Spray & pray vs. account-based sniper targeting
Most sales teams love dashboards. They love counting calls, counting emails, counting meetings. It looks productive. It feels busy. It convinces everyone for a moment that the pipeline problem is being solved.
But Marvin Karis has spent more than seven years inside one of Europe’s most data heavy go to market engines, and he says the truth out loud. Volume makes teams feel safe, yet it almost never produces a scalable revenue machine. It just produces noise.
As Senior Director of GTM Execution at Dealfront, Marvin has seen both extremes. He has watched teams burn an entire quarter spamming 5000 accounts with generic messaging. He has also watched what happens when a team slows down, picks a niche, learns its pain like a doctor, and uses data to speak to the right people at the right moment. The results are not even comparable.
This is the story of how he thinks about modern outbound, and why the future belongs to teams that behave like snipers, not machine gunners.
The Rise of Spray and Pray and Why It Fails
Marvin says the reason spray and pray is still everywhere is embarrassingly simple. It looks beautiful on dashboards. When a manager is under pressure, volume feels like control. More calls means effort. More outreach means progress.
But the deeper issue is worse. Most companies still don’t know what real ICP means. They treat ICP like a line on a slide. Company size. Industry. One buyer persona. They hand it to an SDR and expect magic.
Marvin calls this the fundamental blind spot. ICP is not thermographics. ICP is the exact problem you solve, the exact person who feels that pain, and the exact moment they feel it. If you cannot articulate that clearly, the best sequences in the world will not save you. The team will resort to blasting the whole market because they simply do not know who actually needs them.
Spray and pray is not laziness. It is confusion disguised as activity.
What Sniper Targeting Actually Looks Like
Sniper targeting begins long before outreach. It begins with truth. Which segment converts best. Which segment keeps paying. Which segment expands. And which segment churns because they never needed the product in the first place.
Dealfront tested this internally. They discovered that manufacturers with specific sales motions converted dramatically better than the average market. So instead of five thousand accounts, they focused on a small corner of that ecosystem. Dedicated messaging. Dedicated AE SDR pairing. Dedicated content. Dedicated creative.
The result was simple to measure. Higher conversion. Lower churn. A clearer narrative. A team that finally understood why these customers bought.
Account based precision is not a workflow. It is a mindset. Slow down. Learn the segment. Use data to validate it. Then go deep instead of wide.
How to Make a Whole Team Care About Quality
The shift from volume to precision is not just tactical. Marvin says it is cultural. If marketing is still measured on MQLs, you have lost before you begin. Marketing must own SQLs or revenue contribution. Otherwise they will continue to pump low quality leads into the pipe while sales quietly rolls its eyes.
On the sales side, Marvin advises something controversial. Stop hiring junior SDRs. Early stage outbound is not an entry level job. It is a strategic research role. SDRs must understand the market better than the buyer. They must guide AEs into conversations worth having, not fill calendars with names that will never close.
Great outbound teams use one shared metric above all conversion. Not activity. Not calls. Not meetings booked. Conversion.
When a team is aligned around one truth, behavior changes automatically.
Why Intent Data and Timing Matter More Than Ever
The heart of sniper targeting is timing. Has this company just hired a new sales leader. Did they expand into a new region. Are they hiring aggressively. Did they visit your site three times this week.
Mass outreach ignores timing completely. Precision outreach is built around it. Marvin puts it simply. A rep with twenty perfect accounts will outperform a rep with two hundred random ones. Every time.
And here is his favorite tactic. Quality calls. Call SDRs at six in the evening. Ask what broke today. Ask what software they use. Ask what is slow, annoying or expensive. These conversations reveal patterns that no dashboard ever will.
You want problems, not prospects.
The Power of Video and Human First Outreach
Marvin is blunt. In most markets, email is too crowded to break through. Generic personalization is dead. He pushes his teams to use video and voicemail almost exclusively. Three videos per rep per day, not three hundred emails.
The key is problem centric communication. A short video walking through the exact issue that segment struggles with. No feature talk. No product monologue. Just a simple explanation of the gap, the impact, and the root cause.
Their conversion rate jumped from around one percent to as high as five in some months. Not by doing more. By doing fewer, better.
You cannot fake relevance. You must earn it.
Sniper Targeting Reduces Churn Too
Here is the part most founders forget. Bad outbound creates bad customers. If someone buys your product for the wrong reason, they will leave. If a whole segment buys your product with no recurring value, churn will explode.
But when you sell into a segment where your product solves a painful, recurring operational issue, retention becomes a natural outcome. Expansion becomes predictable. Sales cycles shorten.
Outbound is not just about acquisition. It is the front door to retention.
The Mindset Every Modern GTM Leader Needs
Marvin’s view of go to market is simple. A great GTM team is not a group of people booking meetings. It is a system that understands a market deeply and uses data, timing, and empathy to deliver value before asking for anything.
Sniper targeting is not a tactic. It is a company level decision to stop pretending that volume equals growth.
Marvin puts it bluntly. Spray and pray is just dashboard theatre. Sniper targeting is the foundation of long term revenue.
