I just wrapped a SPRINT Reset with a founder who had everything most of us want.
A product that works.
A demo that makes people lean in.
Buyers saying they wished they’d had this at every sales job they’d ever held.
And deals that went nowhere.
A SPRINT Reset is a week of pressure testing a go-to-market motion across six dimensions: speed, problem, results, implementation, niche, and trust. We’re not trying to fix six things. We’re looking for the one constraint that’s actually holding everything back.
This founder came in thinking he knew what it was. Most of us do.
Great demos. Lots of interest. Nothing closing. The instinct is almost always the same: we need more at the top of the funnel. More meetings. More outbound.
It’s almost never a volume problem.
When the demo lands and deals still don’t close, buyers are curious, not convinced. Adding pipeline doesn’t fix that. It just gives you more calls that end the same way.
Here’s where the bottleneck actually was.
They came to be educated. He educated them.
Buyers weren’t taking the meeting because something was broken. They were taking it because everyone has been told to figure out AI. Everyone feels behind. Nobody wants to admit they don’t know. So they take meetings to learn.
That’s not a buying signal. That’s curiosity.
And he met curiosity with a great education. He walked them through the product and showed them what good looks like. They left saying, “This was really interesting. Let’s reconnect in six months.”
Over and over and over.
You can’t blame the buyer for that. They told you why they showed up. The job is to turn an education call into a business call. That doesn’t happen in the demo. It happens in the first five minutes.
The opening was abstract.
Calls started with a big idea about what the product was. It sounds visionary. But when you open with abstraction, the buyer has to do the work of figuring out how it applies to them.
You could hear it. “So what would this replace?”
That question is a tell. The buyer is trying to make sense of you. And the minute they’re making sense of you, they’re leading the call. You’re not.
The wow came 20 minutes in. And wow still wasn’t enough.
Every call had a moment where the buyer stopped processing and started reacting. You could feel it. One buyer immediately pictured a colleague using it on a live deal.
But that moment was showing up 20 minutes in. And even when it landed, it didn’t close.
The data created conviction.
The demo created excitement.
Neither created urgency.
Urgency has to exist before the wow. If you don’t know what they’re trying to solve, the wow has nothing to attach to. You’re demoing and hoping they trip over a problem along the way.
That’s not selling. That’s being a tour guide.
So the week wasn’t about a better demo. The demo was fine. The week was about everything that has to happen before it.
Hold up a mirror first.
Instead of opening with what you built, open with what you see.
Not a question. Not a pitch. An observation about their world that they’ll recognize before you finish the sentence.
The structure is simple:
“Most [people in your role] we talk to [are dealing with this]. They think the problem is X. It usually turns out to be Y.”
Then stop. Let them react.
You’re not interviewing them. You’re showing them you’ve seen this movie before.
It’s a hypothesis, and it’s okay to be wrong. If you’re right, they lean in. If you’re wrong, they tell you what’s actually going on. Either way, you’ve got something real to work with, right?
That’s the difference between a buyer who’s being educated and a buyer who feels seen.
Find the trigger before you demo.
Problems that have existed forever don’t create urgency. People have workarounds. What creates urgency is change: a new product launch, a new methodology, a wave of new hires, a mandate with a date on it.
For this founder, we made it a rule. If none of those is on the table, we don’t demo.
Instead, we flip it. “Sounds like things are going really well. I’m not sure we should even be talking.”
They’ll push back. They always do. And what they tell you next is the real reason they took the meeting.
Sell to the person who feels the problem.
A lot of his meetings were with people researching the problem on behalf of someone else. They’ll take meetings all day long because they have to learn. But they don’t move budget. The person who moves is the one whose number is at risk.
Say the objection before they think it.
Every buyer has a reason they’re quietly deciding not to buy. “I don’t have anyone to run this.” “Am I admitting my last purchase was a mistake?” They rarely say it out loud. They just go quiet and don’t call back.
Name it first, and you stop being a vendor. You become someone who understands their business.
Deliver the how before the number.
Most of us lead with the result. “Customers see a 30% lift.” “We cut ramp time in half.”
It sounds strong. It lands like a marketing line.
Everybody has a number. Nobody knows how you got there.
So flip the order:
What you found.
What you changed.
What happened.
Then the number.
Same result. Now it’s believable.
A number on its own is interesting. The how is what makes someone believe it will happen for them.
None of this is unique to him. I see it with almost every founder I work with who’s selling something genuinely good.
The better the product, the easier it is to let the product do the talking.
But the product can’t tell you why they’re here.
It only takes 4 hours of your time and you can learn what’s holding your business back. Stop guessing and let me take a look.