Observations
How can you validate a segment without a CRM or a marketer?
It’s common to overhear conversations like this inside companies. The Chief Business Development Officer (CBDO) says, “We need to test a hypothesis about entering the financial sector.” The response is: “Great idea, but first, we need to implement a CRM, set up end-to-end analytics, and hire a marketer. Let’s revisit this in six months.”
As a result of this “instrumental hunger” (the desire to first build the ideal infrastructure), valuable hypotheses sit on the shelf for months or even years. The company doesn’t progress because it waits for the perfect tools.
This is a fundamental mistake. At the early stage of validation, when your goal is to receive a signal from the market rather than to scale, expensive tools are unnecessary and harmful. They complicate the process, forcing you to think about settings instead of customers and distracting you from the main thing: direct, honest dialogue with the market.
This article is a “guerrilla” guide to segment validation for those with nothing but a goal. We will present a step-by-step framework requiring only three things: a clear mind, a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account, and a simple Google Sheets table. These are all you need to receive a “yes” or “no” signal from the market.
Tool #1: Your mind. Formulate a hypothesis.
The most powerful tool in your arsenal is not software, but clear thinking. Before opening LinkedIn or Google Sheets, clearly define what you are going to test. Without this, all subsequent actions will be random and chaotic.
To transform a vague idea into a functional experimental plan, we employ a specific hypothesis formula. This formula forces you to think through all the key elements in advance.
“We believe that Segment X will use Product Y to solve Problem Z because it will provide Value W. We will consider the hypothesis validated if [success criteria].”
Completing this formula is not bureaucracy, but rather your first and most important paper-based test of the idea. It forces you to answer critical questions honestly. Do you clearly understand the segment (not “fintech,” but “neobanks with an audience of up to one million users”)? Do you understand the problem from their perspective? Can you express the value in measurable terms? Most importantly, do you have a clear, binary success criterion that will prevent you from fooling yourself by mistaking “polite interest” for real demand?
Tool #2: LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Creating a “smart” list.
Once you have formulated a hypothesis, you need people to test it with. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is essentially the world’s most powerful and up-to-date B2B database. At the research stage, it completely replaces both CRMs and expensive contact search tools.
With its advanced filters (industry, geography, company size, job title, and profile keywords), you can accomplish in one hour what would have taken weeks before. Create a hyper-targeted list of 50–100 companies and identify two to three decision makers in each. This is your “miniature market,” on which you will run your experiment.
Tool #3: Google Sheets. Your experiment’s “control panel”.
You don’t need a complex CRM to manage 15–20 conversations. All you need is a simple but properly structured Google Sheets table. It will become your “control panel.”
Create three sheets:
- “Target List” Here, you will copy the contacts found on LinkedIn (Company, Name, Title, and Link).
- “Outreach Funnel” Here, you track the status of every contact (New, Messaged, Meeting Scheduled, Interview Completed).
- “Interview Results” Here, you record the most important information: whether the “pain” was confirmed, whether there is readiness for commitment, and the most striking quotes.
This simple table provides 100% transparency and allows you to see your experiment’s progress at any time.
Process: Ten conversations that decide everything
With your hypothesis, list, and “control panel” in hand, you can begin the process. The process consists of steps that are already familiar to us. First, you create a simple MVO (Minimum Viable Offer) in the form of five slides. Then, you write ultra-personalized LinkedIn messages from the perspective of a learner. Finally, you conduct 10–15 short “problem interviews.”
The key point is that after each call, you immediately log the results in your Google Sheet. This discipline transforms a series of conversations into a dataset suitable for analysis.
First the signal, then the tools.
A lack of CRM or marketers is not an excuse for inaction. On the contrary, it is an opportunity to conduct a “clean” experiment focused on direct dialogue with the customer, not tool configuration.
Expensive systems are necessary for scaling a validated, proven model. To find this model, you only need your intelligence, LinkedIn, and Google Sheets.
What hypothesis have you put off due to a “lack of resources”? Save this article as a manual and try testing it using this “guerrilla” method. You’ll be surprised at how much you can learn without spending a dime.
