Sean Horgan

Essays

On B2B Selling

Sean Horgan

PMs often need to support B2B sales calls and will sometimes need to lead them, especially for smaller companies. It’s useful for PMs to think of these like a product discovery call where you are trying to learn everything you can about the sales prospect.

Your approach to sales is highly dependent on where your product is from a market perspective. I often return to Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm as it has held up over time as a great framing. Below’s an image from

Force, Acceleration, Velocity, Mass: Isaac Newton’s Guide to High-Tech Market Development⁠

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When your product is on the right side of that diagram, you often don’t see PMs show up in sales conversations unless its part of a customer roadmap briefing. The real work for PM is when your product is toward the left side of the diagram and the rest of this doc is focused on navigating this process.

Developing your target segment

(drafting)

Building your pipeline

(drafting)

Customers aren’t just roaming the streets searching for your product. You need to find them!

References

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What’s harder than making your product? Selling it⁠

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Pipeline Qualification Rubric

Qualifying your opportunities is one of the most overlooked and underrated parts of your sales process. It’s easy to simply rank by close date or deal size but that only works for post PMF. For pre PMF you’ll need to pick customers carefully because they will either lead you to the broader market opportunity (early & late majority) or hold you back.

I’ve found it critical to get alignment on customer/prospect priority through a transparent rubric that tries to quantify the characteristics that make one deal more attractive than another, beyond simple deal size. Here’s a rubric I put together many years ago that is focused on the data & analysis platforms market:

Pipeline Rubric⁠

. You’ll need to develop your own that reflects your industry and your company’s strategy.

Discovery calls

There are many frameworks used by sales teams but I like the simplicity of Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline (BANT) in early stage discussions

Budget: Almost all prospects either have a specific price or pricing model already in mind or they have comparables. Does the person you are talking to know that budget? What $ size deals are they empowered to make on their own?

Authority: Who is the person authorized to make the buying decision? Who else does that person need to sign off on this decision?

Need: What are their real pain points?

Timeline: How pressing are these pain points? Dig for those with a real sense of urgency. There are no shortages of problems in enterprise organizations and most people just work through them. Which problems need to be solved in the next 3 or 6 months?

Opportunity Brief

Even if a full-suite Sales/CRM solution like SFDC or Hubspot is available, I like to maintain my own doc (e.g. coda, google doc) that I can collaborate on with others and provides the following:

Summary of the opportunity in a table form that can be easily pasted into a deck

A list of who’s who in the zoo, I.e. the name & title for each person at the prospect. I try to organize the list by their org chart and hierarchy as I learn about it. I include links to LinkedIn.

Meeting Notes. I keep notes on every interaction. Some CRMs have great plugins to email to tackle some of that but they don’t do a great job of synthesizing while I like to do inline with the notes.

Summary

Summary

Problems

Solutions

Deal Details

Who are we selling to?

What are their problems?

Why haven’t they solved these problems already?

How are we solving their problems?

What’s unique about our solutions?

What’s their timeline?

Who are we working with?

What’s their budget?

What’s the deal structure, e.g. term length, payment model?

What are the risks?

What are the next steps?

There are no rows in this table

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Contracting

Once you get a sense that there is product-solution fit for that customer, you are now trying to move towards putting terms on paper to get alignment and move to

If your product is pre-PMF, you’re usually trying to learn more about the scaling factors of your product offering and how much your current pricing model aligns with the value you could provide to the prospect.

Here are a few areas I dig into if I don’t already have a great handle on them:

People & Teams

How many people?

How are those people spread across teams and functions?

Timing

How long do they want to commit? What’s the term length? Does their company have some standards/default they like to start with?

Kickoff date

Payment

How do they like to pay?

Subscription / Fixed

Consumption / Variable

Solutions