.
References
- Adamson, Brent. 2022. “Sensemaking for Sales.” Harvard Business Review 100 (1): 48–57.
- Burt, Ronald S. 1992. Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. 2003. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
- Cialdini, Robert B. 1984. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. New York: William Morrow.
- Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78 (6): 1360–1380.
- Meens, Jeroen. 2025. “De grote ontbundeling van de accountant.” LinkedIn, 26 november 2025.
- Rackham, Neil. 1988. SPIN Selling. New York: McGraw-Hill.
- Vargo, Stephen L., and Robert F. Lusch. 2004. “Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing.” Journal of Marketing 68 (1): 1–17.
Series · Value in the conversation · Add Business
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From rainmaker to rainmaking
“I’m not really a salesperson.” Almost every founder says it, and almost every founder is wrong. Not because they underestimate themselves, but because the choice is not theirs to make. Whoever starts a company becomes its face. In those first years, clients don’t buy an offering, they buy a person. The same goes for the partner in a professional firm: the client does business with him, not with the firm behind him.
We have a word for someone who brings in clients without anyone being able to explain how. We call him a rainmaker, after the rainmakers who promised water to dry land. The word predates business: it first appeared in 1775, for the medicine man who summoned rain through ritual. And that image is precisely the problem. It assumes magic, and magic cannot be taught, planned or handed over.
The two faces of one skill
Rainmaking is not a trait but a skill, and that skill has two faces. In the beginning it is about you: can you, with who you are and who you know, win clients? Later it is about something else entirely: can you make rain fall without dancing for it yourself? Can you uncouple yourself from every client conversation, without fully letting go of what attracted the clients in the first place?
This is where most companies get stuck, and the two common answers don’t help. Keep doing everything yourself: the company plateaus on one agenda, because there is only one rainmaker at the table and his week has as many hours as yours. Give everything away: then exactly what the clients came for disappears. The third way is a mix, and that mix is not a compromise but a paradox. Part 3 of this series is about that.
Why this is not a luxury problem
Research among 120 entrepreneurs in six countries shows how stubborn the pattern is: founders postpone selling, finish their product first and treat the commercial side as something to add later (Onyemah, Rivera Pesquera and Ali 2013). Those who do sell, sell alone, and keep selling alone. Recent research on scaling ventures shows that founder roles do evolve, but the commercial role sticks to the founder hardest (Van Lancker et al. 2023). The client wants the founder, the founder wants the client, and meanwhile nobody in the organisation learns to make rain.
In established professional services firms the pattern is identical, except the rainmaker there is called a partner. The relationship lives in one head, the team works behind the scenes on files, and when the partner leaves or retires, the rain leaves with him. Zoltners, Sinha and Lorimer (2011) asked the question every firm should ask itself: who actually owns the client relationship, your people or your company? As long as the answer is one name, your revenue has a single point of failure, and your company is neither scalable nor sellable.
The movement
From rainmaker to rainmaking is the movement from winning clients as a person to winning clients as an organisation. Understand that movement well: it is the company that moves, not the rainmaker who disappears. I know CEOs of organisations with thousands of people who still make rain themselves, and that is not a failure but their strength. What changes is their second assignment: making sure the organisation learns to make rain itself, what growers so elegantly call organic growth. Keep making rain, and build rainmaking. This series follows that movement in five links.
The five links of the movement
1. Steering growth means being proactive. Waiting for whoever calls is no longer a strategy.
2. Being proactive means choosing. Your time is limited, so which clients yes, and which ones no.
3. Choosing is only possible from your DNA. Without DNA every choice is arbitrary, and arbitrariness doesn’t last.
4. Keeping focus only works with your people on board. Define the DNA together with everyone who carries the growth story, not in the boardroom.
5. Focus only becomes growth in the conversation. As the rainmaker, teach your people to hold conversations that add value.
From rainmaker to rainmaking. That is the movement.
In practice: take your ten most important clients and write behind each name who they call when things get tense. If the same name appears ten times, you know where your ceiling hangs. The next parts are about lifting it.
References
- Merriam-Webster. s.v. “Rainmaker.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Accessed August 2026.
- Onyemah, Vincent, Martha Rivera Pesquera, and Abdul Ali. 2013. “What Entrepreneurs Get Wrong.” Harvard Business Review, May 2013.
- Van Lancker, Evy, Mirjam Knockaert, Veroniek Collewaert, and Nicola Breugst. 2023. “Preparing for Scaling: A Study on Founder Role Evolution.” Journal of Business Venturing 38 (4): 106315.
- Zoltners, Andris A., Prabhakant Sinha, and Sally E. Lorimer. 2011. “Who Owns Your Customer Relationships: Your Salespeople or Your Company?” Harvard Business Review, July 2011.
Series · From rainmaker to rainmaking · Add Business
Want to take this further?
This insight does not stand alone. Explore the other parts of this series and take the next step in your own course.