Startup Founders Need a New Sales Playbook

Starting a technology company in today’s world is fundamentally different from doing so a decade ago. Innovation cycles have accelerated and go-to-market execution has become more complex. Buyers are flooded with competing solutions, and founders face a level of skepticism and noise that traditional sales methodologies were not designed to address.

We’ve reached this conclusion by comparing the results of two studies, a decade apart, that explore the practices of founders as they seek to sell their first products.

The first study, which one of us (Vincent) published in HBR in 2013 (with Martha Rivera Pesquera and Abdul Ali), was based on interviews with 120 entrepreneurs across six countries. Our data showed that founders often approached early sales in the wrong way. Many spent too much time perfecting products before engaging customers, while those who did sell early frequently focused on generating revenue rather than learning. The research suggested that successful entrepreneurs were more deliberate about selecting early customers, using those relationships to test assumptions, refine their offerings, and build the references and credibility needed to accelerate future growth.

To get a sense of what’s changed as AI has become a dominant part of the startup scene, we launched a new study. Between June and December of 2025, we conducted semi-structured 30-minute interviews with more than 250 founders across more than 30 countries and six continents. These founders represented technology companies generating between $500,000 and $10 million in annual recurring revenue. The interviews focused on what was working—and what wasn’t—in customer acquisition, including differentiation, pricing, pipeline development, and decisions related to hiring sales talent.

Although the full study is still in progress, our analysis of the first 100 interviews yielded a consistent conclusion: Many founders are attempting to sell in a market whose dynamics are shifting faster than their go-to-market approach. The result is not simply longer sales cycles. It is the growing inability to distinguish real buying intent from curiosity, and a growing tendency to mistake attention for traction.

What Founders Are Still Getting Wrong

Some of our findings in the current study were consistent from the earlier study in 2013.

They Mistakenly Believe They’ve Reached Product-Market Fit

Instead of pursuing a test-and-learn strategy in close consultation with customers, too many founder are stilling trying to perfect the product in isolation before exposing it to customers—a classic error that the Lean Startup methodology aims to eliminate. Mistaken beliefs about what customers want from the product shape fundraising and hiring decisions, despite insufficient evidence of repeatable adoption.

One founder summarized the problem in a way that was consistent with many of our interviews: “We launched [a] product, we got a bunch of customers and pilots and users, but [when free trials ended] they weren’t willing to pay for it…. So that product failed.”

They Pursue Markets That Are Too Broad

Many founders pursue overly broad markets, often encouraged by investor pressure to build a large company quickly. However, broad positioning frequently results in generic messaging and unclear differentiation. Prospects struggle to understand why the product is specifically relevant to them, or they request special features to make it more relevant to them.

Responding to interest from potential customers by expanding scope rather than sharpening focus can prove fatal: Instead of building repeatability, startups absorb one-off requests and find themselves creating custom products. The company begins to resemble an agency rather than a scalable product organization.

Here’s how one Canadian founder described this predicament: “Every single request ends up making it into the product without processing to see how I can make this something that benefits everybody.” Another founder told us that his startup is focused on sales to companies with between 100 and 1,000 employees, but they often wind up pursuing larger enterprise clients. Translation: They’ll try to sell to anyone. This scattershot approach is all-too-common.

Most Founders Lack Sales Background

Approximately 80% of founders we interviewed had no formal sales background—a finding consistent with the earlier study. This made it harder to generate qualified meetings, run discovery calls, communicate differentiated value, and interpret buying signals. Many also struggled with pipeline management, stakeholder alignment, objection handling, and follow-up. This sometimes leads founders to try to hire salespeople too early—and when the CEOs do that, they often struggle because they lack experience in the function. “I’d never hired sellers before,” one German entrepreneur told us.

Hiring a salesperson too early creates its own set of problems. It increases the burn rate, creates misaligned expectations, and forces founders to manage performance issues before the company has built the conditions for success. Founders also underestimate a key factor: They carry credibility that does not transfer to a salesperson. The founder has authority, conviction, and trust built through direct ownership. A new salesperson does not inherit that trust. One U.S. founder described how their prospects wanted to hear the CEO’s vision for the product’s evolution—and that early sales hinged on the buyer feeling a positive personal connection with the startup owner. If the founder lacks natural sales skills and the first salesperson is sidelined because everyone wants to meet with the founder, frustration ensues.

They’re Also Facing New Challenges

Our current study also identified problems we didn’t see in 2013. Many of these result from higher levels of competition. With more than 90,000 AI-enabled startups worldwide and hundreds more emerging every month, the competitive landscape for tech startups has never been more saturated.

Traditional sales frameworks assume a relatively stable environment. Buyers have time to evaluate options. Sellers can educate prospects through structured funnel stages. Most importantly, these frameworks assume a finite set of competitors that can be identified, benchmarked, and differentiated against. That’s no longer the case—and it leads to three mistakes we observed in many of the companies we interviewed.

They Mistake Attention for Traction

Many founders struggle to distinguish genuine buying intent from simple curiosity. This is particularly true in AI markets, where interest is high but commitment is not. Prospects attend demos, request proposals, and participate in pilots, creating the appearance of momentum. Yet many of those opportunities never convert because the underlying urgency to solve a problem is weak. As one founder explained: “What’s tricky is everyone says they want AI, but they don’t know what problem they’re actually trying to solve. They’re intellectually interested, but they don’t have the budget for it yet.”

Others reported that executives often take meetings simply to demonstrate to colleagues that they are actively evaluating AI options. In these situations, founders can build what appears to be a healthy pipeline but is actually little more than accumulated curiosity. The result is a growing tendency to mistake attention for traction.

Being Better Than the Competition Is No Longer Enough

Even when a founder has built a legitimate solution, differentiation is difficult. That’s creating a new set of problems.

One founder explained the buyers’ perspective this way: “Back in the day, you would maybe schedule a demo with the three legacy tools. Today, you have 20,000 tools. So the evaluation, it’s much longer.” Historically, it was often sufficient to outperform the incumbent solution. A product that was meaningfully faster, cheaper, or easier to implement could displace what already existed.

That is no longer enough. Hundreds of startups claim to be better than the status quo, and buyers lack the time and attention to validate those claims. The competitive challenge is no longer simply replacing an incumbent. It is rising above the noise in a market where nearly every vendor sounds credible and there’s always a new product to evaluate before locking in. One U.S. founder explained the dynamic this way: “We’ll release something genuinely new, and three months later a big player will claim they have the same thing. Even when they don’t, it neutralizes us with prospects.”

Historically, many startups could succeed by offering a product that was noticeably better than existing alternatives. A solution that was faster, cheaper, or easier to use often stood out from the competition.

With So Many Options, They Struggle to Create Urgency

Customers get off the call energized. They learned from the founder and feel smarter after the call. The founder feels confident. “I taught them something. They were genuinely engaged and glad they met with me.”

One month later the founder is still trying to schedule a second call. While the buyer enjoyed the call, and learned something, there was no urgency created. If there is no tension built in a meeting, there is often no deal. Tension creates urgency.

When the buyer ends a call and thinks, “I need to reevaluate how I’m addressing this problem,” she will meet with you again. When the buyer feels “that was helpful or interesting,” a callback is often elusive.

What the Best Sellers Did Differently

Our new research focused on the problems facing founders, but as we analyzed the data, we tried to identify the practices that set the more successful entrepreneurs apart from the rest. This search for solutions revealed six consistent behaviors that distinguished founders who generated early revenue traction from those who struggled to convert interest into adoption. We describe these behaviors using the acronym SPRINT:

Speed (creates attention):

This refers to how fast you make the buyer feel seen, in the first conversation, not the fifth. Buyers are drowning in noise from a marketplace that sounds identical, so attention goes to whomever names their reality first. That recognition creates tension: the gap between where they are and where they assumed no one understood. “Did this person just describe my situation better than I could?” is the moment that cuts through and earns the next conversation.

Problem (creates urgency):

Can you articulate the buyer’s problem more precisely than the buyer can, identifying not just the pain, but the reason they must act now? Generic problem statements produce curious prospects. Specific ones, anchored to a trigger event, produce committed buyers. “What’s changed to make solving this now essential?” is the question that separates the two.

Results (creates belief):

What specific, observable outcome does a buyer get, and when? Vague value propositions like “improve efficiency,” “reduce friction,” or “accelerate growth” create curious prospects. Specific, time-bound results create committed buyers. The test: Can your buyer describe the outcome to their board without you in the room?

Implementation (creates safety):

Can you answer the risk question before the buyer raises it? The real friction in 2026 is buyer fear: AI hallucinating, data corrupted, workflows breaking in front of leadership. Buyers who engage enthusiastically often go quiet not because they stopped believing in the product, but because someone upstream raised a risk they couldn’t answer. Founders who address this before the buyer asks win late-stage deals.

Niche (creates repeatability):

Is your ideal customer profile narrow enough to be actionable? Starting narrow is not a constraint on ambition. It’s the strategy that earns the right to expand. Founders who try to sell to everyone resonate with no one. The ones who win start with a wedge: one buyer type, one problem, one motion that actually repeats.

Trust (creates permission):

Is your credibility transferable, or does it live entirely in your head and your relationships? In founder-led sales, the founder is the trust mechanism. That’s a feature early, since buyers buy because they believe in you. It becomes a liability the moment you need to scale it, hand it off, or explain why it works.

Mathis Stolz, co-founder of Nexwise in Germany, had a strong product and was selling it as a project, cold-calling manufacturers to ask if they happened to have project work. That meant arriving late to each opportunity, on terms he didn’t set, with a pitch that was neither targeted to the needs of potential users nor aligned with the goals of decision makers. He was stuck.

In applying the SPRINT framework, he discovered that he was failing to sufficiently recognize and articulate the problem, and he decided to change his approach. Instead of asking about projects, he opened by naming the tension his prospects were experiencing: chasing revenue growth versus protecting service quality with a finite team. Once he learned to tie his solution to revenue at risk, the problem his ideal target audience really cared about, the shift was immediate. Deals he would previously chase got disqualified, earlier-stage conversations he would dismiss became his strongest, and he stopped waiting for projects to map onto and started highlighting the real tension and eliciting a meaningful problem-driven dialogue with the right decision-makers. The deals in his pipeline now mapped to a C-level problem, executives stayed engaged, and deals moved through the long enterprise cycles typical of his market.

His experience shows how, when taken together, SPRINT is not a sales process. It is a framework for reducing buyer uncertainty in markets defined by noise, skepticism, and rapidly proliferating technology.

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For technology founders, winning early customers is less about having the best product and more about reducing buyer uncertainty. In crowded markets where attention is scarce and trust is difficult to earn, prospects need confidence that a solution addresses an urgent problem, can be implemented safely, and will deliver meaningful results. SPRINT provides a practical framework for diagnosing where deals stall and what founders must establish before prospects are willing to commit.