How EcoLocked Segments Customers by Innovation Appetite, Not Company Size

Your CRM is lying to you. Those tidy segments—enterprise, mid-market, SMB—tell you almost nothing about who will actually buy your product. Company size predicts budget, not behavior. Revenue forecasts resources, not risk tolerance.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Steff Gerhart, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of EcoLocked, explained how her team threw out demographic segmentation entirely and built a filtering system based on something far more predictive: demonstrated innovation appetite.

The Concrete Wall

EcoLocked sells CO2-negative concrete admixes to an industry that treats innovation with suspicion. “Our direct customers are concrete producers. And obviously they are not known to be super innovative or always looking for new materials,” Steff explains.

The industry demands materials that are “well known, that are proven, that are completely de risk.” This creates an impossible paradox for startups: you need customers to prove your product, but customers won’t buy until it’s proven.

Most startups respond by casting a wide net. Send hundreds of cold emails. Run ads to broad segments. Hope that someone, somewhere will take a chance. It’s a numbers game: the more prospects you reach, the higher your odds of finding those rare early adopters.

EcoLocked took the opposite approach. They didn’t try to convert skeptics. They surgically identified the small subset of companies that had already demonstrated they were capable of buying innovation.

Filter One: Public Sustainability Positioning

The first filter was straightforward but powerful. “We right away focus basically on subsections of that market. We look for customers who are already marketing their material as environmentally, you know, less harmful, sustainable,” Steff shares.

This isn’t about companies that have sustainability reports buried on their website—every large company has those. This is about companies actively using environmental positioning as a competitive differentiator in their go-to-market strategy.

The logic is simple but often overlooked: if a company publicly stakes its brand on sustainability, it has skin in the game. Marketing claims create obligations. When a concrete producer tells customers their materials are “sustainable,” they need innovations like EcoLocked’s to back up those claims. Their public positioning creates internal pressure to find solutions.

Companies without this positioning face no such pressure. Sustainability might be “nice to have,” but it’s not core to their value proposition. These companies are structurally less likely to prioritize novel environmental solutions, regardless of how compelling your pitch is.

Filter Two: Proven Innovation Behavior

The second filter is where most founders stop thinking deeply enough. It’s not enough that a company cares about sustainability. They also need to have demonstrated they’re capable of actually adopting innovation.

“We checked that they had either partnered with startups before or they have done some innovative approach within their own operations,” Steff explains.

This filter eliminates a category of prospect that wastes enormous time: companies that love the idea of innovation but can’t execute on it. They take meetings. They express enthusiasm. They might even issue an RFP. But they’ve never actually closed a deal with a startup, and there’s usually a reason why.

Past behavior predicts future behavior more reliably than stated intentions. A company that has successfully integrated one startup’s technology into their operations has proven several critical capabilities:

They can navigate internal procurement processes for novel vendors. They can manage technical integration risk. They can secure budget for unproven solutions. They can build internal consensus around change. Most importantly, they’ve done all of this before, which means the institutional memory exists to do it again.

Companies without this track record might eventually become customers, but they’re not the right early customers. They’ll require disproportionate education, hand-holding, and patience—resources that early-stage startups can’t afford to deploy broadly.

The Dual-Filter Advantage

Using both filters together creates a dramatically smaller addressable market—and that’s exactly the point. “These were the people we then reached out to more really went into conversations with,” Steff notes.

This dual-filter approach doesn’t just improve conversion rates. It fundamentally changes the nature of sales conversations. When you’re talking to companies that have publicly committed to sustainability and have previously worked with startups, you’re not making a cold pitch. You’re offering a solution to a problem they’ve already acknowledged they have, using a procurement approach they’ve already proven they can execute.

The conversations shift from “why should we care about this?” to “how does this specifically solve our problem?” That’s a drastically more efficient sales motion.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Most founders approach segmentation with spreadsheets: company size, industry vertical, geographic region, revenue range. These are easy to filter in databases and CRMs. They’re also nearly useless for predicting adoption of novel products.

EcoLocked’s approach requires different research. You can’t buy a list of “companies with demonstrated startup partnership experience.” You need to look at news announcements, case studies, partnerships, and innovation initiatives. You need to examine how companies position themselves publicly and what they emphasize in their marketing.

This takes more time upfront. But it saves enormous time in the sales process. Steff’s team “talk truly to a large number” of companies, but their filtering ensures that those conversations are concentrated among prospects with real potential.

The False Comfort of Large TAM

The instinct to keep your addressable market large is powerful. Investors want to see big TAM slides. Sales leaders want large prospect lists. Everyone feels safer when the funnel is full.

But for novel products in conservative industries, a large addressable market is mostly fiction. The real addressable market isn’t every company that theoretically could use your product. It’s every company that realistically will.

EcoLocked’s filters shrink their addressable market significantly. In any given region, only a small percentage of concrete producers actively market sustainability, and a smaller percentage still have startup partnership experience. This looks constraining on a spreadsheet.

In reality, it’s liberating. A small list of highly qualified prospects means you can afford to invest deeply in each relationship. You can spend time understanding their specific operations, building relationships with technical leaders, and customizing your approach. You can practice the patient, trust-building sales motion that conservative industries require.

Behavioral Signals in Other Industries

EcoLocked’s specific filters—sustainability positioning and startup partnerships—work for their market. The underlying principle applies everywhere: segment by demonstrated behavior, not demographics.

If you’re selling AI infrastructure, don’t segment by company size. Segment by companies that have already deployed other AI tools in production. If you’re selling security software, don’t segment by industry. Segment by companies that have publicly disclosed security incidents and proven they’ll invest in prevention.

The pattern is universal: look for the intersection of stated priority (through public positioning) and proven execution capability (through past behavior). Companies at that intersection are your real market.

The First Customer Proves the Model

EcoLocked’s first customer validated their filtering approach. “The first customer was coming from very close to where we operate, which was helpful because FaceTime in this industry is very important to build up trust,” Steff shares.

But proximity alone didn’t close the deal. What mattered was that this customer fit both filters perfectly. They had the sustainability positioning that made EcoLocked’s value proposition immediately relevant. They had the innovation experience that made them capable of actually buying.

That first success created a reference point that accelerated subsequent deals. In tight-knit industries where “everyone knows everyone,” one successful customer deployment among respected players carries exponential weight.

Segment for Conversion, Not Coverage

The default approach to segmentation optimizes for coverage: cast the widest possible net. EcoLocked’s approach optimizes for conversion: identify the narrowest possible segment that will actually buy.

For founders selling novel products to conservative industries, this shift in mindset is critical. Your constraint isn’t reaching prospects—it’s converting them. A thousand skeptical prospects add nothing. Ten qualified prospects who meet behavioral filters can build your business.

Demographic segmentation is easy, comfortable, and wrong. Behavioral segmentation is harder, constraining, and accurate. EcoLocked chose accuracy over comfort, and it’s made all the difference.