If you know me, you know I’m a bit expressive. Gesticulating would be an understatement.
Accordingly, I’ve found myself acting out how finding product-market fit tends to feel: it can be like walking around in the middle of the night trying to find a light switch. (Can you picture me on a Zoom with my eyes closed pretending to fumble around in the dark? Perfect.)
But seriously, the majority of your time as a founder is spent without key context. It’s hard to know if a certain buyer type will want our thing until we sell to them. It’s hard to know why buyers wants our thing, or doesn’t, until we ask them. We aren’t sure if a certain go-to-market activity will work until we test it.
It’s stumbling around without all your senses, trying not to stub your toe. It’s messy trial and error.
Finding product-market fit just isn’t linear. That’s why the process I use to find PMF isn’t linear either. Instead, it’s cyclical. You want to run cycles where you sell to one buyer type in order to learn. I call this process a sell-to-learn cycle.
Running sell-to-learn cycles helps us reveal one real, viable pocket of demand from the market, and become excellent at selling to that buyer. It helps you avoid scattershot selling to too many buyer types at one time. It helps you make sense of the many, many datapoints you’re gathering from all your sales efforts.
As you run cycles, you drill down, getting closer and closer to a repeatable sales process that works reliably for one high-demand buyer type.
Here’s what it looks like.
First, let’s break down the four tactical steps to a cycle.
Step 1. Define your buyer hypothesis. Who do you believe has a true demand for your solution? What are they trying to get done, and why?
Step 2. Book calls with a handful of those buyers.
Step 3. Run calls with those buyers, and test the hypothesis you developed. This means your sales calls will be curious and conversational, NOT a pitch. Talking about your supply, instead of deeply understanding their demand, is a great way to waste thirty minutes. If they match your hypothesis and indeed have demand, you’ll see if they want to buy. If they don’t have demand, you’ll dig in further, and try to figure out where your hypothesis might be off.
Step 4. Systematically analyze the insights from these calls. What did we assume about our buyer that was disproven? What did we learn about our buyer that we can leverage in our next cycle?
This brings us back to Step 1. But instead of defining our hypothesis, we’re refining it with all our learnings from the market. Now, we test our refined hypothesis in a brand new cycle. We want to run tight and efficient cycles, with one taking about 4-6 weeks.
As you run cycles, you will get closer and closer to a proven hypothesis. Instead of fumbling around aimlessly, you’ll be taking thoughtful and strategic steps towards a repeatable sales cycle and product-market fit.
Two underrated factors to a successful cycle
To run a cycle well and prevent sliding back into unmitigated GTM chaos, you want to come in with the right perspective and a commitment to consistent selling.
When it comes to perspective, you need to be willing to be wrong. You need to let your customers tell you what they actually have demand for, even if it conflicts with what you assumed. You need to try to test one hypothesis at a time so that you can get really focused, actionable insights. You don’t over-engineer your sales process. Without this perspective, you’ll revert to pitching your product to all different types of buyers and you won’t capture any usable market insights that direct you to PMF.
When it comes to consistency, you’ll need to commit real time, daily, to selling. To run a cycle, you will need to have at least five sales calls. Otherwise, you won’t have a critical mass of insights to analyze. In order to book those five calls, you'll need to reach out to at least 50 prospective customers.
You're going to need to lock in for regular outreach in order to book those calls. Doing so in a concentrated fashion will allow you to run a tight cycle: one that gathers market insights swiftly, and allows you to iterate and pivot fast. One week of outreach, followed by two weeks of nothing, will slow your momentum and hinder your ability to learn real-time insights from the market.
Suffice it to say, two significant but underrated factors in your journey to product-market fit will be a committed sales practice and a demand-focused perspective. If your cycles break down, it may be a perspective or consistency issue that is causing it.
When to stop running cycles
You’re going to take multiple cycles to figure out your product-market fit. No one figures it out on the first go.
You may learn in your first cycle that not one of the ten buyers you spoke to exhibited real interest. You’d then go back to the drawing board, and test a new buyer type.
You may learn in your second cycle that the prospects who have real demand use very specific language or wording to explain their need. You can integrate that learning directly into your messaging on the next cycle.
I recommend that a founder keep running the sales process and refining the hypothesis until you’re starting to show signs of product-market fit – with the same kind of buyer repeatedly showing signs of demand for your supply. They push the deal forward. They don’t just say “That’s really awesome." They say “When can I have this?”
At this point is when you can stop running cycles and add in the final ingredient for repeatable sales: building a sales team.
It’s at this point when we have some semblance of a sales playbook coming together. I usually see this at around fifty repeatable sales of the same product to the same buyer. Hiring any time before that, and a hired AE or head of sales will not have enough information to execute. They'll be likely to slow you down, rather than accelerate you.
If you want to feel more in control of the path to product-market fit, embrace the fact that you'll need multiple attempts. The goal is to make each attempt count, by running tight cycles, learning fast, and culling through data from the market analytically.
Stumbling your way to PMF is no way to build your startup. It works for some, mostly due to luck, but it’s best to control your destiny by committing to a systematic process of learning from the market.
If you're ready to bring this kind of rigor to your early sales process, I've just launched a new membership called the Repeatable Sales Club.
It gives you detailed training and support on exactly how to run sell-to-learn cycles effectively – from booking calls to analyzing insights to refining your hypothesis.
Email me if you have questions.
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This is Extra Extra, a newsletter about the tactics and mindsets that drive early sales. I’m Caroline Fay, an exited social impact founder who’s spent my career launching and selling new products. I help non-traditional tech founders build sustainable, recurring revenue.
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Caroline Fay
