B2B Sales For Dummies

Hi IndieHackers!

I'm KV. I recently started a company called Construct to help people build software without writing code. But in a former life, I ran a security startup that did ~400K ARR and sold to major companies including a chip manufacturer. I also learnt sales from my peers who have bootstrapped their companies to ~1M ARR.

I'm writing this blog post to help you understand how I ran a lean B2B sales process and stayed on top of things. I like to follow a very simple process that has 4 stages: Prospect, Demo, Contract, Closed (won/lost).

The key thing to remember about this process is that there is a proposal associated with every step. If the buyer accepts the proposal, you move them to the next stage. If the buyer rejects the proposal, you move them to "closed-lost" and pocket the learnings for the future. I'll outline below what qualifies someone to be in a given stage, the proposal I make in that stage.

1. Prospect:

• Qualifications: A qualified prospect is someone who has the budget to buy your solution, the need for your solution, the authority to make the purchasing decision and the timing is correct for them to buy it. If you're selling software to a small business, this would be the owner. If you're selling to a big enterprise, it might be someone more specific like the VP of engineering.
• Proposal: The proposal at this stage is simple. You want to see that they agree your product could be useful to them, and you want them to see a demo AND bring someone along from their team (either their boss or a peer). Most people will just say yes to a demo to not hurt your feelings but asking them to bring someone along will help them say no if they don't see the need.

2. Demo

• Qualifications: They've set a concrete date and time for the demo, they've invited their peer on the calendar invite or confirmed the peer will be coming.
• Proposal: At this point, the proposal varies by how big your customer is. For smaller customers, the proposal may range from a paid trial to actually purchasing a license. For a bigger customer, it may need to be a paid proof of concept that you scope out in detail.

[Optional] 2a - Trial/POC

• Qualification: The prospect has agreed to a trial/POC.
• Proposal: A meeting to talk about pricing and contracts if the POC has gone well. It's important you align on what it means for the POC to go well before the POC begins.

3. Contract

• Qualifications: After the demo/trial/POC - you and the prospect have agreed that the solution you are selling fits the problem. The only hurdle now is pricing. Contracting is all about pricing.
• Proposal: At this point, you should share a quote for how much the software will cost the user + details on installation.

Closed-Won/Lost are self explanatory.

If this process makes sense to you and is something you'd want to adopt, we've built a simple and free tool on Construct that you can use by simply hitting the "Remix" button. https://useconstruct.ai/constructs/d161a0ce-61d6-4bb1-8c20-d88b74da6f77