Stop Chasing Everyone. Start Owning Your List.
Part 2 of 6: Applying The Ultimate Sales Machine to a Career in Institutional Finance and Digital Assets
The Dream 100 is the concept from Chet Holmes that I use in my FinTech (B2B) Business Development & Sales Leadership roles. As usual the concept is simple: instead of casting the widest net possible and hoping something bites, you identify the 100 accounts that would most transform your business and you pursue them with disproportionate focus, creativity, and persistence until they become customers. But it’s not easy. (separate post about Simple vs Easy here)
Holmes was writing primarily about consumer and mid-market B2B sales. But the principle translates directly into institutional financial services and digital assets, where relationship cycles are long, trust is the primary currency, and the difference between your top 20 accounts and your next 200 is usually enormous.
ONE LIST PER REVENUE LINE. NO EXCEPTIONS.
Here’s where most teams get this wrong: they build one vague target list for the whole business and call it a go-to-market strategy. That’s not a Dream 100; hat’s a CRM dump.
The right way to apply this: every distinct product or revenue line needs its own Dream 100. If you’re selling custody, your Dream 100 looks different from the one you’d build for staking infrastructure or stablecoin treasury services. The ideal counterparty profile, the decision-maker, the competitive dynamic, the timing trigger are all different for each product. Conflating them produces generic outreach that resonates with nobody.
At Circle, the relevant universe for USDC institutional adoption wasn’t “all financial services firms.” It was a specific set of fintechs, exchanges, payment processors, and eventually banks that had both the technical capability and the regulatory appetite to integrate a dollar-backed stablecoin into their stack. That’s a list you can name. Once you name it, you can build something real around it.
THE COUNTERINTUITIVE PAYOFF: THE LONG TAIL FINDS YOU
This is the part of Holmes’ argument that surprised me most when I first read it, and that I’ve since seen validated repeatedly in practice.
When you build a marketing program and a sales process specifically designed for your Dream 100; the content, the events, the outreach cadence, the proof points, you end up with something that’s genuinely high-quality and specific. And high-quality, specific content attracts attention beyond the list it was built for.
In other words: if you design your go-to-market for the top 100, the next 500 will find you. The inverse is also true. If you design for everyone, you’ll resonate with no one, including the accounts that actually matter.
I’ve watched teams spend quarters building broad awareness campaigns that generated pipeline filled with accounts too small, too early, or too misaligned to ever close. Meanwhile the 20 accounts that could have changed the business trajectory weren’t getting nearly enough focused attention. The Dream 100 solves this.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE FOR DIGITAL ASSETS TODAY
If I were standing up a new institutional digital assets capability at a traditional financial services firm right now, the first thing I’d do is build the list. Not a CRM filter. An actual curated, named, ranked list and it would be segmented by product line. You can use some AI research tools to help, but this is where experience matters. Whether you have sat in the seat of your users, sold to those users multiple times, or have other direct experience with the specific teams inside your target that will use your services … .this list needs human curation.
For a tokenized asset product: which asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, and pension funds have publicly signaled interest in on-chain settlement or programmable collateral? Name them.
For a stablecoin treasury product: which corporates, fintechs, and payment companies are actively building cross-border payment infrastructure? Name them.
For an institutional staking or yield product: which custodians, family offices, and crypto-native funds are already holding proof-of-stake assets at scale? Name them.
Each of those is a different list. Each warrants a different message, a different proof point, a different relationship owner. That’s the work. It’s not glamorous, but it’s the foundation everything else is built on.
The point is that most organizations skip this step. They go straight to tactics: email sequences, conference sponsorships, LinkedIn campaigns. Those things can work. But they work significantly better when they’re aimed at a list you’ve actually thought hard about, rather than fired broadly and optimistically into the market.
Build the list first. Then build everything else around it.