Here is a common scene on B2B sales demos:
The sales rep opens the call. They spend 2 minutes asking how the weather is.
Then they share their screen.
And for the next 28 minutes, they click through 47 different settings tabs, explaining every bell and whistle the engineering team built over the last two quarters:
- “Here you can configure automated webhook retry backoffs…”
- “Over here is the multi-tenant cluster aggregation view…”
- “And if you click this little icon, you can export an XML log file…”
By minute 15, the prospect has zoned out completely. They are checking their phone.
Why?
Because nobody buys features.
People buy relief.
A VP of Engineering does not wake up at 2 AM thinking: “I wish I had a software tool with a more customizable webhook backoff matrix.”
They wake up at 2 AM thinking:
“If production crashes during black Friday again, the board is going to fire me, and my weekend with the kids is ruined.”
That is the pain. That is what they will pay $50,000 to eliminate.
When you position your product around technical features, you sound like a commodity. You force the prospect to compare you on price per user.
When you position your product around the catastrophic cost of the problem, price becomes irrelevant.
Stop selling the drill. Start selling the hole in the wall.
Or even better: start selling the peace of mind of having the bookshelf securely fastened so it doesn’t fall on their head.
P.S.: If your sales reps are struggling to close deals because they spend the first 20 minutes explaining what the software does, that’s a positioning problem. It’s exactly what the Positioning Sprint fixes. Let’s talk here.
