I’ve sold technology to tech companies for more than a decade, and I never once called it easy.
But today is harder than anything I’ve experienced. In the past, I knew who I was selling against. I knew what their gaps were. Now there are more competitors, moving faster, and you don’t always know what you’re competing with.
Sometimes it’s a startup that didn’t exist last quarter. Sometimes it’s a feature added to something the buyer already owns. And more and more, it’s the buyer’s own team asking one question in the meeting: why don’t we just build this ourselves?
It wasn’t always this way. Tech buyers used to take a flyer on new concepts. They wanted to be first to market, and your product didn’t have to be fully baked. Whole companies were built selling to tech, then moved into other verticals.
That has flipped.
The blind spot
Here’s what I see founders missing. They’re busy building something people will want, iterating, shipping new workflows. It’s easy for them. And they forget that it’s just as easy for someone inside the buyer’s company to do the same thing.
The tools that make it fast for the founder make it fast for the customer. The moat the founder thinks they have may be a side project on someone else’s calendar.
Solution first, problem second
There’s another shift. Many of the founders I meet are searching for a problem to solve. They have a tool, or a skill, and they go looking for something to point it at. That’s different from the founders we used to see, who built from a problem they had lived.
Those earlier founders were specific. They knew what problem they solved, what had changed in the market to make it matter now, and what the triggers were: the events that turned a nuisance into something you have to fix. They knew because they’d been there.
When you come at a problem from the outside, as an intellectual exercise, it doesn’t come across as deep. And it doesn’t connect with the buyer.
What this looks like in the real world
I worked with a founder whose website and sales calls said the same thing: AI for manufacturing.
That’s a huge category, and plenty of people can lay claim to it. That was the problem. Buyers were happily taking meetings. They wanted to learn what AI could do for manufacturing. Then they never bought anything, because they’d learned enough to figure it out themselves. The founder had become a free educator.
So we flipped the script. Instead of opening with AI, the meeting started with the business being lost. Manufacturing buyers often have very specific needs, and many need an engineer to walk them through which SKU they should order. When they can’t get that help, they take their business somewhere else, and millions of dollars in lost orders walk out the door.
People started nodding. Yeah, we’re running into that too. We’re losing a lot of business.
The conversations changed. There were significantly more of them, because buyers no longer saw this vendor as an educator. They saw someone who understood the pain. And when lots of vendors could claim to solve the problem, understanding the pain made them the best qualified to solve it, or at least that’s what the buyer believed.
The SPRINT framework
This is the idea behind SPRINT, the framework I published in Harvard Business Review. It’s a 2026 take on what it takes to sell when your product isn’t always the headline.
SPRINT has six dimensions: Speed, Problem, Results, Implementation, Niche and Trust. Today I want to focus on the first one, Speed. How fast can you make a buyer feel seen?
That doesn’t mean walking in and asking, “What are your pain points? What’s keeping you up at night?” That’s discovery by script, and it sounds like you just finished a Sandler training. It means walking in with a specific pain you’ve seen across the industry, and having a conversation that makes the buyer think: this person has been here before.
Your turn
If you made it this far, here’s my challenge.
Hit reply to this email and tell me, in one or two lines, what your business does. I’ll respond with my perspective, and I’ll be looking for the pain, not the product. Your reply comes straight to my inbox and stays between us.