In most B2B SaaS companies, two separate discovery processes operate in parallel without ever converging. The product team runs discovery to understand user needs and validate solutions. The sales team runs discovery to qualify prospects and understand buying criteria. Both are doing important work. But they are doing it in isolation, and the insights from each process rarely flow to the other.

At PR_D_CT DAY 2025 in Louvain-la-Neuve, Jeroen Van Loock, co-founder of Homy, delivered the closing talk of the day on a topic that resonated deeply with the audience: how to align product and sales discovery so that both functions benefit from each other's intelligence. Homy, a Belgian proptech company, learned this lesson the hard way after discovering that their product team and sales team were having overlapping conversations with the same prospects without sharing any of the insights.

For the product professionals in the audience, many of whom have an uneasy relationship with their sales counterparts, Jeroen's talk was an invitation to rethink discovery not as a product-only activity but as a company-wide capability that product teams should lead rather than own exclusively.

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Original Presentation Slides

Download the slides from this talk as presented at the gathering.

The Discovery Gap Between Product and Sales

Jeroen begins by mapping the typical discovery workflows in a B2B SaaS company. On the product side, discovery involves user interviews, prototype testing, usage analytics, and problem validation. On the sales side, discovery involves qualification calls, needs assessments, competitive positioning, and stakeholder mapping. Both processes generate rich insights about what customers need, what they value, and what they are willing to pay for.

The problem, Jeroen argues, is that these insights are trapped in their respective silos. The product team learns about user needs but does not hear about buying objections. The sales team learns about purchasing criteria but does not feed this information back to the product roadmap. The result is a product team that builds features the market struggles to buy and a sales team that sells capabilities the product cannot deliver.

“At Homy, we discovered that our product team and our sales team were talking to the same prospects in the same week, asking different questions and getting different answers. Neither team knew the other was having these conversations. We were paying twice for half the insight.”

- Jeroen Van Loock

Jeroen quantifies the cost of this gap. At Homy, he estimates that duplicated discovery efforts consumed roughly twenty percent of both the product team's and sales team's time. More importantly, the lack of shared intelligence led to product bets that solved real user problems but were positioned in ways that did not align with how prospects made purchasing decisions. The features were valuable but unsellable because the product team had not understood the buying context.

Building a Unified Discovery Process

Jeroen describes the unified discovery process Homy implemented to bridge the gap between product and sales. The process does not merge the two functions. Product and sales retain their distinct responsibilities. Instead, it creates structured touchpoints where insights flow between the two teams at specific moments in the discovery lifecycle.

Shared discovery briefs: before engaging a prospect in discovery, both the product and sales teams contribute to a shared brief that outlines what each function needs to learn from the conversation

Joint discovery calls: for strategic prospects, product and sales participate in the same calls rather than scheduling separate conversations, reducing the burden on the prospect while increasing the richness of insights

Weekly insight synchronisation: a thirty-minute weekly meeting where product and sales share the three most important things they learned from customer and prospect conversations that week

Shared tagging in CRM: discovery insights from both teams are tagged with common categories in the CRM so that patterns can be identified across the product-sales boundary

infoDiscovery is a team sport

Jeroen emphasises that unified discovery does not mean product managers become salespeople or vice versa. Each function brings different expertise to the conversation. The product manager listens for unmet needs and workflow pain. The salesperson listens for decision criteria and competitive positioning. Sitting in the same conversation means both perspectives are captured simultaneously.

He shares that the biggest resistance to unified discovery came from the sales team, which initially feared that having product managers in sales calls would slow down the sales process. In practice, the opposite happened. Prospects appreciated the depth of understanding that a joint conversation provided, and deal cycles shortened because fewer follow-up calls were needed.

Product-Informed Selling and Sales-Informed Building

Jeroen explores the reciprocal benefits of aligned discovery. When sales insights flow into product, the product team builds features that are not just useful but also sellable. When product insights flow into sales, the sales team can articulate value in terms that align with how the product actually solves the customer's problem rather than relying on generic pitch decks.

The proptech positioning pivot

Homy's product team had built an energy efficiency analysis tool that they positioned as a cost-saving feature. Through the unified discovery process, the sales team surfaced that prospects in the real estate sector were not making purchasing decisions based on cost savings. They were making them based on regulatory compliance deadlines. The product was the same, but the positioning shifted from cost saving to compliance readiness, and conversion rates improved substantially. This insight would never have reached the product team without the unified discovery process.

Jeroen argues that this kind of insight, where product value and buying motivation are different, is common in B2B markets but rarely surfaced when product and sales operate independently. Product teams tend to position features based on the problem they solve. Buyers often choose products based on different criteria such as compliance, integration requirements, or internal champion dynamics. Unified discovery exposes these gaps before they become conversion problems.

lightbulbThe positioning feedback loop

Jeroen suggests that product teams should treat positioning as a product artefact that is iterated on continuously, informed by sales discovery insights. How the product is described and sold should be as deliberately designed as how it is built. When positioning is an afterthought, even excellent products underperform commercially.

Practical Steps Toward Product-Sales Alignment

Jeroen closes with actionable steps for product teams that want to move toward unified discovery. He acknowledges that the relationship between product and sales is often tense and that building alignment requires patience, mutual respect, and a willingness to step into each other's world.

check_circleStart by attending sales calls as a silent observer for four weeks. Listen to the language prospects use, the objections they raise, and the criteria they evaluate. Do not contribute or redirect. Just learn

check_circleShare your product discovery findings with the sales team in their language: frame insights in terms of deals, objections, and competitive positioning rather than user stories and personas

check_circleCreate a shared vocabulary for customer problems so that product and sales use the same terms when describing the same challenges, reducing miscommunication and enabling faster insight transfer

check_circleMeasure product-sales alignment explicitly by tracking how often product insights are cited in sales materials and how often sales insights are referenced in product decisions

The talk ends on a note that captures the spirit of the entire PR_D_CT DAY conference in Louvain-la-Neuve: product management is not a solo discipline. It is a collaborative practice that extends beyond the product team into every function that touches the customer. For the Francophone product community, Jeroen's closing talk serves as both a practical guide and a philosophical reframing of what product discovery can be when it is done as a company-wide effort rather than a team-level exercise.

Rethinking Discovery: Aligning Product and Sales

Original Presentation Slides

The Discovery Gap Between Product and Sales

Building a Unified Discovery Process

infoDiscovery is a team sport

Product-Informed Selling and Sales-Informed Building

The proptech positioning pivot

lightbulbThe positioning feedback loop

Practical Steps Toward Product-Sales Alignment

This article is for Consortium members

Key Takeaways

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