Tech sales as the Growth Engine

Sales and revenue are the engine of growth. The product roadmap is the destination.

What happens when tech businesses apply more sophistication to the destination than to the engine that funds it?

Discovery: the comfortable lie in tech sales

Tech sales’ favourite illusion: “We’ve done Discovery.”

Most tech sales teams will tell you they’re good at Discovery. They’ve got notes. They’ve got pain points. They’ve got a list of “compelling events” neatly logged in the CRM.

And yet…

Founders still feel the need to step into deals. Demos still feel impressive rather than coherent. Proposals still don’t quite sound like the client they were written for.

Tech companies will spend months refining product roadmaps – debating trade-offs, dependencies and risk.

But when it comes to sales – the engine that funds every one of those ambitions – the thinking is often far less sophisticated. Speed is rewarded. Tips and trick shared. Depth is optional. Judgement is assumed.

Much of what passes for Discovery in tech isn’t Discovery at all, it’s information gathering.

Discovery isn’t about collecting answers. It’s about understanding how a business actually works when things go wrong. If your Discovery notes could be lifted from one opportunity and dropped into another with only minor edits, you haven’t done Discovery — you’ve done admin.

Real Discovery creates specificity. It makes the sale harder to fake, but easier to trust. Comfort is rarely a sign you’re learning anything important.

Discovery: pain isn’t the point in tech sales

Discovery isn’t about what hurts. It’s about what breaks.

Tech sales has become oddly obsessed with pain points.

“What’s painful?”

“Where does it hurt?”

“What keeps you awake at night?”

Useful questions — but dangerously incomplete. Pain is just a symptom. What matters is where that pain travels.

• Does it slow decisions?
• Create risk?
• Distort reporting?
• Drain senior time?
• Undermine confidence with customers or investors?

Most sales conversations stop far too early – at the point where the client has answered politely and the seller feels they’ve “got enough”.

But Discovery isn’t finished when the client has spoken. It’s finished when the consequences are clear. This is where tech sales often falters.

Not because sales people aren’t trying – but because they haven’t been trained to think systemically about how operational issues cascade into commercial ones. Lists of pain points don’t build conviction. Understanding what breaks if nothing changes does.

Value: the word everyone in tech sales uses

Tech sales talks about value constantly, which is precisely why it’s so rarely clear.

Most sales conversations include the word “value” somewhere. Often early. Often confidently. But when you listen closely, what’s usually being described isn’t value at all. It’s capability.

What the product does. What it enables. What it’s good at. That’s not value. That’s potential. Value only exists once someone has connected a specific operational reality to a meaningful commercial consequence — and a decision that now matters.

This is where many tech sales conversations quietly stall. Sales teams are encouraged to ‘articulate value’, but rarely taught how to reason it through. So value becomes something you assert, not something you can defend. If value feels slightly optimistic rather than inevitable, it usually is. You can’t fuel an engine with aspiration alone.

ROI isn’t a spreadsheet problem

ROI isn’t maths. It’s judgement.

Most tech companies can build a perfectly respectable ROI model. Assumptions neatly listed. Savings confidently projected. Numbers doing what numbers are supposed to do. And still, deals hesitate.

ROI doesn’t fail when the maths is wrong. It fails when the thinking upstream was never solid enough to support it.

Good ROI comes from judgement: knowing which problems actually matter; where cost, risk or delay really bites. And what changes if a decision isn’t made.

When judgement is missing, ROI becomes decorative. Something added late to reassure everyone involved. Conviction doesn’t come from numbers alone. It comes from a shared understanding of consequence.

Demo: the moment everyone misreads

“They loved the demo.”

Possibly the most misleading sentence in tech sales. Demos are usually where confidence peaks. The product behaved. The features landed. Everyone nodded at the right moments.

And yet… weeks later, nothing moves.

A good demo isn’t one that feels impressive. It’s one that feels coherent. Impressive demos showcase capability. Coherent demos make sense of a client’s world.

When the engine isn’t properly tuned upstream, demos become decoration – impressive, but inefficient. If a demo needs enthusiasm to carry it, understanding hasn’t done enough of the work.

Demo: when misunderstanding looks like momentum

Demos don’t lose deals. Misunderstanding does.

Busy demo calendars. Positive feedback. Follow-up questions…All of it looks like momentum.

But often, the buyer and seller are nodding at different things. The sales team thinks they’re demonstrating value. The buyer is still trying to work out whether this really fits. So momentum becomes fragile. It moves forward until it doesn’t.  Until an uncomfortable challenge is raised or the prospect disengages.

The misunderstanding didn’t start in the demo. The demo simply exposed it.

Proposal: the autopsy stage

Proposals are where the truth finally appears. Up until this point, a sale can survive on momentum.

But the proposal is unforgiving. It forces clarity. It exposes assumptions. It makes gaps visible. This is why founders read proposals and feel a flicker of unease — even when the deal feels alive.

Discounting usually starts here. Not because the buyer is difficult – but because conviction and value were never fully built. By the time a proposal is being negotiated, the real mistake is already months old. Proposals don’t create problems. They reveal the ones that were politely ignored earlier.

When this goes wrong, everyone pays

This isn’t just a sales issue. It’s a business one.

When Discovery is shallow and value is vague, the consequences ripple. Pipelines look busy but are fragile. Sales cycles stretch. Forecasts wobble. Revenue recognition becomes unpredictable. Implementation teams inherit ambiguity. Client trust erodes quietly.

Founders feel this instinctively. It’s why they step into deals. Why they rewrite proposals. Why they carry risk in their heads long after it should belong to the system.

When the engine falters, everything downstream feels heavier.

Closing: what tech sales requires

Good tech sales isn’t about confidence. It’s about judgement.

Judgement to slow down. Judgement to probe. Judgement to walk away. Judgement to know what matters.

Most tech sales problems aren’t skill gaps. They’re judgement gaps. Product roadmaps are treated as engineering problems.

Sales is often treated as an energy problem. More activity. More urgency. More push.

But growth doesn’t come from revving harder. It comes from building an engine capable of sustaining the journey.

January is often framed as a moment for more activity. For many tech businesses, the real acceleration comes from raising the quality of thinking at the very start of the sale.

Everything else follows.

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