Product–Market fit: The hidden lever behind new business

More pitches, more networking, more outreach and more activity - all these things matter.

But there is another lever that can make a much bigger difference: product–market fit.

And PMF isn’t simply about having a good product.

It sits at the intersection of your offer, the customer, market conditions, competitive positioning and timing. Get those things right and new business can feel surprisingly natural. Get them wrong and even an exceptional sales team can grind through endless meetings without creating meaningful traction.

Same consultancy, different country

Imagine you have built a strong marketing consultancy in the UK over the past five years.

The work is good. The team is strong. The pricing is competitive. Existing clients value what you do and are increasing their spend.

Yet winning new clients is painfully slow.

Prospects hesitate. Procurement processes drag on. Pitches are competitive. Incumbents are difficult to displace. Every new win feels disproportionately hard.

Now imagine taking exactly the same consultancy into another market—say, the UAE.

Suddenly, conversations move faster. Clients are more receptive. The pipeline builds. The same capabilities that struggled to differentiate you in one market are exactly what customers are looking for in another.

What changed?

Not the people. Not necessarily the pitch. And certainly not the quality of the work.

The fit changed.

In the UK, you may be operating in a mature and crowded market. Buyers have established agency relationships, sophisticated internal teams and plenty of alternative suppliers. The problem you solve may be real, but it is not necessarily urgent.

In a rapidly expanding market, businesses may be building capabilities quickly and looking externally for expertise they cannot—or do not want to—build internally.

Your service did not suddenly become better.

It landed somewhere the problem was bigger, the need was more immediate and the timing was better.

With product–market fit, new business is about capturing demand. Without it, new business becomes an exercise in manufacturing demand.

The high-street lesson

You can see the same phenomenon on almost any high street.

There is often one retail unit that seems to have a different occupant every year. A coffee shop opens. It closes. A boutique replaces it. Six months later, something else arrives.

It is unlikely that every operator was incompetent or every product was poor.

Sometimes the fit simply wasn’t there.

The concept might have been good, but not for that location, customer base, price point or moment in time.

Businesses make the same mistake.

When sales are difficult, the instinct is often to change the sales process: hire another salesperson, increase outbound activity, rewrite the deck, run more campaigns or attend more events.

Sometimes that is exactly what is required.

But sometimes the sales process is not the problem.

The market is telling you something.

Being good isn’t always enough

This is particularly important in services businesses.

Your product isn’t simply what you do. It is also who is delivering it, how you are perceived and whether the customer believes you are the right organisation to solve their particular problem.

You may genuinely produce better work than a much larger competitor.

But if the buyer wants supplier scale, international coverage, an established brand or the reassurance of an incumbent relationship, being “better” may not be enough.

In fact, your point of difference may not be something that particular buyer values at all.

This can be difficult to recognise because founders naturally focus on improving the proposition.

Sometimes the proposition is already good.

The problem is your position in the market.

And if you keep finishing second in pitches, losing to the same type of competitor or hearing variations of the same objection, the answer may not be another iteration of the proposal.

It may be worth asking whether you are repeatedly trying to sell from a position where winning is structurally difficult.

Product–market fit isn’t static

There is another complication: PMF changes.

A business can have strong product–market fit and then gradually lose it.

Competitors arrive. Customers build capabilities internally. Technology changes what buyers need. Procurement consolidates suppliers. A once-differentiated service becomes commoditised.

Equally, a service that struggled to gain traction five years ago can suddenly become highly relevant because the market moves towards it.

AI is providing plenty of examples of both.

This is why founders should not think of PMF as something achieved once and then permanently retained.

Markets move.

The job is to keep moving with them—or occasionally move to a different market altogether.

The questions worth asking

If new business is consistently difficult, don’t automatically respond by increasing sales activity.

Ask whether the underlying conditions are right.

Are we solving a problem customers consider sufficiently painful or important? Are we targeting buyers who genuinely value what makes us different? Is there enough urgency to change supplier or adopt something new? Are we competing in an over-served market? Do we have the credibility, scale or positioning this particular customer expects?

And perhaps most importantly:

Are we trying to improve our sales execution when the real problem is product–market fit?

Hustle matters. Great sales execution matters.

But neither can indefinitely compensate for poor fit.

When the fit is right, sales activity creates momentum. When it isn’t, activity can simply create more opportunities to hear “no”.