# Building a B2B sales motion, from first outreach to forecast — Summary The B2B Sales work group helps early B2B companies build a sales motion in group chats. Members cover setting up a CRM, booking meetings and forecasting, and how to pace founder outreach and staff SDRs. Updated: 2026-10-13 HTML page: [Building a B2B sales motion, from first outreach to forecast]() Transcript: [Full Chat Transcript]() Work group: [B2B Sales]() ## Questions ### [Setting up a startup CRM around what buyers do]() Keep one deal pipeline where each stage needs a buyer action, and open a deal only once the first conversation confirms real pain and an agreed next step. - **Tie each stage to something the buyer did.** Kris Rudeegraap suggests stages such as problem confirmed, demo completed and buying process confirmed. At Atrium, Peter Kazanjy's middle stage was the buyer connecting their own data, which took about five minutes. - **Open a deal after the first real conversation.** Cassie Young calls logging a friendly call as a deal “happy ears syndrome” and wants the pain, budget path, authority and a dated next step first. Peter keeps a booked first meeting on the lead or account, and after hearing him, Kris would move his “meeting booked” stage there too. - **Keep account signals apart from deal stages.** For a free trial, Kyle Poyar tracks ICP fit, active users and activation on the account, and opens an opportunity when the buyer agrees to an evaluation. In his GTM metrics work, best-fit accounts had 2 to 3 times the win rate of average prospects. - **Keep the history of every deal.** Andy Mowat would timestamp each change to stage, amount or close date and compare weekly snapshots, so a founder can tell growing coverage from deals sliding into next quarter. Peter adds two weekly views: open deals with no future meeting, and deals untouched for 30 days. ### [Booking sales meetings around a conference]() Choose the accounts and people first, give each one a specific reason, time and place to meet, and book the next conversation before the event ends. - **Pick the people before the conference.** Kyle Poyar would plan meetings before buying the pass and filter events by the target accounts the team can name. Peter Kazanjy starts a month out with the attendee list, sends specific meeting asks and uses the last two weeks for confirmations. - **Give them a reason to meet.** At Dreamforce, Andy Mowat posted the days he was free and the side events he would attend. Kyle cites Memo's dinners of 10 to 15 buyers, after which roughly 80% took a sales meeting, as one company's reported result rather than a benchmark. - **Spend on accounts with a signal.** Guillaume Cabane would hand reps accounts with a current signal, such as a new executive hire. Kris Rudeegraap saves physical invites, like custom golf balls for an executive golf event, for the people the team most wants to meet. - **Book the follow-up on site and measure it.** Peter has someone book the next meeting while the buyer is there, and follows up within 48 hours. Kris would track meetings held and opportunities created per dollar, and Kyle compares an event's cost with other ways to reach the same accounts. ### [A B2B sales forecast built on your own conversion history]() A forecast earns trust when every number traces back to conversion rates in your own history, and a deal reaches commit only on evidence from the buyer. - **Build it twice.** Kyle Poyar builds a top-down version from the board's number and a bottom-up one from ICP accounts, rep capacity and real conversion rates. The gap between them shows which assumption has to change. - **Project from pipeline cohorts.** Cassie Young groups pipeline by the quarter it was created and applies each cohort's close rate. In her worked example, a $2M plan needed about $16.5M of new pipeline from a team that generated $6M of pipeline last quarter, which showed the miss before the quarter began. - **Let buyer evidence decide commit.** Peter Kazanjy ties every stage to a buyer action you can verify, and keeps a deal in commit only with a mutual close plan and 1:1 contact with the economic buyer and one other stakeholder. Kris Rudeegraap drops deals well past the median cycle out of commit. - **Keep the history and score the call.** Andy Mowat snapshots opportunity history into a data warehouse, then compares the leaders' week-2, week-6 and week-10 calls and the RevOps model with final bookings. He sets the accuracy band from the team's own past misses. ### [Which B2B funnel conversion rates are worth targeting]() Few stages have a public benchmark, so set targets from your own cohorts, split by source, and treat the group's numbers as working checks. - **One range has support.** Guillaume Cabane uses 40 to 60% of first sales conversations becoming a real opportunity as a working heuristic, and says it applies to that step only. - **Work back from the win rate.** Cassie Young uses a 25% opportunity-to-win rate as a planning case, which needs 4x pipeline coverage. Andy Mowat pairs each stage rate with time in stage, since deals created six months ago say little about next quarter. - **Check founder-led sales by cohort.** In one example Peter Kazanjy gave, 10 first meetings yield about 7 second meetings and 2 or 3 customers. He looks for 15 to 25% first-meeting-to-customer conversion, and wants 50 to 100 at-bats before trusting a rate. - **Count inbound and outbound separately.** Kyle Poyar doesn't have a comparable public benchmark split by source. He counts demo requests or targeted accounts through to qualified opportunities, with the same opportunity criteria for both. At Warmly, paid demos booked dozens of meetings, and many lacked fit or urgency. ### [Pacing founder cold outreach across email, LinkedIn and phone]() Keep the sequence to a handful of touches across email, LinkedIn and phone, make each touch add something, and stop until the account shows a new signal. - **Set a pace, then stop.** Kyle Poyar starts with a burst of four or five touches across channels in about 10 days, then recycles the account on a signal such as a site visit. Andy Mowat would space emails about a week apart, because most executives scan filtered mail in weekly batches. - **Make every follow-up add something.** Andy adds a data point, a customer story or an intro. Kris Rudeegraap builds the sequence around one personal, unbranded gift: a message before it, the gift itself, then a call the day after it arrives. - **Reach more than one person.** Guillaume Cabane would spend the extra touches on a champion and two decision-makers instead of a fourth email to one silent VP. At Attention, a campaign built that way, with messages tied to specific signals, produced $1.2M in pipeline in 4 months. - **End with a yes or a no.** Peter Kazanjy’s cadence closes with a direct “top-3 priority?” ask and a break-up email, and he logs a no as a disqualification reason. He tells founders to write every touch by hand for the first 100 accounts, and Kyle changed his answer to agree. ### [Setting the SDR-to-AE ratio from capacity math]() Work out the ratio from each AE's pipeline gap, and measure SDRs on the opportunities AEs accept. - **Run the capacity math.** Andy Mowat divides AE quota by ACV and win rate, subtracts what inbound and partners source, and divides the rest by what one ramped SDR produces. Kyle Poyar treats 1:1 as a starting default until there is conversion data. - **Wait until the motion works.** Cassie Young would build no SDR layer at seed or early Series A. Peter Kazanjy adds the first SDR once the motion is proven and the seller's calendar is the bottleneck, and checks AE win rates rep by rep before adding more. - **Measure SDRs on accepted opportunities.** Andy would have AEs accept or reject every SDR-sourced meeting in the CRM with a reason, and pay SDRs on the same definition. - **Plan the ratio and the total separately.** Kris Rudeegraap would start below 1:1, because Clay and LLM-personalized outbound let pipeline grow faster than headcount. Kyle agreed once the workflow is AI-assisted, and would let AE hiring set the total: in his job-post data, AI companies grew SDR headcount 106% in a year. ## Participants - [Kyle Poyar]() — Founder of Growth Unhinged. Former Operating Partner at OpenView - [Peter Kazanjy]() — Founder of Founder-Led Sales Factory. Co-founder of Atrium and author of Founding Sales - [Andy Mowat]() — CMO at Inflection.io. Former VP of Revenue Operations at Carta - [Kris Rudeegraap]() — Co-CEO and co-founder of Sendoso. Former Senior Account Executive at Talkdesk - [Cassie Young]() — Partner at Primary Venture Partners. Former Chief Commercial Officer at Sailthru - [Guillaume "G" Cabane]() — Co-founder of HyperGrowth Partners. Former VP of Growth at Segment --- Copyright © 2026 Super Me Network, Inc. All rights reserved. | [Terms of Service](https://www.superme.ai/terms) | [Privacy Policy](https://www.superme.ai/privacy)