Tech Sales Capstone — Work One Deal End to End: From Cold Prospect to Closed-Won

The idea: Knowledge becomes skill only when you do the work. In the capstone you adopt one real SaaS product as the thing you sell, pick a target market, and carry a single set of accounts through the entire sales motion an SDR-to-AE actually runs — cold outreach, discovery, demo, objection handling, and a forecasted close. By the end you'll have a portfolio of the real artifacts a rep produces every day, and it proves — to yourself and to employers — that you can actually fill a pipeline, qualify hard, sell on value, and forecast like a professional, not just describe how selling works.

How it works: Each deliverable unlocks after the syllabus topic that teaches its skill. You produce the artifact (a template is provided in ../templates/), submit it, and the app's AI reviews it against a rubric, gives you specific feedback, and lets you revise until it's solid. Finished deliverables assemble into your portfolio.

Your scenario (this is your deal)

You are a new Sales Development Rep at Lumadesk, a B2B SaaS startup that sells an AI-powered customer-support helpdesk — shared inbox, ticketing, and AI reply drafting — priced around $40 per agent/month, landing roughly $18k–$60k ARR per deal. Your manager hands you a territory: mid-market companies (50–500 employees) in e-commerce and online services whose support teams are drowning in tickets.

Your named target account is GearGrid, a fast-growing 220-person direct-to-consumer outdoor-gear retailer that just doubled its order volume, is hiring three support agents, and whose Trustpilot reviews complain about slow response times — a textbook "why now." You'll work GearGrid (and a short list of look-alike accounts) from cold outreach through discovery, demo, objection handling, and a forecasted close — exactly as you would on the job.

You keep the same product, the same territory, and the same lead account for every deliverable, so the artifacts stack into one coherent deal story instead of six disconnected exercises.

The deliverables (your capstone arc)

Each deliverable maps to the real topic that teaches its skill and to the artifact a working rep would hand their manager.

#	Deliverable	Unlocks after	The skill it proves
1	ICP & Prospect List (Account Plan)	Topic 5 (Prospecting and outreach)	Knowing exactly who to sell to and why now
2	Personalized Multi-Touch Outreach Sequence	Topic 5 (Prospecting and outreach)	Filling the pipeline by leading with the prospect's problem
3	Discovery Call Plan & Qualification Notes	Topic 6 (Discovery and qualification)	Asking, listening, and qualifying hard with BANT
4	Tailored Demo Script & Objection-Handling Playbook	Topic 7 (Demos, objections, and closing)	Selling outcomes, handling pushback, and asking for the close
5	Pipeline Tracker & Honest Forecast	Topic 8 (Quota and sales metrics)	Forecasting and working backward from quota to activity
6	Sales Portfolio & 'Why Me' Pitch	Topic 10 (Landing the tech sales job)	Packaging the deal story and selling yourself for the role

Each builds on the last: your ICP tells you who to target, which feeds the outreach sequence that books the meeting, which becomes the discovery call that surfaces the pain, which shapes the demo and objection playbook, which rolls into the pipeline and forecast, which all gets packaged into the portfolio and pitch. Together they tell one coherent story about how you worked the GearGrid deal from cold to closed.

The deliverables in detail

1 — ICP & Prospect List (Account Plan) · after Topic 5 · ~75 min A one-page Ideal Customer Profile plus a researched list of 10 target accounts and named contacts, each with a specific "why now" trigger and the buying-committee role (champion, economic buyer, user) to approach.

2 — Personalized Multi-Touch Outreach Sequence · after Topic 5 · ~75 min A 5–7 touch outreach sequence — cold email, follow-ups, a LinkedIn message, and a cold-call opener script — personalized to your top account, each touch leading with the prospect's problem and ending in one low-friction CTA.

3 — Discovery Call Plan & Qualification Notes · after Topic 6 · ~60 min A discovery call plan of 8–10 open-ended, non-leading questions, plus filled-in call notes that qualify the deal against BANT and quantify the pain (e.g., hours/dollars lost), ending with a clear qualify-in or qualify-out decision.

4 — Tailored Demo Script & Objection-Handling Playbook · after Topic 7 · ~90 min A demo script that shows only the 3–4 capabilities tied to the discovered pain (outcomes, not a feature tour), plus a playbook of 5 likely objections with acknowledge-understand-respond-confirm responses and a confident closing ask.

5 — Pipeline Tracker & Honest Forecast · after Topic 8 · ~60 min A CRM-style pipeline tracker covering your accounts with stage, deal size (ARR), next step, and close probability, plus a short forecast and a working-backward activity math from quota to required meetings and outreach.

6 — Sales Portfolio & 'Why Me' Pitch · after Topic 10 · ~50 min A one-page portfolio summary linking all five artifacts into one coherent deal story, plus a 60-second written "why tech sales, why me" pitch that reframes your background around drive, communication, resilience, and results with quantified bullets.

What "done" looks like

A complete capstone is six artifacts about one deal, each passing its rubric, assembled into a portfolio you can link from your resume and walk through in interviews. When you reach the interview prep, you'll practice presenting these artifacts the way you would to a hiring manager — and they double as your evidence in the mock cold-call, mock-discovery, behavioral, and sales-metrics role-plays that decide most entry-level loops.

Tips

• Keep it real and specific. "Reach out to some companies" is weak; "GearGrid doubled order volume, is hiring three agents, and has Trustpilot reviews about slow replies — so I lead with response time" is a rep thinking.
• Sell on value, not features. Every artifact should tie back to a quantified pain (tickets, hours, dollars, churned customers), not to what Lumadesk can do.
• Reuse your earlier work. The trigger you found in your ICP should show up in your outreach; the pain you quantified in discovery should drive your demo and your forecast — graders (and hiring managers) love a coherent thread.
• Use the templates in ../templates/ as starting points, and revise based on the AI feedback rather than aiming for perfect on the first try (that's the whole loop).