The 3% nobody is filtering for

One message. One signal. $1M in closed revenue. No volume play.

Author

Kara McMaster
April 21, 2026

In any given week, roughly 3% of your target market is in a buying window. The other 97% will either ignore you or reply politely and stall for six months. Doubling the send volume keeps the ratio exactly where it is. Moving it means landing inside the 3% on purpose, which requires knowing which buyers in your market are in the window this week and which ones won't be until Q4.


I walked through how to spot signals like that in a short video. Worth watching before the rest of this email:

The catch is that the 3% are almost never the people a Sales Nav filter pulls. A VP of Engineering who just inherited a failing project is a different buyer than a VP of Engineering who inherited a clean team six months ago. Same title, same company size, same industry. Two completely different readers. One of them replies in eleven minutes. The other sends you to spam.


Wesley runs a blockchain engineering firm. Reputation-sensitive industry, long sales cycles, the kind of market where founders will tell you "outbound doesn't work here, we close face-to-face at conferences." One of his target accounts quietly appointed a new CTO. We sent that CTO one message that referenced the project he had just inherited and named two specific failure modes the project was already showing.


Reply in eleven minutes. Paperwork signed in forty days.

"We're about to close on a million dollar deal. We're now doing 1-2 deals a quarter, and it's already put us in a situation where we are striving to meet growth demand."

One message. One signal. $1M in closed revenue. No volume play.


If you're doing over $500K a year and you want to know whether your market has signals like that sitting in plain sight, the Fit Call is where we find out. Fifteen minutes on Zoom.


Kara