From Customer Discovery to Sales: How to Turn Interest into Evidence (Pt 2)
In Part 2 of our conversation with customer discovery expert Felix Günther, we move from exploration to commitment. Felix explains
how to tell the difference between polite interest and genuine customer pull,
why the first pilot is still part of the learning process, and
how early customer success can eventually become the foundation for repeatable sales.
What does it take to turn customer interest into evidence that a market is really there?
“As long as there’s no skin in the game from the other person, their feedback and their opinion are just not trustworthy,” Felix says. “Not because they’re bad or because they want to fool you, but because it doesn’t matter to them.”
Skin in the game can mean money, but also commitment in terms of time, work and effort on the customer's side. Only then does an opinion start to look like evidence, because customer behaviour tells you more than customer compliments.
From “Interesting” to “When Can We Start?”
There is a big difference between someone who says, “That’s really interesting. Can you send me an email?” and someone who asks, “Can I bring my colleague into this? Do you have time next week? When could we start?”
In the second case, the customer wants to push the next step themselves, instead of the founder chasing them for it. That is what founders are looking for: pull.
Getting there takes patience and volume. As Felix says, “It’s just a matter of time and consistency to find these people who are intrinsically motivated.”
Your First Customer Is Still Part of Discovery
Once you find someone with genuine pull, the goal is not necessarily to maximise revenue immediately.
“From my perspective, the first customers are an extended investment period into understanding and into building the product,” Felix says. “What we want to get out of these customers is the success story for the next ones.”
That's why Felix is often happy to start with a free or low-cost trial when the customer represents a larger group the startup wants to pursue. Keeping the price small on purpose gets the pilot started fast. "And then we have a bigger worm we can put on the hook to catch bigger fish later."
There's a second reason. No first rollout goes flawlessly, whether it's the onboarding or the product itself. "If you didn't charge too much, or maybe not even at all, their willingness to accept your errors might be higher."
Free does not mean without commitment. Felix frames these trials as experiments with a clear timeframe, often around three months, with defined goals, measurements and regular feedback from the customer. A trial can also be set up to convert into a paid project once agreed milestones are reached.
There are exceptions, of course. If the pilot means a lot of work that the startup can't afford to give away, or the customer already has budget and is ready to spend it, then charging makes sense.
The real asset at the end isn't the first cash flow, it's the proof that the technology created value for a specific type of customer.
Don’t Pitch the Technology, Pitch the Success Story
Once that proof exists, the sales conversation changes.
Felix uses a simple example, borrowing the interviewer as his first customer. Imagine Stella wants to get to work faster, and the startup helps her cut her commute by 30 percent. Later, the startup meets Thomas, who has the same goal. For Thomas, the Fraunhofer partnership, the pitch award and the conference talk don't matter. Neither does whether the market is worth €7 billion or €300,000. "Either we can help him or not. It's that easy."
So Felix starts with Thomas's situation. He mirrors it back to make sure he understood it, and only then brings up Stella: ‘We worked with someone in a similar situation, and she now gets to work 30 percent faster. Would you like to hear more?’
He corrects himself on one point: this is still a pitch. "But we don't pitch ourselves, we pitch the success story."
Notice how that story is framed around a goal, not a problem. Felix is blunt about this. “Talking in problems,” he says, "is very misleading and one of the biggest diseases we have in the entrepreneurial world, because I have so many problems I don't act on."
A list of pain points your product solves invites a shrug. A customer who reached a goal that your prospect shares is much harder to ignore.
Founders Live in the Supply World
Felix describes the underlying shift as moving from supply to demand.
Supply is the founder's world: the technology, product and features the startup controls. Demand exists independently of the startup. Whether Thomas wants to get to work faster has nothing to do with whether anyone has built a technology for it.
The work of customer discovery, then, is to translate the supply into what matters to the customers who said yes the fastest. Finding the right words and materials, the hook that makes someone read the next two sentences, depends on knowing what matters to the reader.
A pitch award or grant may add some credibility and it signals that you are not a fraud, but it does not create demand.
Look for Patterns, Not Just Customers
A handful of paying customers can feel like market validation. Felix cautions that this can still be misleading.
First customers often come from the founders' network: former colleagues and study friends who buy for different reasons and use the product in different ways. The result feels like a win but it’s confusing. Imagine ten customers using your product in five different ways. One asks you to make a laser work better in rain, which would take two months, while everyone else uses it indoors. Should you build it? Without a clear pattern, Felix says, those decisions become "so, so foggy."
Five customers who share the same situation and the same reason to buy can tell you more. So Felix looks behind the customer count: Who uses the product most? Who is happiest? Which sales cycles were shortest, and why? What situation were those customers in? What triggered them to start looking?
Felix points to xG-team CipherCell as a concrete example: they encountered a customer already searching for a solution who was dissatisfied with the alternatives. The move from first contact to pilot happened unusually quickly.
“We identified the triggers,” Felix explains. “Why are they looking for it? What is the motivation behind it? Where does this pressure come from?”
The next step is to find others with a similar situation.
When Discovery Becomes Repeatable Sales
Customer discovery never disappears completely.
“We always start with discovery,” Felix says. “We always start with understanding what matters.” Only when he sees a fit does the conversation move into sales.
What changes is how much the startup already knows. After dozens of similar conversations and deals, founders know who to approach, what tends to matter and what evidence is needed to close. This highly personal process can then become more systematic, and people other than the founders can help sell.
“You know what matters for the other side. Now you know who the target is and what you need to deliver to close the deal, because you did it 50 times, 100 times.”
Felix has rough benchmarks for what that looks like. A team that has really nailed its target will see more than half of first calls turn into genuine interest, with the customer pushing for next steps. About half of those will become paying customers. The numbers vary widely, of course; a six-figure B2B enterprise deal is a different game from selling t-shirts.
He is also clear that almost no one gets there in the first year. "That would surprise me a lot," he says. For pre-seed and seed-stage founders, the benchmark that matters is still the one from the beginning: get your five calls a week.
The Bottom Line
Customer discovery is not complete when customers say they like your technology.
The stronger signals are harder to get: people introducing colleagues, investing time, agreeing to a pilot with clear goals, committing resources, paying, or otherwise pushing the process forward themselves.
That is why Felix pushes discovery closer to sales than many founders are comfortable with.
“Everyone is happy to share their opinion,” he says. “You need to make a call to action and see how they react to know if it’s actually true.”
For deep tech founders, that is the transition that matters: from people who think this is interesting to people who are actively trying to make it happen.
In Part 1, we explore a wide range of topics, including:
accepting that you do not know
understanding the customer before pitching
choosing and testing a market
personal outreach and founder-led discovery