In a small business, when you’re at the point of adding your first salesperson, or expanding your sales force, it often looks like you need to expand your market to be sure there are enough deals for the new person or people to chase.

In most situations, I don’t think so. Instead, you should be tightening your focus so that you’re selling only to high-probability prospects. Here are three reasons why:

1. You always have a better chance of success when you’ve built an unfair sales advantage. Whatever unfair advantage you have built up till now won’t span many market segments. You need to use that unfair advantage to help your new people succeed, so you’ve got to tighten your sales focus and sell just to those segments.
2. Even though you’re expanding, your sales resource is still tiny compared to your overall potential markets – and most likely compared to your larger competitors. You have to make sure that you aren’t wasting that tiny resource, so you have to keep your salespeople from wasting time calling on prospects that are unlikely to buy from you.
3. Salespeople will want to expand the number of prospects they are working on rather than focusing on the prospects that you know have highest value. If you aren’t tightly focused, they won’t be, and you’ll have a lot of waste sales motion.

So think hard about the market segments you have been pursuing, pick the ones where you have built your unfair advantage, and focus in on getting the most business possible out of those segments. You’ll do a lot better going deep than you will going wide.