01ICP & Personas
The Buyer
- ICP definition - who you are actually selling to
- Buyer personas - the person in the room
- Their incentives, blockers, and career risk
- Pain mapping - what they're losing today, in their language
The situation
Good product.
Right room.
Wrong read.
Most legaltech startups lose on messaging, not product.
You've had the meeting. The managing partner was engaged. The demo landed. And then... nothing. Was it price? Timing? The tech committee? Something you said in the last five minutes?
This silence is not random.
PDF · 7 pages
The pattern
"The demo went well. And then it went quiet."
Legaltech is not a normal B2B market. Legal buyers - managing partners, GCs, Legal Ops Directors - do not decide the way any other buyer decides.
The billable-hour calculus, the risk aversion that runs bone-deep, the partner hierarchy that can quietly kill a decision for months. If you've sold to enterprise IT, CFOs, or operations leads, your instincts are partly right and partly wrong in ways that are hard to see until the pipeline tells you.
Founders iterate the message. They adjust the deck. They hire an AE who can't replicate what the founder does in a room. They burn the outbound list, and in an 800-firm market, a bad first impression does not get a second chance.
The fix is not more outbound. It is knowing exactly who you are selling to, why they care, and how to say it in a room you are not in.
The work
The GTM foundation.
Nothing else.
02Positioning & Value Prop
The Message
- Value proposition - the specific outcome
- For a specific person, vs. a specific alternative
- Positioning statement - the internal brief everything is built from
03Sales Narrative
The Narrative
- The story that works whether or not the founder is in the room
- Objection handling & competitive positioning
- Non-founder sales narrative for Seed-stage clients
What changes
Just imagine.
The meeting where the MP leans in.
You say something and the managing partner stops writing. She asks a follow-up. You know the message landed.
The AE who closes alone.
Closes a deal without the founder in the room - because the conversation you've had a hundred times is now something anyone on the team can have.
The investor Q&A.
The lead partner asks "who exactly is your buyer?" and you answer in one sentence. Not a framework. The specific answer, for your product, your market.
The positioning that holds.
Whether you're talking to a managing partner, an Innovation Director, or the CTO - the message is consistent, but delivered differently.
What founders say
"One of the strongest and most useful inputs I've ever received. We used it directly as the brief for our outbound sales program."
About
"I do this because I genuinely like to help startups. I only work with two or three new clients per quarter, when we both believe I can help."
25 years in the legal industry. Former managing partner of a boutique law firm. Former GenAI leader at Big4. Former VP of Growth at a legaltech startup with a successful exit.
Jan has been the legal buyer in the room deciding whether to spend the budget, and the vendor trying to convince that room to say yes. Most GTM advisors have been one or the other. He has been both.
If it clicks
Start with the deck.
Seven pages. The situation, the work, the two tiers, and the next steps. Read it, then decide if it's worth a 30-minute chat.