There is a moment in almost every start-up pitch that determines the
trajectory of the deal. It usually comes right after the founder introduces the "big
problem." They cite a massive total addressable market (e.g., the multi-trillion-dollar
construction industry) and list the threats facing that sector.
Then they make the mistake: They immediately pivot to the features of the
solution. Out come the demos, charts, graphs, and dashboards. They spend their energy
showing off what the development team has built, often talking too much in an effort to
showcase every feature and every stream of data. Sigh. I've been in this meeting before,
and I'm already bored.
This is understandable; founders should be proud of their product, but it
often fails to resonate with the buyer. To scale successfully, founders must remember
that clients do not care about the technology for its own sake. They don't even really
care about the data! They care about the business they are trying to run.
Put differently, the client does not care about your technology nearly as much as they care about what it changes in their business. If your pitch stays at the feature level, you are underselling the value of your solution.
The Hierarchy of Value: From Data to Decisions
The core issue is that many start-ups stop at the "solution" phase
without asking what that solution actually enables. Consider a company building
financial visualization software for insurers: A standard pitch focuses on the
problem of fragmented data and offers a solution that makes reporting easier for the
CFO. That may be true, but it is still a low-level value proposition.
To truly capture attention, the pitch has to move upstream. The
problem is not just that data is hard to find; it is that poor visibility prevents
leadership from acting. The real pitch is that the
CEO can instantly see loss ratios and make a
business decision that changes the company's trajectory—or even lifts stock
price.
Founders must realize that data, on its own, is irrelevant. It may be a leading or lagging indicator, but it is still just a number. What matters is the human decision made because of that data. If you are selling data, you are a commodity. If you are enabling a different decision that leads to a better result, you are a strategic partner.
Tip #1: No one cares about data. They care about decisions.
Case Study: The IoT "One-Night Stand"
The danger of promoting a data platform without tying it directly
to outcomes is best illustrated by a cautionary tale from construction technology. A
few years ago, a start-up introduced an Internet of Things (IoT) solution for
jobsite equipment. It tracked energy usage, productivity, and efficiency, producing
a comprehensive 25-plus page report every month. The company initially raised nearly
$100 million behind the idea.
At first, clients were dazzled. They had never seen that level of
data before; it felt like "super sexy" technology. But the relationship quickly
became a "one-night stand." Why? Because despite the mountain of data, project
managers did not know what to do with it. The insight was interesting, even
impressive, but it did not drive meaningful changes that outweighed the burden of
reading the report and figuring out what it meant—especially before generative
artificial intelligence was widely available.
As a result, no one made a different decision because of the data;
the "impressive data" did nothing to further the business, and the technology faded
away. It was not because the code was bad or the team was inexperienced. It was
because the product did not create a meaningful enough change in outcome to justify
the time, effort, or cost. The problem it solved was simply not important enough,
and the value was simply not clear enough.
Tip #2: Make sure the problem you're solving is big enough to justify the time, effort, and cost. And make it easy—no one's reading your 26-page monthly report.
Redefining Competition
This leads to a critical realization about the competitive
landscape: Founders often believe they are competing only against other start-ups in
their niche, for example, one equipment IoT company against another. Or, if they are
especially naïve, they will claim they have no competitors because no one does it as
well as they do. Insert eye roll here.
Both assumptions are false: Tech solutions compete against every
other priority crossing an innovation leader's desk that day—actually, every cost
crossing a project manager's or underwriter's desk. In construction, if a project
has a fixed general conditions budget, a founder may literally be competing with
toilet paper and coffee pods in the trailer.
Innovation leaders have limited bandwidth and budget. They are trying to modernize legacy systems, simplify reporting, optimize operations, and manage portfolios at the same time. To win budget for something new, you have to be better than everything else they are considering. That means understanding the competitive landscape, where others excel, where you excel, and how to guide the customer through the decision with humility. You must be able to articulate exactly how the business will be different next month because of your solution, without disparaging competitors, insulting the customer, or dodging the conversation because you think your product is above comparison.
Tip #3: Even if your competitor
is an old-school pen-and-paper business, you have competitors—the best thing you can
do is understand who they are and what they offer, and help the customer make the
best decision for their business.
The Pilot Program Paradox
The final hurdle where founders often trip is the pilot program. When a large enterprise agrees to a pilot, it is a massive opportunity. Yet, many founders squander it by tracking the wrong metrics.
For example, I recently saw a founder secure a pilot with a Tier 1 insurer. When setting success metrics for the engagement, the founder focused almost entirely on their technology: turnaround times, tickets addressed, data points delivered, and system performance. In other words, they were trying to prove to the pilot client that their product "worked as advertised."
For an enterprise buyer, this is the wrong approach. If you made it to the pilot meeting, the buyer already assumes your technology works. If the premise of the pilot is proving the technology performs, you have already lost the sale. You are not selling features or system performance; you are selling outcomes.
So set pilot metrics the client can actually defend: loss ratios,
efficiency, safety, revenue optimization, and whatever the client measures and is
measured by. Then prove that your X-week pilot generated Y-amount of value,
extrapolate it over a year, and show what that leader could credibly present to the
CEO in 12 months.
How to Arm Your Champion
If the goal of a pilot is business validation, not technical performance, the buyer needs to know the following.
What will my loss ratio look like after this?
How much headcount can I streamline?
How much will client retention increase?
These are the metrics that matter because the person sitting across from the founder may not be the final decision-maker. Even senior leaders have a boss. They have to report to someone and justify why they want to spend significant capital on a piece of technology nobody has heard of (yet).
The innovation leader has already invested time in understanding
the solution. Now, they need the founder to give them the information to sell it
internally. They need defensible, business-centric metrics (not dev-ops metrics).
Even if the numbers are hypothetical extrapolations based on the pilot, they need to
be framed in terms of return on investment and business health, not application
programming interface latency.
Tip #4: A pilot should justify
the business outcomes that the client wants, not validate your beta test.
One Really Great Client
Beware the tendency to over-invest in an early adopter client. It is especially easy to do when you have an enthusiastic champion at a big-name company who is happy to give feedback and introduce you to stakeholders. Founders often cling to that first client like lifeblood, treating every opinion as gospel and assuming this one "really great client" perfectly represents their ideal customer persona.
In reality, they are often building one very tailored solution for one very specific client who still has not committed to the sale. I have seen enormous amounts of time, money, and energy spent customizing a product for a pilot customer, only to derail development of the core solution, distort the planned sales cycle, and jeopardize broader market adoption by concentrating resources on one client's preferences.
Do not let an overly enthusiastic early-stage champion derail your
business plan with customizations and feature requests. Build and sell the solution
you know works with the business strategy you planned. You can customize later, once
they are a paying customer. And, do not mistake enthusiasm for purchase intent.
Innovation leaders are in those roles because they are excited about new solutions;
that does not mean they will buy all of them, even if you build exactly what they
asked for. As a start-up, you have to protect your time and resources if you want to
enter the market effectively.
Tip #5: Do not mistake an
enthusiastic pilot champion for a paying customer until they've signed on the dotted
line. And even then, beware of over-customization that hijacks your development road
map.
Conclusion
The shift from selling features to selling outcomes requires a
change in mindset and asks founders to stop obsessing over what they have built and
start obsessing over the business they serve.
By focusing on decisions instead of dashboards, avoiding the trap of data for data's sake, structuring pilots around defensible business metrics, and resisting the urge to over-customize for one early champion, founders can move beyond pilot purgatory and build lasting enterprise partnerships. Innovation happens when a business is empowered to act differently.
Opinions expressed in Expert Commentary articles are those of the author and are not necessarily held by the author's employer or IRMI. Expert Commentary articles and other IRMI content do not purport to provide legal, accounting, or other professional advice or opinion. If such advice is needed, consult with your attorney, accountant, or other qualified adviser.
There is a moment in almost every start-up pitch that determines the trajectory of the deal. It usually comes right after the founder introduces the "big problem." They cite a massive total addressable market (e.g., the multi-trillion-dollar construction industry) and list the threats facing that sector.
Then they make the mistake: They immediately pivot to the features of the solution. Out come the demos, charts, graphs, and dashboards. They spend their energy showing off what the development team has built, often talking too much in an effort to showcase every feature and every stream of data. Sigh. I've been in this meeting before, and I'm already bored.
This is understandable; founders should be proud of their product, but it often fails to resonate with the buyer. To scale successfully, founders must remember that clients do not care about the technology for its own sake. They don't even really care about the data! They care about the business they are trying to run.
Put differently, the client does not care about your technology nearly as much as they care about what it changes in their business. If your pitch stays at the feature level, you are underselling the value of your solution.
The Hierarchy of Value: From Data to Decisions
The core issue is that many start-ups stop at the "solution" phase without asking what that solution actually enables. Consider a company building financial visualization software for insurers: A standard pitch focuses on the problem of fragmented data and offers a solution that makes reporting easier for the CFO. That may be true, but it is still a low-level value proposition.
To truly capture attention, the pitch has to move upstream. The problem is not just that data is hard to find; it is that poor visibility prevents leadership from acting. The real pitch is that the CEO can instantly see loss ratios and make a business decision that changes the company's trajectory—or even lifts stock price.
Founders must realize that data, on its own, is irrelevant. It may be a leading or lagging indicator, but it is still just a number. What matters is the human decision made because of that data. If you are selling data, you are a commodity. If you are enabling a different decision that leads to a better result, you are a strategic partner.
Tip #1: No one cares about data. They care about decisions.
Case Study: The IoT "One-Night Stand"
The danger of promoting a data platform without tying it directly to outcomes is best illustrated by a cautionary tale from construction technology. A few years ago, a start-up introduced an Internet of Things (IoT) solution for jobsite equipment. It tracked energy usage, productivity, and efficiency, producing a comprehensive 25-plus page report every month. The company initially raised nearly $100 million behind the idea.
At first, clients were dazzled. They had never seen that level of data before; it felt like "super sexy" technology. But the relationship quickly became a "one-night stand." Why? Because despite the mountain of data, project managers did not know what to do with it. The insight was interesting, even impressive, but it did not drive meaningful changes that outweighed the burden of reading the report and figuring out what it meant—especially before generative artificial intelligence was widely available.
As a result, no one made a different decision because of the data; the "impressive data" did nothing to further the business, and the technology faded away. It was not because the code was bad or the team was inexperienced. It was because the product did not create a meaningful enough change in outcome to justify the time, effort, or cost. The problem it solved was simply not important enough, and the value was simply not clear enough.
Tip #2: Make sure the problem you're solving is big enough to justify the time, effort, and cost. And make it easy—no one's reading your 26-page monthly report.
Redefining Competition
This leads to a critical realization about the competitive landscape: Founders often believe they are competing only against other start-ups in their niche, for example, one equipment IoT company against another. Or, if they are especially naïve, they will claim they have no competitors because no one does it as well as they do. Insert eye roll here.
Both assumptions are false: Tech solutions compete against every other priority crossing an innovation leader's desk that day—actually, every cost crossing a project manager's or underwriter's desk. In construction, if a project has a fixed general conditions budget, a founder may literally be competing with toilet paper and coffee pods in the trailer.
Innovation leaders have limited bandwidth and budget. They are trying to modernize legacy systems, simplify reporting, optimize operations, and manage portfolios at the same time. To win budget for something new, you have to be better than everything else they are considering. That means understanding the competitive landscape, where others excel, where you excel, and how to guide the customer through the decision with humility. You must be able to articulate exactly how the business will be different next month because of your solution, without disparaging competitors, insulting the customer, or dodging the conversation because you think your product is above comparison.
Tip #3: Even if your competitor is an old-school pen-and-paper business, you have competitors—the best thing you can do is understand who they are and what they offer, and help the customer make the best decision for their business.
The Pilot Program Paradox
The final hurdle where founders often trip is the pilot program. When a large enterprise agrees to a pilot, it is a massive opportunity. Yet, many founders squander it by tracking the wrong metrics.
For example, I recently saw a founder secure a pilot with a Tier 1 insurer. When setting success metrics for the engagement, the founder focused almost entirely on their technology: turnaround times, tickets addressed, data points delivered, and system performance. In other words, they were trying to prove to the pilot client that their product "worked as advertised."
For an enterprise buyer, this is the wrong approach. If you made it to the pilot meeting, the buyer already assumes your technology works. If the premise of the pilot is proving the technology performs, you have already lost the sale. You are not selling features or system performance; you are selling outcomes.
So set pilot metrics the client can actually defend: loss ratios, efficiency, safety, revenue optimization, and whatever the client measures and is measured by. Then prove that your X-week pilot generated Y-amount of value, extrapolate it over a year, and show what that leader could credibly present to the CEO in 12 months.
How to Arm Your Champion
If the goal of a pilot is business validation, not technical performance, the buyer needs to know the following.
These are the metrics that matter because the person sitting across from the founder may not be the final decision-maker. Even senior leaders have a boss. They have to report to someone and justify why they want to spend significant capital on a piece of technology nobody has heard of (yet).
The innovation leader has already invested time in understanding the solution. Now, they need the founder to give them the information to sell it internally. They need defensible, business-centric metrics (not dev-ops metrics). Even if the numbers are hypothetical extrapolations based on the pilot, they need to be framed in terms of return on investment and business health, not application programming interface latency.
Tip #4: A pilot should justify the business outcomes that the client wants, not validate your beta test.
One Really Great Client
Beware the tendency to over-invest in an early adopter client. It is especially easy to do when you have an enthusiastic champion at a big-name company who is happy to give feedback and introduce you to stakeholders. Founders often cling to that first client like lifeblood, treating every opinion as gospel and assuming this one "really great client" perfectly represents their ideal customer persona.
In reality, they are often building one very tailored solution for one very specific client who still has not committed to the sale. I have seen enormous amounts of time, money, and energy spent customizing a product for a pilot customer, only to derail development of the core solution, distort the planned sales cycle, and jeopardize broader market adoption by concentrating resources on one client's preferences.
Do not let an overly enthusiastic early-stage champion derail your business plan with customizations and feature requests. Build and sell the solution you know works with the business strategy you planned. You can customize later, once they are a paying customer. And, do not mistake enthusiasm for purchase intent. Innovation leaders are in those roles because they are excited about new solutions; that does not mean they will buy all of them, even if you build exactly what they asked for. As a start-up, you have to protect your time and resources if you want to enter the market effectively.
Tip #5: Do not mistake an enthusiastic pilot champion for a paying customer until they've signed on the dotted line. And even then, beware of over-customization that hijacks your development road map.
Conclusion
The shift from selling features to selling outcomes requires a change in mindset and asks founders to stop obsessing over what they have built and start obsessing over the business they serve.
By focusing on decisions instead of dashboards, avoiding the trap of data for data's sake, structuring pilots around defensible business metrics, and resisting the urge to over-customize for one early champion, founders can move beyond pilot purgatory and build lasting enterprise partnerships. Innovation happens when a business is empowered to act differently.
Opinions expressed in Expert Commentary articles are those of the author and are not necessarily held by the author's employer or IRMI. Expert Commentary articles and other IRMI content do not purport to provide legal, accounting, or other professional advice or opinion. If such advice is needed, consult with your attorney, accountant, or other qualified adviser.