If you can’t get more at-bats, you’d better make each one you get count.
In baseball, they say every player falls to their average at some point. Go on a heater, and you’re bound to come back to reality. A massive slump will happen at some point. The numbers say so. What happens when your at-bats are limited? Will the numbers tell the same story?
If you are selling in B2B, you’d better hope not. The data is not in your favor. Growth across the board is slowing. The SaaS growth benchmarks show massive slowing from 2024 to 2025, both of which are a far cry from the metrics we saw in the early 2020s.
Further, according to an article on 2025 B2B SaaS Startup Benchmarks, investments in sales and marketing were half as effective in 2025 compared to 2024. What’s the answer? Better at-bats. Adopting a mantra of no lead left behind, coupled with a hyper value sales cycle, is the way to ensure we boost our average even with fewer at-bats.
The hyper value sales cycle consists of 3 core tenets:
- Dynamic Discovery
- High Value Sales Offer
- Co-Authored Business Case
Let’s break them down with some examples from early-stage companies in our IRC investment and advisory portfolio.
Dynamic Discovery
Gone are the days of a sales team running a “qualification survey” and calling it discovery. Buyers are too sophisticated and can see right through it. They want to be understood, educated, and guided. Discovery is a credibility builder; the questions you ask, when you ask them, and how you frame them all play into world-class discovery. The interesting thing for start-ups looking to scale their sales process is that founders, who are typically not great at the mechanics of sales, are absolutely fantastic at discovery. They are close to the problem, the customer has a natural curiosity and credibility that make them a weapon in discovery. It doesn’t scale to have the founder on all disco calls, but the sales process can be built around it.
If you have a founding AE or top seller, have them run a month’s worth of disco calls with the founder. Have the seller drive, setting the table for the founder, keeping the meeting on the rails, and ensuring good qualification. The founder is then teed up to do what they do best: get to the heart of the buyer with great discovery. This will take some trial and error, but once you have it nailed, use the best calls as the basis for your discovery call script that you will use for sales moving forward.
The goal of your discovery isn’t qualification, it’s a thesis.
If you can formulate a fundamentally sound thesis for the deal after your discovery call, you have a qualified opportunity. It is sales’ job to continually pressure test that thesis and drive the sale. Founders, as a high-leverage sales engineer in this case, are a major unlock for early deals and for the foundational AE to see what good looks like.
I noticed a pattern in one of our portcos recently. When the founder had disco convos without the founding AE present, the deals got lost and the founder got frustrated. However, the AE was closing deals at a very high rate in late-stage pipe. The gap seemed to be in the early pipe, capitalizing on discovery and getting deals into a stage where the AE could drive toward a close. The first step in closing the gap is playing to their strengths.
So we decided to run a play that required the founder and AE to be on every initial disco call together. The goal was to leverage their strengths to build velocity in the pipeline. With no solo discos, sales are the driver, and the founder sets the table with world-class discovery. All calls are recorded so we can take the learnings from this to scale into the future with AEs who can deliver a founder-level of discovery and run a best-in-class cycle like the AE.
Architecting the perfect discovery call builds credibility and sets the stage for moving a deal forward.
The High Value Sales Offer
When I evaluate pipeline at start-ups, there is always a fall off between initial discovery and a validation stage. This signals the lack of value early in the cycle. The job of a high-value sales offer (shout out to Craig Rosenberg and Scott Albro, who introduced me to this concept in 2015) is to bring the value you deliver late in a sales cycle, like workshops, business cases, value modeling and possibly even live product use cases, to the front of the sales cycle. The concept is simple: deliver hyper value early, show your prospects, not tell them the value, lower the trust barrier, and accelerate the cycle.
The high value sales offer (HVSO) feels bespoke, typically requires a level of research and input data from the prospect to run, and pulls at the heart of the problem you are solving. The HVSO is not the business case; it’s finding the root of the pain, opening the wound, and turning the knife, wrapped around the premise that you can tell them something about their business they don’t know. A highly attractive operating model to get executives engaged.
We happen to have one of the best HVSOs I’ve seen living in one of our portfolios. The company has built an assessment tool for large healthcare systems in which they can ingest a common export from their system, run a credible analysis on it to roughly 98% accuracy, which uncovers massive amounts of wasteful spend. If you’ve ever run an enterprise system that includes a data analysis, you know that EVERY prospect calls BS on your data. This Portco expects it and provides them a validation period to run the numbers themselves. This phase has proven to be a unique qualifier and deal accelerator, moving their conversations from a nice-to-have to a top-level CFO priority.
Co-Authored Business Case
You don’t win deals on a business case, but they are a necessary proof point in the cycle. The most important component is that it’s co-authored. It’s the seller’s job to QB the building of the business case with the prospect the same way they are playing signal caller in discovery with the founder. Where business cases fall down is where the HVSO offer falls down: the prospect does not believe the data.
A business case must use the prospect’s internal language and actual data with credible benchmarks in order to be defensible to the CFO. If your HVSO has a data calculation component, that’s a great start, but it does not end there. The business case is as much art as science. It’s about the narrative tied to the numbers. Suggest having a framework you leverage to guide your prospect through the process; you can use ours as a starting point. It’s about anchoring on the deal thesis, then backing it credibly with data from the business. The thing the CFO is looking for (beyond a simple revenue lift or cost reduction model) is the total cost of ownership. Insights you can provide on implementation, adoption curve, and FTE impact will lead to a more credible position as your deal goes through its final validation stages.
As you build your champion, share your framework early, start helping them think in terms of building the business case together, which looks like consistently making updates, sharing it, and asking for feedback. I ran this process with a portco selling a three year $1.8M deal into healthcare. It was their largest deal in company history. When I drafted the first version of the business case and sent it to the champion, I remember he sent it back thoroughly marked up with notes that said, “We don’t say things that way.” That’s when I knew we had a deal; he was doing his part to take ownership of the process.
Go-to-market leaders are battling day in and day out to cut through the noise. Investments in marketing are not generating the same level of impact as last year, and it’s a dramatic decline from 3-5 years ago. Each at-bat must be approached with intention.
The tenets of the hyper value sales cycle are somewhat common in enterprise or upper mid-market sales cycles, but the ability to adopt the principles and scale down market is a massive differentiator for start-ups, especially in laggard markets that aren’t as exposed to high-end professional sellers. It’s one of the reasons we love vertical SaaS: there are unique opportunities to deliver truly differentiated sales experiences.
