What is the best way to research whether you have product-market fit ahead of losing/winning deals?

It’s worth doing some user testing of your prototypes or MVPs before putting a new product forward in your sales pitch. That said, to set expectations, you can’t truly gauge whether you have product-market fit until you really have put your product to test in the market, which includes running it through your sales cycles. 

Even if you can’t claim PMF at this early stage of product development, you can certainly conduct validation research to increase your confidence levels. Here are a few approaches to consider.

Check in with existing customers you trust. Consider using call transcripts to identify existing clients who have the need you are expanding to serve. See how the solution resonates with them. Then, if you can talk to some similar clients who haven’t expressed the need. Seek to understand whether they also would benefit from such a solution, and if not why not?

Build a “painted door” landing page and run it by your prospective audience in unmoderated user testing. Better yet, A/B test it in your demand gen flows! This will give you some further up-funnel data to tweak your positioning and potentially your product offering itself, before your salespeople hang their hats on it.

Conduct a market survey where you ask about key feature sets or attributes to better understand how much your audience values them. You might consider using established willingness-to-pay methodologies, as well as feature comparison methodologies like Max Diff. Market data like this can help you build confidence that what you’re building is differentiated, valuable, and solving significant enough problems for your would-be customers.