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Haggle's Future Path to Product-Market Fit — How a Founder Pitched Todd Jackson With His Own Newsletter


Haggle's founder Peter Townsend gave a fictional interview with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how he is finding product-market fit creating the first B2B pre-demo communication platform.

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Most people say the best ideas come while you’re in the shower – but Peter Townsend would say they come when you are on the ski lift.

Peter has over 12 years of B2B SaaS experience, starting his career at Level 4+++ Extreme product market fit, billion dollar ARR Bloomberg, managing accounts at Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan. Today, he leads Global Sales Operations and Strategy at Pitchbook Data where he was integral to the company going from Level 2 Developing PMF to Level 4+ Extreme PMF.

But it is in his free time that he loves to test and work on entrepreneurial ideas. His latest idea came to him on the ski lift. Peter was skiing with his brother, a marketing manager, who was purchasing a number of software tools. He complained that the sales rep was pestering him for updates and he wanted a way to “mute” the rep.

The problem resonated with Peter because he had experienced this scenario as both a seller, prospecting buyers, and as a software buyer, fielding emails and calls from relentless sales reps. He knew there had to be a more efficient way to buy software, that wasn’t painful for both sides, and put buyers in control of the process.

EXPLORING IDEAS


The problem that Peter’s brother surfaced fit perfectly with Peter’s previous work on B2B software sales ideas in years past.

In 2020, Peter worked on a way to streamline B2B negotiations by providing dynamic pricing sheets that would automatically update based on given criteria. In 2021, he built an algorithm for a middle pipeline prioritization tool - similar to opportunity scoring. And he tinkered on a way to fully automate a demo with an AI sales rep essentially eliminating the largest cost structure for sales teams.

After conducting initial testing, none of these ideas had longevity and all were catering to sales teams, a saturated market. Discussing dynamic pricing sheets with sales reps was perceived as ineffective. Opportunity scoring for middle pipeline leads, though valuable, was difficult to achieve using unstructured data in 2021. And the technology behind AI sales reps was not advanced enough to reach parity with more complex, higher ticket B2B sales.

The ski lift conversation opened Peter’s eyes to a problem he wanted to dive into: The B2B sales process was broken. Buyers were frustrated with pestering, annoying sales reps who clogged their inbox and pressured them to join a call to learn basic information about their product - and sales reps were wasting time on low-quality MQLs who were not likely to convert in the short term.

Peter believed there was an untapped opportunity to create a more efficient B2B buying experience that put the buyer in the driver's seat.

Aligning With Major Market Shifts

What Peter found out after starting his research was that a major market shift was occurring. The way buyers were purchasing software was fundamentally changing.

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According to Gartner, 70% of the buying journey was conducted away from the sales rep. Buyers were self learning. Much of this had to do with the new found proliferation of available information online, SaaS review sites, blogs, Slack groups and other channels where buyers could get information away from a sales rep.

The second major shift was in cold sales emails. Before the introduction of email automation tools like Outreach and Salesloft in 2017-2018, outbound prospecting was a laborious process. Outbound prospectors would manually copy and paste emails one by one. This handicapped the quantity of emails sent. But with the rollout of email automation tools everything changed.

Sales reps could send 10x as many emails, which led to a massive oversaturation of sales emails. Buyers were becoming frustrated with constant emails and started regarding their inbox as sacred. Form fill responses became fewer and fewer.

BUILDING EARLY PRODUCT

Peter’s initial idea was to create a better way for buyers to receive sales emails, recognizing that outbound prospecting was broken for both sides.

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Peter thought if you could create a way for buyers to receive sales pitches on their terms, based on the criteria they care about, then sales reps would see an increase in response rates. His thinking was it would be similar to how VCs require companies to send a pitch based on certain criteria. Peter would create a way for buyers to filter sales emails to a “pitch portal”.

Peter’s time going through the Tacklebox Accelerator program and at Cornell getting his MBA in Entrepreneurship taught him how to test ideas with landing pages and language market fit.


Language Market Fit = Pre-Product Market Fit

Using low code website builders, Peter was able to spin up different versions of the landing page, naming the company “Haggle” to embody the push and pull of a sales interaction. He ran inexpensive ads on various social media channels to test language market fit.

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With LinkedIn outreach and sites like Clarity.Fm, Peter scheduled calls with decision makers on both the buyer and seller side. He wanted to avoid the “mom test”, talking only to people he knew, and pitch the ideas to strangers who had experience buying and selling B2B software.
He conducted over 50 interviews, speaking with target customers to understand the problems they face with buying software, and specifically cold sales emails.


Pre-Product Pivot

Talking to his customers revealed something new. Sales emails were annoying but not the primary pain point. When asked about sales emails, buyers felt they were irrelevant.

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The problem Peter found is that when buyers get a personalized sales pitch, they aren't in the market for a software solution, and thus don't see the value in spending the time to divert a sales email to a platform for review.

Based on his customer interviews, the lengthy and time consuming process of researching and scheduling multiple demos with vendors to get basic information and visualize the product was the primary pain point buyers were facing.

Peter realized that Haggle needed to capture buyers when they were in the market for a product.


Pivot 1: Buy Software Like You Hire Employees

Peter made the decision to pivot the product based on his interviews, changing the focus from cold emails to buyers with an identified software need. He envisioned a tool that let buyers request an anonymous pitch from vendors, that they could review on their own time, without having to formally start a sales cycle.

The closest analogy was that buying software should be like hiring an employee.

When you hire an employee you post a job description, field applications, screen candidates, conduct 2-3 interviews with the top candidates and hire one. Peter wanted to replicate this process for software sales.

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During this time, it was Fall of 2023 and they began building the initial MVP.

The first version of the MVP let buyers set questions and sales materials requirements that they wanted to receive. Haggle would then manually reach out on the buyers behalf to get responses from top vendors. The eventual goal was to create a marketplace for buying and selling software, but initially Peter wanted to initially use the “unscalable business model” to test the idea.

A familiar problem arose with the go to market strategy: how do you capture buyers when they are in the market to buy? A VP might be involved in 1-2 software purchases in a year. And thus it was hard to target them when they were in the market for a tool.

They were getting closer to the correct solution. And the next path to test was right under their nose - the vendor’s website.


Pivot 2: Unexpected, Expected Pivot

Peter and his team needed to figure out where buyers live when they are in the market for a solution. After conducting more customer interviews, it turned out the answer was in their face: the vendor website that buyers are researching. The vast majority of buyers still go to a vendor's website to learn more about a company but they resist requesting a demo or form filling because they aren’t ready to start a sales cycle.

It was unexpected to go to market from the seller side, being that the product was built for buyers. But upon further examination the pivot seemed obvious.

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From his market research, Peter knew buyers were sick and tired of form fills, providing their email to download resources, and requesting demos. Buyers wanted to learn more about a company without starting a sales cycle or having to schedule a demo with a sales rep, to be inevitably pestered by countless sales emails.

A Haggle button on a vendor's site would sit alongside the traditional “Request a Demo” or “Talk to Sales” call-to-action (CTA). The solution combined anonymity and personalization to allow buyers who were interested, but not ready to demo, engage with software vendors in a way that possesses the personalization of an in-person call, but is time efficient and non-committal.

Peter called this the Pre-Demo.

Here is an example of the Pre-Demo CTA on a sample website:

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A Pre-Demo CTA is Born

This is where Pre-Demo CTA was born.

Because of the work done in Pivot 1 in Fall 2023, the prototyping and build was straight forward. The team already had the request form built and just needed to create a new widget, similar to Calendly. From there vendors could easily embed the CTA widget on their website as an alternative to Request Demo or Talk to Sales.

This new angle, though now “selling” to vendors, is still first and foremost servicing the buyer by giving them control of the process, catering to the major market shifts in buyer behavior.

During January 2024 the team built the new widget and by February 2024 was ready to test the new Pre-Demo CTA.

LOOKING FORWARD

On April 7th 2024 Haggle applied to the PMF Method Summer 2024 session.

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The perception is that many companies are just features. Nice to haves and not need to haves. Not an everyday “vitamin”. Let alone a painkiller. Haggle upon first glance looks like just a feature.

Peter and team think otherwise. They know Haggle will change the way B2B software is bought and sold, fulfilling its ultimate vision to create a B2B sales marketplace. The pre-demo CTA is the “wedge” to capture buyers at the initial stages of their buying journey, providing a launching pad for capturing all phases of the buying and selling process, from cold outreach through contract negotiation, onboarding, and potentially vendor management.

By creating a single platform where buyers are in control and can centralize communications across all prospective vendors, as opposed to having to login to multiple sales-led platforms, Haggle solidifies its stickiness and potential scale – because weknow where buyers go, sales reps with inevitably follow.

The legacy way software was bought and sold is changing with the shift in buyer behaviors, led by Millennials becoming the majority decision makers quickly followed by Gen Z. Haggle is here to help buyers and sellers optimize for these shifts.

Peter Townsend
Linkedin
PLTownsend2@gmail.com