Over 10,000 founders and investors downloaded and read it, and the feedback was incredible.

What started as an attempt to cut through the noise at pre-seed has quickly turned into something much bigger, a shared language for the ecosystem. So we’re back for round three, and we’re excited to share our third annual Israeli Pre-Seed Report.

Download it right here 👇

This year’s report dives deep into the evolving pre-seed market trends, shifting investor dynamics, and market benchmarks. We analyzed data from 70 of the most active Israeli pre-seed angel and VC investors, including nearly 1200 teams we personally engaged with at Fusion during 2025.

Here are some of the key findings:

• Valuations in 2025 were, on average, 14% higher than in 2024. The average post-money valuation cap rose to $7.25M, with a median valuation cap of $6.8M, while round sizes grew to a range of between $1.1M and $1.75M.

• Nearly two-thirds (64%) of VCs now invest exclusively via post-money SAFEs at the pre-seed stage.

• More than half of investors now expect a shorter timeline between pre-seed and seed rounds, as the standard has shifted to 6-12 months, down from 12-18 months in 2024.

• Pre-seed rounds are increasingly led by a single VC, with a ~50% increase in solo-led rounds compared to 2024, reflecting a continued move away from co-led dynamics.

• Over 80% of VCs and angel investors expect founders (particularly the CEO) to be working full-time for a certain period of time before making an investment.

• VC-backed pre-seed rounds remain overwhelmingly team-driven. Despite the rise of solopreneurs, nearly 90% of VCs did not invest in solo founders as part of their core investment strategy in 2025.

If you find some of the above interesting, you should check out and read the answers, find more exclusive data and insights in the full document.

Many thanks to Fusion Principal Amit Shechter for his work compiling the data and leading the charge on writing.

Our goal in publishing this report is to spur a better-informed conversation about pre-seed investment moving forward, and inspire others to collect and share more data in the future. In the long run, a more transparent and data-driven investment landscape is better for everyone. And of course, we hope you will enjoy reading it.

Get the report here 📥

Over 10,000 founders and investors downloaded and read it, and the feedback was incredible.

What started as an attempt to cut through the noise at pre-seed has quickly turned into something much bigger, a shared language for the ecosystem. So we’re back for round three, and we’re excited to share our third annual Israeli Pre-Seed Report.

Download it right here 👇

This year’s report dives deep into the evolving pre-seed market trends, shifting investor dynamics, and market benchmarks. We analyzed data from 70 of the most active Israeli pre-seed angel and VC investors, including nearly 1200 teams we personally engaged with at Fusion during 2025.

Here are some of the key findings:

• Valuations in 2025 were, on average, 14% higher than in 2024. The average post-money valuation cap rose to $7.25M, with a median valuation cap of $6.8M, while round sizes grew to a range of between $1.1M and $1.75M.

• Nearly two-thirds (64%) of VCs now invest exclusively via post-money SAFEs at the pre-seed stage.

• More than half of investors now expect a shorter timeline between pre-seed and seed rounds, as the standard has shifted to 6-12 months, down from 12-18 months in 2024.

• Pre-seed rounds are increasingly led by a single VC, with a ~50% increase in solo-led rounds compared to 2024, reflecting a continued move away from co-led dynamics.

• Over 80% of VCs and angel investors expect founders (particularly the CEO) to be working full-time for a certain period of time before making an investment.

• VC-backed pre-seed rounds remain overwhelmingly team-driven. Despite the rise of solopreneurs, nearly 90% of VCs did not invest in solo founders as part of their core investment strategy in 2025.

If you find some of the above interesting, you should check out and read the answers, find more exclusive data and insights in the full document.

Many thanks to Fusion Principal Amit Shechter for his work compiling the data and leading the charge on writing.

Our goal in publishing this report is to spur a better-informed conversation about pre-seed investment moving forward, and inspire others to collect and share more data in the future. In the long run, a more transparent and data-driven investment landscape is better for everyone. And of course, we hope you will enjoy reading it.

Get the report here 📥

From Real Patients to Real Demand

When most startups talk about “getting out of the building”, they usually mean launching fast and tweaking as they go. Feminai chose a different path - Long before building a prototype or writing a single line of code, the founders asked a more fundamental question: what would a real solution look like for the women who don’t show up for breast screenings at all?

The barriers weren’t technical, they were personal, cultural, and logistical. Women who live far from screening centers. Women who can’t afford to miss work. Women who feel unsafe or uncomfortable with existing procedures. Instead of forcing a solution into those constraints, the team built around them. What emerged was a radiation-free, wearable screening kit designed for home use: private, comfortable, and simple. Not to replace hospitals, but to reach the women who never make it there in the first place.

Early clinical trials at Sheba Medical Center showed strong results: 96% sensitivity and 98% negative predictive value. Numbers that come remarkably close to hospital-grade mammography.

The biggest shift happened inside the team. Dr. Karny Ilan, still practicing at Sheba, stepped into the CEO role, leading fundraising, managing regulatory strategy, and building partnerships between ER shifts. Shani Klein, CTO, leads machine learning development. Gal Yanuka, CPO, oversees hardware and product integration. Their seed round closed during the Swords of Iron war, between Zoom calls, reserve duty, and late-night shifts. It’s not your typical startup timeline, but then again, this was never meant to be a typical startup.

Rewriting the Rules of Startup Culture

At Feminai there are no all-hands meetings. No open office hours. No illusion of “business as usual”. With the CEO often working hospital shifts, communication happens differently: 20-minute WhatsApp calls between rounds, decisions delivered in voice notes, shared Google Docs instead of whiteboards. It’s not chaos, it’s intentional. A flexible rhythm shaped by real-life constraints, where leadership isn’t always physically present, but the mission stays tightly aligned.

“It’s not about always being available or flying to every investor meeting”, says Karny. “That’s not the culture we’re building”. They don’t pretend to run a 24/7 operation. They design around constraints: parenting, medicine, military duty. These aren’t disruptions but part of the model. Life doesn’t pause for startups, so they don’t ask it to.

And somehow, it works. This model forces clarity, builds trust, and creates a kind of resilience that’s rare in early-stage companies. What emerges isn’t just a more flexible startup, it’s a sharper, more focused one that knows exactly what it’s here to do: close a global health gap for women, with tools that fit their lives, not just their clinics.

Founders, Take Notes

1. Don’t wait for the “right moment” - Feminai launched during hospital shifts, reserve duty, and nap times. The perfect time rarely shows up.

2. Validate before you build - especially in healthtech where lives are on the line. Talk to users, solve their actual problem.

3. Culture beats polish - no office, no fancy deck, just a team that trusts each other, moves fast, and gets things done.

4. Split roles by strength - a practicing doctor can fundraise, lead product, and still run an ER. Titles matter less than capability

5. Use what you’ve got - WhatsApp voice notes, Zoom from the car, 6AM syncs before kindergarten drop-off. If it works, it works.

About Feminai

Feminai is a women-led healthtech startup developing a radiation-free, wearable kit for early breast cancer detection at home. After promising clinical results, the team is preparing for FDA trials in the US - and exploring ways to adapt their technology to other underserved areas in women’s health. Their innovative approach recently earned them a 1.65M NIS grant from the Israel Innovation Authority.

In this blog post, we’ll analyze: In which categories are teams actually building? What does the average Pre-Seed startup look like in terms of team structure, traction, or product maturity?

And more importantly, what can we all learn from it?

To kick things off, I shared below some real data from the event itself.
Out of 600+ teams that applied to attend, here’s the breakdown of who actually got in.

The long tail is getting thinner.

We’re seeing fewer and fewer teams working on categories like Food, eCommerce, Education, Climate, or Supply Chain & Logistics. That’s not a coincidence. These are some of the toughest sectors to raise for in the Israeli early-stage (and namely in the Pre-Seed) ecosystem.

Even in our 2024 Pre-Seed Report, we saw the same trend - only a handful of Pre-Seed rounds per year across these verticals. So while teams might still be able to raise a first (angel) check, very few manage to raise a full round that gives them a real 12–18 month runway.

There’s a new kid on the block. He’s called PropTech.

In the last 12 months, we’re seeing a clear spike in the number of teams entering PropTech, but it’s not just quantity. It’s quality too. When we zoom into our own internal Fusion data, there’s a specific pattern:

• These teams often have a CEO with deep domain expertise, just like we see in Fintech or Digital Health.

• They usually have unique access to the market.

• Unlike other verticals, they’re managing to generate meaningful traction in the US market from day one.

Why? In part, because PropTech go-to-market motions tend to be faster and more direct with less red tape & fewer compliance barriers, so tapping into the market, and the sales processes themselves are ‘easier’ (founders - don’t kill me for using this word).

Half of B2C teams work in the Mental Health or Wellness category.

That’s a dramatic concentration. In previous years, we didn’t see anything close to this trend, which leads us to believe it’s likely a byproduct of the last two years of conflict and uncertainty. Founders are recognizing a growing need and sense of an opportunity. But the US market is telling a different story.

Despite the interest, these teams are struggling to get early traction as most aren’t able to reach meaningful user scale before their first fundraising attempt. and as a result, most aren’t able to raise.

It makes sense when you think about it. These are the kinds of products that are easier to build, cheap to launch, and often characterized by the fast-initial-feedback-loop from user engagement. But that early momentum can be misleading. The harder part is building a company around it.

Zooming Out: What Fusion’s Internal Data Shows Us

From the graph below & a high-level perspective, the macro landscape hasn’t changed dramatically. But when we look closer at the numbers, we’re seeing a few important shifts in where founders are choosing to build, and what that says about how the market is evolving.

Some verticals are shrinking fast.
In 2025, the number of teams building in FoodTech and AgTech dropped by ~25%. In eCommerce and Supply Chain & Logistics, the decline was even sharper—nearly 50%. That’s a steep drop, which also mirrors what we’re seeing on our dealflow: founders who are raising Pre-Seed money are starting to ‘avoid’ the verticals that have historically been hard to raise for.

But while we’re seeing some categories ‘disappearing’, the truth is that the Pre-Seed category is growing. We’re seeing more teams that opt to raise their Pre-Seed round; the only difference is that they’re shifting focus:

• Vertical SaaS/AI → up 15% YoY

• Digital Health → up 20% YoY

• PropTech & ConTech → up 100% YoY

That’s not a fluke - it’s ecosystem maturity. Founders are becoming more strategic. They’re choosing verticals where early traction is more attainable, investor appetite is higher, and the path to Seed is clearer.

Similar to Life Science startups which tend to raise their first check from incubators or government/innovation grants, or Cyber/Infra teams that raise large $6–8M Seed rounds to support heavy technical lift (and talent); we’re seeing the rest of the ecosystem split into distinct funding patterns. For categories like Gaming, Healthcare, Fintech, LegalTech, EdTech and more, Pre-Seed is becoming the default entry point.

Traction builds conviction, but is it realistic in Pre-Seed?

We’ve all seen the posts:

• “AI makes it 10x easier to build.”

• “Shipping an MVP takes days, not months.”

• “Founders are more empowered than ever.”

But - easier to build ≠ paying customers.

In 2025, less than 20% of the teams we met at the Pre-Seed stage had any kind of paying customers. That’s a drop from 31% in 2024.

So we dug deeper: What’s happening with the teams that don’t have paying customers yet? Here’s what we found - less than 50% had any form of real market validation (pilots/design partnership, or a structured user discovery).

This means that only one out of every three Pre-Seed teams actually manages to convert their potential customers from pilots/design partnerships to paying customers.

That’s a bottleneck. Here are a few questions one might want to ask oneself when working with customers:

• What will trigger the end of a pilot?

• What KPIs matter to this customer?

• What accelerates or delays conversion?

• Should we ask for payment up front to validate urgency?

Of course, there are many more, but these are a few signals investors are tracking, and as the bar keeps rising, getting this right might make the difference between a good story and a funded one.

More Solopreneurs, Fewer Co-Founder Pairs - and B2B Still Dominates

Let’s talk about who’s actually building these companies, and who they’re building for.

The data (on the left side of the graph) is pretty clear: nearly 80% of Pre-Seed teams we met in the local ecosystem are selling to businesses (B2B). Roughly one-third of those are operating in a B2B2C model.

On the other (right) side of the graph, we can see a comparison between 2024 (inner ring) and 2025 (outer ring) data. There’s been an 8% increase in solo founders, and a 5% drop in the number of two-person founding teams. We believe this is a direct result of the generative AI wave. Tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Base44, Loveable, and others have made it easier than ever to launch something alone, and many did, but we’re already starting to see the limits of that model.

Looking ahead to 2026, I believe we’ll see a shift in the other direction, and we’re likely to see a sharp decline in the number of solo-founder teams, a correction after the solo-founder boom we’ve seen over the last two years.

Actually, we’re already seeing (shoutout to CrustData) a decline in usage across tools like Loveable and others (as of October 2025), suggesting that the solo-founder playbook might not scale as well as people thought.

What Investors Say They Want vs. What Founders Actually Have

On the left side of the graph below, you’ll see data from our 2024 Pre-Seed report, where we asked top Israeli angels and VC funds what they expect from founders at the Pre-Seed stage in terms of product maturity and traction. On the right side, you’ll see what we actually observed from the founders we met at Fusion in 2025.

At first glance, things seem pretty aligned, but there are two big gaps that stand out:

1. Pre-Seed on a deck is nearly dead.

The majority of the founders we meet are showing real products; whether it’s a functional MVP or something more mature, ready for early go-to-market. If you’re raising a full round, and not just a small check to get things going and have some resources to play with - you’re expected to have something tangible. The bar has risen. The idea stage is not a category where you’ll find first-time founders raising Pre-Seed.

2. Investors say they don’t require pilots, but they kind of do.

Many investors say that formal pilots or design partnerships aren’t necessary when raising your first funding round (Pre-Seed or Seed). But in practice? That’s almost always their next question. From our conversations with dozens of funds, it’s clear that validation, especially early signs of “willingness to pay”, carries serious weight. It doesn’t make ‘No’ a ‘Yes’, but it definitely can change a ‘No’ to ‘Interesting. Perhaps we should take a closer look.’

We hear on many panels that customer/user interviews and feedback are good signals, but the truth is that, in more challenging and non-trivial markets, regulated industries, complex GTM motions, or new tech categories, those signals often aren’t strong enough.

Two Things I’m Watching for in 2026 (and Beyond)

As we look ahead, here are a couple of my personal takeaways that I believe will shape how early-stage funding evolves, namely at the Pre-Seed level.

• More local first checks. More international follow-on.

In non-obvious verticals like DeepTech, Supply Chain, SpaceTech, LegalTech and many others - we’re starting to see a consistent pattern. Founders raise their first check locally, often from Pre-Seed funds or angels who know the ecosystem. Then, when they’re gearing up to raise the entire funding round, they’re increasingly turning to foreign capital, such as from US and European investors/funds.

We’re already seeing this play out at Fusion. In the past year alone, nearly five teams we backed went on to raise Pre-Seed or Seed rounds from US (80%) and European (20%) investors. For first-time founders in these verticals, it’s becoming almost impossible to raise a full round solely from Israeli capital.

• Pre-Seed rounds will get smaller and more focused.

While we do expect to see more teams entering the Pre-Seed market, mainly due to the current challenging fundraising landscape, we believe that we’ll see a decline in round sizes across the Pre-Seed space.

Why? As we already discussed in the past, early-growth funding changes, and this means early-stage investors demand more proof before they put their skin in the game. They’re shifting to a “do more with less” mentality. So how (I believe) can founders adjust?

Raise $500K–$750K, stretch it for 12 12-month runway, build a solid product, generate real revenue, and then raise a strong Seed round with 24+ months of runway. That’s the new playbook.

And as always - now, it’s time for all of us to get back to work

Turning “Impossible” into Partnerships

Ziv’s passion for construction started early, spending summers on job sites alongside his father. Sapir Tubul, Co-Founder and CTO, grew up with the same backdrop - his father was a general contractor who exposed him to the day-to-day headaches of planning and managing projects. Both eventually became engineers, but their DNA was construction long before it was technology. That lived experience with the industry’s pain points is what gives LeanCon’s solution its credibility.

Their first careers weren’t in Silicon Valley - they were on real construction sites, planning and managing multimillion-dollar projects, solving scheduling nightmares, and witnessing firsthand how fragile timelines and budgets can be. “Construction projects are simply too complex to plan optimally”, says Ziv. “It takes too long, and the mistakes we make cost billions every year - everyone pays the price”.

When they first approached Phil Bernstein, Deputy Dean at Yale’s School of Architecture, former VP of AEC at Autodesk, and one of the industry’s most respected voices - his response was blunt: “It’s hard for me to believe anyone could build such a technology”. Instead of backing down, they went back to work. Nine months later, they returned with a working MVP, which was successfully deployed in a live project in Manhattan. The result? Bernstein not only changed his mind - he joined the mission and became an advisor, investor, and key connector, he even helped open doors within Autodesk itself. It’s a pattern they’ve come to know well: skepticism → proof → adoption → partnerships.

From Cold Outreach to Mega-Deals

Before there were pilots and partnership decks, there was good old-fashioned discovery. Ziv and Sapir spoke with everyone involved in pre-construction - not just general contractors, but also banks, insurers, architects, and private-equity players, to truly understand how decisions are made. Only then did they start outreach.

Breaking into the US market wasn’t about splashy campaigns or glossy conferences. It came down to persistence, precision, and one well-placed message. A cold LinkedIn note to a pre-construction director at a mid-sized contractor, who later became head of pre-construction at one of America’s largest GCs - became the catalyst. One conversation led to a pilot, then to a strategic partnership. Today, that GC plans over 3,000 projects a year, and LeanCon is helping them plan faster, smarter, and more efficiently.

Beyond individual partnerships, LeanCon’s impact is starting to ripple across the broader US economy. By eliminating costly inefficiencies, the platform helps developers and contractors reduce project costs, improve profitability, and take on more work - creating new opportunities for both skilled and on-site labor. The software is also being explored for use in infrastructure and public-sector projects, where better planning can prevent budget overruns and protect taxpayer funds.

“I believe LeanCon’s solution could significantly advance academic research within the construction industry in the US”, says Dr. Lufan Wang, one of the company’s earliest investors and a globally respected voice in AI and construction. “It allows us to understand construction at a level of complexity and scale we couldn’t before”.

For Ziv and Sapir, the journey from a single LinkedIn message to multi-million-dollar deals proves their core belief: construction doesn’t need more noise - it needs clarity, proof, and persistence.

💡 Lessons from LeanCon’s Journey

1. Deep roots matter. Ziv and Sapir didn’t need to “study” construction from the outside; they grew up in it. That gave them credibility when talking to industry veterans and the intuition to spot which problems were worth solving.

2. Prove the “impossible”. When experts dismissed their idea as unrealistic, they didn’t argue - they built. Ziv’s founder takeaway: when someone senior says “it can’t be done”, if you can do it, you’re probably staring at a huge opportunity.

3. Markets reveal themselves through people. They didn’t rely on consultants or theory. They spoke with stakeholders across the ecosystem - project engineers, district managers, GCs, financiers, to learn how decisions really happen.

4. Capital is more than cash. They chose investors who opened doors, not just wallets. The right backers accelerated trust and adoption, paving the way into mega-projects.

5. Patience scales better than panic. In slow-moving industries, quick wins don’t last. Focus, consistency, and a long-term view turned persistence into traction.
   
   

About LeanCon

LeanCon is building the world’s first AI-powered pre construction engineering team. Their technology automates project planning for general contractors and developers, transforming what used to take months and millions into a fully automated, seven-minute process. The result: 20% shorter schedules and a dramatic drop in planning costs - from $1.5-2M per project to near zero. With over 90% accuracy, LeanCon delivers in minutes what was once considered impossible. By empowering pre-construction teams to manage 100x more projects per year, enabling them to win more bids with superior planning accuracy, complete financial clarity, and zero guesswork. Its technology is also being adopted for public-sector projects and academic research, further amplifying its economic and societal impact.

#1 Pre-Seed Isn’t Just “Mini-Seed” Anymore

Back in 2017, when Fusion first started investing, pre-seed was barely considered a stage. It was a small check, a line on the cap table, nothing more. Fast forward to 2025, and it’s a whole category of its own. Round sizes have doubled or tripled: what once used to be $500K is now closer to $1-1.5M. At the same time, Series A investors have raised their bar and are looking for $3-4M ARR, not just $1M.

That shift has left early founders in a tricky spot: too early for Seed, too ambitious for just friends-and-family. This is exactly where we step in - helping founders validate their problem, take their first real steps in the market, and build the traction needed for the next leap..

👉 Founder Tip: When raising pre-seed, plan your runway with Series A expectations in mind. Don’t just fund the “start” - set yourself up to hit the milestones investors will demand 12–24 months down the road.

#2 Fundraising: Don’t Wait Until You’re Thirsty

One of the easiest traps founders fall into is waiting too long to raise. They think, “I’ll go out once I really need the money”. But by the time the tank is empty, it’s already too late. Investors don’t invest in desperation; they invest in momentum. Having capital in the bank shows strength. It signals that others already believe in you, and it makes it far easier for new investors to join. Money attracts money - we saw it clearly with Newlight. The moment our check went in, follow-on capital arrived much faster. Nothing fundamental had changed, except perception.

👉 Founder Tip: Don’t wait until you’re out of runway. Start raising when things are going well, so you can build momentum on your own terms.

#3 Founders > Technology

Yes, the tech matters, but at the very earliest stages the team matters more. That’s why we rarely back solo founders, and why we insist on full-time commitment from day one.

So what really makes the difference?

• Chemistry: can the founders argue, disagree, and still move forward?

• Humility: do they admit what they don’t know, and learn fast?

• Storytelling: can they share a vision clear enough to inspire investors, employees, and customers?

Even in today’s world, where AI makes it easier than ever to spin up an early product, it can’t replace a strong founding team. We’ve seen shiny AI tools crumble without the right people behind them. And we’ve seen founders like Karny Ilan (CEO) of FeminAI, whose ability to turn a deeply personal vision into a story that resonated with investors, partners, and customers - that’s what tipped the scale.

👉 Founder Tip: Don’t rely on your tech alone. Invest in your team, your dynamics, and your storytelling. Even in the AI era, it’s people who lift a company, not just the product.

#4 The US Is the Market, Don’t Hide in Israel

It’s tempting to start close to home. In Israel, customers pick up the phone, feedback comes fast, and quick wins feel great. But that comfort can also be a trap. For global B2B or consumer products, the US is the real proving ground. It’s where scale happens - and it’s what investors expect to see. When founders spend too much time chasing validation in Israel, it’s usually a red flag.

👉 Founder Tip: Don’t get too comfortable in Israel. The only way to stress-test your product, sales cycle, and customer fit is to engage US customers from day one.

#5 Discovery Beats Decks

One of the biggest mistakes early founders make is pitching investors before they’ve truly listened to customers. Strong founders don’t start with a glossy deck, they start with questions:

• Who actually controls the budget?

• How do decisions really get made?

• What pain is so sharp to trigger a purchase now, not “someday”?

The answers don’t live in PDFs or boardrooms, they come from dozens (or hundreds) of unglamorous conversations with the people living the problem every day. That’s where real insights hide, and that’s how markets reveal themselves.

👉 Founder Tip: Don’t treat customer calls as a checkbox. Make them the core of your process. Every discovery chat you skip today is a blind spot you’ll pay for later.

#6 Proof Changes Everything

In venture, doubt is the default. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard “This can’t be done”. But nothing flips a skeptic faster than proof: an MVP, a design partner, a pilot that actually delivers - these move the needle more than a hundred slides ever could.

Ziv and Sapir, the co-founders of LeanCon, know this well. When they first pitched their AI-powered construction platform, one of the most respected executives in the industry told them flat out: “It’s Impossible”. Less than a year later, they returned with a working MVP - and that same skeptic became one of their biggest champions.

👉 Founder Tip: Don’t waste energy debating if something is possible. Build a version that works, however scrappy, and let the results speak for themselves.

#7 Choose Investors Who Do More Than Wire Money

Capital is everywhere, but not all capital is created equal. The best investors don’t just transfer funds - they transfer trust, open doors, make the intro you couldn’t land yourself, and help you skip months of cold emails.

At Fusion, we’ve seen this play out again and again: one warm connection can accelerate a startup’s trajectory more than a pile of cash ever could. Smart money isn’t just about dollars, it’s about leverage. And at the early stage, that leverage can be the difference between grinding in circles and actually breaking through.

👉 Founder Tip: When choosing investors, don’t just ask “how much are they putting in?”. Ask - “who will they pick up the phone for on my behalf?”.

Early-stage founders face fire and water. It’s messy, unpredictable, and never quite what you expect. But that’s also where the magic happens - where grit, clarity, and persistence turn the chaos into a company worth building. And from my side of the table? If it’s worth building, it’s worth investing in.

When it came time to enter the US education market, they made a bold choice: no fancy consultants, no inflated ad budgets, no Silicon Valley-style blitzscaling. Just deep curiosity, and a commitment to listen. And it’s working. Over the past few months, several leading US and Israeli funds have shown serious interest in joining the ride - but for now, the team is focused on product, partners, and profitable growth.

The Big Break: From Interviews to Revenue

The US education market is massive, but also highly regulated, fragmented, and extremely competitive. Idan and Lior had no Lego certification, no brand recognition in the US, and limited understanding of the system’s cultural and regulatory maze.

So instead of rushing in, they slowed down. With a lean budget and a lot of curiosity, they launched an unconventional experiment: they posted job openings, real ones, on LinkedIn and other platforms. Not just to hire, but to learn. They invited former principals, district administrators, curriculum leads, policy advisors, and education aides to apply. Then booked 20-minute calls, back-to-back. Each call became a crash course in US edtech: How do public schools make purchasing decisions? Who controls after-school budgets? What’s the concern with unlicensed kits? What language resonates with decision-makers?

The puzzle pieces came together, and so did the first big break. One of those calls led to a pilot with a national after-school organization serving 2,700 school clusters across the US The pilot worked, and a long-term partnership followed. Within months, iBrick hit $1.7M ARR - all without raising more than $1.5M, most of that is still in the bank.

Grow First, Fund Later

iBrick started out as DTC (direct-to-consumer), selling directly to parents who wanted more meaningful alternatives to screen time. But those early market conversations revealed something even bigger: an untapped ecosystem of B2B funding.

“We discovered an entire landscape we hadn’t considered - public grants, virtual charter schools, nonprofits with scholarship budgets”, says Idan Vilbach, co-founder & CEO. “Now we run a dual engine - B2C and B2B, It makes us far more resilient”. Once they understood the market’s structure, it wasn’t about breaking down locked doors, just recognizing the open ones.

That clarity comes from trust. Idan, the CEO, leads partnerships, GTM, and US expansion. Lior, the CPO, drives product evolution and internal operations. This isn’t their first time building together, and it shows. They’ve learned that focus and discipline often outperform speed and capital. Even now, with growth accelerating and interest from both US and Israeli funds picking up, they’re staying lean. “We’re not raising right now”, says Idan. “We’re close to profitability, growth is strong, and we’re deliberate about avoiding dilution. When the time is right - we’ll know”.

6 Founder Lessons from the iBrick Journey 💡

We asked Idan and Lior what they’d tell founders breaking into new markets today. Here’s what they said:

1. Don’t scale before you understand.
   Before selling in the US, they spoke with over 20 insiders. Know the system before you enter it.
   Hiring can be a research tool.
   Those job interviews? They weren’t just hiring. Some of the candidates taught them more than any paid consultant could.

2. Dual engine = diversified growth.
   B2C and B2B channels balance each other. When one slows down, the other picks up.

3. Fear the noise, not the silence.
   Avoid attention-grabbing rounds that distract from your product and customers.

4. Physical can scale, too.
   With the right packaging and ops, physical kits can scale just like SaaS. You just have to think like a product company, not a logistics one.

5. Old friends make great co-founders.
   If you divide roles clearly and trust runs deep, things move faster, with less drama.

6. Start young, bring old-school grit.
   Yes, be creative. Yes, build fast. But don’t skip the “boring stuff”: consistency, cash flow, operational depth. That’s where resilience comes from.

About iBrick

Founded by Idan Vilbach and Lior Yogev, iBrick is an Israeli edtech company combining hands-on Lego-based kits with digital learning tools to teach STEM skills to children. After operating successful enrichment programs across Israel and Europe, the founders pivoted during COVID to build a scalable hybrid platform. Today, iBrick serves both consumers and institutions in the US and beyond - blending creative play with structured pedagogy, and growing steadily toward profitability.

But beneath the hype lies an unsettling truth: what feels cutting-edge today might be irrelevant tomorrow. Generative AI stole the spotlight in 2023, Agentic AI is trending now, and something else will take its place. Because innovation never slows down. You can’t predict the next wave, but you can design with enough resilience to ride it.

And resilience starts by asking harder questions. What happens when the tool you just integrated becomes obsolete? When the workflow you spent months perfecting suddenly disappears? What will still matter two years from now - and are you building toward that?

Longevity isn’t a byproduct, it’s a strategy. And it demands a different mindset: not faster, but deeper. Not just better models, but better judgment about what truly matters.

Think Bigger, But Stay Grounded

As if the pace weren’t already brutal, early-stage founders today aren’t just chasing product-market fit, they’re racing against Big Tech companies. Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon - all pouring billions into AI, building fast, failing fast, and still coming out ahead.

The AI startup space has never been more crowded. Over 70,000 companies are operating globally, including 17,000 in the U.S. alone. Open-source tools keep lowering the barrier to entry, while Big Tech bakes AI into everything they touch. In this reality, speed alone won’t cut it. Startups need a strong point of view, and the conviction to stick with it.

Quack AI is betting on focus. Instead of chasing trends, they’re building for what will still matter two years from now: empowering customer-facing teams - support, success, ops - to scale smartly, without sacrificing depth or quality. Their platform transforms scattered CRM data into contextual, real-time guidance that helps human agents work faster, think sharper, and deliver more consistently.

It doesn’t replace people, it makes them better.

"We’re not here to build a pretty interface over a shallow solution", says co-founder and CEO Nadav Kemper. "We’re here to rethink how support should actually work". That philosophy shows in how they operate. The CEO joins support calls, the CTO handles tickets, they don’t just listen to customers - they sit in the trenches with them. It’s not glamorous, but it keeps the company grounded and the product relevant.

Because AI doesn’t replace domain expertise, it amplifies it. The best tools are built with the people who feel the friction every day. If you want to build something that still matters years from now, start with the ones feeling the pain today.

Yeah, You Can Build It - But Should You?

One of the most common frictions Quack hears in the market is one every AI founder will recognize: "We’ll just build it ourselves". And honestly? They’re not entirely wrong, at least not at first. With LLMs and open-source tools, spinning up a prototype has never been easier. But turning a cool demo into a production-ready system, one that integrates across teams, scales with the company, and delivers real ROI? That’s a different game entirely.

Nadav calls it The illusion of AI accessibility. "It’s like saying you can build your own satellite - technically true, but practically? It’s a trap". Many teams start by building in-house, only to realize (often painfully) that they lack the infrastructure, the context, or the volume of insights needed to build something truly robust. Quack doesn’t resist that instinct, they welcome it. “If a team wants to build part of the solution themselves - great”, says Nadav. “We’re not here to replace them. We’re here to partner with them”.

Lastly, his advice to fellow founders: don’t fight the instinct to build, respect it. Let teams explore, experiment, learn, and hit their own walls. Then be there, ready to help them go the last mile. “It’s like a restaurant, we’re not telling you what to cook - that’s your expertise. But we’ll bring the kitchen, the tools, the logistics - everything you don’t need to reinvent from scratch”.

Because in 2025, building is easy. But knowing what not to build, and when to partner instead, is what keeps you in the game in 2027.

About Qucak AI

Founded in 2023 by Nadav Kemper and Aviram Roisman, Quack AI helps customer support teams scale without compromise, keeping every single customer happy. Its platform enables deeper and more nuanced training than any other AI support solution, by surfacing insights that help improve the entire product experience, and empower CX & Support teams to drive significant business impact. Because amazing CX isn’t just about fixing what’s broken - it’s about owning the product’s “unhappy flows” and proactively turning painful moments into growth opportunities.

With over 40 paying customers and a lean team of 15 members, Quack is on track to double revenue by the end of 2025.

That myth kills startups. Because in early-stage companies, if you're not selling your product, you're not really building it - you're just guessing. And guessing is a very expensive habit.

So what happens when a founder chooses not to guess, but to sell? Dor Vardi, CEO of Samplead, chose a different path. With no sales team, no VP of Revenue, and no marketing engine ,he initiated over 900 sales calls in just 10 months. It wasn’t glamorous, and it wasn’t scalable - but it worked. Those calls didn’t just generate early traction, they shaped the product itself. Every conversation revealed real needs, challenged assumptions, and brought the team closer to building something people actually wanted.

The MVP That Actually Matters

At some point, nearly every startup hits the same wall: “We need revenue. Let’s hire someone to sell”. A promising VP of Sales joins the team, often hired for their U.S. market expertise. You burn through $200,000 on salary, flights, dinners, CRMs, and campaigns. Six months later: you realize there’s no pipeline, no traction, no meaningful learning, and still no real sales.

It’s not necessarily the hire’s fault, it’s the stage. Early sales aren't only about closing deals; they’re also about figuring out what the deal is in the first place. You’re not optimizing CAC, you’re still discovering who your customer is and what they actually care about. And that’s a job only founders can do.

Dor understood this. He didn’t outsource or delegate. Instead, he went all in - not because he loved sales (though, he does), but because he needed answers. Over the course of 900 calls, he kept hearing the same pain points echoed across companies. He tweaked messaging on the fly, sat with engineers that same night to adjust the UX, and treated every conversation like a product sprint in disguise.

That effort taught him more than any roadmap ever could:

• What customers actually needed (vs. what they said they wanted)

• What messaging triggered real engagement

• Which features were make-or-break, and which didn’t matter

• Where the product fell short, and how to fix it

• And most of all: what not to build

From Swag to Sales Intelligence

The journey didn’t start with AI, it started with coffee mugs. Back when they were just two founders looking for a way in, they began by sending personalized swag to HR leaders and simply asking for feedback. No hard sell, no hidden agenda, Just “tell us what you think”. It worked, with over 10% conversion rate from samples to paying customers - because it felt personal.

Then COVID hit, and the swag business disappeared overnight. The team pivoted quickly, launching an SDR-as-a-service agency to help B2B companies book outbound meetings. It wasn’t a detour, but a move into their customers’ world. They treated it like a lab: hundreds of interactions across industries, patterns emerging over time, and one central question guiding the work: how can outbound be made smarter?

Build It Through Selling, Not Spreadsheets

Samplead wasn’t built in a boardroom, it was built in the field. The team spent months deep in the trenches, running outbound campaigns for real companies, across real use cases, to figure out what actually works. Their biggest insight? The future of outbound isn’t about volume, it’s about timing. Companies need to shift from mass outreach to trigger-based outbound: engaging the right prospects at the right moment, with messages that truly resonate.

To make that possible at scale, Samplead uses AI-powered agents to handle the manual, repetitive work - not to replace humans, but to amplify them, freeing teams to focus on what matters most: building real relationships.

But they didn’t start building until the pain was clear and consistent. Dor’s philosophy is simple: don’t guess what customers want. Test, fail, observe - and only then, build. While others raised millions on a pitch, the company took a different approach. They waited until they passed $240K in ARR, with a product still closer to prototype than platform, before expanding. And when they hit $1M in ARR, it was without a single full-time salesperson.

Would a VP of Sales have helped them move faster? Maybe. But they would have missed the insights that shaped the product. Because even the best sales hire won’t rewrite the pitch after every call or push a UX fix at midnight. A founder will, because their goal isn’t to hit quota. It’s to build something that works.

If you're building something, sell it before you scale it. The real insights don't live in your deck, they live in the market.

About Samplead

Samplead is a trigger-based outbound platform that helps B2B companies book more meetings by reaching the right prospects at the right moment. By detecting buyer intent across channels like LinkedIn, Reddit, GitHub, podcasts, financial reports, and more, Samplead enables timely, personalized outreach that feels like a conversation - not a cold pitch. The platform empowers teams to run executive-level outbound at scale, turning any employee into a high-performing SDR through AI, automation, and smart targeting.

Founded in 2022 by Dor Vardi, Gadi Vardi, and Yotam Nahum, Samplead has helped dozens of fast-growing startups build pipelines and grow revenue - without growing headcount.

We kept the format simple: question → emoji → answer. It was light, fun, and packed with sharp insights.

Here are five things every founder should think about:

#1 Cyber is great, but not the only game in town

Israel has built a "cyber nation" over the years - it’s the default path for many founders. It’s easier to sell, there’s a playbook, and buyers are ready to invest. But when everyone runs to the same field, real innovation gets lost. Founders who could be building in biotech, agritech, or fintech, often end up launching yet another cybersecurity startup.

If you're a founder: Cyber is important, but don’t let it be the only lens you look through.

#2 Agentic AI is not hype, it’s happening

Forget the buzzwords. Agentic AI - systems that act as personal agents, making decisions and doing the work for you, isn’t just a trend, it's already here. The technology is advancing fast: more efficient, cheaper, and in many cases better than people.

The takeaway: Think about the cloud a decade ago. That’s where this is heading. Ignore it, and you’ll get left behind.

#3 Vertical SaaS? Not enough anymore

Once, building a SaaS product for a niche like dental clinics was enough to stand out. Today? That won’t cut it. With development costs dropping and competition rising, you need a real edge. Another generic platform isn’t an edge, it’s a risk.

For founders: Don’t just build a product. Solve a pain so real that users can’t imagine life without it.

#4 Founders don’t have to come from 8200 unit

Yes, there’s a bias in the ecosystem: founders from elite military units like 8200, 81, and Talpiot tend to get the spotlight. But that’s not the whole picture. Some of Israel’s most successful companies were built by people from different paths - pilots, combat officers, or founders with no relevant army background at all.

For investors and founders alike: Great talent comes from everywhere. Don’t let a resume blind you to potential.

#5 B2C in Israel isn’t dead. It’s just ignored

Most Israeli startups stick to B2B because it feels safer, more measurable, and familiar. But AI is opening up new opportunities to build global consumer brands, and not enough founders are going after them.

For the bold: There’s real upside waiting if you’re willing to explore it.

This panel wasn’t just another industry event, it was a reminder for founders to ask themselves: Are you building what everyone else is building, or are you chasing the opportunity no one else sees yet?

So we’re back for round two and we are thrilled to share our second annual Israeli Pre-Seed Report (PDF)!

Download it right here 👇

This year’s report dives deeper into the evolving pre-seed market trends, shifting investor dynamics, and analyzing benchmarks. We analyzed data from the most active pre-seed VCs (40) and angel investors (51), including 1000+ teams we personally saw at Fusion during the past year. Here are some of the key findings:

• The average post-money valuation cap stands at $6.45M, with a median valuation cap of $6M, while round sizes typically fall between $825K and $1.5M.

• Over half of VCs now invest exclusively via post-money SAFE in the pre-seed stage.

• The path from pre-seed to seed takes longer than expected (mostly 12-18 months).

• Current pre-seed rounds are now structured with more VCs (writing smaller checks), and fewer angels (making larger bets) in 2024.

• Over two thirds of VC and angel investors expect founders to work full-time for a certain period before they invest.

• AI-related pre-seed investments are focused on the application layer and vertical AI.

If you find some of the above interesting, you should check out and read the answers, find more exclusive data and insights in the full document.

Many thanks to Fusion Associate Amit Shechter for his work compiling the data and leading the charge on writing.

Our goal in publishing this report is to spur a better-informed conversation about pre-seed investment moving forward, and inspire others to collect and share more data in the future. In the long run, a more transparent and data-driven investment landscape is better for everyone. And of course, we hope you will enjoy reading it.

Get the report here 📥

In venture capital, reports typically focus on the successes—fundraising milestones, acquisitions, and exits. But there’s an equally important, often underexplored side to this industry: the startups still on their fundraising journey. Understanding their challenges, sectors, and team dynamics can offer valuable insights—not just for investors, but for the entire ecosystem.

Breaking Down the Numbers

This year, we evaluated 1,091 startups. Of those, 763 teams formally applied through our website to join Fusion’s 2024 program. The remaining 328 teams came from other channels:

• 114 teams came via warm intros,

• 156 reached out cold via email, and

• 58 were teams we proactively approached. (Yes, investors do reach out to founders too!)
  

So, What Are These Teams Building?

Unsurprisingly, AI leads the pack (120 teams, 15.8%) working in this space. Next up is Digital Health (65 teams, 8.6%), followed by familiar favorites like Enterprise SaaS/Vertical SaaS (46 teams, 6.1%), FinTech (46 teams, 6%), and Gaming (35 teams, 4.6%).

How Much Have They Raised?

Most teams we met (493, 64.6%) came to us without any prior funding. However:

• 156 teams (20.4%) raised small funding (tens to hundreds of thousands of $’s).

• 38 teams (4.9%) raised between $250K and $500K.

• 10% (1 out of every 10) of the teams we’ve met had raised over $500K before our meeting, often from angels, incubators, or other funds.

Were we surprised? Not really, but we’ll discuss this later.

What Did We Learn from the Data (and the Lessons Hidden in What’s Missing)?

1. “AI-powered” VS. Core-AI

First and Foremost – the real insights lie beneath the surface (and we’ll delve deeper into them in the coming months when we publish our annual Pre-Seed Report.), but while nearly 16% (1 in 6) of the startups we met has identified as "AI-focused," a deeper dive revealed that only 12 teams (out of 120) were working on what we’d consider deep/core tech AI (e.g., data infrastructure, hardware, cloud). The other 108 teams were building what we call "AI-wrapped products"—tools or platforms with yet another (sometimes cliche) one-liner starting with “AI-powered.” This raises critical questions: Can the market absorb all these AI-driven solutions? Or will many struggle to secure follow-on funding and market adoption?

We’re leaning toward the latter. In fact, we believe that much of the current excitement around AI is fueled by FOMO—organizations rushing to adopt AI solutions out of fear of being left behind, rather than because they genuinely need them.

This trend is one of the main reasons we’re cautious about investing in the space. Founders need to set themselves apart, either by building a unique moat or showcasing an undeniable founder-market fit. And right now, that’s tough to do given the noise in the market:

• On the supply side: The barrier to building applications, platforms, and solutions has become almost non-existent. In some cases, it’s as simple as stringing together a few well-crafted prompts.

• On the demand side: The real money for AI solutions is concentrated in a handful of verticals—Sales, Support, and Finance—where budgets are significant. Other areas like HR, Legal, and Product? They often have smaller budgets for their tech stacks, making it harder to justify adoption.

In short, when ROI and metrics are crystal clear, adoption follows, and so does the money—from both investors and customers. The rest? Well, let’s just say they’re in for a tough ride.

2. Not every founder is an 8200 that raises multi-million dollar rounds on a presentation

In less common and non-obvious sectors, the ability to move quickly with limited resources—often bootstrapped with no external funding—becomes crucial. The formula? Build an initial product that tests fundamental hypotheses and, most importantly, proves them. This proof can come from different metrics such as user engagement, active customers, early sales, or other KPIs.

Why does this matter? Because this proof alongside the ability to craft a compelling narrative and manage a fundraising process, will ultimately determine a founder's success towards securing follow-on funding. So, what matters less?

• Polished pitch decks.

• Fixating on terms like dilution or deal structures (which often adjust over time).

• “Advisors” who don’t deliver real value.

And what matters most? Execution.

Not all markets or teams were born equal. Not every founder is an 81/8200 alum launching a cybersecurity startup that raises $12 million on a presentation. For many, the journey is different, and to be honest much (much) more challenging. They’ll need to navigate a strategic pre-seed round—often broken into several smaller sub-rounds—to secure somewhere between 6-18 months of runway before reaching the seed stage.

It’s not an easy path, but for those who can prove their worth through action, the rewards are well worth it.

3. Revenue ≠ Validation

We’ve noticed a significant growth in the number of teams generating initial revenues in the tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars within just weeks of launching their product. Undeniably impressive.

However, when we dig deeper and ask for metrics and KPIs, the picture becomes less rosy—or, more accurately, customer churn data tells a different story. It’s easy to mistake early validation as being solely about traction and sales. But the reality is far more complex.

Here are some of what we consider red flags that lead to why we often choose not to invest:

• The sales didn’t come from the right ICP (Ideal Customer Profile).

• Selling to Israeli organizations isn’t indicative of the team’s ability to sell in the U.S. market, which is often fundamentally different. We can not stress enough how common it is to see that slide in a pitch deck featuring a collection of (IL) Blue-White logos of “customers.” All too often, these are pilots that were set up with the help of friends from the army or a previous workplace—and they rarely reflect true market validation.

• The company doesn’t fit the venture capital model. While it might be an incredible business generating millions in annual revenue, it’s unlikely to scale into the kind of company that delivers returns for our LPs.

Validation goes beyond impressive numbers—it’s about proving that the business can sustain and scale in the right market with the right customers. For us, that’s the defining factor.

4. Hardware Startups: Two Paths, One Clear Winner

When it comes to hardware startups, we’ve noticed two distinct categories emerging from the teams we’ve met.

• The first category? Consumer-focused products designed to sell directly to customers (D2C) or through similar channels. Here’s the reality: out of thousands of startups we’ve evaluated, we’ve invested in exactly one D2C company. Why? Because most simply aren’t a fit for the venture capital model. These teams often struggle to achieve meaningful sales (think tens or hundreds of millions of dollars within 6-10 years) while operating with limited resources. And even when they do, raising follow-on funding tends to be a massive hurdle.

• The second category, and the one we find much more exciting, revolves around deep technology. This is where we see hardware startups shine. Founders in this space often come with rich backgrounds—whether from academia, military service, defense industries, or top-tier companies. This level of expertise stands in stark contrast to many software startups, where domain experience is often less critical.

At Fusion, we weigh founder experience heavily when evaluating hardware and robotics startups. These industries demand unique access to specialized knowledge, talent, and networks of customers and investors. It’s no surprise, then, that we’re seeing more exceptional teams gravitate toward this space. The shift is clear in our numbers: in 2023, we didn’t make a single hardware investment. This year? Six(!) and not one of them was in a D2C product. Instead, these investments were in startups combining deep technology, advanced algorithms, and clear, scalable business use cases. Many of these teams are rooted in academic research or cutting-edge knowledge gained during military service.

The trends we see here mirror what’s happening in Silicon Valley (Tesla’s Optimus and many more..), with a growing intersection of artificial intelligence, hardware, and robotics shaping the future of industries far beyond tech.

This shift is driving innovation across the physical world: from construction and factory infrastructure to supply chain solutions like packaging plants, asset management, shipping, and aviation.

5. EQ & Meta-Behavior

At Fusion, one of the most important factors we evaluate is whether the founder sitting across is feedback-sensitive. To be honest, this is often the reason why some teams don’t make it past the first meeting.

We want to see founders who can read the room—and, more importantly, adjust accordingly. For us, this is a critical component of a team’s entrepreneurial DNA. Far too often, we meet teams where the CEO is more focused on delivering a pitch than engaging in a dialogue. They answer questions only after finishing their prepared slide, prioritizing the points they want to share rather than addressing what we’re actually asking.

Our advice, which we also share with our alumni? Lean back, listen, and stay flexible. Be open to steering the conversation in directions that may feel less comfortable or stray from your rehearsed plan.

What we call "meta-behavior" often manifests in subtle yet powerful ways: language, communication style, honesty, and transparency. These qualities don’t always show up in a pitch deck or metrics, but they are crucial for building trust and strong relationships—with investors and, even more importantly, with customers (especially those early adopters). After all, in the early days, it’s the founders themselves—not a sales team—who drive the critical sales processes.

To us, entrepreneurial leadership isn’t just about technological innovation or marketing prowess. It’s about the ability to listen, recognize opportunities, make necessary adjustments quickly and wisely, and steer the ship toward its ultimate destination.

Now, it's time for all of us to get back to work & hope for a better year to come

Episode Highlights:

It's a common misconception among founders that sales calls are a stage to display their product's brilliance and bask in the glow of the prospect’s admiration. In reality, sales is about strategic communication and relationship-building, not a solo performance. 

In this Masterclass, you'll gain the tools to identify potential customers, craft a compelling narrative, lead a productive meeting, and critically analyze the outcome to refine your approach. Understand it, use it, rinse, and repeat. 

What you’ll learn :

• Creating a targeted list of prospects.

• Preparing for a sales meeting 

• Taking command of the meeting and guide it towards your goals.

• Analyzing the meeting afterwards to gain actionable insights.

Meet the expert: Alon Cinamon works at Ibex Investors and focuses on investing in early-stage B2B enterprise software companies. He previously worked for Glilot Capital for three years. Over the years, he has participated in over 300 sales calls with 30 different startups

.

Step 1: Prospecting

Prospecting is how you pinpoint the people who are likely to become your product's most enthusiastic users and advocates, so you can sell to them.

We've covered into this in the previous episodes, but here's the gist:

• Specify your value proposition: start by articulating what your product does better than anyone else's. What customer pain points are you addressing, and how do you stand out from the crowd? 

• Identify your ideal customer profile (ICP): the next step is to determine who will benefit most from your solution. Analyze common traits among your best customers, such as industry, company size, and decision-maker roles. 

• Build a prospecting list: now it's time for some legwork. Utilize platforms like LinkedIn Sales Navigator or ZoomInfo to assemble a database of potential organizations and key contacts. Keep the list organized in a CRM of your choice. Don’t forget to prioritize based on your current assumptions about how is easier to reach or sell to

• Use warm introductions: Operate every connection at your disposal to reach your ICP. When you make contact, lead with your 'bottom line'—a concise, powerful statement of your product's value. This is your hook in cold emails and a valuable nugget for your connectors to share.

Step 2: Preparing

Approach each sales meeting with the kind of preparation that gives you a sense of control over its direction. As we all learned in the IDF, success in any mission depends on thorough preparation; the same principle applies to sales. And like the IDF, the mission can be divided into three parts:

1. Research: Before you even set foot in the room, become an expert on the organization you're engaging with. Understand their market position, size, employee count, and financial turnover. This knowledge positions you as an authority and shows that you don't just understand your product—you understand their business. In addition, use the wealth of information available online to get to know the person you are meeting, their professional challenges, and their personal interests. This is about finding common ground for a rapport that can make or break deals.

2. Impressive demo: Your demo isn't just a feature tour; it's a narrative that needs to be convincing. Invest in its quality. A crisp, engaging demo can transform a pitch from forgettable to front-of-mind.

3. Answers to pushbacks: Every question or challenge from your prospect is an opportunity to showcase your product's strengths. Don't leave this to chance. Prepare for the hard questions about competitors, data security, integration, scalability, cost, support, and customer success stories. Your readiness to address these points confidently can shift the momentum in your favour.

Owning

Own your meeting with a firm hand and a listening ear, adhering to the 40/60 rule: limit your talk to 40% and let the other side elaborate on their challenges, organizational structure, and preferences. Listen actively, respond thoughtfully, and be fully present.You should come prepared with a powerful presentation and ensure your technology is fail-proof. If feasible, bring a teammate to observe, take notes, and provide post-call feedback. Consider the option of recording the meeting for learning purposes, but know that it may influence the meeting's dynamic.

Furthermore, be cognizant of cultural nuances. For instance, Israeli business culture often embraces directness and might interpret interjections as a sign of engagement, while in the U.S., such behaviour could be perceived as intrusive or disrespectful. 

The minute-by-minute structure of a 30-minute demo

Minutes 0-3: Introduction and Ice Breaker

• Begin with a friendly introduction of yourself and your team.

• Establish yourself as a credible entrepreneur.

• Move to an icebreaker to build rapport and set a positive tone for the conversation.

  

Minutes 4-9: Discovery

• Validate the pain points uncovered during research.

• Understand their needs, budget, authority, and timeline through open-ended questions.

• Actively listen and give them space to describe their problems in their own words. Don’t jump-in with your pre-fabricated conclusions.

Minutes 10-17: Pitch and Demo

• Give a compelling presentation or demo of your product.

• Focus more on the benefits than features, making sure it's aligned with the discovery step.

• Keep it interactive, asking questions to ensure understanding and engagement.

Minutes 18-27: Discussion and Elicitation of Feedback

• Encourage them to share their impressions about your presentation/demo.

• Ask specific questions to gather authentic, valuable feedback.

• Use their responses to further highlight your product's value and address any concerns.

• Keep the conversation natural and inviting.

Minute 28-30: Set Next Steps and Conclusion

• Propose a clear next step, like a follow-up call, a product trial, or a meeting with others in their company.

• Summarize key points, thank them for their time, and express anticipation about the next steps.

Step 4: Retrospecting

Reflecting on your performance after a sales call can be as daunting as staring into a mirror, flaws and all. It’s a time when you confront the uncomfortable truth that not everything went as planned and that your sales hypotheses may not be as rock-solid as you believed. But embrace the learning curve; with each review, the process becomes less about critique and more about growth.

Start the post-mortem by revisiting your goals. Did the meeting fulfil your objectives? If it fell short, identify where and why. Then, turn to the connection you established—was there a genuine warmth and authenticity in your rapport, and did your delivery convincingly validate their pain points, positioning your solution as the remedy they’ve been seeking? Lastly, evaluate the immediate reaction to your pitch. Measure their interest and engagement: Was it a must-have product in their world or a nice one to have? 

Use the insight from your post-mortem analysis of the call to refine your strategy. Question what could be enhanced and what lessons can be applied moving forward.If a particular segment of your presentation didn't resonate, it's time to overhaul it. If you find yourself repeatedly missing the mark on specific objectives, it's time to reevaluate those goals or adjust your tactics to better achieve them.

Now, go back to the prospecting list and repeat. 

This was the final episode of our Sales masterclass! We hope it will serve you as a valuable resource moving forward. You can see the full list of episodes here – and if there’s any feedback, please let us know in the comments!

Episode highlights:

Strategy is important, but eventually you need to get down to the brass tacks. This masterclass will cover three tactics that will help you close more deals. We start with some tips and tricks into social selling on LinkedIn, move on to leveraging the power of referrals and end with how to manage price negotiations that reflect the value your product provides. 

What you’ll learn:

• Tips for better engagement on LinkedIn

• Referrals techniques

• Price negotiation guidelines

Meet the expert: Simon Gerstler has been doing sales for 27 years, and was on the co-founding team of 2 tech companies that were both acquired. 4 years ago he co-founded Pipe Global, where he advised over 120 companies on their sales and marketing strategies.

Navigating the Waters of Social Selling

LinkedIn is a treasure trove for entrepreneurs and salespeople. Why? 92% of potential buyers engage more with domain experts, and LinkedIn is an excellent place to show your expertise and gain their trust. 

• It starts with your brand - make your LinkedIn banner eye-catching and reflective of your brand's core message. Ensure this branding is consistent across all team member profiles to effectively represent your company's collective ethos.

• Personalizing connections - adding a note to your LinkedIn invitations can seriously improve engagement levels. Refer to Dor’s masterclasses for strategies for connecting effectively on LinkedIn.

• Knowing the algorithm: There are two important things to know about LinkedIn algorithm. First, it prefers content that engages and demonstrates expertise over repetitive sales posts. Second, the performance of your content in the first hour will determine its exposure. Engaging posts with immediate likes, comments, and shares gain more visibility.

• Staying on your prospects’ radar - to keep track of your prospects activities, use LinkedIn's notification feature. Keep your existing clients engaged with your content to remind them of your value and share your successes.

• Participating in industry communities - create and grow LinkedIn groups in your field to establish your authority and build trust. Start with engaging content and invite participation to strengthen your industry relevance.

Maximizing Referral Potential

Referrals work wonders for businesses. People are four times more likely to buy something if a friend suggests it. Referrals make everything faster and better: When someone is referred, they usually spend 16% more over time. Sales happen 69% quicker, and those referred customers are more likely to stick around and spend more.

Although 83% of happy customers are ready to make referrals, only 29% actually do. Why do people refrain from referring? Mainly because they're not asked. The best way for companies to get more referrals (and by extension, customers) is simply asking for them.

Tips for better referrals:

• Provide exceptional service: obviously, less than exceptional service won't set the proper foundation for referrals.

• Communicate your need for referrals: tell clients your business grows through word-of-mouth and ask directly for introductions.

• Reward referrals: offer incentives like discounts, additional service months, or gifts to appreciate their effort.

• Personalize your appreciation: send handwritten thank-you notes to make a memorable impact and show genuine gratitude.

• Specify your ideal customer: clearly define the type of client you're looking for.

• Leverage happy clients: ask clients who have provided positive testimonials to introduce you to others or share your business on social media with a pre-crafted, easy-to-use message.

• Keep it professional: ensure your outreach is polite, appreciative, and tailored, emphasizing the mutual benefit and maintaining a high standard of service.

Strategizing Price Negotiations for Success

After mastering social selling and referrals, the focus shifts to pricing strategy. Your pricing should be clear and simple, open to testing and adjusting, and not seeking perfection from the start. Use customer feedback and performance metrics to gauge how changes in pricing impact your sales outcomes.

When entering negotiations, never offer concessions without securing something valuable in return. To manage this, develop a negotiation strategy detailing potential concessions and desired gains.

Concessions might involve enhancing deals with extra services or licenses instead of reducing prices, offering flexible payment schedules, or contract lengths. You could also propose non-monetary perks, like seeking testimonials or case studies, to add value in ways that deepen customer engagement.

On the winning side, aim for longer contracts to ensure stability and show long-term viability. This is particularly valuable for newer products.

Throughout the negotiations, adopt a collaborative standpoint, proposing solutions that benefit both parties, such as "If we agree on X, can we proceed with Y?" This approach strengthens the overall sales relationship.

With these tactics, you're now prepared to improve your sales game, efficiently close deals, and accurately reflect the value of your offerings in every transaction.

Episode Highlights:

One of the best ways to establish your startup's presence in the market is through outbound sales. Sharing your story with the right audience is the shortest way to get their attention, and can be done on a shoestring budget (or with no budget at all).

After diving into the strategies behind cold outreach in our last master class, we're now bringing you practical examples to craft messages that resonate across all three outreach layers – from warm intros, to shared-interest contacts, and finally completely cold prosepcts (customers, investors, or design partners).

What you’ll learn:

• Warm introductions email template

• Target prospects outreach template

• Cold outreach sequence template

Meet the expert:

Dor Vardi is the Founder & CEO of Samplead - A generative AI sales agent. For has sold products to 400+ companies, generating $1M+ in sales using outbound only.

Real-World Example 1: Warm Intro Request

What’s going on here:

● Zero in on your desired connection: begin your email with the specific name of the person you're seeking an introduction to. Reflect this in both the subject and opening lines of your email to immediately convey your intent.

● Value the referrer's time: start your email with your primary request. Once you've made your ask, you can then provide broader context about your product.

● Lead with a request for insight: instead of initiating a sales-oriented conversation, ask for feedback. This strategy paves the way for a more authentic and insightful dialogue.

● About us: 3-4 lines, which you should be regularly updating based on what’s happening with the company.

● Use social proof: include a compelling piece of evidence that illustrates the value of your product or service. In this scenario, highlighting that "users are seeing a 25x increase in savings" immediately showcases the impact of your offering.

● One-pager: if someone wants to take a deeper look, the one-pager will be there for them without taking too much attention from the email.

A lesson from what failed to resonate:

In a prior iteration of this email, we mentioned, “I’d be happy to share how similar companies to yours have used our product to get more leads.” This sentence led to a decrease in response rates. Reflecting on this, it seems the sales-oriented nature of the statement clashed with our stated intention of looking for feedback, which made it less effective.

Real-World Example 2: High-Relevance Prospect

We use a personalised approach for specific prospects who are too important for generic outreach, building on a shared interest that will make it much more likelier to create a connection. In these tailored emails, the primary goal is to get a response. Securing a reply sets the stage for the next step—potentially arranging a meeting. Each email is designed to progress to the next point of interaction rather than asking for the meeting immediately.

What to notice:

• The hook: We’re emailing Jason, an investor and avid LinkedIn user. The perfect moment to reach out emerged when he shared a particular tweet that gave us a relevant opening. This moment served as our "hook", and shows we made the effort to understand his interests and align with his viewpoints.

• The "potential" section highlights the opportunity our product addresses: over 85% of 3M SDRs in the UK missed their quotas last year—a pain point our solution can remedy.

• The "blurb" succinctly describes our product in 3-4 lines, offering a snapshot of our offer.

• The "teaser" then hints at our product's commercial promise, aiming to pique interest and invite further conversation. Afterwards, we reinforce our admiration for Jason, further proving our familiarity with his work and the industry. This not only validates our genuine interest but also establishes our credibility.

• The communication ends with an ask: a straightforward, uncomplicated request. This "ask" is designed to be clear and easy for Jason to act upon, encouraging him to take the next step in our interaction without asking for a significant amount of time or commitment.

Real World Example 3: Effective Follow-Up Messages

Follow-up emails should be limited to 4-5 sentences in the following format:

Relate: Begin by mentioning a recent post, article, or achievement related to them. This makes them feel appreciated, shows your active interest in their work, and reinforces the personal connection.

Ask: Clearly express what you're seeking from them. Aim for a request that requires minimal time or effort to fulfil.

Execute: Make responding to your request as easy as possible. For example: suggest a specific date and time for a meeting.

LinkedIn Cold Outreach Examples

Below we show examples of completely-cold outreach via a sequence of LinkedIn messages. You could execute a similar play over email.

Step 1 – LinkedIn connection request

The most effective connection requests are based on some previous mutual engagement - you both are in the same group, speak the same language, or went to the same event. Once the request is accepted you can send them additional messages, which is what’s going to get you to a meeting (with the prospect or their network). Here are some examples:

Event

"Hey David,

I saw your profile and noticed you're really good at sales and also got a nomination for an award by AMY—congrats! I'd like to connect with you.

Thanks,

Gadi"

Specific Technology

"Hey Maxime,

I’m asking around for people who know how to use Outreach.io for sales. Your profile made me think you could help. I’d like to connect.

Cheers,

Dor"

Funding Event

"Hey Juan Pablo,

Congrats on getting funding for EIWA! We like the same things, and I want to connect with you.

Thanks,

Dor"

Webinar

"Hey Meir,

I saw you went to the Poalim Hi-tech webinar on growing a business in the USA. Looks like we both want to grow our businesses abroad. Let’s connect.

Thanks,

Dor"

Step 2 - the ask

After they accept your request, you send a short message (no more than 600 characters). This message should:

1. Say thanks for connecting.

2. Ask for their thoughts instead of a meeting to sell something.

3. Give a quick intro to your company.

4. Say clearly what you’re asking for.

Outbound marketing strategies will not yield a 100% response rate and might occasionally get you some negative feedback. This is part of life in sales, and you shouldn’t take it personally. Stay resilient and persistent, hone your offer and your approach, and you’ll eventually get the right people on the hook.

Episode Highlights:

Waiting for your VP of Sales to jet in from America and magically open doors for your startup? News flash: they're not coming. In a startup’s early days, sales is a founder job. This might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s essential in order to refine both your sales pitch and your product based on real-world feedback.

But how do you initiate this process when you're a newcomer to the market and your product is unknown? The answer lies in leveraging your existing network for introductions and methodically broadening your sphere of influence. This isn't just a temporary tactic; it's a core strategy that should be implemented from day one and sustained throughout your journey.

This Masterclass covers cost-effective strategies for kickstarting your outbound marketing efforts. We'll show you how to effectively tap into and expand your network, setting the stage for successful product demos and, ultimately, sales.

What you’ll learn:

• How to define your ICP

• How to efficiently request introductions

• How to strategize and execute cold email campaigns

Meet the expert: Dor Vardi is the Founder & CEO of Samplead - A generative AI sales agent. Dor also founded bootstrapped and sold products to 400+ companies, generating $1M+ in sales using outbound only.

Step 1: Define your ICP 💁

Your primary objective is to create enough interest in your product that individuals will engage in a call with you. This initial interaction serves as the first signal of engagement, and not all of them will result in a demo. However, each conversation is a step closer to a broader network and a deeper understanding of how your product market fit.

Your outreach journey begins with a clear understanding of whom you're targeting. This step involves specific criteria to identify your target companies—such as those with 200-500 employees and an ARR of $5-10 million—and the key personas within these organizations, like HR directors. Your target groups might include potential prospects, as illustrated, but the same approach would apply to various potential investors or design partners. 

Define 2-3 distinct personas or company types. This allows you to test your initial assumptions and refine your approach based on feedback. You want more than one to be able to compare results, but too many personas will be spreading yourself to thin.

Be specific with who you aim to reach based on the pain points your solution addresses. This specificity means deliberately excluding certain personas if your product doesn't meet their needs. If you cannot say, "My product wouldn't benefit this particular group at this time," you're likely casting too wide a net and missing the opportunity to tailor your solution to urgent customer pains.

This profiling is primarily a conceptual exercise performed away from the frontline realities of the market. Expect your understanding and strategy to evolve as you engage with more people, refine your product, and expand your business's footprint.

Step 2: Referrals 🗣️

After defining your ICP, the next step is to contact your existing connections and ask them for introductions. Referrals are a continuous, week-by-week effort and not a quarterly blitz, so you should establish clear goals for your referral strategy. For example, if your objective is to achieve 50-60 sales calls within a quarter, you’d need at least 100 requests for referrals. “I aim for five introduction requests each week, and not meeting this target signals a potential thinning of my future meeting pipeline.”, says Dor.

The more meetings you secure, the richer the insights you'll gather, and the clearer the emerging patterns will become. This iterative process begins with identifying the individuals you aim to connect with and those who can bridge that connection. Dor suggests maintaining a weekly updated spreadsheet to track these connections, ensuring systematic follow-up and engagement.

Specificity is key to reducing friction and making the process as smooth as possible for potential connectors. When reaching out, you should:

• Request introductions to specific individuals rather than a general type of contact. Provide a list of relevant individuals to your connector and ask them to indicate those they can introduce you to.

• Include a Calendly link (or similar) to your calendar to make scheduling as straightforward as possible.

What to do when you get a meeting

• Listen first - when you're in these meetings, your focus should be on understanding the other person's perspective, not on praising the virtues of your product. Authentic interest in their challenges will naturally lead the conversation towards potential solutions, including your product, if it's a fit. 

• Land and expand - every meeting should at least open the door to another. Even if it becomes apparent within the first few minutes that the person you're meeting with isn't the right fit for your product, they likely have connections—colleagues, bosses, friends—who could be valuable for feedback or potential interest.

• Segment and evaluate - after your meetings, take the time to categorize them according to your ICP groups, and analyze which strategies resonate best with each segment. Refine your approach, and repeat the process. 
  

Real World Example: A Compelling Introduction Request

1. Zero in on your desired connection: Begin your email with the specific name of the person you're seeking an introduction to. Reflect this in both the subject and opening lines of your email to immediately convey your intent.

2. Value the referrer's time: Start your email with your primary request. Once you've made your ask, you can then offer broader context about your product. 

3. Lead with a request for insight: Rather than soliciting a sales-oriented conversation, ask for feedback. This approach opens the door for a more genuine and insightful dialogue.

4. Use social proof: Include a compelling piece of evidence that illustrates the value of your product or service. In this scenario, highlighting that "users are seeing a 25x increase in savings" immediately demonstrates the impact of the offering.

Step 3: Establishing Thought Leadership 💡

Starting a business is tough with an unknown name and unproven product. Early on, relationships are key, and your expertise is your strongest asset. To establish credibility, start writing and publishing your thoughts (in a blog or on LinkedIn). It's not a quick fix for customer growth, but it will inform your audience and shape the conversation around your solution.

Content Writing Tips 

• Set achievable goals: you're an entrepreneur first, not a full-time content creator. Set yourself up for success with attainable goals—mine is to publish ten posts per quarter.

• Focus on the industry, not your product: your blog should be a space to discuss broader industry challenges, trends and insights, not showcase your product's latest features. 

• Learn from competitors: read your competitors' websites and social media to see what kind of content resonates with the audience. Use this as inspiration and a starting point to create your own unique content that reflects your expertise and vision.

Step 4: Expanding Reach with Colder Outreach 🥶

Eventually, you'll need to go beyond your network and embrace cold outreach. Success here means engaging where your target audience already is, from LinkedIn to niche online forums. To establish common ground, personalize your outreach by referencing mutual activities, like real-live events, webinars or forums you both frequent.

Here a few tips on how to engage with your target audience:

1. Initiate contact: begin by connecting on LinkedIn. Craft your connection requests to reflect shared interests or activities. For example, if you notice someone has commented on a shared connection, mention their comment as a common ground in your invitation to connect.

2. Follow-up: if you don’t receive a response, follow up a few days later. 

3. Concluding the outreach: end the conversation gracefully if your attempts don't bear fruit. Before moving on, you might suggest a smaller action they could take, such as following your company's LinkedIn page.

Step 5: Scaling Cold Outbound ✉️ 

The most cost-effective method to validate your assumptions about your ideal customer is through targeted cold emailing. This approach is built on the same principles as online networking: to engage genuinely, convey a willingness to learn, and, most importantly, avoid coming across as automated.

While this is a big topic in itself, here are a few tips to keepin mind:

• Personalized engagement: Your emails should feel one-on-one and tailored to the individual. Make it clear that you've done your homework and show that you're interested in the person you’re emailing, not just in making a sale.

• Test and iterate: Begin with a small, carefully selected batch of emails sent manually. Pay close attention to your subject lines and the body of your emails. Analyze open, click-through, and response rates to determine what works and what doesn't.

• Scale with automation: Once you're confident in your email's effectiveness, consider using an oubound email automation tool to reach a larger audience.

Initial outreach is how you turn your vision into viable customer relationships. Keep refining your approach with the insights gained from each interaction, and you'll build a customer base and an engaged community around your product.

Episode highlights:

Demo meetings are highly coveted in the startup world, second only to meetings with VCs. Success is a major step towards net new logos; repeated failure can doom your company. 

Demos are a prime opportunity to present their product in all its glory. But a demo is more htan a product showcase; it's a strategic step in a larger dance, where discovery calls unearth the prospect's pain points, qualification ensures alignment with your startup's capabilities, and only then does the demo take the stage. Success here paves the way to a proof of concept or trial and closing the deal if all goes well. 

This masterclass guides you to a structured approach to nailing that demo meeting and executing an effective POC. Let's dive in.

What you’ll learn:

• Integrating demo meetings into your sales strategy

• Key steps before, during, and after a demo meeting

• Crafting an effective POC

Meet the expert: Shounit Lax-Swisa is an executive strategy, marketing, product and presale leader with proven success in establishing a lasting presence in new markets, identifying growth opportunities, positioning core competence, innovative directions, and initiating strong business alliances. 

The Basic Rules Of A Successful Demo Meeting

Often, in the whirlwind of startup activities, founders can lose sight of the true purpose of a demo meeting. It's about continuously validating your product's fit with your prospect. Even after a thorough discovery call, the demo will give you deeper insights into an organization's internal dynamics and specific needs. It's also your chance to fortify trust with your potential client.

In these meetings, you must present your product in a way that resonates with what the prospect is eager to understand. Link their pain points directly to your features, painting a picture of a future where those pains are effectively addressed (See our previous masterclass: 4 Pillars of Successful Startup Sales). Resist the urge to overindulge in self-praise, which can be a cultural faux pas—particularly noticeable in the contrast between Israeli forthrightness and American perceptions of modesty.

The key is to engage in active listening. Aim to speak only half the time. Use the rest to listen, adapting your demo on the fly to address the prospect's concerns. This approach means that no two demos are identical, as you're not reciting a fixed script but rather composing a response tailored to the live feedback you're receiving. Use the insights gained to guide the prospect to the following steps and steer the conversation towards your objectives.

Preparing for a Demo

Contrary to the common Israeli approach, improvisation isn't the most effective strategy here. Preparation is key to ensuring your demo meeting reaches its goals.

Firstly, set the stage for a successful meeting by sending out an agenda in advance and reconfirming the meeting's schedule. This increases predictability, boosts engagement, and helps reduce the likelihood of no-shows. With these steps, you're not just prepared; you're setting the scene for a demo that delivers results.

Then, understand the prospect's pain points. Even if you've conducted the discovery call, revisit your notes. A second look might reveal new insights or refresh your perspective.

Next, research the individual you'll be meeting. Utilize resources like the company website, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook to gather as much background information as possible. You're looking for any details that might help forge a personal connection. Does this person have a passion for innovation? Are they data-driven? Identifying common ground with your product can be priceless.

Before the meeting, outline your ideal next steps, whether moving to a POC, scheduling a follow-up with their purchasing committee, or sending a quote. This plan should be aligned with your sales strategy.

Demo meetings are typically scheduled for an hour and can sometimes encompass the discovery phase, which is typical in SaaS sales. Nevertheless, aim to keep the actual product presentation concise—no more than 7-10 minutes, and don't be afraid to cut the meeting short. A well-tailored presentation will briefly demonstrate the key features relevant to the client's needs.

Demo Day Dynamics

Every founder and salesperson will have their own approach to sales and their formula for telling their product or company’s story. However, here too you should have clear objectives that go are more specific than “get the sale”. Here are some bases you want to hit in the precious ±60 minutes you get with your prospect:

• Refine pain points: The day of the demo is an extension of the discovery process. Take the opportunity to validate your understanding of the client's pain points. Are the issues you're addressing genuinely their primary concerns? Refine and adjust your pitch as needed.

• Develop a personal connection: Start the conversation on a personal note. People appreciate when you show interest in their experiences and challenges. Allocate 10-15 minutes for an open, human conversation. This makes the prospect feel valued and builds trust and receptivity towards your product.

• Narrate the pain: Kick the demo off with a narrative that expresses the client's pain point, then transition into how your product can make that pain point a thing of the past. A story illustrates the tangible benefits of your solution in a relatable way.

• Elicit genuine feedback: It can be daunting to seek honest feedback, especially when the product is your brainchild. Nevertheless, you must leave the meeting knowing whether your product truly addresses their needs and is considered essential within their organization.

• Plan the follow-up: While it might be tempting to set up a trial account and hope for the best, a more hands-on approach would work better. Facilitate the prospect's journey to the next step without being overbearing. Before concluding the demo, schedule a follow-up meeting and agree on the forthcoming actions with the client. This ensures momentum and clarity in the sales process.

Post-Demo Protocol

After the curtain falls on your demo, you’re still nowhere near done - in enterprise sales, there are going to be many additional touchpoints before you can move the opportunity to Closed Won. 

Your primary task at this stage is ensuring the agreed-upon next steps occur. It's only sometimes straightforward or doable - deals can and will fizzle out at this stage, for a thousand different reasons - but you must do everything in your power to increase the odds of having a next meeting:

• Send meeting summary: Summarize key discussion points within 24 hours of the demo. This keeps the engagement alive and demonstrates your professionalism.

• Persistently follow-up: If no response is received within 48 hours, follow up. Your demo is one of their many tasks so that a reminder can be necessary.

• Set an Agenda for Advancement: If a trial or POC has been agreed upon, immediately arrange a meeting to define the next steps. If an additional meeting is necessary before this, arrange it without delay to maintain the momentum.

The POC Dilemma: Essential Or Expendable?

The proof of concept stage is often seen as a key step toward sealing a deal. However, you shouldn’t always try to pressure the prospect into starting one right there and then. A POC without internal champions or commitment can fumble in large organizations, and fail to justify the significant effort required on your end. This is particularly risky in the final quarter of the fiscal year when the POC could cause you to miss a crucial spending window.

If a free or paid POC is the logical next step and you have buy-in from the buyer to move it forward within an agreed-upon timeframe, keep these guidelines in mind:

• Keep it short and specific: design a brief, defined trial period that allows the client to experience the product without getting distracted by competitors.

• Insist on commitment: don't initiate a POC without an internal advocate and budget commitment. Without these, a POC is likely to fail.

• Set clear objectives: establish what success looks like before the POC begins. Define measurable KPIs to ensure that the trial's outcomes are unambiguous.

As you embark on a POC, appoint a dedicated person from both your team and the client to oversee the trial. Together, establish KPIs for success and outline the post-trial steps. This is often formalized in larger organizations through a contract stating the final pricing. Your goals for the trial don't need to promise the moon—modest improvements can be just as persuasive.

Structure your POC around three key meetings:

1. Kickoff meeting: engage all relevant stakeholders and outline the POC process.

2. Status meeting: monitor progress and address any issues.

3. Summary meeting: review results and analyze outcomes.

These meetings should be scheduled before the POC begins.

Stay proactive throughout the trial. Assign a team member to monitor the trial's progress, ensuring the client actively uses and finds value in the product.

If the trial doesn't yield the anticipated results, take ownership of the outcome. Demonstrating transparency and a willingness to learn can set you apart from the competition, showcasing your dedication to continuous improvement.

Most Demos Will be Duds. Keep Going

Demo meetings and POCs are necessary strategies for securing your place in the competitive market. Each of them is an opportunity to refine, adapt, and impress. As you pursue them, remember that success is not just in closing the deal but in the lessons learned and the relationships built along the way. 

Episode highlights:

You’re on a prospect call. It’s looking good:  they’re listening closely to your pitch, keep their camera on, and don’t seem to be tabbing out during your demo. But after the call, they mysteriously vanish, leaving you wondering where everything went wrong. 

If this describes your experience in sales, it might be  time to hone in on the art of client discovery. 

In this masterclass, we'll dive into the discovery stage of your sales cycle, centered around understanding your potential customer's pain. We’ll introduce straightforward, practical frameworks that will transform initial conversations into solid foundations for future relationships. 

What you’ll learn:

• How to dive into your customer’s pain

• How to structure your discovery conversation

• How to demo like the top 5%

Meet the expert:

Or Biderman is a lifetime salesperson, and is the Co-founder and CEO of Novacy - which provides audio, text, and body language analysis of sales calls. He is also the resident  sales mentor at Fusion VC. 

The Starting Point: 4 Truths About Your Prospects 

During discovery calls, there's a natural inclination to seize upon the first hint of a problem and proclaim, "We have the perfect solution for you!" But this eagerness can be premature. The deeper your understanding of a customer's pain, the smoother the path to a sale becomes.

Your customers’  pain points follow in various timelines: 

• Immediate crisis: "If I don't boost sales now, my company is doomed." 

• Future crisis: "If sales don't increase by 20% in four months, I'll have to let go of 20% of my sales team", 

• An aspirational future: "Increasing sales could lead to my promotion"). 

If you identify which timeline your prospect is living in, you can tailor your sales approach accordingly. The ideal is obviously a current and urgent problem, which reduces friction in the sales process and puts you in a better position in pricing negotiations. 

Every sale alters the customer's world. Change requires effort and adaptation and is therefore scary. You must thoroughly understand their pain and articulate how your solution minimizes friction to make a compelling case that the discomfort of change outweighs the relief it brings. This applies to the person you’re meeting right now, but also to every  other person involved in the buying decision. You must equip your ambassador with the tools to advocate for the change.

Moreover, sales have an emotional aspect. People don't just buy solutions; they buy better versions of their world. A deep grasp of the customer's pain lets you touch directly on their core issue, applying enough pressure to forge an emotional bond with your solution.

Lastly, before stepping into any sales call, remember that the world doesn't revolve around your product. People are focused on their jobs, and your product is a means to an end. Rather than clinging to a limited MVP or a prototype, you should anchor your pitch in their pain, painting a vivid picture of how their  world will look like once it has been transformed by your solution.

Uncovering the Pain with Sandler’s Pain Funnel

The Sandler pain funnel is a framework you can  use on your first sales call to dig deeper into the pain. It starts with the current problem. Let’s say the problem is that salespeople are not reaching their goals.

1. "Tell me more about that." - gives the stage to  the prospect to unveil a more detailed landscape of their problem, and encouraging  deeper self-reflection. ("Over the past four months, we've observed a consistent sales decline.")

2. "Can you be more specific? Give me an example." This shifts abstract issues into concrete challenges. ("Recently, even our top performer has been struggling to win against one of our competitors.")

3. "How long has this been a problem?" Encouraging the prospect to trace the issue's timeline stirs emotional engagement. ("The downturn began four months ago, but we haven't seen any positive shifts for over seven months.")

4. "What have you tried to do about this?" This query uncovers the prospect's commitment to solving their challenge. A lack of action suggests a potential misfit with your solution's value proposition. It they have sat idle so far, there might not be enough urgency to pursue a solution.. ("We've overhauled our sales strategy and intensified management oversight.")

5. "And did that help?" Here, the prospect's response can expose vulnerabilities in competing solutions, arming you with insights to distinguish your offering. ("No success; the issue seems to transcend our internal processes and points to the competitor's influence.")

6. "How much do you estimate this has cost you?" only some prospects will outright give you exact figures. Still, their earlier disclosures can help gauge the financial impact, reinforcing the urgency and relevance of your solution. ("A significant loss, to be honest.")

7. "How do you feel about that?" This question converts a business dialogue into an emotional journey. The keyword to look for here is “frustrated”, with which you can pivot the conversation towards the transformative potential of your solution. ("I’m frustrated by our inability to counter our competitor's moves.")

8. "Have you given up trying to deal with this issue?" This final probe gauges their willingness to make an effort, setting the stage for a mutual determination to tackle the challenge head-on with your solution. ("Far from it. That's precisely why we're having this discussion.")

Beyond Pain: BANT Qualification 

If there’s no pain, there’s no sale. But even when there is a pain, there can still be impassable roadblocks on the way to a sale. You want to find out about these early in order to disqualify irrelevant prospects.

The first call serves to uncover additional dimensions about your client.  Among the myriad frameworks and acronyms that guide this exploration, one of the most popular ones is budget, authority, need, timeline (BANT)::

• Budget: Has the organization allocated budget for solutions like yours?

• Authority: Can the person you're speaking with green-light this purchase? 

• Need: Is there a reason to buy? This is basically the pain point you're already probing. 

• Timeline: When does your prospect need a solution? Establishing a sense of urgency (or lack thereof) can influence your approach and negotiation stance.

There’s plenty of information online about BANT so we’re not going to dive too deep into it here. But for our purposes, you should remember that if you don’t have good answers to the questions we’ve listed above, it’s going to be very hard to get to a ‘yes’ and you should consider disqualifying the prospect.

Note that this doesn’t mean the  door is not permanently closed. If there’s a clear pain but no budget allocated, you’ll want to check in with this prospect in six months time; however, if now isn’t the right time, you probably have warmer leads to focus on.  Maintaining a pipeline that accurately reflects reality frees up time and resources for prospects who are  ripe for conversion (see our previous article to learn more about pipeline management ).

We've Reached The Demo, Your FAVORITE Part 

Many salespeople, especially founders, rush through the conversation to get to the demo part, a chance to sit back and breathe easily. However, remember you should get here after fully grasping the client's pain. And even then, your demo should be at most five minutes. Why? That’s right; no one is as invested in your product as you are.

Chris Orlob's insightful post outlines eight elements that make SaaS sales demos compelling, condensed in the F.A.V.O.R.I.T.E. acronym. We can distil the essence into three guidelines:

Firstly, align each feature you present with a specific pain point. There's no benefit in bombarding your counterpart with an array of irrelevant features to their challenges.

 Secondly, never assume familiarity with your platform. Take the time to guide them through the interface, explaining each element's purpose and positioning and ensuring they understand the flow and rationale behind the design.

Lastly, tell a story that resonates. Use your understanding of their pain and how your product offers relief to craft a story that begins with their current struggle, showcases your solution's value, and illustrates its transformative potential. Leverage any social proof or testimonials at your disposal to bolster your narrative, making it not just a demo but a compelling journey from problem to solution.

Episode highlights:

"How can I establish trust with potential clients for my new and unproven startup?" This is a common challenge faced by early-stage entrepreneurs. It's a catch-22 situation: You need to earn clients' trust to get started, but you require that trust to secure clients in the first place.

In this masterclass, we'll explore two key strategies to help you overcome the trust barrier: tapping into your existing networks for warm introductions and mastering the art of cold outreach.

What you’ll learn:

• How to tap into your existing networks for warm introductions

• How to streamline your warm introduction process

• How to master cold outreach techniques

• How to max out LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Meet the expert:

Alex Shandrovsky mentors and coaches early-stage startups in business development. 

Start With Warm Outreach to your Network or Tribe 

One way to build trust is to start your outreach in the communities you're already a part of. This is the low hanging fruit that you should look at before trying to approach Fortune 500 CEOs who have never heard of you. These close-knit groups already have a strong foundation of trust, which is sustained by the consequences of breaking it. As a founder, you can benefit from this trust by tapping into these "tribes" and getting warm introductions to your desired contacts.

Step 1: Identifying your tribe

It may seem challenging to find ways to connect with potential customers  outside of your immediate circle, but there are a few avenues you can consider:

• Army service: this is an obvious choice for 8200 alumni, but even if you weren’t in an elite unit, you’ll often find the people you served with in various positions that can open doors for you..

• Professional networks: your lawyer, accountant, and other professionals you interact with are often linked with relevant contacts at companies you can sell to.

• Social circles: your religious community, hobby groups, or other social networks can have lead you to surprising places.

• Family and friends - well, obviously, they will try their best to help you, right?

• Israel Economic Missions: these entities have personnel specifically tasked with facilitating business connections and meetings for Israeli companies abroad

Step 2: Get Meetings

When you tap into someone's network, you leverage their social credibility, so you have to treat it carefully. To succeed, you need to recognise what the other party stands to gain. It could be fulfilling their professional role (which is often the case with investors);  when you’re asking for feedback, you’re offering them   the intrinsic satisfaction the prospect gets from helping someone, and the ego-boost of being considered an expert whose feedback is requested. Never underestimate people's willingness to meet you because you asked politely..

Prepare a concise, 7-line introduction about your company to make this process efficient. This should include your problem, solution, traction/team credentials, and what you're looking for. Provide this to your contact, allowing them to personalize it when making the introduction. 

Pro Tip: Look for Advisory Board Members 

To break into targeted companies, consider leveraging advisory board members from these companies. These individuals are often retired C-suite executives or decision-makers who hold a lot of respect in the industry. Approach them directly: introduce your early-stage company, mention your recent funding, and express your need for design partners and initial customers. Emphasize that you're in the process of assembling a top-notch advisory board yourself and invite them for a conversation.

If they accept, you already gained an opportunity to receive valuable insights. They might even become ambassadors for your company if you convince them of your vision. The typical compensation for such roles includes a monthly retainer of around $2,000 and equity ranging from 0.25% to 0.75%. What do you get in return? One to two hours of coaching weekly and direct introductions to potential customers, with the added advantage of them accompanying you in these meetings.

Use Sales Navigator To Find Warm Leads

LinkedIn is where most outbound B2B happens in 2024. Here’s how you can effectively use LinkedIn Sales Navigator in your effort to break the trust barrier:.

Target prospects with past company connections: identify prospects from your target companies who worked at companies you already have a relationship with. This will help them recognize your current clients faster and help you use your successful projects as a trust-building factor.

Identify Israelis abroad: it’s inevitable that Israelis and former Israelis will be more receptive to your message. Use Israeli universities as filters to find Israelis working abroad, focusing on alumni from institutions like Tel Aviv University, Reichman University, or Ben Gurion. The same goes for universities with a big Jewish community abroad. 

Leverage existing connections: search through the first-degree connections of your first-degree connections to get a better sense of possible warm introduction. You can also tap into broader networks or affiliations, such as alumni of programs like 8200.

Progressing to Cold Outreach: A Practical Breakdown

At some points, you’ll have tapped out your warm intro possibilities and will need to go cold. You’ll encounter many people trying to tell you there’s a single way to ‘hack’ this process; most of these tricks are not likely to work. Instead, you should focus on a few fundamentals, which we detail below.

Cold outreach can deliver results if you put in the necessary groundwork to show that you've done your homework and understand the recipient's needs and priorities. A typical outreach effort might yield a 2-4% response rate, but Alex says he’s achieved an impressive 15-25% average (with an investor audience) by following these techniques:

The use of buzzwords: Buzzwords get a bad rep, but they help your ICP understand that you’re offering what they’re searching for. For example, if you’re a healthtech startup, you want to make sure your message includes keywords like 'diagnostics', 'AI', 'impact', 'pre-seed', 'early-stage', 'Israel', and 'mental health'. Start by scouring customer websites for these terms or use tools like clay.com to extract them. This allows you to tailor your communication.

Highlighting the problem:If you’re looking for investors, this is relatively easy. VCs are problem solvers at scale, interested in major issues. When attracting VCs, it's advisable to use big numbers like the "$6B/year costs associated with late diagnoses in underserved communities." When you’re trying to find customers, you want to shine a light on the current inefficiency or gap that your company is solving, and the potential benefits this solution would create for them.

Building credibility: Highlight your team's unique qualifications and early successes - e.g., completing a clinical trial with over 90% sensitivity and specificity, to demonstrate market readiness.

The ask: Instead of requesting a full solution demo upfront, gauge their interest first. Ask if they’re willing to provide feedback on your product direction. This minimizes the commitment and opens a line of communication.

Following Up

Wait seven days and then follow up with another email. Sending a gentle reminder is nothing to be ashamed of: You are less important to them than they are for you. . When you follow up:

Avoid generic messages: don't just check in; add value. Share an article or report that's relevant to them. Tell them something that they might not know. This not only shows you're informed but also that you respect their time and interests.

When should you hire SDRs?

Sales development representatives (SDRs) are a staple of enterprise software sales. While there are different opinions about the role of SDRs in modern sales, Alex advises most founders NOT to hire an SDR team:

• Different outreach needs: warm outreach strategies used with the founder’s personal networks don't translate well to cold outreach, which SDRs typically handle.

• SDR lifecycle challenges: SDRs require about two months for onboarding, and peak productivity lasts around six months, followed by expectations for career progression. This cycle often leads to high turnover and makes it difficult to formulate a scalable process.

• Better to start with outsourcing: instead of hiring an SDR, opt for a short-term engagement with a specialized agency. This allows you to dip your toes in the water, gauge how successful your SDR motion is, and can be a more cost-effective way (around 20,000 NIS for three months) to build a solid outreach process.

 Whether relying on warm introductions or executing a cold outreach strategy, the key to building trust in your early-stage startup is a blend of personalization, relevance, and consistency. You maximize your startup's chances of signing a customer by approaching each interaction thoughtfully and genuinely understanding your audience's needs and interests.

Download the slides here 📥

Episode Highlights

Sales get  a bad rap with founders. It's easy to picture it as the territory of slick, smooth-talking types, using the over-the-top tactics a-la The Wolf of Wall Street. But this is a dated view: Sales today isn't about schmoozing over drinks, but about expertise and understanding. 

Software sales mean  knowing your product inside out, understanding the tech landscape, and being savvy about your potential clients' needs and structures. Founders often act as the sales team by default – because you know your product best and nobody else can sell it as well as you can.

In this masterclass, we're going to break down the sales process into four pillars, walk through a real-life example of a sales method that works, and wrap up with a look at the essential sales stack. 

What you’ll learn:

• The four pillars of sales: pain, product, clarity, and trust

• The SPIN methodology

• The basic sales stack

Meet the expert:Avi Wiesenberg is a strategic advisor, early-stage investor and sales leader with over 15 years experience, with a focus on scaling hyper-growth SaaS startups. He has previously held revenue leadership positions in Oracle, ClickTale, and SimilarWeb.

The four pillars of your B2B sales process:

1. Pain

The primary question of sales is why someone would buy your product. Nobody jumps out of bed excited to purchase enterprise software. There’s only one reason that would lead them to do so:  pain. The kind of pain that blocks them from reaching their goals – whether it's getting a promotion, being seen as an innovator, or getting a shout-out from the CEO.

Whenever you think about pain, you have to remember two things:

• Everybody hurts… differently: every stakeholder in a deal has unique worries and ambitions. Your strategy needs to be inclusive enough to address each person's concerns in the decision-making chain. In big organizations, this might mean understanding and addressing the diverse pains and perspectives of dozens of stakeholders.

• Inertia is your biggest competitor: for many founders, particularly those who have a disruptive or innovative product, it might seem like they are operating in a clear field with no competition. They are wrong: their biggest competitor is the status quo. It’s on you to show that your solution offers more value than the familia, seductive allure of doing nothing and sticking to what the organization already does.

2. Product

In most cases, founders are not identical to their customers, which can distort their worldview and the importance they place on their own product. . A founder gets a lightbulb moment to solve a problem, validates it, pitches it to investors, and boom – a company is born. But the problem you've been obsessing over for the last year or two? It's not necessarily what your customers are obsessed with.

Getting past the ‘why should I care’ threshold. Customers only care about what’s happening in their company. When you're selling, you've got to pivot from the problem you started with to the pain points your customers are voicing.

A simple way to do this is to  start with the problem you identified, then ask your prospects how they handle it. Probe into their current situation and look for other related issues where your solution might fit.

Is your product a must-have or nice-to-have?  Getting the sale across the line  will  be difficult if it's perceived as non-essential. You need to reframe the product's value proposition to make it indispensable.

Cool is not enough. Your product’s  'coolness factor', especially in SaaS, needs to be tied back to its practical value. A visually appealing product is great, but it must clearly address and resolve customer pain points to be compelling.

3. Clarity

Keeping your prospects engaged and committed is a key part of the sales process, and it’s your job to eliminate any reasons for them to step back from the deal. 

Keep your messaging consistent.  Your sales pitch and deck need to tell the same story as your website or your ad . For instance, if your website markets you as the ideal solution for SMBs, telling a client that you're the top choice for large enterprises wouldn't make sense.

In early stages, you have more flexibility. There's likely less information about your company online, allowing you to create a perception that might be slightly ahead of your current reality. For example, you might be able to get away with less transparency on pricing. But tread carefully: While a little creative framing can be helpful, transparency and honesty are the foundations for long-term success and credibility.

4. Trust

We buy from people we trust. Trust is built by being transparent, showing genuine curiosity, and offering a product that truly impacts your prospects’  lives. 

To establish trust, you need to see your role as more than merely  presenting a product; you’re expected to guide your prospects through the sales journey, leading them confidently towards a purchase they feel confident in making. To do so, you need to understand the dynamics of your stakeholders within their organization.

In the past, face-to-face meetings provided cues about a stakeholder’s level of involvement and decision-making power. In the era of video calls, these cues have changed, but they haven't disappeared. Pay attention to the dynamics of the call. Assess the confidence level of each participant within their company. Do they bring in other key people effortlessly? Do they follow through on what they promise? How swiftly do they act on decisions? 

But don't rely solely on observation. Ask direct questions: Have they purchased similar products before? Who else should be involved in this decision? How are purchases typically made in their organization? Do they have the budget for the product? 

These inquiries are expected and legitimate. But remember that this should be a natural conversation, driven by your curiosity and desire to understand how you can best help them - not an interrogation or a box-ticking exercise.

Addendum 1: SPIN Sales

One basic sales methodology that captures all that beautifully is "SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham. The approach has four parts: 

• Situation: Understand the prospect's current status quo to reveal a pain point. For example, asking, "How are you managing this process currently?" can lead to uncovering problems with their existing methods.

• Problem: Dig deeper into the issues they're facing. "What challenges are you encountering with your current approach?" helps identify specific pain points.

• Impact: Explore the potential impact of these problems. "If this issue was resolved, what would be the value?" 

• Need-Payoff: Let the client articulate the personal or business benefits they'd gain from your solution. Asking, "If our product could give you two extra hours a day, what would that mean for you?" helps clients visualize the tangible benefits, making the value proposition more personal and compelling.

Using this approach, you guide clients to realize how resolving their issues can lead to significant improvements in their professional or personal lives. It's about helping them see the 'lightbulb moment' – how your solution can positively impact their world. If you want to dive deeper, we recommend looking into it!

Addendum 2: Building Your Sales Stack 

There are many, many sales tools that you can potentially buy…

But if you’re starting out you should probably go with something much leaner:

• Customer research: The first step is understanding your clients. Use LinkedIn and other public sources to gather as much information as possible about your prospects. 

• Call recording: make sure to use the recording feature of your video call platform. The recording would allow you to review details you might have missed. It also acts as an organizational memory bank, providing insights for future interactions.

• CRM: This is where you keep your list of prospects dynamic and updated to maximize sales opportunities (see Keren's Mir's masterclass for a deeper dive into effectively using CRM).

• Engagement tools: Tools like HubSpot or similar platforms help you manage your outbound efforts. Documenting and tracking these activities alongside your other sales efforts helps maintain a cohesive sales strategy.

Embracing Your Role as Salesperson #1

By now, we hope it’s clear that mastering sales isn’t about showmanship, but revolves around understanding your product, market, and customer needs and making impactful connections with your prospects. Keep these principles in mind, and stay curious and genuine. And sell.