Buyers often volunteer the exact details of their problem—their project, its urgency, and their frustration with current options. However, traditional sales training teaches founders to ignore these cues, interrupt the customer, and pivot to pitching their solution, thereby missing critical information.
The difficulty of enterprise procurement is a feature, not a bug. A champion will only expend the immense internal effort to push a deal through if your solution directly unblocks a critical, unavoidable project on their to-do list. Your vision alone is not enough to motivate them.
Instead of pitching a future product, identify an enterprise champion's urgent, blocked project. Deliver the solution manually as a service first (e.g., a PDF report). This validates demand, generates revenue, and is a common path in enterprise software.
Founders seeking repeatability in enterprise sales often get stuck looking for identical job titles or departments. True repeatability comes from identifying a consistent 'project they are trying to accomplish but are blocked on,' even if the champions' roles have some idiosyncrasies.
This reframes the fundamental goal of a startup away from a supply-side focus (building) to a demand-side focus (discovery). The market's unmet need is the force that pulls a company and its product into existence, not the other way around.
For deep tech startups aiming for commercialization, validating market pull isn't a downstream activity—it's a prerequisite. Spending years in a lab without first identifying a specific customer group and the critical goal they are blocked from achieving is an enormous, avoidable risk.
While unscalable for sales, direct one-on-one interaction with early B2C customers is an invaluable learning tool. Founders like Howard Schultz of Starbucks used this approach to observe customer friction and discover what they were truly trying to accomplish, which is essential for refining the product.