Today is day 42 of building our AI SaaS.

We last closed a deal 12 days ago on day 30.

Honestly, I’m a bit disappointed.

I’ve been pretty busy — 37 meetings and 3 events in the past 2 weeks.

Yet, I’ve got nothing to show for it.

While I secured 18 opportunities, some of them will not materialise immediately, and some of them are not high-quality opportunities.

As I reflect on these meetings, I need to improve on certain things:

1. Meeting flow — being more intentional about the questions I’m asking to identify potential sales opportunities

2. Discovery questions — digging deeper to better understand their goals and challenges before explaining our solution

3. Meeting quality — I shouldn’t be wasting time with unqualified prospects

However, the biggest reason is also because I haven’t been actively pitching.

I’ve been waiting on our product demo to be out, so that I can showcase the full solution to the people I’m speaking with.

On hindsight, perhaps I should have pitched regardless.

Product Evolution

Initially, when we first went to market, we were focused on helping companies find new sales opportunities.

This was supported by custom signals and data enrichment to build a target list.

However, after working with our initial users, a few lessons emerged:

• List-building is often a one-time exercise

• Users found the most value in custom qualifiers and signals

• You can’t always find signals, but you always need to do research

These insights were similar to my conversations with 50+ sales and marketing leaders.

So we decided to refine our value proposition into 5 use cases:

1. Find Target Companies & Contacts

2. Qualify Companies & Contacts

3. Enrich Verified Contact Info

4. Ongoing Signals Tracking

5. Custom Research

Steps 1-3 will generate a qualified target list.

Steps 4-5 involves the ongoing tracking of qualified companies and contacts to generate account and contact intelligence for effective sales prospecting.

Strategic Oversight

When we refined our direction, Justin started working on the platform to focus on steps 4 and 5.

However, this is where I should have made a better decision.

Instead of rushing to build out the platform, we could have continued selling the signals and research intelligence without the platform.

Yet, I kept waiting for the demo to be ready, and didn’t pitch our solution to the people I met.

And with the complexity involved for the platform, Justin hasn’t been able to complete the MVP demo version.

As I head into a new week, I shall not continue making this mistake of waiting for the demo.

We can already deliver the results, so I shouldn’t hold back just because the platform isn’t ready.

What’s Coming Next?

Justin is pushing to get the demo out by this week.

Meanwhile, I’m working on a pipeline generation playbook series to drive brand awareness (will be released over the upcoming weeks).

I will also be kickstarting cold email campaigns to secure demo calls.

Let’s see if we can generate some real traction this week 💪

PS — which part of your sales prospecting process do you struggle with most?