Most GTM advice is about adding something new.

In the early days, there’s often pipeline hiding in what you already have.

Your LinkedIn network.
People you’ve already spoken to.
Deals that went quiet.
People who could introduce you.

So this episode is short on purpose.

3 things you can ship today to generate pipeline from people who already know you.

Each takes less than 30 minutes.

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ 10 GTM principles I recommend to every founder
✅ The 13 GTM Workstreams in my GTM advisory work
✅ Your GTM Foundation on One Page

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Let’s get into it. 👇

1) Scan your own network for your ICP (20 min)

I have 12,000+ LinkedIn connections. But I couldn’t have told you which 10 of them I should message today.

So last week I did something new.

I exported my LinkedIn connections, gave the list + my ICP criteria to my AI employee (I use viktor.com), and asked it to find the best matches.

For every match, I wanted to know:

→ Why do they fit my ICP?
→ Is there a relevant trigger right now?
→ What can I observe about their business?
→ What’s my best reason to reach out?

What came back was a short list of people I already know who fit my ICP today.

Find ICPs in your network

2) Ask for an intro at the end of your next call

I used to treat warm intros as something that happens to you.

Someone likes you enough, and one day a name arrives in your inbox.

That’s the wrong way to think about it.

Warm intros are a GTM motion you can run deliberately.

Start simply asking. At the end of the call. Every call.

What I learned: most people are happy to introduce you. They just don’t think of it on their own, and they don’t know who you want.

That second part is the whole tactic. “Do you know anyone who might need this?” gets you a polite “I’ll have a think”.

So do the thinking for them:

1️⃣ Before the call, open their LinkedIn connections and find 3 to 5 people who fit your ICP.

2️⃣ Ask the open question first: “Who are 2 or 3 other companies dealing with this?”

3️⃣ Then get specific: “I saw you’re connected to [name] at [company]. Would an intro make sense?”

4️⃣ Write the intro message for them, so all they have to do is forward it. Or even better, ask them to CC you in the email (or create a LinkedIn group conversation)

3) Reopen 10 dead deals with one observation (25 min)

Open your CRM.

Filter for deals that:

→ had at least one real conversation
→ looked like a genuine ICP fit
→ never explicitly said no
→ haven’t moved in 30+ days

Pick the 10 with the highest potential.

Give them a new reason to talk to you.

Then write each one a message like this:

✅ One concrete observation (e.g., from their website, product, competitor, market…)

✅ A callback to what they told you back then

✅ Exactly ONE question

❌ No “just checking in”

❌ No pitch

Here’s one I sent last week:

Robin, had a look at your new website - very nice design. But 2 things that cost you pipeline: there isn’t a single customer testimonial on your homepage, and the hero section misses “who it’s for”.

In August you told me your three problems were ICP, messaging and lead generation. And we discussed that the best thing you can do is analyzing your customers to find your best-fit customers.

Have you identified your best fit segment?

Bonus, if you have 15 more minutes: write your Anti-ICP

Every founder I work with has an ICP. Almost none of them have written down who they will not sell to.

I learned that from my own business. The engagements that wrecked my calendar were never the ones I said no to. They were the ones I never decided about.

So take 15 minutes and write 5 lines that start with “We don’t sell to...”.

Mine:

❌ Agencies and service businesses

❌ Companies past Series A

❌ Selling to enterprise clients (with ACVs of 50k€+)

❌ Idea-stage founders (without a live product)

❌ Founders who want it done for them

That’s it

Three things. Under 90 minutes total.

1️⃣ 10 ICP-fit people from your own network

2️⃣ One intro ask at the end of your next call

3️⃣ 10 dead deals reopened with something worth replying to

Ship one today. Reply and tell me which one.

Happy growth

Alex

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

If you’re somewhere between €0 → €1M ARR, I can help you with your GTM.

1️⃣ GTM Foundation Library
→ More than 50 frameworks, guides, and templates.

2️⃣ GTM Clarity Sprint
→ A complete GTM audit and a six-month action plan delivered in < 7 days

3️⃣ 1:1 GTM Advisory
→ Work directly with me to build your GTM, workstream by workstream

If you joined my GTM advisory calls for a month, you’d probably hear me repeat the same sentences over and over:

“Ship it.”

“Don’t do everything at once.”

“Talk to customers.”

“Give it more reps.”

“Don’t outsource this.”

A lot of GTM problems look different on the surface.

❌ One founder struggles with outbound.

❌ Another with positioning.

❌ Another with pipeline.

❌ Another with their sales process.

Despite all those differences, I keep coming back to the same beliefs about how GTM should be built.

But the advice I give often comes back to the same principles.

Here are the 10 GTM principles I probably repeat the most (+ believe in most).

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ The 13 GTM Workstreams in my GTM advisory work
✅ Your GTM Foundation on One Page
✅ Pricing Guide 101

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1. Ship fast & iterate

Don’t wait until it’s perfect.

Ship the new homepage.
Launch the campaign.
Publish the post.
Test the new pitch.

Then see what happens and improve it.

I’ve seen founders spend weeks discussing things they could have tested in days.

My bias is almost always toward shipping.

I’d rather see a founder put an 80% version in front of customers this week than spend another month getting it from 80% to 95%.

And I know quality matters. Because real feedback is usually more valuable than another internal discussion.

Think about how you build your product.

You ship something.
Collect feedback.
Look at the data.
Learn.
Prioritize what to improve.

Then ship again.

GTM should work the same way.

That’s why I like working in 2-week GTM sprints.

Your GTM isn’t something you “figure out” once.
You build it.

2. Repetition matters: Get enough reps before you draw conclusions

Most things need more reps than you think.

❌ You won’t know whether LinkedIn works after five posts.

❌ You won’t become good at discovery after ten calls.

❌ One outbound campaign probably won’t tell you whether outbound works.

Of course, there is a point where you should stop something that isn’t working.

Define what “enough reps” means before you start.

Maybe that’s 30 posts. 500 targeted outbound messages.

Then evaluate.

Otherwise, you either quit too early or keep going forever.

3. Find the bottleneck

Founders often tell me:

“We need more leads.”

Maybe.

But maybe you don’t.

❌ If you’re generating 30 demos per month and closing 5%, more leads probably aren’t your biggest problem.

Your win rate is.

❌ If plenty of people visit your website but nobody books a demo, traffic isn’t your biggest problem.

Conversion is.

❌ If customers buy but leave three months later, acquisition isn’t your biggest problem.

Retention is.

Your job is to identify the constraint currently holding growth back.

Ask yourself:

If we could fix ONE part of our GTM in the next 30 days, which one would have the biggest impact?

Start there.

P.S. This is also why I always start an engagement with a GTM audit.

I don’t want to walk in with a predetermined answer like “you need outbound” or “you need better positioning.” I want to understand where the biggest constraint is first.

4. Stay close to the market

Especially from €0 → €1M ARR, you as the founder need to stay close to customers.

✅ Be on sales calls.
✅ Analyze the recordings.
✅ Join customer success calls.
✅ Talk to lost prospects.
✅ Ask customers why they bought.
✅ Ask why they didn’t.
✅ Listen to the exact words they use.

The insights you learn from your customer conversations are the source for your GTM foundation:

Your ICP. Your positioning. Your messaging. Your sales process.

All of them should improve as you learn more from the market.

5. The founder needs to own GTM: GTM can’t be outsourced

I don’t believe in done-for-you GTM from €0 → €1M ARR.

And yes, that’s coming from someone who sells GTM advisory.

This one might sound slightly ironic coming from a GTM advisor.

But I strongly believe it. Especially early on:

❌ GTM can’t be outsourced.

An advisor can guide you.
Challenge your thinking.
Share frameworks.
Review your work.
Help you avoid mistakes.

But you, the founder, need to own GTM.

That’s also why my advisory isn’t done-for-you.

I want founders to do the work while I guide, challenge, and give feedback.

Because you need to understand your GTM.

Not your agency. Not your freelancer. Not your advisor.

You.

Want to go deeper?

6. Narrow before you scale

One of the first things I work on with almost every founder is the ICP.

And one of the most common reactions is:

“But couldn’t we also sell to X?”

Probably.

That’s not the point.

The question isn’t:

“Who could buy?”

It’s:

“Who should we focus on right now?”

Especially early on, trying to serve everyone makes everything harder.

❌ Your positioning becomes vague.

❌ Your messaging becomes generic.

❌ our outbound becomes less relevant.

❌ Your content speaks to nobody in particular.

Start with a beachhead.

Learn who gets the most value.
Understand why they buy.
Win more of them.

Then expand.

Want to go deeper? → My Ideal Customer Profile framework

7. Prioritize. You can’t do everything at once.

This is probably one of the things I do most in my advisory:

Tell founders what NOT to work on.

There’s always another idea.

You can easily fill every week and still make very little progress.

A simple way I prioritize initiatives with founders is:

Impact × Effort x

Then we do them one after another.

8. Measure to make decisions, not dashboards

I love data.

But please don’t give me a GTM dashboard with 100+ metrics.

I want every founder I work with to have a GTM dashboard we can open and quickly understand:

✅ What’s working?
✅ What’s not?
✅ Where are we behind?

The purpose of measurement is to answer questions.

✅ Where does pipeline come from?
✅ Where are we losing deals?
✅ Which channels perform?
✅ Are conversion rates improving?
✅ Are we on track to hit our targets?

Every important metric should support you in making a decision:

“So what are we going to do about it?”

If it doesn’t, ask yourself why you’re tracking it.

Want to go deeper? → The only GTM Dashboard you need

9. Do things that don’t scale before you automate them

In 2026, founders love asking:

“How can we automate this?”

I usually want to know something else first:

Does it work manually?

✅ Ask for referrals yourself.
✅ Write the first posts yourself.
✅ Do cold calls yourself.
✅ Hang out in communities yourself.
✅ Review lost deals.
✅ Write the first outbound messages.

At this stage, you want to learn.

Once you understand what works:

Document it.
Build the process.
Automate the repetitive parts.
Then scale it.

Want to go deeper? → 9 tactics to get your first 50 customers

10. Master before you multiply

You don’t need:

Outbound + LinkedIn + SEO + paid + partnerships + events + influencers + communities.

You need 1–2 channels that reliably generate qualified pipeline.

Which ones depend on your target audience, ACV, product, market, resources and your own skills as a founder.

For many B2B founders I work with, primary channels could be:

• Outbound

• Founder-led LinkedIn

• Social listening

• BOFU content

Then you can add secondary channels such as paid search, paid social, GEO/SEO, partnerships, influencers or events.

Add new channels because the first one works and you’re ready for more.

The same principle applies elsewhere.

❌ Don’t add another ICP before you’ve learned how to win the first.

❌ Don’t add another sales motion because the first one is difficult.

❌ Don’t hire five GTM people before you know what they’re supposed to repeat.

Master before you multiply.

Want to go deeper? → The 21 SaaS GTM Channels

Bonus: Fix GTM Foundation first

If you’ve followed my content for a while, this one won’t surprise you.

I believe most early-stage companies need fewer new GTM tactics and a better GTM Foundation.

When pipeline isn’t growing, founders naturally start looking for another channel.

Outbound? LinkedIn? Ads? Partnerships? GEO?

Sometimes that’s the answer.

But often, the problem sits further upstream.

❌ Your ICP isn’t sharp enough.

❌ Your positioning isn’t clear.

❌ Your messaging doesn’t resonate.

❌ Your website doesn’t convert.

❌ Your sales process is broken.

Adding more traffic on top of that doesn’t solve the underlying problem.

That’s why I keep coming back to:

ICP → Positioning → Messaging → Collaterals → Channels → Sales Process → Pricing

Get the foundation right. Then build on top of it.

Want to go deeper? → Your GTM Foundation on One Page

Happy growth

Alex

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

If you’re somewhere between €0 → €1M ARR, I can help you with your GTM.

1️⃣ GTM Foundation Library
→ More than 50 frameworks, guides, and templates.

2️⃣ GTM Clarity Sprint
→ A complete GTM audit and a six-month action plan delivered in < 7 days

3️⃣ 1:1 GTM Advisory
→ Work directly with me to build your GTM, workstream by workstream

A few weeks ago, a founder asked me a simple question:

“Alex, what do you actually do all day?”

I laughed.

Because, from the outside, my work probably looks completely random.

• One day I’m reviewing demos.

• The next day I’m rewriting a homepage.

• Then I’m analysing pricing.

• Then I’m mapping an ICP.

• Then I’m reviewing content.

• Then I’m helping someone build an outbound campaign.

It looks chaotic.

But after working with more than 30 early-stage founders, I’ve realised:

The work itself is remarkably similar.

Not because founders are identical.

But because the underlying problems are.

Different industries.
Different products.
Different price points.
Different team sizes.
Different GTM motions.
Different resources.

After hundreds of hours of sprint planning, audits, sales call reviews, content reviews, website teardowns, and strategy sessions, I noticed something surprising:

The same 13 workstreams appear almost every single time.

So today, I’m opening up the actual operating system behind my 1:1 GTM Advisory.

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ Your GTM Foundation on One Page
✅ Pricing Guide 101
✅ The GTM Audit Playbook

A quick word from our sponsor: I include only sponsors I would personally recommend.

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Why This List, Not the 7-Block Chain

If you’ve read my GTM Foundation one-pager, you already know the strategic version:

That’s the chain of decisions.

Today, it’s the delivery system - the actual steps I run inside every 6-month engagement.

Here’s the full list.

1. Audit & Plan

We always start with the same question:

“Where are we today?”

Before we change anything, we need a clear picture of the current situation.

This includes:

• A complete GTM assessment

• Identifying quick wins

• Defining goals for the next 3, 6, and 12 months

• Prioritizing initiatives

• Building the roadmap

The goal is to:

1. Have a shared understanding of what’s working & what’s not working

2. Where the focus needs to be for the next months

3. What you should NOT do

Self-check:

If I asked you right now “what are your top 3 GTM priorities for this quarter,” could you answer in one sentence each - or would you list 8 things you’re “working on”?

P.S. Book a free call if you want me to run a GTM audit for you.

2. ICP

One of the most common mistakes I see is trying to sell to everyone.

❌ “We sell to companies with 50-500 employees.”
❌ “Our ICP is mid-market SaaS.”
❌ “Anyone who has this problem.”

Those are TAM descriptions, not an ICP.

On top I see is founders refusing to make a choice.

• Everyone is a potential customer.

• Every feature is important.

• Every channel looks promising.

And that’s exactly the problem.

Using my ICP Framework, we define 4 parts:

1. The Ideal Company - 3-5 firmographics/technographics, not a long wishlist

2. The Ideal Personas - the champion/user and the economic buyer (often different people)

3. Intent Signals - the events that show someone is in-market now

4. The Anti-ICP - who to explicitly disqualify, and why

The clearer the target, the easier everything else becomes.

Everything downstream like positioning, messaging, channel selection - traces back to this.

Self-check:

Can you describe your best-fit customer with 3-5 specific attributes, and can you name the event that triggers them to buy?

3. Positioning

I would estimate that around half of the biggest breakthroughs comes here.

Using my 3-Step SaaS Positioning Framework, we choose a Primary Anchor - the answer to “what are you?”:

• Activity Positioning - you replace a manual behavior (”stop scheduling over email”)

• Use Case Positioning - you own a job-to-be-done (”schedule interviews without email back-and-forth”)

• Product Category Positioning - you’re a recognized category (”the scheduling software for recruiting teams”)

• Competitive Alternative Positioning - you replace a known leader (”the Calendly alternative for recruiting teams”)

Then we layer the differentiator inside that anchor, and the competitive landscape it sits in.

Every successful company stands for something specific. Most founders’ assets, on the other hand, still try to speak to everyone.

Self-check:

Open your homepage, your LinkedIn profile and your sales deck side by side. Is the positioning identical? If not, your buyers can’t classify you - and buyers who can’t classify you don’t compare you.

4. Messaging

Messaging follows Positioning and is what actually reaches the market.

Using my 16-point Master Messaging Framework, this covers:

• Market insight and the core problem

• ICP context and jobs-to-be-done

• Competitive alternatives and their limitations

• Product capabilities → features → benefits

• Proof, objections, and the core messaging blocks (tagline, elevator pitch, proof point)

The messaging framework together with the positioning and ICP document becomes the foundation of everything we do. Especially when it comes to creating the assets (number 6), this is super powerful.

Feed your Claude/ChatGPT with these insights.

Self-check:

Do you have a messaging document that contains all the information? And if I ask you on a call, can you (and your team) actually use your ‘messaging’?

Can you explain the market problem, the alternatives, and your value prop - without mentioning a single feature?

5. GTM Motion

Before picking channels or tactics, we decide how you sell.

• Sales-led, product-led, or a hybrid?

• Founder-led sales, or ready for a first hire?

• 1-step (disco-demo combined) or 2-step (discovery, then demo) sales process?

Most early-stage founders never make this decision explicitly.

The motion should follow your ACV, your ICP, product complexity, and market maturity.

Self-check:

Could you describe your GTM motion in one sentence, or does it change depending on who’s asking?

6. Assets

Once we have clarity on ICP, positioning, and messaging, we make sure that all assets follow the foundation.

We typically work on:

• The website (homepage, case study page, pricing page, book a demo page, blog…)

• LinkedIn profiles (founder + team)

• Sales decks

• Case studies and testimonials

• Lead magnets

• Onboarding materials

These assets are your GTM on autopilot - the things buyers look at before, during, and after talking to you.

Buyers often know much more about you than you realise.

By the time you speak to them, they’ve usually visited your website, looked at your LinkedIn profile, read your case studies and compared you with alternatives.

Your assets are often selling long before you ever enter the conversation.

Self-check:

Pull up your website, sales deck, and LinkedIn profile. Do they tell the same story as your internal ICP, messaging and positioning documents say?

Helpful resources if you need to work on your assets:

👉 GTM Foundation Part 2: Channels & Collaterals
👉 The Founder & Team LinkedIn Playbook
👉 SaaS Lead Magnets That Actually Convert

7. Quick Pipeline Wins

Early-stage founders almost always have more opportunities than they realize.

We start with the lowest-hanging fruit:

• Customer referrals

• Warm introductions (from Investors, Advisors, existing networks)

• Current Pipeline (+ lost deals)

Warm pipeline converts faster than anything you’ll pay for.

I’ve seen founders spend thousands of euros on advertising while ignoring dozens of existing customers, investors, advisors and former colleagues who would happily introduce them to the right people.

Self-check:

Have you asked your last 10 happy customers for a referral, directly, in the last 30 days?

8. Pipeline Generation Engine

Once the quick wins are tapped, we build the system that keeps producing repeatable pipeline.

Some channels are a better fit for your primary channels, like:

• (Warm/signal based) outbound

• Founder LinkedIn content

• Social Listening

• BOFU content

Others are better once you've found something that works:

• Paid Social

• Paid Search

• Partnerships

• GEO/SEO

• Influencer/Creator partnerships

• Events

The goal is consistency: a channel you can predict pipeline from every month.

And it starts with focus: 1-2 channels, mastered, before adding a third.

Self-check:

Which single channel drives 50%+ of your pipeline today?

9. Sales Process

A repeatable sales process makes buying and selling easier, both for the founders and buyers.

This includes:

• CRM setup

• Using a sales framework like SPICED

• Qualification frameworks & Discovery structure

• Demos (see my Sales Demo Toolbox)

• Email templates and follow-up sequences

• Regular call reviews

One closed deal doesn’t validate anything on its own.

The goal is to build a system you (or a future first hire) can run predictably.

Self-check:

After your last 5 demos, did every call end with a specific next step, or with "let me know what you think"?

10. Demo Call Coaching

A repeatable process still needs to be executed well - so I review actual calls using my Sales Demo Toolbox.

So what we do is 2 things:

• I review your sales demos frequently

• We set up a sales coaching automation (e.g. with Granola), so every call gets analyzed

Self-check:

After your last 5 demos, did every call end with a specific next step, or with “let me know what you think”?

11. Pricing

Pricing is important, but I realized that it’s less important than most founders think (for your 0-1€ million ARR journey).

We define:

• Packaging

• The value metric

• Pricing structure

• Trial and pilot models

• Payment terms

At €0-1M ARR, keep it simple: one value metric, reviewed every quarter, beats four tiers with feature gating you can’t justify.

Self-check:

When did you last review your pricing? If the answer is “never,” you’re probably underpricing.

Can you explain your prospect in <30 seconds how your pricing works?

12. Customer Success

Growth doesn’t stop at closed-won.

We work on the first customer success playbook.

This usually includes things like:

• Getting them to a case study

• Asking for referrals

• Spotting expansion potential

• Spot churn risks early

Self-check:

Have your last 3 closed-won customers been asked for a referral or a case study - directly, not “if you get a chance”?

13. Reporting & GTM Planning

We set the Goals in step 1 (as part of the audit), but it’s important that we:

• measure weekly/monthly our progress

• see if we are on track (or not)

• adapt the plan

So we build:

• GTM Dashboards

• Weekly and monthly reporting

• Financial Model

Plus, we revisit priorities every month (after we review the metrics).

Self-check:

Do you have a dashboard that helps you take GTM decisions?

Now you know what I actually do as a GTM advisor.

I help founders build the GTM foundation system: 13 steps, sequentially, one built on top of the other.

Happy growth.

Alex

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

If you’re somewhere between €0 → €1M ARR, I can help you with your GTM.

1️⃣ GTM Foundation Library
→ More than 50 frameworks, guides, and templates.

2️⃣ GTM Clarity Sprint
→ A complete GTM audit and a six-month action plan delivered in < 7 days

3️⃣ 1:1 GTM Advisory
→ Work directly with me to build your GTM, workstream by workstream

I’ve written 15+ deep dives on GTM over the last year. ICP, positioning, messaging, demos, outbound, pricing, channels, and more.

But here’s the thing: no one has read all of them.

And even if you did, the episodes were published separately. Each one goes deep into one topic. But none of them show how everything connects.

So today, I’m putting your entire GTM foundation on one page.

7 building blocks. For each one: the key insight, a self-check question, and the link to the full deep dive.

This is the episode to bookmark.

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:
✅ Pricing Guide 101
✅ 8 GTM Infographics for SaaS/AI Founders 2026
✅ The GTM Audit Playbook

A quick word from our sponsor: I include only sponsors I would personally recommend.

📢 “When I think of revenue, I think of Attio.” Shreman Shrestha, Head of Business

Granola’s revenue motion runs on Attio. Here’s what that adds up to:

• Zero missed leads and 10X faster access to customer context

• Lead triage 83% faster

• 5 hours saved per week with automated updates

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Let’s get into it. 👇👇

The GTM Foundation System

Don’t make the mistake of treating GTM like separate pieces. ICP here. Positioning there. Channels somewhere else.

In reality, your GTM is a chain of decisions. Each block depends on the one before it.

❌ If the ICP is unclear, positioning breaks.
❌ If positioning breaks, messaging gets vague.
❌ If messaging is vague, your demos, content, outreach feel generic.
❌ When everything is generic, you don’t win deals.

Fix the upstream problem, and 3 downstream problems disappear.

Here’s the system:

ICP → Positioning → Messaging → Collaterals → Channels & Tactics → Sales Process & Demos → Pricing

1️⃣ ICP (Who You Sell To)

The insight: I see most founders define their ICP too broadly.
“B2B SaaS companies with 10-200 employees” is not an ICP.

A real ICP includes 3-5 firmographic/technographic attributes, the specific persona, the buying trigger, AND the Anti-ICP (who you should not target).

The founders who grow fastest are the ones who say no to the most prospects.

Self-check: Can you describe your best-fit customer with 3-5 specific attributes, and can you name the event that triggers them to buy?

If not, start here.

2️⃣ Positioning (What You Are)

The insight: Positioning is a founder’s bet.

You decide:

• what your product is,

• who it’s for,

• and what alternative it replaces.

If buyers can’t mentally classify you in 5 seconds, they can’t buy you.

Confused buyers don’t book demos. They ignore you.

Don’t wait for perfect data before positioning. Positioning creates the data.

Bad positioning beats no positioning. Every time.

Self-check: Can you explain what you are in one sentence, without rambling?

If a stranger asks “What does your company do?” and you need more than 10 seconds, you have a positioning problem.

3️⃣ Messaging (How You Communicate It)

The insight: Great messaging uses the customer’s language, not yours.

It focuses on one core outcome/workflow/jobs-to-be done.

And it’s consistent everywhere: website, sales calls, LinkedIn, emails, ads.

The most common mistake I see:

❌ Founders use different messages across every channel. Different storyline on the homepage, different pitch in demos, different story on LinkedIn.

That’s not creative. That’s confusing.

Repetition builds clarity. Don’t reinvent the message for every channel.

(I’m not talking about copy/words. I’m talking about messaging. For sure, you can use different words across different channels and different stages of the funnel)

Self-check: If I put your homepage hero, your sales deck, and your LinkedIn profile next to each other, would they tell the same story?

4️⃣ Collaterals (The Assets That Sell When You’re Not in the Room)

The insight: Your collaterals are your GTM on autopilot. Your website, case studies, sales deck, LinkedIn profiles, lead magnets. These are the things buyers look at before, during, and after talking to you.

Here’s what I see constantly: the positioning and messaging is clear (on paper), but the website still says something different. The sales deck opens with a company history slide. The LinkedIn profile talks about the founder’s background instead of the buyer’s problem.

Your collaterals need to tell the same story as your messaging.

Same ICP. Same pain. Same value prop.

Adapted for the format, but the same core narrative.

Self-check: Pull up your website, your sales deck, your LinkedIn profile, and your last case study. Do they all tell the same story? If not, your collaterals are working against you.

5️⃣ Channels & Tactics (Where You Show Up and How You Create Conversations)

The insight: Early-stage founders spread across too many channels. LinkedIn, Google Ads, SEO, partnerships, events, communities, cold email. All at once. None working well.

Every channel requires depth to work. LinkedIn takes 3-6 months of consistent posting. Outbound needs signal tracking and message iteration. SEO takes 6-12 months. At 20% effort, nothing compounds.

Master 1-2 channels before adding a third.

And within each channel, the tactic and execution matter.

In 2026, here are the channels I would bet on:

1. Organic LinkedIn (Founder & Team Personal Brands)

2. Referrals & warm intros

3. Signal-based/ warm outbound

4. Social listening

5. BOFU content

(P.S. Channel selection always depends on your ACV, market maturity, target audience, founder/team skills)

Self-check: Which 1-2 channels drive 80% of your pipeline today? If the answer is “I’m not sure” or “we’re testing everything,” you’re spreading too thin. And for your main outbound campaign: can you name the specific signal that triggers it?

6️⃣ Sales Process & Demos (How You Convert Interest Into Revenue)

The insight: Most weak demos are not demo problems. They’re GTM problems.

❌ If your ICP is unclear, your discovery stays superficial.
❌ If your positioning is vague, you can’t handle “How are you different?”
❌ If your messaging doesn’t resonate, the buyer understands the features but never understands why it matters.

The demo is just the live expression of your GTM clarity.
Fix the foundation, and the demo improves automatically.

But the demo is also just one part of a broader sales process.

• What are the typical steps you guide your buyers through

• How you qualify leads

• How you structure discovery

• How you follow up

• How you create urgency

Founder-led sales at the early stage means you ARE the process. And that process needs to be repeatable before you can hand it off.

Self-check: After your last 5 demos, did the buyer clearly understand what you do, who it’s for, and why it’s different from what they use today? And do you have a defined next step for every call, or do your demos end with “Let me know what you think”?

If not, the demo isn’t the problem. Go back to blocks 1-3.

7️⃣ Pricing (How You Capture Value)

The insight: Pricing is 80% about the right structure. Not the number on the page. The structure is what determines how your pricing scales with the value your customer gets: per seat, per usage, per feature tier.

Get the structure wrong and you’ll either leave money on the table or create friction that kills deals. Get it right, and pricing becomes a growth lever, not just a number.

Most founders underprice. Not because the market can’t pay more. Because they lack confidence in their positioning. When you’re not sure what makes you different, every price feels too high. The founders who raise prices almost always wish they had done it sooner.

And if you’re between €0 and €1M ARR: don’t overcomplicate it. One value metric. You can build a sophisticated pricing model later. Right now, simplicity wins.

Self-check: When was the last time you raised your prices? If the answer is “never” or “I’m not sure we can,” you’re probably underpricing. And does your pricing structure actually scale with the value your customer gets?

The System View: Why the Order Matters

Here’s what most founders miss:

These 7 blocks are not independent topics. They’re a chain.

When the chain works: ✅ Clear ICP → Sharp positioning → Resonant messaging → Strong collaterals → Focused channels → Great sales process → Confident pricing

When it breaks: ❌ Vague ICP → Generic positioning → Inconsistent messaging → Weak collaterals → Too many channels → Unstructured sales process → Underpricing

Every GTM problem I see traces back to a break somewhere in this chain. And 80% of the time, the break is in the first 3 blocks.

So before you invest in better outbound tools, demo coaching, or a pricing consultant, ask yourself:

Is my ICP actually clear? Is my positioning actually sharp? Is my messaging actually consistent?

If yes, move downstream.

If no, fix the foundation first.

That’s the system.

📚 Your GTM Reading List (All Deep Dives)

Here’s every episode referenced above, in the order I’d read them:

1️⃣ GTM Foundation Part 1: ICP, Positioning & Messaging
2️⃣ The Ultimate Positioning Guide (+ Worksheet)
3️⃣ GTM Foundation Part 2: Channels & Collaterals
4️⃣ The Founder & Team LinkedIn Playbook
5️⃣ SaaS Lead Magnets That Actually Convert
6️⃣ 8 Must-Have Signal-Based Outbound Campaigns
7️⃣ The GTM Foundation Behind Great Sales Demos
8️⃣ SPICED Sales Engine (+ Granola Templates)
9️⃣ GTM Foundation Part 3: Pricing & Sales Motion
🔟 The Pricing Guide 101

Plus, of course: The GTM Playbook to €1M ARR

Bookmark this episode. Come back when something breaks. Start with block 1.

Happy growth

Alex

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

If you’re somewhere between €0 → €1M ARR, I can help you with your GTM.

1️⃣ Free GTM Foundation Library
→ 50+ resources (guides, templates, frameworks)

2️⃣ 7-day GTM Clarity Sprint
→ 360° assessment + 6-month action plan: Your GTM blind spots revealed

3️⃣ 1:1 GTM Advisory
→ Work directly with me to build your GTM

Most founders treat pricing like a math problem. They argue over whether the number should be €79 or €99, pick one, and move on.

Working with founders on their GTM foundation, pricing comes up in almost every engagement. And the issue is almost never the number. It's the structure.

That’s why I invited pricing expert Serge Herkül, Founder of Potio (a boutique pricing consultancy for startups), to MRR Unlocked.

He'll walk you through a step-by-step process to find your value metric, pick the right model, and package it, specifically for founders on the road from €0 to €1M ARR.

I'll hand it over to Serge from here.

P.S. At the end of the episode, we offer to roast your pricing for free.

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ The GTM Audit Playbook

✅ The 8 GTM Infographics for SaaS/AI founders

✅ The GTM Foundation behind great Sales Demos

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I’ve seen pricing from both chairs: the CEO sweating his own pricing, and the professional companies now hire to fix theirs.

❌ Pricing isn’t a pure math problem.

✅ It’s a design problem with math applied at every step.

And it’s the highest-leverage part of your whole company. With the same product and the same team, the gap between mediocre pricing and great pricing can be a 10x difference in growth.

This guide is how I think about building a pricing model, written specifically for founders on the road from €0 to €1M ARR.

Use it as a step-by-step process, and by the end, you’ll land on pricing you can trust and share with your customers. Let’s start with the mindset, because if you get this part wrong, nothing else lands.

The core philosophy

Pricing is central to your company, not an afterthought you pass to finance.

Pricing defines how you align the customer’s wallet with the way they get value from what you built, which means it touches your core product metrics as much as any feature does.

There’s no single right way to price, but there are several great ones.

The best companies shift pricing as the product evolves, ICP changes, and the market moves. The best companies treat pricing as something they tune continuously, dozens of small changes a year rather than one big overhaul they bet the company on.

Pricing is closer to conversion rate optimization than to accounting. You don’t solve it once; you keep tuning it.

Your goal on day one IS NOT to be right.
It’s to ship something defensible fast and improve it on a loop.

And good pricing does more than set revenue per customer.
It quietly shapes retention, activation, and expansion.

✅ The right model pulls customers up as they grow.
❌ The wrong one caps them, or nudges them to ration their own usage, and it’s almost never the dollar amount that causes that. It’s the structure.

So start simple.

Since your pricing will change anyway, your first model should be quick to take to market.

Flat fee or per-seat is often enough to prove the one thing that matters pre-revenue: that someone will actually pay you.

Pricing by stage

How much effort pricing deserves depends on where you are. Alex splits the climb from €0 to €1M ARR into three stages, and pricing plays a different role in each.

Stage 1: Hustle mode.

You’re chasing your first 10 to 100 customers.

Pricing’s only job here is to stay out of the way.

Keep it dead simple, a flat fee or per seat, and prove people will actually pay.
Don’t optimize, don’t agonize over packaging.

→ The question is binary: will someone hand you money?

Stage 2: Focus mode.

You’ve niched down to one segment, one use case, one channel, and you’re pushing past those first customers toward €1M.

Now pricing earns real attention.

This is where you run the full exercise in this guide once and ship a real pricing V1:

→ find your value metric

→ pick your model

→ package it.

Timebox the thinking to a day or two, put it live, and let real conversions tune it.

Get this roughly right and pricing starts pushing your growth.

P.S. Make sure to plan a quarterly ‘pricing review meeting’.

Stage 3: Expansion mode.

Past €1M, pricing stops being a project you revisit annually and becomes an ongoing function, as permanent as marketing or product.

As you expand into new use cases, your pricing has to flex with it. You’re probably not here yet, but it’s where all of this leads.

Price structure vs. price points

Here’s the distinction that reframes everything.

Pricing has two layers, and founders spend their time on the wrong one.

1️⃣ Price structure is how you charge

→ your value metric plus your packaging. It decides who pays and how their bill scales.

2️⃣ Price points are how much you charge

→ the actual numbers on the page.

If your structure is wrong, no price point can save it.

Charge a flat rate to an enterprise account that’s getting massive value and it makes no difference whether you set it at €99 or €199.

You’re leaving most of the money on the table either way, because the model doesn’t scale with the value they’re getting.

The good news is that price points are the easiest thing to change later.
→ Get the structure right and the number becomes a tuning knob.
→ Get the structure wrong and the number is a band-aid.

So that’s where we’ll spend the rest of this guide: structure first, numbers last.

Step 1: Get clear on who you’re selling to

Before you can charge anyone, you need to know who “anyone” is.

Some products get bought by structurally different types of customers.

In SaaS, this split is usually less obvious, and pricing people call it “fencing.”

At your stage, you don’t need the jargon, and you definitely don’t need more than one of these.

This isn’t about tiers or packaging. It’s just about picking one type of customer and aiming your entire pricing architecture at them.

If you’re below €1M and already trying to serve structurally different buyers, that’s a sign you’re spread too thin.

Step 2: Your value metric

This is the single most important decision in your pricing, and if you get it right, most of the early-stage work takes care of itself.

Your value metric is the unit you charge by, and the whole point of it is to make your pricing scale alongside your customer’s success.

Land on the right one, and the rest of your pricing clicks into place.

→ Pricing feels fair, because buyers pay more only when they’re getting more.

→ Upsells happen on their own as customers grow into the metric.

→ And those painful discount fights in negotiation mostly evaporate.

Picking one can feel daunting, so I use three strict filters.

A candidate metric has to pass all three:

1️⃣ can you measure it,

2️⃣ do customers like it,

3️⃣ and does it grow as they grow.

Filter 1: Operational fit. Can you track and bill on it?

A clever metric is useless if you can’t build billing around it. Yours has to be:

1. Measurable. Can you point to an actual number in your product’s database and charge against it?

2. Attributable. Can you confidently say your product was the reason that number moved?

3. Execution feasibility. Can finance and engineering meter and invoice this without making it a mess?

Filter 2: Customer perception. Do buyers like paying this way?

If a customer feels punished for using your product, they’ll stop growing. A good metric matches the buyer’s psychology:

4. Understandable. Can everyone, your team and theirs, grasp it in seconds?

5. Fairness. Does it feel like a reasonable way to pay for the software?

6. Expectation to Pay. Does the market already pay for this kind of product this way?

7. Willingness to Pay. Does their willingness to pay actually rise as they consume more of the metric?

Filter 3: Economic logic. Does it scale with success?

The metric has to make mathematical sense for your margins too:

8. Cost aligned. Does it move in step with your cost to serve? Critical for AI companies carrying real compute costs per unit.

9. Consistent. Is one unit roughly worth the same as another, whoever’s buying? (For an OKR software a CEO seat and a junior designer seat differ wildly in value, which is a strike against seats as a metric).

10. Scalable. Does it reliably grow as the customer’s business grows, or as the value they pull from you grows?

Your best metric lands dead-center in all three circles.

In practice, almost nobody finds one that scores 10/10 on every criterion, and that’s fine. Index your candidates against each filter, judge which performs best overall, and commit.

The exercise to find it

This works on a whiteboard with your team in under an hour.

Step 1: First, list every possible value metric.

Don’t pre-filter, don’t be precious, get them all down. Push past the obvious ones.

If you write “# of users,” also write “# of active users,” and so on.

Creativity is the whole game here.

Step 2: Second, run a fast pass on measurability.

For each candidate, can you literally point to a number in your database you could bill against? If it’s hard or impossible to measure, kill it now.

Step 3: Third, score what survives on how well it correlates with perceived value.

If the customer is happy to pay more as the metric grows and the economics hold up, it’s a strong candidate. If they understand why you’d charge on it but don’t love it, keep it as a backup. Anything else, discard.

By the end you’ll be down to a handful. Rate those finalists against the three filters above, and your winner usually becomes obvious.

Can you have more than one value metric?

Yes, and plenty of strong companies do.

But there’s a right and a wrong reason to.

A second metric earns its place when it captures a genuinely different axis of value, the way Stripe charges on payment volume and also per active connected account, two real dimensions of how customers grow.

The wrong reason is hedging, bolting on a second metric because you’re not confident in your first.

That just confuses the buyer and muddies your billing. Early on, run one primary metric that carries the model, and add a second only if it tracks a distinct, real source of value.

Your model falls out of your metric

Once you have the metric, your pricing model is mostly decided. Don’t choose a model first and reverse-engineer a metric to fit it.

That’s backwards, and it’s one of the most common early mistakes I see. Pricing models go through fashions, and whatever is trendy right now might not fit your product.

A few questions to connect the two:

1. Do individual users get standalone value? Per-seat.

2. Does usage volume equal value? Usage-based.

3. Does value scale with the customer’s revenue? Percentage of GMV.

4. Do free users drive adoption and network effects? Freemium.

5. Does each action directly save time or money? Per-action.

The warning: don’t price on a metric that punishes success

The most common version of this mistake is charging by seats for a product whose value comes from usage, not access.

Picture a product that lets agencies build custom client proposals. What used to take three hours now takes ten minutes. It’s tempting to charge on “# of proposals” and tack on “# of seats” too, because seats are familiar and surely more users means more value.

But proposals are your real value metric.

They sit right next to the outcome the customer is buying.

Seats sit far from it. A seat on its own does nothing. It’s just a door to the thing that actually matters, which is proposals going out.

Charge by seats and you hand customers a reason to ration access: they funnel everything through one person to keep the seat count down, the product never spreads through the org, and they create fewer proposals.

You’ve priced in a way that throttles the exact behavior you want.

Charge on the outcome and that ceiling disappears.

Value-based pricing and the value chain

“Value-based pricing” gets talked about like it’s mystical.

It isn’t.

Strip away the jargon and it just means choosing a value metric that sits close to the end outcome your customer actually cares about.

A value chain makes this concrete. It’s the full sequence of steps a customer moves through to get value from your product.

Take the proposals company again.

To get value, the customer signs up, sets up their account (invites teammates, uploads brand assets and tone of voice), creates a proposal, and sends it to their client, who accepts, rejects, or asks for changes.

Lay the candidate metrics along that chain and it reads:

The further right your metric sits, the closer you are to real value, and to true value-based pricing.

When you’ve got several decent candidates, the chain is a clean way to choose: prefer the one furthest right that you can still measure and bill cleanly.

One important caveat. Most companies can’t price right at the point of value, and true value-based pricing is rarer than the theory suggests.

Plenty of the biggest companies, Anthropic and AWS among them, price on the left of the chain, on tokens and compute rather than business outcomes.

From metric to model: 3 examples

The move is always the same. Work out what actually creates value for the customer, and the model picks itself.

A few examples you’ll recognize:

Figma (per-seat)

The people holding editor seats are the ones creating the work, so a seat is a clean proxy for the value a team gets.

And one creator seat is worth about as much as the next, since they’re all creating. When each user gets a standalone value and that value is spread evenly across them, per-seat is the obvious fit.

Stripe (percentage of revenue)

Stripe gets more valuable the more money you move, and, rare for any software, it can see your revenue exactly because it’s the one processing it.

When value tracks a number you can measure directly, and that number is the customer’s own growth, taking a small cut of it is the natural model.

Most companies can’t price this way because they never have that visibility.

Intercom Fin (per-action)

Each Fin resolution has a concrete, calculable value: you know what it costs to close a ticket with a human, and Fin does it cheaper.

When every action your product takes maps to a clear dollar saved, charging per action is the cleanest way to price.

Step 3: Packaging

Depending on how mature your product is, you may be able to have more than one package.

In fact, if possible, you should always aim for more than one, ideally at least three.

Early on, a single offer is fine. But once you’ve been building for a while, there’s real money in having a few.

Here’s why.

Different customers value your product differently and have different willingness to pay.

Offer one package at one price, and you’re forced onto a single point on that demand curve.

❌ Price high and you lose the lighter buyers.

❌ Price low and you leave money on the table with the heavy ones.

Multiple packages let you capture more of the area under that curve:

✅ an entry tier that converts the price-sensitive,
✅ a premium tier that captures the high willingness-to-pay buyers,
✅ and something in between.

The image shows the price curve across your customers. Maximise the area under the curve and you maximise your revenue.

So packaging is building offers, each a deliberate combination of features, services, and price, aimed at a segment, so you capture the most value possible from it.

There are three primary ways to package, and I prefer them in this order:

1️⃣ Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD)

Each package serves a different job your product does. Use this when your product does several distinct jobs and different buyers show up for different (or multiple) ones.

2️⃣ Personas

Each package targets a distinct persona. Use this when your product does one job for several audiences with different willingness to pay.

3️⃣ Good-better-best (GBB)

Each package is a bigger version of the one below it. Use this when your product does one thing and value scales with how much of it someone needs.

Startups drift toward GBB by default, usually by accident.

The story goes: company has one paid plan, grows, and gets told more tiers mean more revenue.

So they take whatever feature they just shipped, drop it into a new “Premium” plan next to priority support and a CSV export they scraped together, and keep stuffing Premium until it feels full enough to justify a third tier.

That’s how most early GBB pricing gets built. It’s also inefficient and the wrong way to package.

Every package needs a clear purpose and a clear audience, and that purpose decides which features go where.

So if it isn’t obvious yet: use GBB only when you have no better option.

Otherwise, reach for job-based packaging first. It’ll serve you far better, because it maps your pricing to how customers actually think about what they’re buying.

Which features actually matter

Once you have your packages, you need to sort your features into them. Which features carry weight, and which don’t?

The value matrix gives you a clean way to decide.

It’s a four-quadrant grid.

→ The vertical axis is willingness to pay, low to high.

→ The horizontal axis is customer preference, low to high, how much people actually want the feature.

Every feature you’ve built drops into one of four buckets.

Value drivers (high preference, high WTP)

Your standout features, the ones that make a customer go “ah, that’s why I upgrade.”

These are what your packaging revolves around. Every tier should have at least one, and you use them to structurally pull customers up the ladder. Put them in your higher tiers.

Core features (high preference, low WTP)

Everyone expects these features. Put them in every package and never gate them. If you find yourself having no value drivers (and only core features), you only have one tier.

Add-ons (low preference, high WTP)

A small, specific slice of users wants these, and that slice will happily pay a premium.

Not enough demand to justify a whole tier. Keep them out of the standard packages and sell them à la carte.

Forgettables (low preference, low WTP). No one asked for them, and no one will miss them. Question why they exist, and at minimum, stop talking about them.

When companies go through this exercise, they often get stuck on what is a Value driver vs Core feature.

Ask yourself:

Would a customer pay more for this, or do they just expect it to be there?

✅ Pay more means value driver

✅ Expect it means core.

The truth about “Enterprise” plans

Enterprise is a way of buying, not a wallet size, and not a bundle of fancy features.

The two classic mistakes are setting an arbitrary revenue or headcount cutoff, and stuffing the enterprise plan with your coolest features.

Both misunderstand what an enterprise buyer is.

❌ They aren’t defined by size (though they correlate with size)

✅ They’re defined by how they operate, what processes they run, and how they see themselves.

I’ve seen 200-person companies behave like full enterprises, and I’ve worked with companies like Booking.com, well past 10,000 employees, that still operate like startups.

❌ Enterprise mistake 1: Setting an arbitrary revenue or headcount cutoff

Force a self-serve company to “contact sales” because they crossed 1,000 actions or some ARR line, and you’ll not just annoy them, but by forcing them into an Enterprise contract, you’re going to be giving them a discount, and you’re going to pay your sales rep commission, lose-lose.

❌ Enterprise mistake 2: Stuffing the enterprise plan with your coolest features

An enterprise buyer doesn’t buy software because it has better features. They buy it because it clears their internal legal, security, and IT requirements.

So your enterprise plan shouldn’t gate your core product value behind a sales call. It should hold the plumbing that lets corporate procurement hit “approve”:

What enterprise is

✅ SSO and SAML,

✅ advanced audit logs,

✅ custom roles and permissions,

✅ data residency,

✅ dedicated SLAs,

✅ procurement-friendly invoicing.

What enterprise is not:

❌ access to the “best AI models,”

❌ advanced analytics,

❌ or faster performance.

Keep your actual product value in the standard tiers. Let enterprise be the operational toll bridge that corporate IT is required to pay.

Avoid the survey trap

When founders finally decide to fix their pricing, many of them turn to academic market research.

They send out elaborate surveys, run a conjoint analysis, or build a Van Westendorp price sensitivity meter.

Don’t.

For almost every situation, and always for early-stage startups, traditional pricing surveys are a counterproductive waste of time, for two reasons.

❌ You can’t survey a structure

A survey can only ask what someone would pay for one isolated thing.

It can’t capture the interaction between your value metric, your feature gating, and your tiers, and structure is exactly where the leverage lives.

You’d be researching the 20% and ignoring the 80%.

❌ Opinions are cheap, credit cards are not.

There’s a wide psychological gap between a person typing a hypothetical number into a text box and a buyer actually pulling out a company card to kill a painful bottleneck.

The first costs nothing and predicts almost nothing.

Market-testing beats market-research

Stop trying to predict the future with data that doesn’t exist yet. Replace academic research with conversation and real deployment.

Talk about value, not numbers.

In discovery calls, never ask

“what would you pay for this?”

Ask questions that surface their economic reality instead:

“How much time does this bottleneck cost your team each week?”

or

“What happens if this breaks for a day?”

Quantify the pain first, then design the structure around it.

Then ship the pricing page.

Your single most accurate data point is a conversion.

Get a high-conviction Pricing V1 live, fast.

Real users paying real money will teach you more in a month than any survey will in a quarter.

The short list of don’ts

To close, here are a few additional pricing mistakes we often see startups making:

❌ Don’t blindly copy competitors

At best, their structure was built for their value metric, their ICP, and their stage.

At worst (much more likely), they have bad pricing, which holds them back. Use pricing as your competitive advantage.

❌ Don’t use cost-plus to land on your price

In software, what it costs you to build has nothing to do with what it’s worth to your customer.

❌ Don’t undercharge

Near-universal among early founders. If no one ever flinches at your price, you’re too cheap. Some pushback is good!

❌ Don’t throw features into tiers at random

Every feature placement should follow from a deliberate packaging strategy, never from how much effort the feature took.

That’s the whole loop:

None of it is one-and-done.

The founders who win at pricing aren’t the ones who got it perfect on the first try. They’re the ones who started simple and kept iterating.

We roast your pricing page for free 🔥🔥🔥

Serge and I are offering to roast your pricing page for free.
A 5-min Loom video with our honest take. No strings attached.
Just reply to this email with your pricing page URL and we’ll record one for you

Happy growth.

Alex + Serge

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

If you’re somewhere between €0 → €1M ARR, I can help you with your GTM.

1️⃣ Free GTM Foundation Library
→ 50+ resources (guides, templates, frameworks)

2️⃣ GTM Audit
→ 360° assessment + 6-month action plan: Your GTM Blindspots revealed

3️⃣ 1:1 GTM Advisory
→ Work directly with me to build your GTM

Want me to run this audit for you? I do a 360° assessment of your current GTM + build you a custom 6-month GTM action plan, delivered in <7 days.

Book a GTM clarity sprint

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ 8 GTM Infographics for SaaS/AI Founders 2026

✅ The GTM Foundation Behind Great Sales Demos

✅ The 6 Sales Demo Mistakes

P.S. You love playing Padel? Then check out my 7-day Padel Workation for Founders, Solopreneurs, and GTM operators.

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Why Most GTM “Fixes” Don’t Work

Here’s something I’ve noticed across almost every founder I’ve worked with:

They start fixing the wrong thing.

❌ “Our outbound isn’t working” → So they buy a new tool or add more leads.

❌ “Our demos don’t convert” → So they take a sales course.

❌ “We’re not getting inbound” → So they hire a content person.

But most of the time, the root cause sits upstream.

The outbound fails because the ICP is unclear.
The demos fail because the positioning is weak.
The inbound fails because the messaging doesn’t resonate.

That’s why I always start with an audit before I fix anything.

Because the symptom is rarely the problem.

The 6-Part GTM Audit

When I sit down with a founder, I run through 6 areas. Each one builds on the one before.

If you get the first 3 right, everything downstream gets easier.
If the first 3 are broken, nothing downstream will fix it.

1. ICP Clarity

The first question I ask every founder:

“Describe your ideal customer in one sentence.”

Here’s what I usually hear:

❌ “We sell to companies with 50 to 500 employees.”

❌ “Our ICP is mid-market SaaS.”

❌ “We target anyone who has this problem.”

That’s not an ICP. That’s a TAM.

A strong ICP answers:

✅ What type of company? (industry, size, stage, business model)

✅ Who is the buyer and champion? (role, seniority, day-to-day pain)

✅ What triggers the buying process? (critical events)

✅ What makes them a best-fit customer? (fast sales cycles, low churn, high usage)

The best early-stage companies don’t target everyone. They become extremely relevant to a specific segment before expanding.

The pattern I always find: Founders who struggle with outbound, demos, or content almost always have a vague ICP. Fix the ICP, and 3 other problems disappear.

Quick self-check:

1. Can you name 5 best-fit customers today?

2. Do they share the same industry, size, and pain point?

3. If not, you likely have an ICP problem.

2. Positioning Clarity

The second question:

“What are you?”

If the answer takes longer than 10 seconds, we have a problem.

I wrote an entire episode on this, but here’s the short version:

Positioning is two decisions:

1. Primary anchor: What is your product? (Activity, Use Case, Product Category, or Competitive Alternative)

2. Secondary angle: Why you? (What makes you different?)

Most founders try to sound differentiated before they’ve become understandable.

But buyers who can’t classify you will never compare you. And buyers who can’t compare you will never buy you.

The pattern I always find: When I review their homepage, LinkedIn profiles, and sales deck side by side, I often see two completely different positioning stories. That’s a red flag. If your own team can’t agree on what you are, your buyers definitely can’t.

Quick self-check:

1. Open your homepage and your sales deck. Is the positioning identical?

2. Ask 3 team members “What are we?” Do you get the same answer?

3. Can a stranger understand what you do in 30 seconds?

3. Messaging Clarity

The third question:

“Do you have a messaging framework?”

Most founders don’t. They go straight to writing homepage copy, sales emails, and pitch decks, without defining what they actually want to say first.

Here’s the thing most people miss:

Messaging defines your copy. Copy changes based on the channel, medium, and buyer stage. But the messaging stays the same.

Without a messaging framework, every time you write an email, build a landing page, or pitch your product, you use different words, different narratives, and different ways to communicate, you basically start from zero every time.

A strong messaging framework answers 5 questions:

✅ The Market — What’s changing? What’s the status quo and what’s broken about it?

✅ The ICP — Who’s most affected by this problem?

✅ The Competitive Alternatives — What are they doing today instead? What are the limitations?

✅ Your Product — What can customers do with your product that they can’t without it? (Capabilities, not feature lists.)

✅ The Value Proposition — What’s in it for them? What results do you drive? What social proof do you have?

Once you have this framework, it becomes the foundation for everything: your homepage, your sales deck, your outbound, your demos.

Here’s what a founder recently said about it.

The pattern I always find: Founders who skip the messaging framework end up with a homepage that says one thing, a sales deck that says another, and outbound emails that say something completely different. Three assets, three stories, zero consistency.

Quick self-check:

1. Do you have a written messaging framework your team can reference?

2. Does your homepage copy, sales deck, LK profile, and outbound all tell the same story?

3. Can you explain the market problem, competitive alternatives, and your value proposition, without mentioning a single feature?

4. Sales Demo Quality

The fourth question:

“Let me review your last 3 sales demo calls?”

Here’s something most people don’t realize:

Your demo quality is usually a reflection of your GTM quality.

I’ve reviewed 50+ founder-led demos. And weak demos are almost never a demo problem.

They’re a GTM clarity problem.

❌ If your ICP is vague, your discovery stays superficial.
❌ If your positioning is unclear, you can’t handle “How are you different from X?”
❌ If your messaging is feature-first, your demo becomes a product tour.

Great demos are operationalized GTM clarity. They break down into 4 layers:

✅ ICP clarity → You ask deep, relevant questions. You adapt the demo to their use case.

✅ Positioning clarity → You explain what you are and why you’re different, in 30 seconds.

✅ Messaging clarity → You lead with the painful workflow, not the feature list.

✅ Process clarity → You guide the buying journey with clear next steps.

The pattern I always find: Founders who “need to improve their demos” usually need to improve their GTM foundation first. After that, work on your sales demo skills.

Quick self-check:

1. Does your demo feel different for each buyer, or is it the same product tour every time?

2. Can you handle “How are you different?” without listing features?

3. Do you end every demo with a specific next step (not “Let me know if you have questions”)?

5. Channel Focus

The fifth question:

“How many GTM channels are you running right now?”

If the answer is more than 2, we usually have a problem (if you’re in Focus mode from 100k€ to the first million ARR).

I see this constantly:

❌ “We do outbound, LinkedIn content, SEO, partnerships, and PPC.”

Each channel works differently, takes time to master, and eats up resources.

At €0 to €1M ARR, you don’t have the bandwidth to run 5 channels well. You’ll run all 5 badly.

✅ The fix: Pick 1-2 channels. Get it to work. Add more only after the first ones are producing predictable results.

The pattern I always find: Founders who spread across 4+ channels usually have none that work consistently. The founders who focus on 1-2 channels and master it are the ones who hit €1M ARR fastest.

Quick self-check:

1. Which single channel generates the most pipeline today?

2. Could you double down on it instead of adding a new one?

3. Can you describe your playbook for that channel in 5 bullet points?

6. Pricing & Sales Motion

The sixth question:

“Can you explain your pricing in 30 seconds?”

Early-stage pricing doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be clear enough to NOT stop you from growing.

Here’s what I look for:

✅ Does the value metric make sense? (What do you charge for?)

✅ Is it easy to understand? (Can a buyer the pricing page?)

✅ Is it iterative? (Are you reviewing pricing every quarter?)

And on the sales motion side:

✅ Is the founder still involved in sales? (They should be.)

✅ Is there a clear process from first touch to close?

✅ Do you know your sales cycle, win rate, and average deal size?

The pattern I always find: Founders either overcomplicate pricing (4 tiers with feature gating they can’t justify) or they haven’t touched pricing since day 1. Both hurt growth.

Quick self-check:

• Open your pricing page. Can a buyer understand which plan is for them in 10 seconds?

• When did you last review your pricing?

• Is the founder still involved in every deal (you should)?

• Can you explain your sales process steps from first touch to closed won?

• Can you name your average sales cycle length and win rate?

After the Audit: What Usually Happens

After running this audit with a founder, the result is almost always the same:

The problem is not that they need more tools, more channels, or more people.

The problem is that 2 or 3 foundational elements are unclear. And everything downstream is suffering because of it.

Here’s the typical priority order:

1. Fix the ICP. Everything else depends on it.

2. Fix the positioning. Make it understandable before you make it unique.

3. Build the messaging framework. It’s the foundation for every customer-facing asset.

4. Once those 3 are clear: optimize demos, channels, and pricing.

That’s it. No magic. Just clarity.

Focus beats complexity. Every time.

Want Me to Run This Audit For You?

I run 360° GTM audits with early-stage B2B SaaS/AI founders (€0 to €1M ARR).

Here’s what you get:

✅ A complete assessment of your current GTM foundation

✅ A custom 6-month GTM action plan — specific to your stage, ICP, and channels

✅ Delivered in less than 7 days

No fluff. No long-term commitment. Just clarity on your next GTM moves.

→ Book your GTM Audit here

Happy growth.

Alex

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

If you’re somewhere between €0 → €1M ARR, I can help you with your GTM.

1️⃣ Free GTM Foundation Library
→ 50+ resources (guides, templates, frameworks)

2️⃣ GTM Audit
→ 360° assessment + 6-month action plan: Your GTM Blindspots revealed

3️⃣ 1:1 GTM Advisory
→ Work directly with me to build your GTM

This week, I compiled 8 of the most useful infographics covering the foundations of go-to-market for SaaS/AI founders and GTM operators to hit the first 1€ million in ARR.

These are the topics most get wrong early on, and the ones that cost the most when done wrong.

Here’s what’s inside:

• Infographic 1: Don’t copy the big SaaS/AI players

• Infographic 2: The 3 stages from €0 → €1M ARR

• Infographic 3: The power of niching down

• Infographic 4: How Sales Demos help you build your GTM foundation

• Infographic 5: The 3 steps to build your positioning

• Infographic 6: Why buyers don't know what to compare you against

• Infographic 7: The Signal-based outbound playbook

• Infographic 8: The Demo structure to Win more deals

Together, they form a practical playbook for building your GTM foundation and reaching your first €1M ARR.

Let’s get into it.

Get access to my 80+ GTM foundation infographics for free.

80+ GTM Infographics

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ The BOFU Content Playbook 2026

✅ The 6 Most Common Demo Mistakes (+ Sales Demo Toolbox)

✅ The GTM Foundation behind great sales demos

A quick word from our sponsor: I include only sponsors I would personally recommend.

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Start creating with Pitch

(Get my sales demo template + prompt for Pitch AI agent for free)

📢 Attio — the AI-native CRM for GTM

Attio is the AI-native CRM with built-in enrichment, flexible workflows, and fast setup. Connect your email and calendar, and Attio instantly builds your CRM.

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Infographic 1: Don’t copy the big SaaS/AI players

One of the biggest mistakes I see founders make is copying GTM strategies from companies 100x bigger than they are.

Large companies can afford multiple ICPs, multiple channels, and complex pricing because they’ve already found what works.

At €0-€1M ARR, the game is different: focus beats complexity almost every time.

Infographic 2: Understand where you are in your journey - different stages, different goals

Different stages require different goals.

In the beginning, your job is to learn. Then it’s to create repeatability. Only later does scale become the priority.

Many founders try to scale before they’ve built a repeatable GTM playbook.

Learn more about the 3 stages to build a strong GTM foundation.

Infographic 3: Why you can’t target your TAM - better niche down

Founders often worry that niching down makes the opportunity smaller.

In reality, the opposite is usually true.

The fastest-growing companies become extremely relevant to a specific segment before expanding into adjacent markets.

Learn how to find your best-fit customers.

Infographic 4: How Demos help you shape your GTM foundation

In the early stages, demos are actually one of your best research tools.

They reveal who buys, what problems resonate, what objections appear, and how buyers make decisions.

Learn how to run great sales demos (as a founder and early AE) with my Sales Demo Toolbox.

Infographic 5: Know what you are and how to communicate it (in simple words)

Many positioning problems come from trying to sound differentiated before becoming understandable.

The first job of positioning is helping buyers quickly understand what you are.

Only then can you explain why you’re different.

Learn how to build your strong positioning (with my free Positioning Guide)

Infographic 6: Specific positioning (clarity) helps you sell better (because your buyers can compare you)

If prospects constantly ask, “So is this like X?”, you likely have a positioning problem.

Buyers need a mental reference point before they can evaluate your product.

Clarity almost always beats creativity when communicating what you do.

Infographic 7: Don’t cold blast messages, run a few high-relevance outbound campaigns

Most outbound fails because the message has no relevant trigger behind it.

The best campaigns start with a signal: a hiring event, website visit, new customer, technology change, or social engagement.

Relevance creates conversations

The 8 must have founder-led signal-based outbound campaigns

Infographic 8: Your demos are NOT product tours

Most demo calls fail because they become feature presentations.

Great demos are decision-making conversations.

The goal isn’t to show everything your product can do. The goal is to help the buyer move toward a decision.

Learn how to run great sales demos (as a founder and early AE) with my Sales Demo Toolbox.

GTM Library with 80+ more actionable GTM infographics like these.

If these 8 infographics were useful, you’ll probably enjoy the full GTM Library.

Inside, you’ll find 80+ practical frameworks and infographics.

Access 80+ GTM Infographics

See you in 2 weeks.

Alex

P.S. You love playing Padel? Then check out my 7-day Padel Workation for Founders, Solopreneurs, and GTM operators.

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

If you’re somewhere between €0 → €1M ARR, I can help you with your GTM.

1️⃣ Free GTM Foundation Library
→ 50+ resources (guides, templates, frameworks)

2️⃣ GTM Audit
→ 360° assessment + 6-month action plan: Your GTM Blindspots revealed

3️⃣ 1:1 GTM Advisory
→ Work directly with me to build your GTM

Last week, I shared the 6 most common founder-led sales demo mistakes.

We talked about feature dumping, weak discovery, lack of structure, presentation over conversation, weak next steps, and losing momentum during the buying process.

And yes, all of those things matter.

But there’s one more fundamental layer above all of this:

Even the best demo techniques break if the GTM foundation is unclear.

Because after reviewing dozens of founder-led demos across B2B SaaS and AI companies, I’ve noticed something:

Most weak demos are actually not demo problems. They’re GTM problems.

Whenever I start working with founders on their GTM, there are usually two assets I review first:

1. The homepage

2. The sales demo

Because both immediately reveal the quality of the GTM foundation.

Within minutes, you can usually tell:

• whether the ICP is clear

• whether the positioning makes sense

• whether the messaging resonates

• whether the sales process is structured

• and whether the GTM motion is focused or chaotic

The homepage shows how you communicate value asynchronously.

The demo shows how you communicate it in real time.

And both expose the same thing:

👉 The clarity of your GTM.

A quick word from our sponsor: I include only sponsors I would personally recommend.

📢 Pitch — A smarter way to sell ideas

Pitch is the presentation platform for fast-moving teams that are serious about winning. It combines collaborative workflows, design control, and purposeful AI features — letting you instantly rewrite slide content, keep every word on brand, and enhance visuals.

Curated deal rooms wow clients, and engagement analytics help you follow up in the right way at the right time so every presentation lands with confidence.

Start creating with Pitch

📢 Attio — the AI-native CRM for GTM

Attio is the AI-native CRM with built-in enrichment, flexible workflows, and fast setup. Connect your email and calendar, and Attio instantly builds your CRM.

Their new “Ask Attio” agent changes how you run your CRM: Prep for calls in seconds, update fields automatically, get deal summaries with one click

Start now

Sales Demo Quality is Usually a Reflection of GTM Quality

Most founders treat demos like an isolated sales skill.

But sales demo quality is usually downstream from GTM quality.

Here’s the pattern I see over and over:

Weak demos are often just symptoms.

The real issue usually sits upstream in the GTM foundation.

What Research Consistently Shows

The more I work with founders on GTM, the more I notice how directly GTM clarity impacts demo quality.

And interestingly, a lot of sales research points in the same direction:

Gartner found that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their buying journey meeting potential suppliers.
→ Your demo needs immediate clarity and relevance.

Gartner also found that 73% of B2B buyers actively avoid vendors with irrelevant outreach.

→ The same happens inside generic demos.

Gong’s analysis of winning sales conversations found that top-performing reps consistently create more balanced conversations instead of long monologues.

→ Great demos are conversations, not presentations.

In other words:

Great demos are usually not just a presentation advantage.

They’re often the result of strong GTM clarity upstream.

👉 The B2B SaaS Sales Demo Toolbox for founders & sales teams

After reviewing 100+ demos over the past few years, I’ve consolidated everything I’ve learned into a practical B2B SaaS Sales Demo Toolbox.

Fix your sales demos

(50% OFF with the code ‘mrrunlocked50’)

Great Demos Are Operationalized GTM

The best founder-led demos are usually just clear.

Great demos are operationalized GTM clarity:

• who the buyer is

• what painful workflow they solve

• what triggers the buying process

• which objections matter

• how to guide the buying journey

The demo simply becomes the live expression of that clarity.

You can usually break great demos down into 4 GTM layers.

The 4 GTM Layers Inside Great Demos

1️⃣ ICP Clarity

You know exactly who your product is for.

❌ Weak demos try to serve everyone.

✅ Strong demos feel highly relevant to one specific buyer.

You notice this especially during discovery.

Do buyers see you as an expert?

Because you:

• ask deep questions

• understand their workflow

• challenge assumptions

• share strong POVs

• recognize patterns across companies

Or does the discovery stay superficial?

You also see ICP clarity during the demo itself.

Can you adapt the demo to their actual use case?

Or is every buyer getting the same generic product tour?

The strongest demos usually focus on:

• one painful workflow

• one core use case

• one transformation

Weak demos try to justify the product by showing every single feature.

2️⃣ Positioning Clarity

You explain:

• what the product is

• what painful workflow it replaces

• why it’s different

You especially notice positioning quality when buyers ask:

“How are you different from X?”

Every serious buyer compares you against their current solution.

Do you have:

• a clear positioning anchor?

• a differentiated narrative?

Or do you start listing features?

The best demos don’t just explain the product.

They frame the market.

They help buyers understand:

• why the current solution is broken

• why existing alternatives fall short

• and why this approach is fundamentally different

That’s positioning clarity in action.

3️⃣ Messaging Clarity

You already know:

• the dominant status quo

• the top objections

• the language buyers use

So the demo feels aligned with their reality.

A surprising amount of demos fail because founders simply don’t speak the language of their buyers.

Can you explain the product in a way your ICP understands?

Or do you rely on:

• internal terminology

• technical explanations

• vague AI buzzwords

• feature language

Strong messaging creates:

“Yes — that’s exactly our problem.”

Weak messaging creates cognitive friction.

The buyer understands the features.

But they never fully understand:

• why it matters

• why now

• or why this is better than the status quo

4️⃣ Sales Process Clarity

You guide the conversation.

Weak demos end with:

“Let me know what you think.”

Strong demos:

• define next steps

• create momentum

• drive decisions forward

One of the biggest things demos reveal is whether there is an actual sales process behind them.

Whenever I ask founders to walk me through their process, this is where things often become blurry.

They say things like:

“Usually we do a demo… sometimes another call… sometimes a trial…”

That’s not a repeatable process yet.

For example:

Do you run a 2-step process (discovery and demo call) or a 1-step process (disco-demo)?

There’s no universally right answer.

But you need to be intentional about it.

What actually happens after the demo?

• a 14-day free trial?

• a pilot?

• a pricing review call?

• stakeholder alignment?

• security review?

Strong demos create momentum because the next steps are already designed.

Founder-Led Demos Are How You Discover GTM Fit

Founder-led sales matters so much early on.

Not because founders are magically better salespeople.

But demos are where GTM learning happens fastest.

Do you remember the 3 stages to reach €1M ARR?

If you don’t switch to Focus Mode, you will constantly switch between:

• ICPs

• narratives

• use cases

This means, different messaging, different way to position your product, different competitors you need to outperform, different way they buy products, different language they use, different expectations they have….the list goes on.

But if you switch into FOCUS MODE, you create repeatability around your GTM.

❌ You stop improvising every call.

✅And start building a real GTM playbook.

The 3 Demo Stages from €0 → €1M ARR

Stage 1 — Hustle Mode (€0 → €100k ARR)

Goal: Learn.

At this stage, demos help you discover:

• who actually buys

• which use case resonates

• what objections repeat

• what buyers care about

• what language converts

The goal is not efficiency.

The goal is pattern recognition.

At this stage, messy demos are normal.

Because you are still discovering:

• the ICP

• the positioning

• the messaging

• the process

Stage 2 — Focus Mode (€100k → €1M ARR)

Goal: Create repeatability.

Now patterns emerge:

• same ICP

• same trigger

• same objections

• same narrative

• same next steps

This is where:

• demo structure improves

• messaging sharpens

• win rates increase

• sales cycles shorten

You’re no longer improvising every call.

You’re building a GTM playbook.

This is usually where demos start feeling more confident and more focused.

Stage 3 — Expansion Mode (€1M+ ARR)

Goal: Operationalize and scale.

Now the founder’s job becomes building a sales team, enabling, coaching, and consistently optimizing the process.

You can scale demos because the GTM playbook is clear.

Okay, that’s it for today.

Now you know how GTM clarity impacts your demo quality.

See you in 2 weeks.

Alex

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

1️⃣ Free GTM Foundation Library
→ 50+ resources (guides, templates, frameworks)

2️⃣ 7-day GTM Clarity Sprint
→ 360° GTM assessment + 6-month action plan: Your GTM Blindspots revealed

3️⃣ 1:1 GTM Advisory
→ Work directly with me to build your GTM

📢 Attio — the AI-native CRM for GTM

Attio is the AI-native CRM with built-in enrichment, flexible workflows, and fast setup. Connect your email and calendar, and Attio instantly builds your CRM.

Their new “Ask Attio” agent changes how you run your CRM: Prep for calls in seconds, update fields automatically, get deal summaries with one click

Start now

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Hey - it’s Alex.

Over the past few months, I have reviewed 50+ founder-led demos across B2B SaaS and AI companies.

And honestly?

The same patterns repeat over and over.

Most founders don’t lose deals because of a weak product.

They lose deals because they lose control of the buying process.

❌ No structure.

❌ Weak discovery.

❌ Feature dumping.

❌ Presentation.

❌ No clear next step.

And all of them lead to the same problem:

❌ Lost momentum.

That’s the real job of a great demo (Not presenting features).

Because a great sales demo is:

✅ a decision-making conversation

✅ creating buying momentum.

So today, I’ll break down the 6 most common sales demo mistakes I see and how to fix them.

👉 The B2B SaaS Sales Demo Toolbox for founders & sales teams
(50% OFF with the code ‘mrrunlocked50’).

After reviewing 100+ demos over the past few years, I’ve consolidated everything I’ve learned into a practical B2B SaaS Sales Demo Toolbox.

Fix your sales demos

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ The BOFU Content Playbook 2026

✅ 8 Founder-led Signal-Based Outbound Campaigns

✅ How to turn Granola into your full-cycle sales engine using SPICED

What Great Sales Demos Actually Do

I believe great demos follow a very simple chain:

If one breaks, the deal slows down.

Weak discovery? → Low relevance.

Low relevance? → Less engagement.

Less engagement?→ Less buying momentum.

Once momentum disappears, deals stall.

1️⃣ No Structure → You Lose Control

One of the biggest patterns across the reviews:

❌ missing agenda

❌ missing outcome framing

❌ abrupt transitions

❌ rushing the last 5 minutes

❌ no time reserved for next steps

Then suddenly:

“I’ll send you something.”

And this is exactly why I keep repeating:

If you skip steps, you lose control.
If you lose control, you lose deals.

How to fix it

Follow the golden 10-step Demo structure every single time:

1. Intro

2. Time Check

3. Agenda

4. Discovery

5. Buy-In Summary

6. High-level Product Framing

7. Tailored Demo

8. Pricing

9. Recap

10. Next Steps

Simple framing example:

“By the end, we’ll know if this is a fit or not — and if yes, what the best next step is.”

A structured demo feels calmer. More professional. More trustworthy.

And ultimately, makes you more confident.

2️⃣ Weak Discovery → Generic Demo

This is probably the biggest mistake I see.

Founders ask 3–4 surface-level questions…

…and then immediately jump into screen share.

The result?

❌ A generic demo that could have been shown to literally anyone.

❌ Less engagement from the buyer (as parts are not relevant to them)

❌ Cognitive overload for the buyer (as they need to translate your product features into how this might fix their problem and fit into their workflow)

And yes, I know you think now:

“Prospects just want to see the product.”

No.

Prospects want relevance. And relevance comes from discovery.

That’s why one of the core rules in my sales demos is:

Discovery creates relevance.
Relevance creates engagement.
Engagement creates momentum.

Across almost all demo reviews, the same discovery gaps were repeated:

❌ no deep understanding of the current workflow

❌ no quantified impact

❌ no urgency (“Why now?”)

❌ no decision process and stakeholder clarity

How to fix it

Run proper SPICED discovery before demoing anything:

Situation

“Walk me through how you handle [workflow] today — end to end.”

Pain

“What’s the most frustrating or time-consuming part?”

Impact (Quantify)

“How long does this take per week/customer/task..?”

“What happens when this breaks?”

Critical Event

“Why are you looking for a solution now?”

Decision

“Who else is involved in the decision?”

I’m not saying that you need to cover all of these points in the discovery section of the demo, but all points need to be addressed throughout your demo call.

And ‘Situation’ and ‘Pain’ need to be discovered before any product demo.

3️⃣ No Buy-In Summary Before the Demo

This is massively underrated.

As said above, most founders do a ‘discovery’…but never validate whether they actually understood the buyer correctly.

So the prospect stays passive.

And the demo lands weak because the buyer never fully bought into:

• the problem

• the urgency

• or your framing of the situation.

One of the strongest patterns across the coaching reviews:

❌ no summarizing

❌ no validation from the prospect

❌ abrupt shift into demo

How to fix it

Before showing the product, always do a Buy-In Summary.

Summarize:

• their current workflow/ current solution

• top pains

• desired outcome

• quantified impact

• urgency

Something like:

“Let me quickly recap what I heard, and you tell me if I got this right.

You’re [ICP / role] at [Company]. Today you’re using [current solution / workaround] to do [JTBD].

The main challenges are:

• [Pain #1]

• [Pain #2]

• [Pain #3]

This results in [impact: time, cost, risk, missed opportunity]. And the reason this matters now is [critical event].

Did I miss anything important?”

“If that’s accurate, I’ll show you only the parts that matter for those priorities — and ignore the rest.”

And most importantly: WAIT.

Let them confirm.

This is the transition from: discovery → into demo.

If they don’t confirm, go back to discovery:

“If they don’t agree with your summary → do not demo, instead go back to discovery.”

That’s such an important rule.

4️⃣ Feature Dumping Instead of Tailored Demos

This kills demos all the time.

Founders think:

“The more features I show, the more value they’ll see.”

Usually, the opposite happens. More features ≠ more value.

The buyer gets overwhelmed.

Momentum slows down because they now need to mentally translate:

• your features

• into their workflow

• into their business impact

And most buyers never do that translation themselves.

In more than 65% of the demos I reviewed, the same issues:

❌ broad platform tours

❌ showing 10+ features

❌ no prioritization

❌ no connection to actual pain and current way of working

One coaching note summarized it perfectly:

“3 focused workflows would have been stronger than a broad platform tour.”

How to fix it

✅ Show fewer features.

✅ Go deeper.

✅ Connect features with their pain points.

The best demos repeat the same loop:

1. Re-anchor to their pain

2. Show one core capability

3. Share one short customer story

4. Ask one concrete engagement question

Example:

“You mentioned onboarding of new team members is painful.
Here’s how other HR teams use (productname) to reduce the manual workload, as (productname) automatically creates user accounts for new team members.”

Then ask:

“Would this replace your need to manually keeping track of user accounts in your spreadsheet?”

That’s a tailored demo.

Not a product tour.

5️⃣ Weak Storytelling & No Proof

This one can make your demo 10x better.

Storytelling creates belief.

Buyers don’t buy software just because of features. They need to believe you.

They buy when they believe:

• this problem matters

• your solution actually works

• companies like them succeeded with it

Without proof, demos stay theoretical.

With proof, buyers start imagining themselves succeeding with your product.

Common patterns I see:

❌ no customer story

❌ no proof point

❌ no before vs after

❌ no quantified outcome

❌ not connected to the actual workflow/data of the customer

How to fix it

The best demos use short customer stories throughout the demo.

I believe there are a few ways you can use:

✅ Take their real data/workflow

“Let’s quickly take your set-up, so you can imagine how [feature] would work for you”

So instead of a generic demo, use their reality.

✅ Use customer stories

“A company similar to you, [customer / ICP], used this to [result], saving [X].”

Or:

“We have a few other [customer types] with also [attributes] who now run their [core workflow] with [your product], and they mainly value X”

✅ Compare to the current way

“Okay, imagine you’re doing your [workflow/task/job to be done], so instead of now doing with [current way of working], you can [better way with your product]”

Or:

“A lot of teams switched from [competitor tool] to [your product] because they ...”

✅ Reference something they mentioned earlier

“You mentioned earlier that [person X] struggles with [pain point]. This feature will enable you to finally have a single source for your KPIs — something your [specific people/team members] can all trust.”

It’s social proof. It’s trust. It will help you close deals.

P.S. Use your existing customers proactively throughout the sales process:

• During the demo (see above)

• added as case studies in the follow-up email

• optional: offer prospects a talk with your existing customers

6️⃣ Passive Closing → Dead Pipeline

This is another huge pattern I see when reviewing sales demos.

Founders end demos with:

“Happy to send a trial.”

“Okay talk internally and then send me an email about next steps.”

“I’ll send some information later via email.”

That way, you lose control of the next steps.

❌ No calendar invites.

❌ Waiting for the buyer to “get back to us.”

❌ No mutual action plan / suggested next steps

How to fix it

Own the next step.

Your job is to guide them throughout the process.

Remember, you sell your product every day. You know what’s the best way to evaluate your product.

So guide them.

✅ Important: The next steps always need to be mutually agreed upon.

Based on their current situation, urgency, and decision process, you suggest the next best step. These can be steps like:

• 14-day free trial starting next Monday

• product deep dive with XY team

• Technical deep dive

• business case/pricing review call

• Onboarding Kick Off

Then you need to get their buy-in for this.

Say something like:

“Before we wrap up, let me propose the cleanest next step.

Based on deals like yours, what works best is [next step — e.g. technical deep dive / stakeholder call / pilot].

The goal would be to [clear outcome].

I have [Option A] or [Option B] — which works better?”

Every single demo should end with:

✅ a clear recommendation

✅ a calendar invite

✅ defined stakeholders

✅ timeline

✅ success criteria

One of my favorite recommendations:

“Every demo ends with a calendar invite.”

Additional relevant content

👉 Meeting Note Taker Templates for Discovery and Demo Call (applying SPICED)

👉 Email Templates for Demo Call Follow Ups

Final Thought

After reviewing 100+ demos over the last few years, I think great demos are mostly about:

✅ structure

✅ relevance

✅ engagement

✅ belief

✅ momentum

The best founders don’t present software.

They guide buying decisions.

And the founders who create the most buying momentum…
usually win the deal.

See you in 2 weeks.

Alex

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

1️⃣ Free GTM Foundation Library
→ 50+ resources (guides, templates, frameworks)

2️⃣ GTM Audit
→ 360° assessment + 6-month action plan: Your GTM Blindspots revealed

3️⃣ 1:1 GTM Advisory
→ Work directly with me to build your GTM

You sometimes join a meeting and more notetakers are in the room than humans.

Today, we share how you can turn your meeting notes into fuel for your sales engine.

We will cover:

1. Discovery Call Analysis & Coaching

2. Demo Call Debrief & Coaching

3. Email Follow Ups

4. Objection Patterns

5. Customer Quote Library and LinkedIn post ideas

All powered by SPICED.

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ The BOFU Content Playbook 2026

✅ 8 Founder-led Signal-Based Outbound Campaigns

✅ The GTM Playbook to €1M ARR

A quick word from our sponsor

I include only sponsors I would personally recommend. If you’re interested in reaching 28,000+ SaaS operators, sponsor the next newsletter.

📢 Granola — The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings

Most AI note-takers just transcribe meetings and send summaries afterward. Granola is different: it’s an AI notepad.

• You start with a simple notepad and write down what matters to you while Granola transcribes in the background.

• After the meeting, Granola combines the transcript with your notes to generate summaries, action items, and next steps from your perspective.

• Then you can chat with your notes. Use Recipes (pre-made prompts) to draft follow-up emails, pull decisions, prep meetings, or turn conversations into real work in seconds.

Think of it as a super-smart notes app that actually understands your meetings.

Get Granola 3 months for free

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• Build workflows by chatting with Cody; ship automations in minutes, not weeks

• Connect to 2,800+ apps like Slack, Gmail, Notion, HubSpot, and Google Sheets

• Let Cody debug, optimise, and keep everything running 24/7 while you sleep

Ready to turn your repetitive tasks into a self-running system?

Start for free

SPICED is great. Most founders use it once in discovery. Then the information dies.

By the time CS does the kickoff, nobody remembers why the customer bought.

The fix isn’t discipline. It’s a system.

Remember: SPICED is a sales methodology, not a meeting or discovery framework. It’s the backbone across the full sales process.

Meaning:

• Discovery → uncover SPICED

• Demo → validate SPICED

• Handoff → transfer SPICED

• Kickoff → reconfirm SPICED

Here’s how to make SPICED stick across your critical meetings, using Granola as your information layer.

Instead of getting just a transcript of your call, each template produces a structured call summary you can paste straight into your CRM (in SPICED style).

Below you will find 2 templates:

1. Discovery Call SPICED Template

2. Demo Call SPICED Template

With those 2 templates applied to your sales calls, you will:

✅ collect better structured insights about your customers
✅ feed your CRM with richer information
✅ write better email follow-ups & optimize your sales process
✅ understand your ICP much better
✅ optimize your positioning and messaging
✅ write better (LinkedIn) content
✅ write better outbound messages

SPICED Meeting Template for Discovery Call

Copy and paste the text below into your Granola Template.

Meeting Context

Sections

Here’s how this looks inside your Granola account.

SPICED Meeting Template for Demo Call

Meeting Context

Sections

To make it easier for you, we also created 9 SPICED recipes.

9 SPICED Recipes for Granola

Now, let’s have a look at some prompts (recipes) that help you get deeper insights about your customers and calls.

→ Discovery Call Analysis
→ Discovery Call Coaching
→ Discovery Follow-Up Email

→ Demo Call Debrief
→ Demo Call Coaching
→ Post Demo Follow Up Email

→ Objection Patterns
→ Customer Quote Library
→ LinkedIn Post Ideas

Each recipe includes the name, type (single or multiple meeting), and the prompt to paste.

Get access to the Full SPICED Guide, including all templates + recipes.

Get SPICED Granola Guide (FREE)

Summary

Most teams already have the conversations. They just don’t use them.

SPICED gives you the structure.
Granola makes it stick.

The combination turns every call into:

• better deals

• better positioning

• better content

• better decisions

Not because you worked more.

Because you stopped losing the information you already had.

👉 Get the full SPICED guide (all templates + recipes).

Use it on your next 5 calls.

You’ll immediately see where your deals break.

And where they actually close.

See you in 2 weeks.

Alex

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

If you’re somewhere between €0 → €1M ARR, I can help you with your GTM.

1️⃣ Free GTM Foundation Library
→ 50+ resources (guides, templates, frameworks)

2️⃣ GTM Audit
→ 360° assessment + 6-month action plan: Your GTM Blindspots revealed

3️⃣ 1:1 GTM Advisory
→ Work directly with me to build your GTM

AI made content easier to produce. But harder to win with.

Working with founders on their GTM foundation, BOFU content is almost always a core part of the execution we bet on.

Because in 2026, it’s not just about ranking on Google anymore.

It’s about shaping what buyers and AI agents believe about your category.

That’s why I invited content marketing expert Ugi, Founder of Contentmonk, to MRR Unlocked.

He’ll show you how to create BOFU content that ranks, converts, and gets cited by AI.

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ 8 Founder-led Signal-Based Outbound Campaigns

✅ The GTM Playbook to €1M ARR

✅ The Partnership Guide for SaaS/AI Founders

A quick word from our sponsor

I include only sponsors I would personally recommend. If you’re interested in reaching 28,000+ SaaS operators, sponsor the next newsletter.

📢 Contentmonk — all-in-one AI visibility, SEO, and content platform

ContentMonk helps you track your AI visibility & SEO rankings, identify gaps & opportunities for improvement, and create high-quality content that ranks and converts.

Try 7 days for free

📢 Attio — the AI-native CRM for GTM

I’ve got some free advice on building a strong GTM foundation for your SaaS: your CRM should be doing more of the work.

Attio is the AI CRM that shifts from a passive system of record to an active collaborator. Connect your email and calendar, and it instantly builds your CRM with enriched data and complete context. Then Ask Attio anything:

• Which deals haven’t had a touchpoint in two weeks?

• What’s the best demo angle for my call this afternoon?

• What should I follow up on from my meetings today?

Fast-growing teams like Granola, Lightdash, and Wispr Flow are already running on it. Ask more from CRM. Ask Attio.

Try for free

So the stage is yours Ugi - let’s get into it. 👇👇

It was week two since we wrote an amazing BOFU article for our client, Certificial, for their brand-new blog.

After 14 days, the article ranked on page 1 of Google - position #4 in the US, for one of the highest-intent keywords in their category. No backlinks. New blog.

A few days later, Claude was already citing our content and taking information from the article we wrote when answering questions about competitors.

In less than 20 days, one article helped them:

• Bring high-quality SQLs into the pipeline

• Influence how AI talks about competitors

Now, if only one article could deliver these amazing results, can you imagine the power of 20,30 or even more BOFU articles?

In the next chapters, you’re going to see a brutally actionable strategy and process to:

• Write 30+ high-quality and converting BOFU articles in 2-3 days

• Rank them in weeks without wasting your time building backlinks

• Get mentioned by AI as the best alternative to your competitors

• Shape how AI talks about your competitors and the software landscape.

Let’s get started.

Why BOFU content is the #1 moat in 2026

Whenever I start working with a new client, I write articles targeting the highest-intent keywords and prompts.

Why? Getting them SQLs or user sign-ups is only the tip of the iceberg.

The real power of BOFU content lies in:

1. Catching existing demand (way cheaper and faster than generating new demand).

2. Ability to influence how customers, and most importantly, AI assistants, talk about the software landscape in your category.

3. Shaping the narrative of how AI assistants talk about your competitors.

4. Testing messaging, positioning, and CTAs fast.

If you’re in a competitive market, BOFU content is one of the most reliable and scalable acquisition channels you can build.

Take the CRM industry, for example.

With a quick search for the 20 most popular brands, we can see that the total search volume exceeds 178.000.

That’s potentially almost 200.000 people looking to buy CRM software every single month. Now, on top of that, add all other keywords with different brands, or variations such as Competitor A vs Competitor B, etc., and we’re probably over 500.000 unique monthly searches.

If you’re in the CRM space and you do a good enough job, you’re probably looking at around 20.000+ high-intent visitors.

With our average conversion rate of 3%, that’s around 600+ new leads in the pipeline.

Three types of BOFU content you should focus on

In reality, there are only three types of content worth writing:

1. Alternative articles often focused on the keywords following the [Competitor] alternative/s format (such as HubSpot alternative, Pipedrive alternatives, etc).

2. Best category tools general guidelines on the best products in your industry (i.e., best lead generation tools; best software for cold email, etc.)

3. Direct comparisons content focused on the keywords that compare two or more competitors (i.e., Semrush vs Ahrefs or Semrush vs Ahrefs vs Moz).

These three formats cover the majority of high-intent searches — both in Google and in AI tools.

Now, let’s dive into the actionable step-by-step plan to write 30+ BOFU articles in 3 days, and start getting rankings and customers by week 2 (even if you’re not the writer or SEO specialist).

Step #1 - How to find the best BOFU topics & keywords to focus on

This step will take about 30 minutes, but it’s crucial to the success of this strategy.

List all your direct, relevant competitors. Make sure you compile the ultimate list of every major company you compete with (by main or complementary use case).

If you don’t have one, feel free to ask AI. Based on my experience, the best model for this task is the latest version of Claude Opus.

Here’s the prompt you can type:

Here’s a bit of a modified prompt example that I recently used for ourselves:

Once you have your list, it’s time to go back to Claude (you can use Sonnet or Haiku for this one), and write the following prompt.

You’ll now get a complete list of all possible BOFU keyword variations.

Copy the list and paste it into your Keyword Research tool of choice to check for search volume, keyword difficulty, and other data:

In less than 30 minutes, we now have a complete list of all relevant BOFU terms we need to attack to start getting more organic customers.

Now it’s time for quick prioritisation.

To be honest with you, if you have the will, time, and resources, my advice is to write one article for ALL keywords. Even though some keywords do not have search volume.

Why?

That doesn’t mean that some specific users are not searching for them. They probably are. They’re probably asking their AI assistants about different software comparisons.

And since few people target these keywords because they don’t have search volume, it’s very easy for you to rank fast and influence the AI narrative when answering questions about specific software comparisons.

If, on the other hand, you have limited resources, then I suggest choosing 20-30 most important keywords based on the search volume and keyword difficulty.

Prioritize keywords with the biggest volume and lowest difficulty.

But remember, do not stray from keywords with lower search volume, especially if they are direct competitors.

The same as we did here with our article on the best AirOps alternatives. As you can notice, one article is ranking for 15+ different keywords:

Step #2 - Research and prepare your knowledge base (Knowledge Base)

Before using AI to write BOFU content, you need two types of input:

1. Competitor research

2. Your own brand and product data

You must do research for each competitor before using AI to write content.

If you don’t do that and ask AI to do research while writing content, you’ll most likely end up with a bunch of false and hallucinated information, further hurting your credibility and not getting the results you need.

Competitor research

You need a clear, structured understanding of each competitor before generating content.

Use a prompt (Claude Opus model) like this for every competitor (new chat for each):

For the [category/user-specific information you need about each tool] syntax, put down any type of information your readers would love to understand about each tool, or information that will help them make a decision (especially information about specific things where you know that you’re better than your competitors).

To give you some practical idea, here’s what I used for our product, ContentMonk.

Once you do this, you’ll end up with an ultimate PDF covering everything you (or your AI writing software) needs to know about specific competitors, together with their pros, cons, and latest reviews.

Repeat the process for every competitor you’re planning to write about.

Collecting documents and research about your brand

To position your product correctly, AI also needs deep context about your company.

Prepare these documents:

• ICP persona overview and their Jobs to be done

• Messaging/Positioning guide and Brand Narrative - So AI can know how to position you inside content

• User Manual about your product/service

The most critical part here is the user manual. It’s a document that outlines every possible piece of information about your product, from its pricing to how to perform specific actions within it.

Think of it like a user manual you would get when buying a new dishwasher. Just this one is for your product and AI to better understand it.

You can use this prompt:

Make sure to use your knowledge base when writing the articles.

ContentMonk has a built-in knowledge base feature. In just a few simple clicks, you upload your documents and Contentmonk will use your documents to generate high-quality content full of your unique insights, but also automatically optimized for SEO and AEO.

Once you have both competitor research and your internal documents, you have everything needed to generate high-quality BOFU content that is accurate, differentiated, and conversion-focused.

Step #3 - Create SEO/AEO optimized & converting BOFU content

Now it’s time for the magic.

1. Inside your ContentMonk account, go to Content Editorial, and click on the “+ New” button in the upper-right corner

2. A right-side modal will appear with the option to add instructions:

3. You can leave the headline empty and let ContentMonk decide, or you can use some of the following variations that we found convert the best (after writing 1000s of BOFU articles as an agency for other brands):

• X Best [Competitor] Alternatives in 2026 [In-depth Review]

• X Best [Competitor] Alternatives to [benefit/value; i.e. get more customers] [2026 Review]

• X Best [Competitor] Alternatives For Your Use Case [2026 In-depth Comparison]

4. The most important field here is Content Instructions - this is what we instruct ContentMonk to write. You can leave it blank or write less information to give more freedom to ContentMonk. If you want to have more control, then I suggest adding more information. In the section below, I’ll give you our best-performing instructions for different BOFU article types.

5. Leave the target word count blank, and add focused and secondary keywords:

6. Now click on Generate Brief, and in a few minutes, you’ll get a high-quality brief for your article.

7. Once the brief is ready, quickly look through it. If you did everything right so far, everything should look fine. But in case you want to make any suggestions, just click on the “Edit” button above and add your edits.

   Once you’re satisfied, click on the “Generate Article” button

8. And voila! After a few minutes, our article is ready. You can now play with it, add images, edit slightly, whatever you want. In most cases, article is 95% ready for publishing, but I always recommend giving it a quick look before going live.

And now, my friends, you have a complete, SEO and AEO optimized article ready to go live. In less than 15-20 minutes per article.

Repeat the process for every BOFU keyword you want to target, and quickly, in 2-3 days, you’ll have 20-30+ BOFU articles ready.

Below are the templates for content instructions you can copy/paste.

Content Instructions for different BOFU content types

Paste the following instructions into ContentMonk’s Content Instructions. Just replace the syntax with actual information and adapt the template to you.

Alternative Articles

When writing the article, for the insights, ContentMonk will first use the research documents you uploaded to your knowledge base. If some information is missing, it will search the web to find the needed information.

“Best [Category] Tools” Articles

This is the content instruction template you can paste inside ContentMonk to create “best category tools” article (i.e. 5 Best CRM tools, 10 best sales intelligence apps, etc):

Competitor A vs Competitor B

The idea for these articles is to compare two popular competitors in your space for different use cases, and subtly mention your tool in the use cases where it’s “better” than the two competitors that you’re better.

The template for this will require a bit more modification on your end, since you want to be in control of how your brand is mentioned in this article. Below is the “general example” you can use and build upon.

Before writing these, prepare all the use cases you want to compare the competitors on.

How to monitor and improve your BOFU content

To make this strategy work long-term, you need to track three things:

1. Google rankings
   → How your articles rank for your target BOFU keywords

2. AI visibility
   → Are you mentioned in AI answers for the prompts relevant to the BOFU content we wrote

3. Citations in AI answers
   → Is your BOFU content cited by AIs, and are you directing how AI speaks about you & competitors.

What prompts to track (BOFU AI visibility & AI influence)

For each article type, track the prompts your buyers are likely to ask AI tools.

For alternative articles:

• “What is the best [Competitor] alternative?”

• “What is the best [Competitor] alternative for [use case]?”

• “What’s the best [Competitor] alternative for small companies in Europe”.

For category articles:

• “What are the best [category] tools?”

• “What are the best [category] tools for [use case or ICP]?”

You can also send the list of articles you wrote to Claude, and ask it to generate a list of prompts (one by line) that follows the templates above.

Once the list is ready, it’s time to start tracking the prompts:

ContentMonk will now start analyzing what ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Overview, and Perplexity answer when users ask them these questions.

How to track your BOFU SEO rankings

The process is similar to that for the prompt tracking: You add all your focused keywords

Now, in a few minutes, you’ll be able to see your and competitors’ rankings for the focused keywords:

How to improve your AI visibility and SEO rankings?

Once your content is live, improving it is straightforward:

• Identify where competitors rank higher than you

• Look at which articles AI assistants cite most often

• Update your content to be more complete, specific, and better structured

• Continuously refine messaging, comparisons, and positioning

Once you start tracking your prompts and keywords in ContentMonk, you can leave it to ContentMonk to suggest real-time updates you can make to your content to start ranking better or getting cited by AI.

ContentMonk will:

• Notify you whenever your articles drop in Google rankings or go stale at a specific position for too long

• Other articles similar to yours are frequently cited by AI

You’ll see these notifications in the Opportunities pages:

Once this happens, you have the option to let ContentMonk run research, analyze top-ranked articles, or top cited articles in AI, cross-reference these articles with your content, and suggest the exact updates you can make inside your content to make it better.

You can then accept or decline ContentMonk’s updates in one click:

This allows you to keep your content up-to-date and optimized for AEO/SEO without almost any effort from your side.

The bottom line & how to get started

So, here’s a quick recap of what you need to do to dominate BOFU terms in your niche in both AI answers and Google rankings:

• Identify relevant BOFU terms

• Run Competitive research

• Create a Knowledge Base

• Use one of the templates shared above to create SEO/AEO optimized BOFU content

• Expect to rank for your BOFU terms in 2-8 weeks (some backlinks in the meantime can definitely help)

• Start tracking your AI visibility and Google rankings

• Optimize your content ongoing

Good luck!

See you in 2 weeks.

Alex

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

If you’re somewhere between €0 → €1M ARR, I can help you with your GTM.

1️⃣ Free GTM Foundation Library

→ 50+ resources (guides, templates, frameworks)

2️⃣ GTM Audit

→ 360° assessment + 6-month action plan: Your GTM Blindspots revealed

3️⃣ 1:1 GTM Advisory

→ Work directly with me to build your GTM

I’ve noticed something across most early-stage teams.

My LinkedIn feed is full of:

“30+ tools to run GTM/outbound”

“How I orchestrate 50+ tools to book 20+ meetings per week.”

But here’s the problem: Most outbound doesn’t fail because of tools.

It fails because it’s random.

No trigger.
No timing.
No reason to reach out now.

So I don’t think (early-stage) founders need to orchestrate so many different tools.

So today, we break down 8 outbound campaigns that book you meetings, without using hundreds of different tools.

1. ICP Auto-connect campaign

2. LinkedIn content engagement campaign

3. New signups/demos booked campaign

4. Website visitor campaign

5. Customer lookalike campaign

6. Customers’ network (nearbound) campaign

7. Specific tech tool campaign

8. Value first campaign

You can run all these campaigns with Lemlist.

A quick word from our sponsor

I only include sponsors that I would recommend personally. If you’re interested in reaching 28,000+ SaaS operators, sponsor the next newsletter.

📢 lemlist — The outbound platform that books meetings, not bounces

lemlist is the multichannel outbound platform built for sales teams who need real pipeline, not just activity metrics.

• Connect intent signals, personalize at scale, and send sequences that actually get replies

• Build email + LinkedIn sequences in minutes, with AI that sounds like you

• Trigger outreach based on timing signals, not guesswork

• Track every reply, click, and booked call in one dashboard

Want to make your direct motion work before you try to scale it?

Try lemlist for free

4-Step System: Turn Insights into effective Outbound Campaigns

The two ingredients that make your outbound effective: Timing + Relevance

This means we use a signal (that is relevant for the contact) to reach out. The most powerful buying signals are often very specific to your market.

So step 1 is:

Think about relevant triggers that are a proxy for your product that might be relevant to them.

When you track the right signal:

1. Your message becomes relevant to your contact.

2. And it comes at the right time.

So let’s have a look at the 4 steps: Identify critical events, track signals, map pain, write messaging that converts.

Step 1: Identify Critical Events (From Sales Calls)

Listen for patterns that you hear in your sales calls. If you apply SPICED, watch out for the critical events mentioned:

• “We’re hiring fast”

• “We just implemented [Tool X]”

• “We’re expanding into a new market”

Step 2: Translate into Signals (Observable Triggers)

Think about trackable signals for these events. Something that you can observe from the outside. A proxy that timing is right:

• Hiring → Job postings / team growth

• New tool → Tech stack changes

• Expansion → New locations / languages

Here’s an overview of the signals that you can monitor with Lemlist, without using another tracking tool.

Step 3: Map the Pain (Why it matters)

This step is critical. Connect signals with related pain points:

• Hiring → Long ramp-up time for new hires

• New tool → Training and adoption are slow

• Expansion → Payment complexity increases

👉 This makes your outreach relevant

Step 4: Turn It into Messaging

Now you connect the dots: Signal + Pain. Build your outreach around it:

• “Saw you’re hiring fast — teams often struggle with [pain] at this stage…”

• “Noticed you implemented [Tool X] — many teams run into [gap]…”

• “Expanding into [market]? That’s usually where [problem] shows up…”

Signal-based messaging

Here are a few more examples of signal-based messaging.

So let’s have a look at the campaigns. 👇

Campaign 1: ICP Auto-connect

This one isn’t signal-based at all.

But it helps you build a relevant network on LinkedIn. Especially if you create content (Founder LinkedIn brand) and do (signal) based outreach via LinkedIn, it helps if you expand your network with ICP contacts.

You can connect with 100-200 contacts per week (depending on whether you are a free user or a premium/sales navigator user). Expect a 30% acceptance rate.

This means you add roughly 50 ICP contacts per week to your network - on autopilot.

Do this for 12 months, and you’ve added 2500+ ICP contacts to your network.

People who see your content will start to build trust and are more likely to engage with you when you reach out.

All you need to do is add the right ICP contacts to your Lemlist Auto Connect campaign.

You will have a few ways to add the contacts to the campaign:

1. Import from Sales Navigator

2. Adding contacts manually with the Lemlist Google Chrome extension

3. Use Lemlist native database

4. Push leads from third-party databases (Clay, Prospeo, Apollo)

5. Upload a CSV or Import from your CRM

This first campaign fits perfectly with Campaign 2.

Campaign 2: Engaged with your LinkedIn content

Lemlist makes it easy to track people who engaged with your LinkedIn content.

To make sure you only get relevant signals, you can define:

1. What type of engagement counts as a signal (like, comment, both)

2. Add filter criteria (so you only get signals from your ICP)

I started using it for myself a few weeks ago. You see, I get 2-3 ICP leads per day.

With one click, you can push them to the right campaign.

And the campaign itself doesn’t need to be super complex.

2 steps are all you need:

Step 1: LinkedIn connection

The message can be as simple as:

“Hi {{firstName}}, noticed you liked one of my recent posts.

Great to connect.”

Step 2: DM after they accepted the connection request

Don’t send straight after they accepted. Wait 1-2 days.

Initial response: Thank them specifically for engaging with your particular post

“Hey [Name], I noticed you liked my post about [specific topic]. Thanks for the engagement! What part resonated most with you?”

“Hey [Name], I liked your comment on my post about [topic]. Are you currently working on [relevant challenge or solution]?”

Value-add follow-up: Share additional relevant information

“Since you found that interesting, you might also enjoy this [resource/article] that dives deeper into [related topic].”

Relationship building: Ask about their experience with the challenge your content addresses

“I’m curious - have you been facing similar challenges with [problem your solution addresses] at [their company]?”

Direct Approach:

“Hey [Name], I noticed you’ve been engaging with content about [topic]. We’ve helped similar [company specifics] companies in [country/industry] to [usecase] - resulting in [positive results]. If this sounds interesting, I’d be happy to [soft value-first offer] - no strings attached.”

For advanced LinkedIn signals, consider a tool like Trigify.

Campaign 3: Connect with new Signups/Demos booked

Sounds obvious. Reality is that more than 50% of the founders I worked with did not do this.

So what is it about?

If you get a new sign-up for your product or a new inbound demo booked, make sure to send them a connection request on LinkedIn.

“Hi {{firstName}}, saw you booked a call with me — looking forward to it!”

Lemlist allows you to use webhooks and connect tools like zapier, n8n, claude, make to automatically push new leads to your Lemlist account.

Once you have added the contacts to Lemlist, you can use their enrichment feature to find the LinkedIn profile based on their email address.

Campaign 4: Website visitors

Knowing that a company visited your website is a strong signal.

Lemlist currently enables company-level identification. Meaning you know that someone from the company visited your website.

But with one click on the company, you see its contacts.

In case you want person-level identification, consider using a tool like Snitcher.

What’s great is that you can narrow down to specific pages and filter only for relevant target locations.

For me, I focus on Europe-based founders, and I care about people who’ve been on my GTM audit & GTM advisory page for longer than 30 seconds.

Here are some DM templates you can use:

“Hey {{first_name}}, thanks for connecting!
We saw some interest from {{company_name}} on our site recently, so I thought I’d reach out. Is there anything I can help you with?”

“Thanks for connecting, {{first_name}}! I noticed you or one of your team members from {{company_name}} recently visited our website.
Usually this means explore new ways for {{usecase}}.
Curious if that’s something that’s been top of mind for your team lately?”

Campaign 5: Customer Lookalike

Look for companies that are similar to your best-fit customers.

Thanks for connecting, {{first_name}}!

We recently started working with {{company_lookalike}}, which is quite similar to {{company_name}}, and it made me curious about how you’re handling {{usecase}} today.

Is that something you’re involved with on your side?

{{first_name}}, I saw your setup is pretty similar to the one of {{company_lookalike}}.

It made me curious: how do you currently manage/handle {{usecase}} without {{painpoint}} ?

To find the right lookalikes, you could test a tool like ocean.io or LGM lookalike feature - or manually find the right companies based on firmographic and technographic filters (based on your ICP criteria).

Depending on your exact set-up, this is also where Lemlist’s new AI agentic enrichment might be smart to use.

Here’s an example of how you can enrich your leads based on if they are a ‘SaaS company’.

Campaign 6: Customers’ network (Nearbound)

The approach is very similar to the customer lookalike campaign above.

The difference here is that we scan the network of your customer to find relevant ICP fits.

And you use their names as an ‘opener’.

Here are some ideas for you:

Search for companies that are located in the same area as your new customer

This can work great if you know that there is a high likelihood that they know each other.

Think about:

• restaurants on the same street

• Architecture firms in the same city

• Logistic teams with hubs in the same industrial park

• Municipal administrations with close Zip Codes

Now, when you reach out to those companies, you can leverage your existing customers’ names. They will recognize their name, which makes your message relevant to them.

Search your customers’ suppliers, customers, and partners who fit your ICP

Same strategy as above. Instead of the local relevancy, you use their existing relationship as a conversation opener.

Hey {{firstName}}, great to be connected.
Looks like we both work with {{Customer}}. Do you run more projects together with them?

Hey {{firstName}}, saw you also worked with {{Customer}} on a previous project.

We work with them on {{customers_core_usecases}}.
Out of curiosity: how do you currently manage/handle {{usecase}} without {{painpoint}} ?

Campaign 7: Value First Campaign

In case you can provide easy upfront value to your clients, that can be a great strategy.

There are 2 ways to perform this tactic:

1. You actually did create something relevant to them and share it upfront, or

2. You create on demand: you ask them if they are interested, and if they are, you create the content and share it with them

A few examples so you can better understand what I mean:

“Reviewed your product onboarding flow and found a few things that you could improve”

👉 If you offer a service/product that helps with onboarding

“Reviewed your LinkedIn profile and can share with you 4 things that would help you to stand out more”

👉 I received this actually 3x times in the last weeks, every time I responded. Why: Easy to say yes, low commitment.

“Saw your Google ads on keyword X - a few things that I observed…”

👉 If you offer a service/product that helps companies run better ads

“I found a few public tenders that might be relevant for you. Want me to share it with you?”

👉 If you offer a service/product that helps companies find relevant tenders.

“I’ve created a short 2-min video that shows you how you can improve your website visibility in LLMs - want me to send it over?”

👉 If you offer a service/product that helps companies to increase their AI visibility

“I really enjoy your content. I’ve turned your last newsletter episode into 5 LinkedIn posts that will increase your engagement on LK. Want me to share them with you?”

👉 If you offer a service/product that helps creators with content production

I’ve actually tested this approach for myself, and it works!

I think you get the pattern.

You offer free value with low commitment. Something easy to say Yes to.

Campaign 8: Companies using a specific tech tool

Knowing that a company is using a specific tool is a strong and actionable signal. It gives you immediate context and a natural way to start the conversation.

In practice, this signal is most useful in three scenarios:

1. You integrate with the tool (product partner)

Your product works on top of or alongside their existing tool.
→ Example: an analytics tool built on top of a CRM like HubSpot or Shopify.

2. You extend the tool

Your product fills a clear gap or missing capability.
→ You’re not replacing it — you’re making it more valuable.

3. You replace the tool (competitor)

Your product is a direct alternative.
→ You’re positioning against the limitations of their current solution.

Across all three cases, the key advantage is simple:
👉 You can use the tool they’re already using as a relevant, personalized icebreaker.

Campaign 8a: Company adopts a new tool

A particularly strong version of this signal is when a company has recently adopted a new tool.

This often indicates:

• They are actively improving their stack

• They are open to new solutions

• They are still shaping their workflows

This is especially powerful if:

• Your product integrates with that tool, or

• You know your best customers typically use both tools together

Example:
If companies that adopt a product analytics tool often also need your solution, this becomes a high-intent trigger.

This works extremely well in ABM (Account-Based Marketing):

• Define a target list of accounts

• Track when they adopt relevant tools

• Reach out at the right moment

Example message

“Saw you’re using [Tool X]. Teams often complement it with a solution for [specific gap]. Worth exploring if that’s relevant for you?”

Campaign 8b: Companies using a competitor

You can apply the same logic to competitor-based outreach.

Here, the goal is to:

• Acknowledge what they’re using

• Highlight common limitations

• Open a conversation around gaps

Example message

“Saw you’re using [Tool X] for [use case]. Many teams find that while it works well for [core strength], they still run into challenges around [adjacent gap]. Curious how you’re currently handling that?”

So by now, you have at least 8 relevant campaigns to test yourself.

But there are 2 more things that I want to share with you:

1. Be intentional and specific about your CTAs

2. Track your outbound campaigns (and learn)

Specific CTAs

Even with perfect targeting and strong messaging, your outbound will fall flat if the CTA creates friction.

The goal of a great CTA isn’t to close a deal, it’s to earn the next small step.

Common CTA Mistakes

❌ Too much commitment
Asking for a 30-minute call upfront is a big ask — especially from someone who doesn’t know you yet. You haven’t earned that level of time.

❌ Low perceived value
“Let me show you our product” isn’t compelling. Buyers care about their problems, not your demo.

❌ Vague or unclear
“Let me know your thoughts” or “open to chat?” creates ambiguity. If it’s not clear what happens next, people won’t act.

❌ Too many options
Multiple CTAs in one message (“call, demo, webinar invite, share case study?”) create decision fatigue and lead to no decision at all.

Strong outbound CTAs are:

• Low friction → easy to say yes to

• Clear → one simple next step

• Value-led → tied to something relevant for them

Here are 25+ effective CTAs:

Outbound Success Metrics

Once you run your outbound campaigns, analyze your performance.

Key Metrics

1. Connection Acceptance Rate → Accepted ÷ Sent

2. Reply Rate → Contacts replied ÷ contacts messaged

3. Positive Reply Rate → Qualified/positive replies ÷ contacts messaged

4. Meeting booked rate → Meetings booked ÷ contacts messaged

Analyze your results:

1. Low LK acceptance rate → Optimize your profile; wrong leads

2. Low reply rate → Optimize your messaging; improve signal relevance

3. Good (positive) reply rate but low meeting booked rate → Optimize your CTAs

Takeaway

By now, you have 8 outbound campaigns you can start testing.

But if there’s one thing to take away, it’s this:

Outbound isn’t about sending more messages.

It’s about sending them at the right moment. That’s what signals give you.

Start asking:

👉 “What happened that makes this the right time to reach out?”

Answer that and your outbound will feel completely different.

See you in 2 weeks.

Alex

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

If you’re somewhere between €0 → €1M ARR, I can help you with your GTM.

1️⃣ Free GTM Foundation Library
→ 50+ resources (guides, templates, frameworks)

2️⃣ GTM Audit
→ 360° assessment + 6-month action plan: Your GTM Blindspots revealed

3️⃣ 1:1 GTM Advisory
→ Work directly with me to build your GTM

I’ve noticed something across most early-stage teams:

They don’t fail because of GTM tactics.

They fail because their GTM doesn’t match their stage.

So they:

• hire sales too early

• test 5 channels at once

• constantly change their messaging

…and nothing compounds.

Not because GTM doesn’t work.

But because they’re solving the wrong problem.

What I’ve learned:

Before you think about how to grow,

you need to understand where you are in GTM

Because what works in one stage will break you in another.

You can not apply the same GTM playbook to completely different stages.

In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ The Ultimate Partnership Guide for Founders

✅ 17 must-have questions about your GTM

✅ The Ultimate SaaS Positioning Guide

A quick word from our sponsor

I only include sponsors that I would recommend personally. If you’re interested in reaching 28,000+ SaaS operators, sponsor the next newsletter.

📢 lemlist — The outbound platform that books meetings, not bounces

lemlist is the multichannel outbound platform built for sales teams who need real pipeline, not just activity metrics.

• Connect intent signals, personalize at scale, and send sequences that actually get replies.

• Build email + LinkedIn sequences in minutes, with AI that sounds like you.

• Trigger outreach based on timing signals, not guesswork

• Track every reply, click, and booked call in one dashboard

Want to make your direct motion work before you try to scale it?

Try lemlist for free

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Let’s get into it. 👇👇

The Foundation (Why Most GTM Breaks Early)

Before we talk about stages, there’s one thing most teams get wrong.

They treat GTM like separate pieces:

• ICP

• Positioning

• Messaging

But in reality:

These are a chain of decisions

• Your ICP defines what problem matters

• That problem defines your positioning

• That positioning defines your messaging

Make this actionable:

ICP (who actually buys):

• Pick one narrow segment (not multiple)

• Define the trigger (why do they buy now?)

• Use real customers, not assumptions (unless you’re pre-revenue)

When you build your ICP, include 4 key elements:

—> The ideal company (3-5 firmographics, technographic criteria)

—> The ideal personas (economic buyer + users/champion)

—> The intent signal/ buying triggers

—> The Anti ICP (3-5 disqualifiers)

Positioning (why you for them):

• What you are: Anchor around one use case, product category, or competitor

• How are you different

• Make it obvious in <5 seconds (1-sentence positioning statement)

Messaging (how you communicate it):

• Focus on clarity —> don’t try to sound super clever

• Use the language of your customers

• Focus on one core outcome/usecase; don’t communicate everything at once

• Repeat the same message everywhere (website, calls, emails, content…)

So let’s do a quick reality check:

You don’t have a GTM foundation yet, if:

1. You don’t know your ICP, or you're still testing multiple ones

2. You’re unclear about your positioning, meaning you can’t explain in an easy, short sentence what you are + who you are for + why you are better/different

3. Your messaging is inconsistent, meaning you see yourself using different words (in your copy, sales calls, content…)

The Stage-Based GTM Playbook

Now the part most founders skip:

GTM only works if it matches your stage

1️⃣ Stage 1: Hustle (0 → ~€100k ARR)

Goal: Find something that works

How to recognize you’re here

• ICP is still unclear

• Messaging feels inconsistent

• Deals are unpredictable

• Growth feels random

👉 You don’t have GTM foundation yet; you’re searching for it.

What actually matters

Talk to customers every week
Nothing beats real customer feedback.
This can include cold calls, sales demos, or interviews with lost deals and churns.

Test ICP + messaging in real conversations
You’re still testing, so use the touchpoints you have to see how your messaging resonates with your (future) ICP. Don’t just think internally about it, test it in the trenches: calls, demos, outbound, content are your friend.

Sell manually (founder-led)
You’re the founder. You own GTM.
Don’t outsource selling to an agency, intern, or consultant.
You need direct feedback loops.

Look for pull signals
Once the first customers come in, look for pull signals. Where do you see that things move faster/easier, and what segments are harder to close?
—> fast conversions, repeated patterns, low friction

What “good” looks like

✅ You hear the same problem repeatedly

✅ Prospects understand your value quickly

✅ Some deals feel surprisingly easy to close

Biggest mistakes

❌ Scaling too early (paid channels, hiring sales)
❌ Jumping between ICPs too fast (before getting enough validation)
❌ Overthinking positioning instead of testing it
❌ Avoiding real customer conversations (and just building the product)

👉 If things feel inconsistent: You’re still in Stage 1.

2️⃣ Stage 2: Focus (→ €1M ARR)

Goal: Make GTM predictable

How to recognize you’re here

• You found an ICP that converts

• Messaging resonates across multiple prospects

• Deals close, but not consistently yet

• You see traction in 1–2 channels

👉 Something works: now make it repeatable

What actually matters

Lock 1 ICP + 1 use case
This is the hardest part. You likely have customers across different segments and use cases.

That’s fine for the hustle phase, but very hard to scale.

So your job is now to niche down and say no to everything else.

Double down on 1–2 channels max
You’re early; this usually means limited resources. To grow to the first million, you have a higher chance of mastering 1-2 channels (where you already see traction), instead of running multiple channels at the same time.

Build a repeatable sales process
Until now, the founder has handled all sales. So there was no ‘need’ to systemize.
But the next step is to become predictable and build your repeatable playbook.

This means you need to build your first playbook.
—> Same steps in the sales process (e.g., disco —> demo —> pilot —> won)
—> Deal stages in your CRM
—> Tracking conversion rates
—> Analyze lost reasons
—> Draft email templates per stage
—> Collaterals across the full funnel (pricing, case studies, ROI calculations…)

The goal: Find something that is repeatable and that you can teach your first sales hires.

Systemize your messaging
Sounds simple. But too often, when I’m doing my GTM audits, I see that the internal messaging framework (living in Notion or Miro) and the actual customer-facing messaging on their website, outbound, sales demos, blog, and LinkedIn content are completely different. Also, each asset tells a different story.

→ Your job: Create messaging alignment

What “good” looks like

✅ Pipeline becomes predictable

✅ Deals follow similar paths

✅ Customer understand your Positioning

✅ Messaging consistently converts

Biggest mistakes

❌ Adding new channels too early

❌ Expanding ICP (“we can also sell to…”) too early

❌ Constantly changing messaging

❌ Flying blind: Not tracking key metrics

👉 This is where I see most early-stage startups struggle.

Because success here comes from: Focus, not more ideas

Get your GTM Blind Spots revealed: Get a 360° assessment of your current GTM strategy plus a custom 6-month action plan all within 7 days - so you can act with confidence, not guesswork.

Get GTM clarity

3️⃣ Stage 3: Expansion (Post €1M ARR)

Goal: Scale what works

How to recognize you’re here

• You can predict pipeline from activity

• Messaging consistently converts

• Sales is repeatable

• You know your numbers and can plan properly

• You can ‘teach’ someone else how your ‘playbook’ works

👉 You now have a system. Something you can ‘scale’.

What actually matters

Scale proven channels aggressively
This means more budget, more people, more volume.

Add new channels (if needed)
In case your existing channels are not enough, you can now test new channels on top.

GTM motions
It might also be the right time to add a secondary motion (for instance: partnerships, product-led growth, or outbound/inbound)

Build specialized teams
You now outgrow founder-led sales. So you bring in the first specialized roles in your GTM team.

Protect your core positioning
Don’t make the mistake of changing your core positioning. Just because you hit the 1€ million ARR, doesn’t mean you can now play the same game as the big guys. Keep your positioning advantage.

Option to expand horizontally (new ICP) or vertically (new use cases)
It’s also the time when you could think of expanding into adjacent segments or use cases. Important: You can, but definitely don’t need to.

What “good” looks like

✅ Growth becomes predictable

✅ Your GTM still works/is healthy (even though you added more resources)

✅ Expansion feels like an extension, not something completely new

Biggest mistakes

❌ Scaling too early (with a broken GTM foundation)

❌ Adding too much complexity at once

❌ Losing clarity in positioning

❌ Forgetting your initial wedge

Final Takeaway

GTM foundation work is not about doing more.

It’s about doing the right things at the right stage:

• Stage 1 → Find what works

• Stage 2 → Make it repeatable

• Stage 3 → Scale it

And all of it sits on:

• ICP

• Positioning

• Messaging

Get that wrong → nothing works
Get that right → everything compounds

Okay, that’s it for today.

See you in 2 weeks.

Alex

The Ultimate Positioning Guide + Worksheet

Get Positioning Guide

3 ways I help founders build a strong GTM foundation 👇

If you’re somewhere between €0 → €1M ARR, I can help you with your GTM.

1️⃣ Free GTM Foundation Library
→ 50+ resources (guides, templates, frameworks)

2️⃣ GTM Audit
→ 360° assessment + 6-month action plan: Your GTM Blindspots revealed

3️⃣ 1:1 GTM Advisory
→ Work directly with me to build your GTM

Most early-stage founders think partnerships will unlock growth.

So they:

• Sign a few partner logos

• build integrations

• launch a “partner program”