Pre-Market Fit Sales: What It Really Means
Founding teams are wonderful.
They’re full of excitement and vision. They’re ready to change the world and start seeing sales roll in. The question they must pause and ask, however, is whether their market is ready, too.
Today, we’re going to talk about establishing product market fit (PMF). How to do it, and how to know when your product is validated so you can confidently begin to scale.
We’re going to start by addressing your product or service and your prospective buyer. Let’s get right to it.
How to Know You Have Product-Market Fit
One of the simplest ways to understand PMF is through the lens of supply and demand. Demand exists when there’s a real problem plaguing buyers, whether they clearly understand and believe your product solves it, and whether they’re willing to pay for the benefits it provides.
Without all of these factors working together to generate demand, product-market validation is not complete.
If you still aren’t sure, you can ask three questions about your business to clarify your current situation:
- Do you have a consistent influx of new customers or a growing book of long-term ones?
- Do you have deals that are flowing through the pipeline with a healthy ratio of them turning into closed sales?
- Do you have competitors that successfully sell the same solution as you, to the same or similar customers as yours?
If you answered “no” to any of the above questions, there’s a chance that you still need to achieve product market fit. If you’ve said no to all three, your product still hasn’t been market-validated. You may have a lot of legwork ahead of you in terms of evaluating your audience and refining your product, and it’s likely too early to go full throttle with marketing and sales.
The Pre-Market Fit Journey
If you’re wondering what that legwork will look like, we’ll cover that now.
Most PMF fit journeys aren’t linear, and are often filled with twists, U-turns, and various reiterations. It can be a frustrating time, and rightfully so. Finding their place in the market is one of the biggest hurdles for any startup. And, while every founder dreams of scaling, the reality is that most never make it past the validation stage.
Take a moment to reflect on the following insights:
42% of startups fail because they build a product the market doesn’t need.
Lack of demand or misreading the market is the single biggest reason for startup failure.
Source: Stripe.com
Around 34% of failed startups cite an inability to achieve product-market fit as the primary cause.
Many teams spend too long optimizing features instead of validating whether anyone truly wants what they’re selling.
Source: Harvard Business School Online
Roughly 90% of startups fail overall. Product-market fit issues are the leading factor behind most of those failures.
Even well-funded startups often burn out before reaching consistent sales traction.
Source: Embroker
Our goal is not to discourage any company from going to market with a new product. On the contrary, we partner with many of our clients through this exciting and experimental phase. We encourage them (and anyone reading this article) to allocate their budgets carefully, create data-driven strategies, and carefully choose activities that will get them into a post-revenue, repeatable sales cycle as quickly as possible.
Getting Market Feedback
There are numerous tools and methods you can use to figure out whether your solution is in demand with your target market. However, the most useful feedback will come from potential buyers, and you’ll want to have as many live interactions with them as you can until you see patterns emerging or have collected good enough data to conduct an analysis.
You can also use outbound phone/email campaigns, third-party services or survey software to gather decision-maker data and record their opinions.
A sales team can be great for having market research conversations with prospects because they’ll go about them in a value-focused way. And if the opportunity arises, they’re going to work to turn it into a sale.
You can also use services like User Interviews to get useful feedback from experienced professionals in your target audience.
Not only do these feedback sessions have potential to convert into a lead, but they also provide you with valuable insights that will help you refine your positioning, value proposition, and even your ICP (Ideal Client Profile). These are the types of insights that bring your company out of the fog and to the next level.
Your Processes
You don’t need an extensive user manual for handling simple platforms and spreadsheets while doing basic market research. What you’ll need is simple documentation that everyone on your team can refer to, ensure they’re collecting the right data, and logging it appropriately for later analysis.
Sample Market Research Process
- Log leads on shared spreadsheet, ensuring source, company name, full lead name, job title, phone number, and email address are completely filled out.
- Transcribe and record your meeting with the interviewee’s permission.
- Upload your transcription and recording to the AI summarization tool.
- Load summaries into the feedback entry form on the shared spreadsheet.
- Confirm that data was attached to the correct lead records and create any follow-up tasks as needed.
- Inform and adjust strategy after reviewing data during weekly meeting.
Complex market research is usually not needed at this phase. Some of these conversations will yield sales results within a timeframe reasonable for your industry, and some won’t. Conversations that end up as qualified leads in your sales funnel should be treated with care, used to identify gaps, and make improvements. They should also be turned into clients as often as possible.
If these conversations don’t yield any sales results, you’ll know you’re not speaking with the right people and need to make adjustments based on the feedback you’ve received from them, and other research.
Accelerating Product-Market Fit
The fastest way to get to product–market fit is by building less and listening more.
Founders who succeed in this stage are the ones who stay open-minded and are willing to see their product the way the market does, then meet buyers where they are.
Keep these fundamentals in mind:
- Listen before you optimize. Let real conversations shape your roadmap.
- Hyper-focus your audience. Win with one ICP before trying to win them all.
- Measure what matters. Closed deals and retention hold more weight than top-funnel replies.
- Team Alignment. Sales, marketing, and product should all speak the customer’s language.
- Act on evidence. Scale what’s working, change what isn’t.
The faster you close the gap between how you see your product and how the market experiences it, the faster you’ll start seeing sales.
TG Sales Agency helps founders and sales leaders navigate this early stage with clarity and structure. Contact us if you’re reach to reach market validation and scale with confidence.
Discuss accelerating my company’s go-to-market traction and true product–market fit.
