The Drift That Feels Like Speed

Why chasing every deal makes your sales look fast and quietly slows the whole business down.
Watch a car drift and your gut tells you one thing: this is fast. Tyres screaming, back end hanging out, smoke everywhere. It looks like the fastest thing on the track.

It isn't.

On a dry circuit, the moment a driver breaks traction and starts to slide, they've gone past the limit of what the tyres can grip. The car feels alive. It feels heroic. And it is, measurably, slower around the lap than the boring driver who kept all four tyres planted and stuck to the racing line. The drama is real. The speed is not.

But here’s the thing about the car itself. A Formula 1 car is one of the most precisely engineered machines ever built. Every wing, every tyre, every gram of downforce exists to do one thing: glue it to the track. You almost never see an F1 car drift on purpose. It can, but it isn’t built to. At those speeds the oversteer is nearly impossible to catch, and sliding through a corner is simply slower than turning through it cleanly. In F1, speed is everything and drifting bleeds it away. The car that stays planted wins. That is the machine your business is supposed to be.

I think about this a lot when I look at sales teams. Because the same thing happens to their pipeline, and almost nobody sees it while it's happening. There's a name for it: ICP drift. And once you see it, you recognize it in a heartbeat,

First, in plain terms

ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile. It's just the type of customer your product was actually built to serve. The ones who get value quickly, stick around, and buy more over time. On the track, that's your racing line: the optimal path through the corner. Stay on it and you're fast without any drama at all.

ICP drift is what happens when your team slowly, deal by deal, wanders off that line. Someone closes a customer who's a bit too small. Then one in a sector you don't really serve. Then one who needs three features you don't have. None of these feel like a mistake in the moment. Each one is a win. Each one goes in the column. The board slide looks great.

And the whole time, you're sliding off the line.

Green flag: it feels fast

Here's the seductive part, and it's exactly why drift is so hard to stop. In the short term, it works. Chasing off-ICP deals feels like acceleration. More logos. Bookings tick up. The reps look busy and heroic, hunting down business nobody else would touch. Leadership sees the numbers move and reads it as momentum. Everyone in the room feels good.

This is the drift that looks fast. Green flag flying, everyone flat out, the back end hanging out and the crowd on its feet. If you stopped reading here you'd say: healthy team, growing pipeline, next slide.

And that is exactly where I go deeper into the data.

Yellow flag: you've broken traction

Because the moment you're closing customers your product wasn't built for, you've broken traction with your own economics. The yellow flag is out, meaning hazard on track, ease off, back to the line. And nobody lifts. Just like the car, you're now going slower even though it feels quicker.

You just can't feel it yet. That's the whole problem. When a driver breaks grip, the car doesn't fall off the track immediately. It hangs there for a second, sliding, feeling fine. The consequence arrives a beat later.

In your business the consequence is the money. A bad-fit customer costs more to sell to, more to onboard, and far more to keep. They lean on support. They ask for features that pull your roadmap sideways. Your customer success team burns hours nursing accounts that were never going to thrive. That's your tyre degradation: every off-line deal wears down the very people and product you need to win the deals that actually fit.

So your cost to acquire creeps up. Your time to real, efficient scale stretches out. Your actual lap time (payback, efficiency, the speed that matters) is getting worse while the bookings chart tells everyone it's getting better.

Most companies, in my experience, lose somewhere between 15 and 40% of their potential ARR this way. Not to competitors. Not to a bad quarter. To bad-fit customers they were quietly proud of winning.

Red flag: where the ARR actually leaks

Now the uncomfortable part. In racing, a red flag means the session is stopped and something has gone wrong enough to halt everything on track. Follow the money past the sale, and you can see exactly what triggered it. It's almost always the same three holes.

ARR growth flattens. This is the strange one. Bookings are up, but net growth won't move. Why? Because every off-ICP win you add at the front door leaves through the back door a year later. You're filling a bucket that's leaking at the same rate you pour. The car is roaring and the lap time won't drop.

Churn climbs. Bad-fit customers were never going to stay. They bought something the product wasn't built to give them, they didn't get the value, and they left. That's not a customer success failure. That's a drift that started at the very first deal, months earlier.

Expansion dies. This is the quiet killer, and it's the one that hurts most. Your best growth doesn't come from new logos: it comes from good-fit customers buying more, year after year. But a book full of misfits gives you nothing to expand into. There's no “more” to sell to a customer who's already straining to use what they've got. The engine that was supposed to power your next stage of growth just isn't there.

That's the spin-out. Flat growth, rising churn, no expansion. The slide is out of control, and by the time the numbers show it, you're already a stint too late.

The twist: not all drift is a mistake

Here's the part that surprises people. Drifting isn't always wrong. There are exactly two places a driver should drift. One is a loose surface: rally drivers slide through gravel and mud on purpose, because that's how you find grip when there's no clean line to hold. The other is a judged event, where the slide itself is the whole point and someone's hands are firmly on the wheel the entire time.

Both of those have an equivalent in software. Before you've found product-market fit, there is no established line yet and sliding around to figure out who your real customer is, is the job. That's the loose surface. And a deliberate move into a genuine second segment, where you know you're leaving the line, and you're actively counter-steering with new packaging, a different onboarding motion, adjusted positioning and that's the judged drift. Controlled. On purpose. Fine.

The lethal version is neither of those. It's the accidental one. Reps hanging the back end out one deal at a time, nobody counter-steering, and leadership reading the drama as speed. Nobody chose it. Nobody's driving it. It's just happening, and everyone's clapping.

So the real diagnostic question isn't “are we taking off-ICP deals?” Every growing company does, sometimes for good reasons. The question is: are we drifting on purpose with our hands on the wheel or are we sliding and calling it momentum?

Why it gets more expensive as you grow

You might think this is a young-company problem you'll grow out of. It's the opposite.

Early on, everyone's close to the line because there isn't much line to leave. Deals are small and similar, the customer base is tight, and a little drift barely registers. The leak is there, but it's a rounding error.

Then you scale. You push for growth, quotas go up, and the pressure to close anything rises with them. That's precisely when reps start reaching further off-line for deals and precisely when your book gets big enough that a leaking 15 to 40% is real, painful money. The faster you push, the more the back end steps out.

So the leak doesn't shrink as you grow. It widens. A team that looked perfectly healthy can be quietly shedding its best future revenue a year later, with the same cheerful bookings number on the slide the whole time. The number never changed. The business underneath it did.

That gap between the growth you're booking and the growth you're keeping is an early warning light. It flashes long before it shows up in the ARR you actually bank.

So what should you actually do?

You don't need a data team for this. You need three honest questions.

1. Measure fit at the front door, not just volume. Don't only count deals won. Ask how many of them actually match your ICP. If a rising share of your wins are off-line, you're drifting, and you're doing it now, not in the churn report six months from now.

2. Watch the gap between new bookings and net growth. If bookings climb but net ARR growth stays flat, you're pouring into a leaking bucket. That gap is the sound of the tyres going off. Go find the bad-fit cohort draining it.

3. Decide, deliberately, where you're allowed off the line. Off-ICP deals aren't banned. They're a decision. Name the segments you're intentionally expanding into, put the right packaging and onboarding behind them, and let the reps counter-steer. Everything else stays on the line. That single distinction, chosen drift versus accidental drift, is the whole game.

None of this is complicated, and that's the good news. The drift is only dangerous while it feels like speed. Put a light on it: measure fit, watch the gap, choose your line and the smoke clears. What's left is just money you were about to slide straight past.

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