Fast Forward – Introduction to Teaching Materials on B2B Sales for Startups

As operators-turned-business angels, we invest our own money in startups and hold a combined portfolio of more than 30 companies. To date, we have discussed the “how-to” of company building and sales activities with hundreds of founders.

In our conversations, we found that selling innovation to corporate customers (business-to-business, or B2B) is one of the hardest nuts to crack for founders.

Why and how we wrote Fast Forward

Hardly a day goes by where a startup team doesn’t approach us with a sales-related problem. This can be anything – from failing to generate excitement with the customers to endlessly long sales cycles and salespeople that don’t live up to their promise.

Not surprisingly, when Matthias held a workshop at Martin’s deep tech incubator XPRENEURS on “The road to €1 million B2B revenue,” the participants were excited about learning more. However, neither of us was aware of a comprehensive and consistent source to guide the founders toward a more structured B2B sales approach.

Following our own advice, we set out to test, sharpen, and validate our ideas on B2B sales with startup founders from our network.

The result of that work is our recent book Fast Forward: Accelerating B2B Sales for Startups. Launched in April 2021, it combines our 40 years of experience as operators in B2B sales with the insights of 32 successful founders from all stages of the journey: from €1 million to €100 million in revenue.

What’s included in the Fast Forward teaching materials

“The book’s systematic approach builds well off the foundations in Disciplined Entrepreneurship but takes it so much further for those who want to be or simply understand B2B sales professionals. It is an incredibly practical hands-on approach to improving your new or existing ventures’ ability to drive sales in a profitable and sustainable way,” says Bill Aulet.

Seeing the demand also for our teaching sessions based on the book from around the globe, we decided to follow Bill’s example and widely share our teaching materials. We feel honored that Bill decided to offer his Disciplined Entrepreneurship platform as a means for distribution. For using the materials, you need to register using the form below.

In 16 separate PPT slide sets, the Fast Forward teaching materials include all key points and illustrations from the 16 chapters of our book: from market segmentation to pricing, contract negotiation, sales process, customer conversations, pipeline management, reporting, sales organization, and customer success.

The teaching materials also feature a key element of the book: direct quotes from the 30+ interviewed B2B founders, illustrating the main lessons learned from their successes as well as failures. This includes well-known companies such as Celonis, Hybris, Peakon, Northvolt, Infarm, Clarizen, Personio, NavVis, Kinexon, Demodesk, Forto, and many more.

The book’s content is complemented in the slides by suggestions for interactive teaching elements and hands-on group work.

Like the book, the teaching materials are structured along the founder’s journey: from the first days of the company to building a sales organization that earns dozens or hundreds of millions in revenue.

How to use Fast Forward teaching materials

While Fast Forward was written with startup founders facing B2B sales challenges in mind, the teaching material is also relevant for College, MBA, and Executive MBA students as well as for aspiring founders in bootcamps, hackathons, incubators, and accelerators.

Most of the materials are already well tested in the Executive MBA of TU Munich and the XPRENEURS Incubator. They are suitable for day-long seminars, but may as well cover a semester-long course format on B2B Sales.

The exercises contained in the material are best used with the participants’ own projects/startups in mind. For students without a founding background, we recommend using sales-focused case studies, e.g.: “Sales Process Reengineering at Robin”, available at HBR.

You can find all Fast Forward teaching materials (16 chapters plus teaching notes in PPT format) for download in the Resources section.

Our book Fast Forward: Accelerating B2B Sales for Startups is available internationally in paperback and eBook format.

Let us know what you think!

Have you used our teaching materials in your course? Or are you planning to? We are constantly trying to improve and would love to hear about your experiences as a fellow educator with Fast Forward in your entrepreneurship teaching. 

Please contact us with your questions, suggestions, or feedback at hello@fastforwardbook.com or send us a message on LinkedIn. (Martin Giese and Matthias Hilpert.