The Mom Test Beats BANT for Early-Stage B2B SaaS

Why most sales questions sabotage early-stage SaaS B2B — and how to fix them.

Image created by the author. And yes, I’ve been in both pictures.

I’ve listened to hundreds of discovery calls across four B2B SaaS startups I’ve worked at or co-founded. The pattern is brutal: smart founders crush these conversations, extracting insights that shape the product and close deals. Then they hire their first sales person, and suddenly every “qualified” prospect disappears into three-month “evaluation cycles” that end with “we’ve decided to build this internally” or “budget got reallocated.”

The problem isn’t the sales rep’s fault — it’s that we’ve handed them enterprise qualification frameworks designed for mature products and established markets. But when you have 18 months of runway between funding rounds, you can’t afford the luxury of BANT theater. You need to separate real pain from polite interest, fast, before you burn through cash optimizing for phantom demand.

Here’s what I learned: Rob Fitzpatrick’s Mom Test isn’t just a customer development book — it’s the conversational foundation that makes every other sales framework actually work.

Without it, even the best qualification framework won’t save you. Frameworks like MEDDIC, SPIN, BANT, and Challenger tell you what qualification data to collect. The Mom Test tells you how to get it without…