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Company playbook / 05 / Finding buyers

Merge

Founder-led sales is market research

Merge’s founders spoke to 100 companies in roughly six months before launching. They kept selling personally after launch, using those conversations to figure out the problem, the buyer and the most convincing demo.

SalesResearch

01 / What they actually did

100 discovery conversations before the company had a product

The founders sent hundreds of emails and interviewed people who built or supported integrations. They recorded recurring pains rather than opening with a product pitch. [M1]

The buyer was not always the person with the pain

Merge learned that people handling integration problems were not always the people able to buy a solution; senior engineering and product leaders mattered. [M1]

They changed how they sold

The founders learned that showing the product earlier in the process could be more effective than a long, abstract discovery conversation. [M1]

02 / What you can learn

Lesson to keep: Treat early calls as fieldwork. Your website copy, demo and outbound should come from the customer’s actual language.

Don’t over-copy: The point is to learn from calls, not to copy a magic interview count. 100 is Merge’s history, not a universal requirement.

03 / How to do something similar

  1. 01Interview users, champions and budget owners separately.
  2. 02Ask for the last real incident or workaround, not general opinions.
  3. 03After each call, write down the exact trigger, urgency, alternative and objection.
  4. 04Test a short demo early when the problem is clear.
  5. 05Turn patterns into a reusable pitch, qualification checklist and demo structure.

Examples you could publish or run

“What happened the last time [technical problem] occurred?”“Who gets pulled in, and who can approve a budget to solve it?”“What would have to improve for you to switch?”

What to measure
Better meeting-to-opportunity conversion and fewer stalled demos.

04 / Copy the framework

Inspired by Merge

Customer discovery notes

A repeatable way to learn buyer language and why deals stall.

ROLE / TEAM / COMPANY:
LAST REAL INCIDENT: “Tell me what happened last time...”
COST OF THE PROBLEM: time, money, reliability, risk
CURRENT WORKAROUND: tools, humans, handoffs
TRIGGER TO CHANGE: why now, not next year?
USER / CHAMPION / BUDGET OWNER:
COMPETITORS / DO-NOTHING OPTION:
REQUIREMENTS TO TRY:
REQUIREMENTS TO BUY:
OBJECTIONS (exact words):
DEMO MOMENT THAT GOT A RESPONSE:
NEXT STEP / TIMELINE:

AFTER 10 CALLS: Count repeated pains, triggers, objections.
UPDATE: ICP, homepage, comparison pages, demo and outbound.

05 / Original sources

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