What Sales and Customer-Facing Professionals Can Learn from Range
Sales and account structures push reps to specialize narrowly by product, vertical, or deal size as the fast track to hitting quota. Reps who've built broader knowledge across products or industries can feel like they're falling behind more "focused" peers, even when that breadth is exactly what lets them solve a customer's actual problem instead of the piece of it that happens to fit their assigned lane.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Question "go deeper in your one vertical, not wider"
Narrow specialization pays off when a market's problems are stable and well understood. When customers' needs cross the lines your specialties are drawn along, though, staying narrow can mean consistently missing part of what the customer actually needs.
A rep who specializes exclusively in one product line keeps steering every customer conversation back to that product, and loses a deal to a competitor who simply listened long enough to notice the customer's real problem sat one product over.
In your next few customer calls, spend the first several minutes only asking about their problem, before mentioning your specialty at all, and note what you learn that you would otherwise have missed.
Test yourself against a different vertical before assuming your lane is fixed
Before assuming your current specialty is the only one that fits you, look for a low-risk way to work a deal, account, or product outside it, and see what you notice about your own performance and interest.
A rep who suspects she'd do better with a different type of account never asks to shadow or take one, because leaving her specialty even briefly feels like risking the numbers she's built. She stays in a lane that's steadily draining her energy.
Ask to shadow, co-sell, or take on a single deal in a different vertical or product line this quarter, purely to test the fit.
Bring what you know from one account into another
Patterns you've learned solving one customer's problem in one industry often apply directly to a different customer in a different industry, even when the products look unrelated.
A rep treats each vertical as requiring a completely separate playbook, missing that the objection-handling approach that worked with one type of customer would solve the exact same hesitation coming from a customer in an entirely different industry.
Before your next call in an unfamiliar vertical, review one pattern that worked with a customer in a completely different industry, and ask whether it applies here too.
Be willing to move lanes
If you learn, through real testing, that a different vertical, product line, or type of account fits your strengths better than the one you specialized in, moving toward it draws directly on the customer instincts you already built, rather than starting over from nothing.
You need to hit this quarter's number in your current specialty, and you also want to test whether a different lane fits you better. Hold both by treating exploration as a small, bounded side effort — one deal, one shadow day — rather than something that competes directly with your core numbers.
Name one thing, honestly
What is one customer problem you've routed toward your specialty by habit, when a different approach might have actually served them better?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Before your next call in an unfamiliar vertical, review one pattern that worked with a customer in a completely different industry, and ask whether it applies here too.