Where to start when scaling a B2B tech business
A founder can usually sell their own product. They know which prospects will buy and which won't, what a buyer needs to hear, and can sense when a deal starts to wobble. The difficulty begins when someone else has to do it.
That knowledge sits in the founder's head. Until it is written down and agreed, every new salesperson, marketer and agency rebuilds it from scratch — usually by filling in the blanks, and by learning it the expensive way, on live deals. Getting it out, in a way the whole team shares, is where scaling starts.
The order below is the order I'd work in, because each step builds on the one before. Each also points to the cards in our free card deck that walk you through it.
1. Agree who you're selling to, and who you aren't
The first job is to create a shared ideal customer profile (ICP). The customers worth chasing are generally the easiest to sell to, because they gain most from what you offer, reach value fastest and can free up the budget to act. They're also the ones who grow their spend over time. A profile earns its keep by what it rules out.
A common mistake is to deliberately make it as broad as possible, to capture as many prospects as you can. That loses the focus that keeps what you say relevant to the people you're selling to. Dave Kellogg puts the cost bluntly – a target audience that means everyone is 'a strategy problem, not a messaging problem'.
Start with the customers you've already won, and talk to the salespeople who won them. The founder's view is the hypothesis; won customers are the evidence.
Geoffrey Moore's argument in Crossing the Chasm is why narrowing pays: win one well-defined niche first, then use it to reach the neighbouring ones. When we took Software AG's streaming analytics product, Apama, into IoT, we narrowed from manufacturing in general to machine builders (the manufacturers of machines used by other manufacturers to make their products).
Then name the people inside those companies who use, approve, sign and block. A VP of operations and a CFO want different things from the same purchase.
In the card deck: Defining your ideal customer — the eight ICP questions, and the target personas example.
2. Find out why customers buy, and why now
Customers don't buy a product. They buy a way out of a problem that is causing pain. Write down that problem in their words, what keeps happening if they leave it, what that costs, and what makes it urgent this quarter rather than next year.
The cost of doing nothing deserves its own line. When Elliot Aronson and colleagues trained home-energy auditors to be more persuasive, one of the four things they taught was to frame advice as money being lost, not money that could be saved. A buyer who can see what inaction costs has a reason to act; a buyer shown only the upside has a reason to wait.
Urgency usually arrives with an event you can monitor — a new CMO, a funding round, a new office or factory, the annual results, news about one of their competitors. Each puts someone under pressure to change.
Then list the prerequisites: what has to be true before a customer can succeed with your support, from budget and evidence of the ROI to skills and the systems you need to connect to. A prospect without them is one that gets stuck mid-funnel.
In the card deck: Focusing on your strengths — the 'Why change now' and 'Why customers buy from you' cards. For the events that create urgency, the signals card in How to create campaigns that work.
3. Turn it into messages anyone can repeat
Once you know why customers buy, the job is to say it simply enough that everyone tells the same story. Al Ries and Jack Trout's argument in Positioning still holds: you are competing for a small space in the prospect's mind, and you win it by owning one idea rather than listing many.
Kellogg's practical version is what he calls a message tree. Most people can't hold nine points in their head, he argues, but they can hold three groups of three. Put the three benefits the customer cares most about at the top, with the advantages and features beneath each. Lead with the benefit; the features are what you answer with when the customer asks why.
Write it into a key messaging document, and let every web page, deck, email and press release be written from it rather than invented afresh. The test is whether a customer can name your benefits without you in the room.
In the card deck: Why your messaging is vital — the features, advantages and benefits cards, and the key messaging document it feeds.
4. Know why customers don't buy
Deals stall for all sorts of reasons: a trial that never made it past the first week, an approval board that meets once a quarter, infrastructure it won't connect to, a budget that won't stretch, doubts it will scale.
During the final stages of the decision-making process, exposure to risk becomes a more significant factor. Is the company financially stable? Will we get ripped off with support fees a year down the line? Is the product stable? Am I willing to bet my job on this?
Rory Sutherland makes the point in Alchemy that many decisions are made to be defensible rather than optimal — the old line that nobody got fired for buying IBM. A smaller supplier has to answer the career risk as well as the business case. List every barrier you've met, and pair each with what removes it.
In the card deck: How to accelerate your sales cycles — the eight questions buyers are actually asking, and the cards that pair each roadblock with its remedy.
5. Write the 30-second pitch, then expand on it
Once you have the customer, their pain and your messages agreed, your elevator pitch becomes relatively straightforward. A modified version of Moore's elevator test in Crossing the Chasm gives it a shape: for this customer, with problem x, our product is y kind of thing that delivers benefit z — and, unlike alternatives, it also delivers benefit w.
The alternative isn't always a competitor. For many buyers it is whatever they already have, be it a spreadsheet, an internal team or carrying on as they are, and naming it is what makes your difference visible.
Write the 30-second version first, then expand it into a short description of around 150 words and a longer one of around 300, each building on the last.
In the card deck: Why your messaging is vital — the card on the one-line description, and the card that takes the pitch from 30 seconds to 300 words.
6. Map what it takes to demonstrate value
Buyers don't just ask whether your product works. They ask what it will take to make it work for them. Moore calls the answer the whole product: everything a customer needs to reach the outcome — set-up, integration, training, support — not just the thing you ship.
Write the implementation down as a process, from signature to first value, with who does what and how long each step takes. It answers the buyer's 'where do we start?', and it shows you where projects get stuck.
The clearest example I've seen began with a prospect whose trial stalled because they couldn't get it working the way they wanted it to. Talking to others showed the problem was commonplace. We turned the stalled trial into a charged three-day workshop that showed them how to move forward — that year, this helped us grow revenue 10-fold.
In the card deck: How to accelerate your sales cycles — the time-to-value card. The engagement stage card in How to create campaigns that work shows where trials and quick-start offers fit.
7. Give each buyer what they need at each stage
A buyer goes through a process of buying, not a process of being sold to. Agree the stages with sales — awareness, interest, consideration, engagement, decision — and define each by what the customer is doing, not by what you are doing to them.
Then ask one question at every stage, for every persona: what do they need to move forward? Early on, the questions tend to be more about the problem — who else in our industry has addressed this, and what happens if we don't. Later they become which options fit best, what the drawbacks of each are, how we prove it will work and what it will cost. A CFO and a VP of operations ask different versions of each.
Not every answer is content. It might be a workshop run by pre-sales, a test drive or a call script. It's anything that makes life easier for the customer and removes friction from their journey.
In the card deck: How to align sales and marketing for the agreed stages; Defining your sales plays for what customers need at each one; and How to create campaigns that work, which gives each stage its own card, with the buyer's questions and a plan by persona and month.
8. Line up the proof before they ask for it
Every claim needs evidence a buyer can check, matched to the question that persona is asking. A CFO wants to see the ROI; the person who'll use it every day wants to know it works for them.
Richard Shotton's work on specificity explains why precision matters: an exact figure reads as observed, a round one as estimated. 'Around twenty customers' is weaker than the real number.
Proof isn't just case studies. It includes customer outcomes, a reference call, an analyst's view or a narrowly scoped proof project. It can even be press coverage, aimed at the executive who fears you won't be around next year.
In the card deck: Why your messaging is vital — the outcomes and proof section of the key messaging document; and the barrier cards in How to accelerate your sales cycles.
9. Know when deals go quiet, and why
Deals rarely die with a no. They go quiet: 'I'm waiting for feedback', or 'The project's on hold'.
A buyer who hits resistance doesn't feel they have rejected you. They feel they took the easier, more pragmatic path, so there is no call to make. Deals go quiet because buying got hard — and doing nothing became easier, or someone else gave them an easier path.
Know how long each stage normally takes, and treat a deal that overstays as a question to ask, not a forecast opportunity that's taking longer than expected. Then ask your own customers where they got stuck and what would have helped at that specific moment in time.
In the card deck: How to accelerate your sales cycles — 'Nobody tells you the deal is dead', and the card on asking your own customers what stopped them.
If you're building from scratch
Three pieces of advice before there's a team to align.
Tell customers what problem you fix, and how. Say it in the first sentence of everything, not the third paragraph. Ogilvy's readership research showed attention falling sharply over the first fifty words and very little after that — the reader deciding whether you're relevant won't wait to find out.
Build enough credibility that people want your time. Awareness and credibility are different things. A logo on every banner might buy some recognition; it doesn't make a busy executive actively want to talk with you. That comes from showing you understand their problem better than they expected, and Sutherland's point about costly signals explains why: effort that is hard to fake persuades where claims don't.
Make service the brand. A small company's brand is the reputation its customers carry for it. Referrals come from customers who would happily take a call on your behalf, and that is earned in delivery, not in marketing.
Where to begin
None of this needs a big team. It needs the founder's time, a few won customers on the phone, and the discipline to write the answers down where everyone can find them.
Start with who you sell to. Everything else on this list depends on it.
References
Gonzales, M. H., Aronson, E. and Costanzo, M. A. (1988) 'Using social cognition and persuasion to promote energy conservation: a quasi-experiment', Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 18(12), pp. 1049–1066. doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1988.tb01192.x
Kellogg, D. (2008) 'How to develop a marketing message', Kellblog, 14 February. kellblog.com
Moore, G. A. (1991) Crossing the Chasm. New York: HarperBusiness.
Ogilvy, D. (1972) 'How to create advertising that sells', Ogilvy & Mather advertisement.
Ries, A. and Trout, J. (1981) Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Sutherland, R. (2019) Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense. London: WH Allen.