You’ve been selling your service for three months. You’re getting meetings, the conversations are going well, prospects seem genuinely interested — they’re nodding, asking questions, telling you it sounds great. And then... nothing. They ghost you. They “need to think about it.” They disappear into the void.

So what do you do? You start tweaking the offer, adjust the price, rewrite the pitch, bring in a new closer, or try a different script. And still, deals aren’t closing at the rate you need.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your offer is probably fine. Your pitch might even be good.

The problem is actually happening much earlier, in the five minutes before you even start pitching.

You’re not qualifying properly, and you’re burning your most valuable resource (time and reps) on people who were never going to buy. This is the single biggest reason your closing cycles are long and closing rates are low: The qualification.

Ninja Closers Are Qualifiers First

The best closers in the game aren’t closing wizards; they’re qualifying machines. Before they’ve said a single word about their solution, they already know whether the person is a fit, whether they have the influence to make a decision, and whether the problem is real and urgent enough to buy.

Qualification happens right after you’ve set the frame and established a status delta with the prospect. You’ve told them who you are, you’ve positioned yourself with authority, and then before you go anywhere near your deck or your offer, you ask questions. You learn about where they are, where they want to go, and what’s standing in the way.

The information you gather in this phase is the raw material of your entire pitch. Get it right, and you’ll tailor every word of your presentation to exactly what the prospect told you matters most.

The Three Things You’re Trying to Uncover

Every qualification conversation has one job: build a complete picture across three dimensions.

• Current situation. Where is the prospect right now? What does their sales process look like? How are they currently generating leads, handling objections, running their team? Get specific: you want numbers, KPIs, concrete details like revenue, headcount, conversion rates - whatever is relevant to your offer. Not “things are going okay.”

• Desired situation. Where do they want to be? What does success look like? What does life look like when the problem is solved? The bigger the gap between where they are and where they want to be, the more compelling your offer becomes.

• Problem isolation. What’s actually blocking them from getting from A to B? This is the most important dimension, and often the hardest one. Some prospects can’t articulate what’s holding them back. Part of your job is to help them see that.

Imagine a prospect sitting alone on a deserted island:

• The sun is setting, there are sharks in the water, and they don’t even have a boat.

• The island is the current situation.

• The mainland is the desired situation.

• The sharks, the sun, the lack of a boat — those are the problems.

Your qualification questions need to surface all three.

Information Is Not Free

Some prospects push back on questions. Especially dominant personalities, like senior executives, alpha founders, who feel like they’re giving something away by answering. They’re cagey, vague, or they try to redirect you straight to the pitch. This is an ego problem, not a legitimate business concern.

Think about it from the buyer’s side. If you were about to make a significant purchase decision, you’d want your vendor to have all the information they need to actually know if it’s a fit. A seller who skips qualification isn’t protecting your time; they’re wasting it by pitching something that may not apply to your situation at all.

When prospects are resistant to sharing, remind them professionally that concise, accurate answers let you make the most of their time. This reframe positions the questions as doing them a favour. If they flat-out refuse to engage and won’t tell you anything about their situation, treat that as a signal. You probably don’t want to be pitching to this person right now anyway. You can respond along these lines:

“We’re happy to show you everything. But please let us know if this is actually on your agenda right now. Otherwise, we can send you some video material and reconnect when the timing is right.”

That’s not aggression. That’s status. And it sorts real opportunities from time-wasters fast.

The Doctor Who Prescribes Without Diagnosing

Imagine walking into a doctor’s office with a complaint. You start to explain your symptoms, but the doctor cuts you off after fifteen seconds: “I’ve seen this before. Here’s your prescription. See you in two days.” You’d walk straight back out. You’d think the doctor was a fraud, and you definitely wouldn’t fill the prescription.

That’s exactly what prospects feel when you pitch without qualifying. Especially C-level buyers. They’re experienced enough to know when a seller is running through a script instead of genuinely trying to understand their situation. They pick up on it fast. And once they’ve decided you’re not listening, you’ve lost them.

That’s why the best salespeople are diagnosticians. They ask before they prescribe. They let the prospect’s answers shape what they pitch and how they pitch it.

The qualification phase isn’t a formality before the real conversation starts. It IS the real conversation.

Everything else follows from what you learn here.

How to Structure Your Questions

The structure of your qualification questions matters as much as the questions themselves.

• Start easy. Open with questions about the business basics: how they’re currently doing things, what their setup looks like, what the numbers are. These are non-threatening questions that any serious decision-maker can answer without hesitation. They also help you establish whether the person you’re talking to actually has context and authority in the area you’re selling into.

• Then go deeper. As the conversation warms up, move toward questions about outcomes, frustrations, and failures. What have they tried before? What didn’t work? What’s the cost of staying where they are? The more trust you’ve built in the early questions, the more honest the answers get here.

• Don’t lead with personal questions. If you open with “what’s your biggest failure?” you’ll lose rapport instantly. But if you’ve spent five minutes asking smart, contextually relevant questions that show you understand their world, then sometimes people will tell you things they haven’t told anyone else. That level of honesty only happens when the qualification is done right.

What to Write Down, and How to Show Up

During the qualification phase, you’re taking notes. But not everything deserves equal weight.

• Write down KPIs and numbers. Revenue targets, conversion rates, team size, timeline — whatever applies to your offer. Numbers give you something concrete to reference when you pitch.

  • “You told me you’re converting 8% of leads to booked calls — our clients typically get that to 20-30%.” That’s a pitch.

  • “I understand things are a bit slow right now” is not.

• Write down context. Beyond the numbers, capture the story of what’s happening. Why now? Why is this a priority? What triggered this conversation? Context is what connects the numbers to a human being who actually needs help.

When you’ve finished qualifying, you should be able to state three things clearly: the prospect’s current situation, their desired outcome, and the specific problems standing in their way. If you can’t, you haven’t qualified well enough, and you’re not ready to pitch.

The tonality throughout all of this is inquisitive and respectful. You’re not interrogating; you’re genuinely curious.

Good questions are themselves a signal of expertise.

They show the prospect that you understand their world well enough to ask about the right things.

Qualify Before You Pitch

Qualification of a lead is the critical foundation on which your sales pitch is built.

• Set the frame.

• Establish your status.

• Ask the right questions.

• Build the full picture across all three dimensions — current situation, desired situation, problem isolation. Tailor your pitch accordingly.

Think about your last five sales calls: did you truly understand the prospect’s current situation, desired outcome, and blocking problem. Or did you start pitching before you had the full picture? Let’s chat.

Phil

Banks ignore most South Africans, so he built the infrastructure to reach them instead.

His first company lent working capital to informal businesses using anonymised telco and liquor distributor data: no forms, loan decisions in 15 seconds.

His second business does the same for vehicle access, flipping car rental from a post-paid, credit-card-required model to a prepaid wallet with no credit score or documents needed.

The pattern across both:

• Partner with the best-positioned infrastructure player. Don’t build the hardware.

• Find the billing model locking people out, then flip it.

• Use alternative data to underwrite what banks won’t touch.

If you have been following this series, you will know from Part 5 that it takes roughly seven hours of positive, helpful interaction before a prospect is capable of making a big decision. The pre-demo period is not dead time — it’s part of those hours. And from Part 1, you will know that status delta is operating from the first moment a prospect encounters you. The work you do before the demo affects both of these simultaneously.

This part of The Startup Founder’s Sales Training Series is about how best to capitalise on that time.

Every Demo Needs a Close — and a Script

Every demo needs a closing step attached to it, and that does not necessarily mean a signed contract. It could be a commitment to a proof of concept, a first workshop, or another clearly defined next step.

What matters is that something exists before you start the demo meeting — this is a structural point, not a philosophical one. If there is no closing step attached to the demo, you should not be investing sixty minutes in it.

This is also where sales scripts come in. Most B2B consultative sellers believe a structured process and genuine expertise are in conflict. This couldn’t be less true. In fact, the more complex the solution, the more the process needs to be mapped out. The brain power required to convey highly complex information consistently, in a single call and at a high level, is enormous. A script does not make you sound robotic. Instead, it frees you to actually listen, because you are not simultaneously trying to remember what comes next.

When I first started selling in my early twenties, I used scripts. I didn’t like it; I thought I was the smartest person in the room. But they worked, so I kept going. Later, I moved into consultative selling and shot from the hip. I still performed, but it took far more energy and the quality was less consistent each time. In the end, I came back to scripts because I realised they are simply more powerful.

It can take two to six months to become proficient at a universal B2B sales process using a script, and one to four years to become a master.

The people who put that work in are the ones closing complex deals in a single hour, while others stretch the process across months or years.

But even a perfect script will underperform if the prospect arrives unprepared. The pre-demo steps in this article are not complicated, yet hardly anyone puts this work in. If you do, your closing rate will most likely increase before you change a single thing about the demo itself.

The Core Idea: Marination

The goal of everything that happens before the demo is to get the prospect into a state where the call is a confirmation of what they already believe, not a string of revelations they are encountering for the first time.

When a prospect encounters too many new ideas on a call (a thesis they have not yet absorbed, beliefs they have not had time to sit with, proof they are seeing for the first time) they struggle to decide. They say they “need to discuss it internally”, or “that’s interesting but I need time to think”. This is not an objection.

It’s actually just the natural response to being hit with too much new information at once.

You know this feeling yourself: when something genuinely challenges how you are thinking about a problem, you cannot make a big decision on the spot. You need time to digest it.

So the goal is to create those epiphany moments before the call. Not to feature-pitch in advance, but rather to prime the prospect with your thesis and transformation first.

By the time they sit down with you, your thesis should feel familiar.

Your case studies should already have made an impression. The core of what you believe should already be part of how they are framing their problem.

What to send ahead of the call:

• 🎥 Video sales letter (VSL)

• 📊 Recorded walkthrough presentation or training videos

• 📚 Case studies

• 🧠 Thesis document

• 📝 Articles you have written

• 👤 Personalised video, where relevant

The specifics of each asset are covered in Part 5. The point here is sequencing: get this material in front of the prospect before they are in the room with you. Every touchpoint in that pre-demo window contributes to your seven hours, and the same applies to the touch points you create after the meeting as well.

After They Book: Your Automated Marination Sequence

The moment a prospect books a demo, they are in a uniquely receptive state. They have just made a small commitment. Their attention is on you, briefly, in a way it will not be again until the call itself. Most founders do very little with that moment.

The thank-you page of your booking funnel (the page a prospect lands on immediately after booking through Calendly, for example) is the easiest place to change that. It takes about an hour to set up and runs automatically for every booking thereafter. At ComX, our thank-you page contained the VSL (Video Sales Letter), a recorded walkthrough presentation, client examples, and case studies.

If your page currently says something like…

“You’re booked — we’ll see you then.”

…you are leaving one of the most receptive moments in your entire sales process completely untapped.

The autoresponder email sequence that follows does the same job in a different medium. The framing here matters more than most people realise. Do not simply say “please watch this” — you need to give the prospect a reason.

At ComX, the message read: “Please review the training videos and case studies before the call. That way we can use the time well, and go straight into an action plan.” That respects their time, signals that the call will be substantive, and begins building your status delta from the very first touchpoint.

A minimum autoresponder sequence:

One more thing to build into this sequence: ask that all relevant decision-makers are present during the call. If the people who matter are not in the room, progress slows. Ask for them upfront, clearly and without apology.

In some markets, like Germany and much of Northern Europe, where people are slower to assign trust, these early structured touch points make a visible difference to how warm prospects are on the call.

The Survey: Qualification, Commitment, and Priming in One Step

If you use a survey or application as part of your process, it can do three jobs at once, which is why it is worth building if you do not already have one:

• Qualification on record. The same questions you would normally spend the first part of a call asking are answered in writing before you meet. Both sides arrive with full context.

• Real commitment. Someone who has invested effort in answering a series of questions is not the same prospect as someone who clicked a booking link in thirty seconds. They have already done something. They are invested.

  • At ComX, our survey contained twenty-two questions and was sent to every prospect, even those we had already spoken to. Answers went automatically to both the sales team and the prospect, and the time they spent filling it in contributed towards our seven hours.

• Status delta, primed. Some of the questions are not easy for casual or low-intent prospects to answer. That alone filters out people who are not serious and sets a different tone for those who do take the time.

It is important to send the survey answers back to the prospect. Them re-reading their own responses before the call is itself a touchpoint, because it reminds them why they booked. And if something in the answers is genuinely interesting, comment on it personally before the meeting. Something like: “You have a fairly small sales unit for that much revenue; that is not something I see often. Keen to understand how you manage that.”

It signals that you have actually read what they wrote, demonstrates expertise, and creates real engagement before the meeting.

The Confirmation Tactic: The Most Effective Show-up Rate Lever

After a prospect books, make it a requirement for them to confirm the meeting to hold their slot. Do not frame this as a friendly reminder. If no confirmation arrives within 24 hours, send a short message and cancel the appointment to free the slot:

“Dear [Name] — thank you for booking your assessment with us.

As we haven’t heard back from you with regard to the booking confirmation, we’ll go ahead and cancel the appointment to make space for other applicants.

If this was a mistake, just let me know and I’m happy to be in touch for our appointment.”

Short, direct, unambiguous.

Why does this work? Because it is an honest expression of status delta. Your time is finite. You have other applicants. If a prospect is serious, they confirm quickly. If they are not, you have found out before wasting an hour. At ComX, this tactic was a big reason why our drop-off rate was so low and our show-up rate was, to put it plainly, absolutely bonkers. Every prospect was required to signal their intent before the slot was confirmed.

Your tone should be professional, not aggressive. The message is that you are not a puppy dog, a point covered in Part 1 of this series, and one that applies just as much before the meeting as it does during it.

Day-of Reminders: The Final Sequence

By the morning of the call, the prospect has confirmed and has likely engaged with at least some of your content. The remaining job is straightforward: make sure they show up, and make sure they can get in.

The personalised video is optional, but worth considering for prospects who have not engaged heavily with prior content. A short video referencing something specific to their situation is enough to increase familiarity and reinforce that there is a real person on the other side. It adds a touchpoint and moves the needle on your seven hours.

For virtual meetings, the meeting link must be in every calendar invite and every reminder, every time. Time lost at the start of a call because a prospect cannot find the link is time that cannot be recovered.

No-shows: Handle Them Without Losing Your Status Delta

Even with everything above in place, no-shows happen occasionally, and how you handle them matters.

The process:

• Send the meeting link and wait five to ten minutes in the meeting room.

• If the prospect still does not show up, send a re-scheduling link.

• Mark the meeting as a no-show in your CRM.

• Include content in the re-schedule email (remember the seven-hour rule: this too is a touchpoint).

Make one thing clear in the reschedule email:

If the next appointment is also missed, there will not be another opportunity to re-schedule.

This is not punitive; it is an honest signal that your time is finite, and serious prospects will understand that.

Many no-shows are caused by external factors such as illness, or something else which is genuinely unavoidable. That is not the end of the world, and the prospect may still become a customer. The point is not to be cold, but to have boundaries.

The Full Process at a Glance

Three Things to do This Week

🖥 Set up your thank-you page. Place your VSL, case studies, and thesis content there today. One hour of work; it runs indefinitely.

📬 Build your autoresponder message sequence. At a minimum: a content email, a 24-hour confirmation request, and a morning-of reminder with the meeting link. That sequence alone will move your show-up rate.

✅ Implement the confirmation tactic. Write the 24-hour cancellation email, load it into your process, and use it from your next booking onwards.

What has been your biggest challenge preparing prospects before a demo? I would love to hear from you — reply in the comments or reach me directly here.

Phil

Europeans visit frequently but rarely spend real time with local builders tackling the country’s hardest problems. The gap isn’t geographic; it’s relational. This dinner brings together European family offices, VCs, and investors with ambitious South African founders from pre-seed to late stage to close that gap.

What makes it work:

• A relaxed format that replaces formal panels with honest, open conversation.

• A specific focus on impact-driven businesses with purpose beyond profit.

• Curated cross-ecosystem connections that lead to real deals and collaboration.

“They were really interested — but somehow next steps never happened.” If your sales team says this regularly, the problem is often that the idea has not marinated enough yet. The prospect was not ready to decide, because they had not spent near enough time with you and your business before you asked them to commit.

This is the 7-Hour Rule: big decisions require approximately seven hours of positive, helpful interaction with you before a prospect is capable of making them. Almost every customer you have ever won has done those hours.

Sales and marketing are two halves of that seven hours. When only sales is carrying the load, sales cycles stretch and teams burn out. This is why this article sits inside a sales training series.

The 7-Hour Rule

The energy required to turn a cold prospect (someone who has never heard of you) into a paying customer is immense.

Big decisions take time. In practice, a prospect needs to spend approximately seven hours interacting with you and your business before they are capable of making a decision. Every customer you have ever won has done those seven hours. It is very rarely otherwise.

This is not something I invented. The 7-Hour Rule is well documented in consumer marketing. Since people are just people, the same logic applies in B2B. I’ve written about the 7-Hour Rule in more detail here.

The seven hours of interaction do not have to be direct time with you; it just has to be about you. The time accumulates through:

• Talking to you directly.

• Talking about you with colleagues.

• Speaking to your customers or referrals.

• Browsing reviews.

• Reading your content.

• Watching your videos.

• Discussing your solution internally.

• Thinking through whether to move forward.

One condition is non-negotiable: the seven hours must be positive and helpful.

Seven hours of complaints, bad reference calls, or unhelpful conversations do not build trust — they destroy it. You cannot cut corners here.

Sales and Marketing Are Two Halves of the Same Seven Hours

Marketing’s job is to cover the early part of the seven hours, before the prospect even speaks to a salesperson.

Strong marketing collateral should:

• Educate prospects.

• Create the status delta.

• Build familiarity and comfort.

• Explain your products and services.

• Convey your thesis and beliefs.

• Warm prospects up.

• Create desire.

If marketing has done its job well, you should already have two to four hours of interaction in with the prospect before you even speak to them for the first time.

When that happens, the salesperson steps into a conversation, not a pitch. Sales’ job is then to get the prospect into the end zone, or (as we say in rugby) “the last thirty yards”.

There is an old caricature worth retiring:

🗣️ Salespeople are the aggressive ones who cannot write, do not understand the technology, and do not know how to create great experiences.

🎨 Marketing people create fuzzy images and cannot close deals.

That is the old way. The new world is made up of people who can go the full way across both sales and marketing. If you are learning this for the first time, be open to being both a salesperson and a marketer.

You can sell without strong marketing material, but it is far more difficult. At the level of a million-euro producer, you should be versed in marketing and copywriting, and always looking for ways to get your seven hours in.

My Football Field Analogy

Think of closing a deal like scoring a goal in football:

• First half of the field: Marketing and your content. Your thesis (case studies, helpful material, videos) should carry the ball to at least the halfway line before a salesperson touches it.

• Second half of the field (before the end-zone): Sales conversations move the ball along the second half of the field. You usually have multiple calls: one with one decision-maker, another with a different stakeholder, each pushing it a few yards further.

• End zone: Bottom-of-funnel content. ROI justifications, deeper case studies, and references kick the ball over the line in the final metres 🏆.

When none of that exists, sales has to run the full pitch alone, every single time. That is what stresses salespeople out and makes deals much harder to close. It’s often when you hear salespeople say: “They were really interested, but somehow next steps didn’t occur.”

In reality, the problem was that the idea had simply not yet marinated enough for anyone to make a decision.

Why Webinars, VSLs, and Books Work So Well

Once you understand the seven hours, a lot of things in the market start to make sense.

Webinars and VSLs (Video Sales Letter) pack hours of interaction into a single sitting. At ComX, we used a 1.5-hour VSL that prospects watched before they ever spoke to the team. By the time they got on a call, they already understood who we were, what we believed, and how we worked.

Books take approximately eight hours to read — enough to cover the entire seven-hour requirement. Think about people like Russell Brunson, who gives his books away for the cost of shipping. He delivers real value, and in doing so, bakes his thesis into the reader so they arrive pre-warmed. Tony Robbins is similar: people read his books, get value from them, and absorb his thesis before they even reach his sales team.

Different formats, same mechanism: concentrated, positive time with your thinking and your solution before anyone tries to sell anything live.

What Life Looks Like For Your Sales Team: With & Without Strong Collateral

Without strong collateral, sales cycles stretch and reps burn out. Then you end up relying solely on referrals.

Note: You do not really have a business if referrals are your only pipeline.

With collateral in place, the sales call becomes a real conversation, with a warmed-up prospect.

Creating Content…and Making Sure It Actually Closes Deals

You do not need a blog, a podcast, a book, or a copywriter. Gary Vaynerchuk, a prominent Belarusian-American entrepreneur, author, speaker, and internet personality recognised for his expertise in digital marketing and social media, says “Document, don’t create”.

You also don’t need to invent things to say. Instead, just start capturing what you are already doing and learning. For example, if you’ve been journaling, take the last seven days of notes and write a list. That is enough for your first piece of content. Then repeat. Even a small snippet or a short video counts.

Your target group is made up of people like you and me — people out there every day trying to solve problems. When they see someone in their shoes doing the same, they spend time with them. Find out what bugs your target group, what is genuinely annoying to them, and solve those problems. It does not even have to be directly about your solution. Anything that is useful to them accumulates positive time and trust, and gets you closer to your seven hours before a sales conversation ever happens.

How to generate topics: I used to keep a spreadsheet of every question a customer has ever asked, or that I knew customers were asking themselves. I then answered each one from personal experience, and that formed my content pipeline. The important thing is not polish; it’s honesty and usefulness.

If you struggle to find questions, go back to your message-market fit framework: niche, current state, desired state, problems, roadblocks.

What to talk about:

• Share a recent positive client interaction — what the client said, what was relevant in that conversation, what you will do differently next time.

• Share your learnings from your last project — tell your audience the five things you learned, what was a great surprise, and how you will do even better next time.

• Share your latest mistake and what you learned from it. People really like authenticity. If you can suggest a solution to others who might be in the same situation, they will appreciate it — people especially like avoiding mistakes that someone else has already made for them.

How to publish it:

• A LinkedIn post of four sentences: what happened in a client interaction, what mattered, what you will do differently.

• A one-minute selfie video with three structured points prepared beforehand.

• A Google Doc: a foundational experience piece that keeps accumulating readers over time.

• A flow diagram mapping a process you have already executed (eg Lucidcharts, Miro)

  • At ComX, we used Lucidcharts heavily. I could see people reading them in real time.I didn’t really have to do a thing; they were already spending their seven hours with me.

Sales Must Decide What Goes Into Your Content 🎯

Here is where most companies get this wrong. A marketer who has never sat on a sales call is not the right person to decide what goes into your marketing content. They have not heard the objections. They have not seen what comes up at the one-yard line, right before someone either signs or walks away. That knowledge lives in sales.

The framework: Sales decides what content needs to exist ➡️ Marketing crafts the wording and makes it presentable.

👷The practical fix: give your marketers your call recordings. They will use them to build arguments that align with how people actually decide to buy, rather than what sounds good in a brochure.

The Document Stack: Before, During, and After Every Demo

Here is exactly what you need, organised by where it sits in the process.

1. Before the Demo

📚 Case Studies

Case studies are the most important assets in your stack. Everything in your sales pitch should be centred around them.

What exactly is a case study?

A case study is a customer giving honest evidence that you did a good job. The structure is simple: Where they were before, What they did with you, Where they ended up. Include evidence wherever possible. It does not need to be complex; the better it is documented, the better it performs.

Every customer should become a case study, and you should never stop collecting these studies. If a customer doesn’t want to be published externally, share it internally: at a minimum, you will learn what worked and what didn’t.

Where to use case studies

Everywhere. Sales pages, VSL decks, Cold emails, Nurture emails, Follow-up messages, Demo presentations

Why they matter

At ComX, every new case study was worth approximately 10x our first ticket deal size. In practice, that meant somewhere between €50,000 and €100,000 in the next deal cycle. This is not an exaggeration!

In competitive markets where pricing and offers look similar, people buy from whoever has the strongest proof and track record for people like them. Robert Cialdini explains this with the concept of social proof: people tend to follow others who are similar to them in order to reduce risk. Case studies are your social proof.

2. During the Demo

📊 Sales Deck

Your sales deck is a clone of your demo presentation with pricing appended at the bottom. It is used during the meeting, and sent to the prospect afterwards. Never introduce pricing outside of the demo. Pricing belongs in a live sales process, where you can give it context.

⚠️ One rule: never publish pricing in marketing collateral or on your website. Pricing belongs in the live sales process, where you can give it context. Your website CTA should be “get a price” or “learn more”.

🧭 Sales Script

If you don’t already have a sales script, write one. Here’s how to go about that.

I spent the early part of my career learning sales with scripts. Then I abandoned them for years, convinced that consultative selling meant shooting from the hip. I was wrong. In the end, I came back to scripts because I realised that they are simply more powerful. Every great sales organisation in the world uses them.

A good script does four things:

• Stops you from deviating from what actually works.

• Maps your full process: thesis, qualification questions, case studies, objections, onboarding, features.

• Helps a rep who is tired or distracted to still run a solid call.

• Enables fast ramping of new salespeople, and makes quality control possible.

3. After the Demo

🤝 Reference List

What it is

A reference list is a curated set of customers willing to vouch for you. Typically this includes LinkedIn profiles, Email addresses and sometimes phone numbers.

When to provide it

Provide this voluntarily, to serious prospects. Withholding references signals you have something to hide, and it costs you status delta at the worst possible moment.

Managing references properly

Reach out to your references beforehand and let them know you may send prospects their way. Treat them very well. That may mean incentives, discounts, extra support, or offering to help them however you can.

Where public naming is sensitive, you can sometimes still share a LinkedIn profile as a private reference with permission, provided you are not under an NDA.

Protecting your references’ time

Only connect references with prospects who are genuinely committed. For example prospects who have started procurement, paid a deposit, or clearly intend to move forward within a defined timeframe.

Explain this protective layer to the prospect. They will understand, and it reinforces your credibility.

A hard truth: If you have no positive references, the problem is not your sales process. Fix the product or the delivery first.

👥 Stakeholder Documents

In complex B2B, you are not selling to one person. You are selling to a buying centre.

The secret to extremely short sales cycles is very strong mid- and bottom-of-funnel material. A strong document plus a 30-minute meeting replaces an eight-hour workshop that produces nothing in writing.

Stakeholder documents you should have ready:

How to build these documents

Build them the same way you build content: Collect every question from each stakeholder group across your deals and answer them in writing. Over time, you will build a document pack for each role that removes friction before it appears.

At ComX, we dealt mostly with CEOs who were also the financial decision-maker and primary user. But legal and technical came up regularly, so we built specific documents for them too. Some of our deals closed in under eight hours, which was only possible because the documentation removed friction at every stage.

Stakeholders are not going away. Understand what they need and give it to them before they ask.

Three Things to Do This Week

1. Map your seven hours. Write down every touchpoint a prospect has with you before they sign. Where are the hours missing? That is where deals are stalling.

2. Start your content pipeline. Open a spreadsheet. Write five questions your customers have asked or are likely asking themselves. Answer one — as a LinkedIn post, a short video, or a Google Doc. Repeat next week.

3. Audit your document stack. Do you have at least one strong case study, a sales deck and script, a reference list, and a basic document for each stakeholder in your typical deal? Identify the gaps. Build them one at a time.

What’s your biggest bottleneck when it comes to sales and marketing working together? Where are your seven hours currently breaking down? Reply in the comments or reach me directly here.

Phil

Louie shares how The Delta co-founds and builds ventures alongside founders, investing early and staying involved through the growth stages. After nearly 30 ventures built across Europe and Africa, their edge comes down to one thing:

Founder quality above everything else.

A few things that define their model:

• A services and consultancy arm that scaled to 250 people to help ventures grow.

• A 15,000m² campus in Berlin housing around 600 entrepreneurs, with a Cape Town campus on the way in 2027.

• A deliberate focus on bridging the European and African founder ecosystems.

Your pilot traction is a case study, not a close. The real work is understanding how the institution actually buys, and who stands in the way.

Three things to nail before you pitch:

• Map the buying centre. The person who says yes isn’t always the one who makes it happen.

• Profile each decision maker individually.

• Start with early adopters. They’re easier to spot and much easier to close.

In this part of the Sales Training series, we’re focusing on Sales meetings, Tracking, and Shadowing.

At first glance, this may sound obsolete, or like micromanagement. But when you do it consistently, you’ll find that it can increase performance significantly and change your team’s lives for the better.

Sales Is a Tough Environment: Give Your People a Base Camp

Making sales calls all day can feel like people are throwing rocks at you.

You meet a lot of people, and you’re not always fully in control of the environment. Prospects may be in a bad mood, you’ll have difficult interactions, and many conversations won’t lead to a positive outcome.

To sustain performance and keep morale and headspace intact in this high-pressure environment, salespeople need a rock-solid base camp they can come back to — a safe place to seek refuge and find help.

One of the biggest stress factors for a sales team (and one of the biggest reasons salespeople burn out or lose motivation) is when you don’t give them that refuge and they don’t know where to turn when things get tough.

The simplest way to create that base camp is a daily sales meeting. It gives your team a place to regroup, surface problems early, and sharpen their skills together.

1. The Daily Sales Meeting 📅

This meeting can happen in the morning or afternoon, whenever best suits your team. At ComX, we ran ours at 08:30 because mornings got people out of sleep mode and fired up for the day ahead.

But the time of day matters less than the rhythm. Frequency is key: block it in the calendar, accept that it’s happening, and never skip it.

What the daily meeting does (4 jobs)

This meeting should not be about long status updates. It has a few clear jobs:

• 🧠 People talk through their day and vent. Sales is a high-pressure job, and these meetings can be somewhat therapeutic

• 🚧 Bottlenecks surface. Difficult situations, which reps can’t solve on their own, surface quickly.

• 🛠 Objections get handled together. When a new objection appears repeatedly, the sales lead or manager can immediately add the objection and rebuttal to the sales script.

• 📡 Everything bubbles up. As a founder or manager, this becomes your market-research feedback tool. At ComX, we even created new offers based on insights from these meetings, especially after Covid.

These meetings create a constant learning environment. People learn from each other quickly, and questions decrease because people are learning so fast.

A simple 4-part agenda

Our sales team came up with this agenda themselves, and it worked really well for us:

DAILY SALES MEETING | AGENDA

• Results from yesterday (without judgement)
  Each person presents what happened yesterday. It’s not about judging; it’s about understanding what happened.

• What was good (and what wasn’t)
  Talk about what went well, what didn’t, what management could do to support the team, and what the salesperson themself could do differently.

• Plans for today
  Everyone shares their plan for the day and their main goal. Saying this out loud sharpens focus and removes anxiety.

• Issues, roadblocks, and support needed.

  You want to surface bottlenecks early so they can be fixed quickly.

2. Tracking (Stop Flying Blind) 📊

If you’re not tracking your sales team’s inputs and outputs, you’re flying blind.

In fact, I have found that not knowing where deals come from or why is a European business disease. People who don’t track can’t build big businesses — I saw this clearly when I worked in Denmark. They had no idea what was happening.

💡 One reason the U.S. has such a high concentration of world‑class athletes and business performers is that they track and understand things without judging them. They look at what works and what doesn’t, they work harder, and they track whatever is happening.

A. What to track (inputs + outputs)

Start simple.

Inputs
📩 Cold messages or dials
📞 Discovery calls or demos
✅ Prospect show-up rates (if this is a problem)

Outputs
🧪 POC closing rate
🎯 Overall closing rate
🔁 Upsell rate
💰 *Average ticket price

*Average ticket price is especially important; I’ve found that many founders don’t know this number.

B. Pipeline stages (status changes)

Activity metrics alone aren’t enough. You also need to track how opportunities move through the pipeline.

At ComX, we tracked these status changes in Close, which allowed us to see exactly what was happening in the funnel:

• Discovery scheduled

• Discovery completed, demo not booked

• Demo scheduled

• Demo no show

• Demo completed, not closed

• Feedback meeting booked

• 7-day signup

• Contract sent

• Contract signed

C. Where it’s breaking (diagnose the funnel)

Once you track the numbers, the funnel will show you where the problem is.

For example:

• Prospects engage but don’t book meetings → message / claim problem

• Meetings happen but you can’t make a concrete offer → script problem

• Offers are made but people don’t buy → offer problem

• Demos are booked but people don’t show → a show-up problem

Instead of guessing, tracking enables you to compare the numbers between stages and see where things break, so you know exactly where to fix it.

3. Recording Calls (Build Your Shadowing Library) 🎥

All of your sales calls should ideally be recorded, indexed, and used internally for training.

Here’s how we did this at ComX:

🎥 Record every sales call. We used Zoom recordings. Ask prospects for permission upfront. We usually framed this as giving them access to the demo afterwards.

🗂 Store recordings centrally. We kept them in our CRM or shared drive folders.

🕒 Delete recordings automatically. Recordings were removed after two to three months.

📚 Maintain a curated set of strong examples. We kept a selection of demos that eventually closed. Keeping this documented consistently isn’t difficult; it just requires discipline. We grouped recordings by:

• Type — demo or feedback meeting

• Format — multi-stakeholder or one-man show

• Sales rep

• Industry / business model

• Deal cycle length

• Package sold

💡 Once you’ve mastered the process yourself, you don’t need to be involved in every training session. Reps can improve simply by watching and imitating what works; it’s the quickest and most effective way to ramp a rep.

The feedback I received repeatedly from reps was: “Philipp, just give me more demos.”

✅ Do These Three Things This Week

If you want to build a serious sales function, start here:

📅 Run a daily sales meeting and never skip it.

📊 Track inputs, outputs, and pipeline status changes.

🎥 Record calls (with permission) and organise them for shadowing.

None of this is complicated. But it requires discipline, and when you do it consistently, it will significantly improve your team’s performance.

What has been your biggest challenge with tracking or running consistent sales meetings? I would love to hear from you — you can reach me directly here.

Phil

Next in The Startup Founder’s Sales Training Series: Part 5 | Sales and Marketing Interdependence.

To me, these three things matter:

• Obsession, because with a specific customer problem, you’ll still be solving this five to seven years from now.

• Conviction, the kind that shows up in things you pursue with zero external reward.

• Finishing. Evidence that you’ve stayed on something long enough to actually get good at it.

Beyond character, the business has to make sense: Unit economics that can reach cash flow positive, a model that works locally before it scales, and a mission worth doing even if it goes sideways.

One reminder for founders:

Scrutinise your investors just as hard as they scrutinise you.

In Part I of this series, we introduced the concept of status delta: the frame that answers why should I listen to this person? We established it through structure and framing in the first 45 seconds of a call.

In Part 3, we go deeper. Status delta isn’t set once and held automatically — it is reinforced or eroded continuously, through every word, pause, and movement. That’s what this article is about.

Why Non-Verbal Signals Run the Room

For thousands of years before language existed, humans communicated through sound and movement. We used grunts, posture, and gesture to coordinate, warn, and survive — exactly as animals still do. That wiring doesn’t disappear because we’re on a Zoom call. We are still reading those signals constantly, and mostly unconsciously.

Yuval Noah Harari covers this well in Sapiens — why these non-verbal layers remain so deeply embedded in how we process one another, long after language made them redundant.

The practical implication: attention during a sales call is partly earned through content. If what you’re saying isn’t relevant, nothing else saves you. But content alone isn’t enough. A significant share of whether someone is actually with you in the room — engaged, processing, responding honestly — is non-verbal. Get this right and you can hold a room for hours. Get it wrong and people drift, regardless of how good the material is.

The Physical Foundations

1. Pacing

Speaking fast signals lower status. This isn’t a theory — it’s something I had to learn the hard way.

At engineering school, I gave a presentation at the pace I always spoke. My professor stopped me and said, bluntly: “I can’t listen to your slides because you speak too fast. Slow down, or I’m not going to let you pass.”

It left a dent. I realised there’s a real difference between speaking with friends — where speed signals energy and enthusiasm — and speaking in a business context, where it signals nervousness and low authority. They are not the same thing.

The rule is simple: slow down for the important phrases, speed up between them. Here’s what the same opener sounds like with flat pacing versus strategic pacing.

Flat pacing:

“My name is Philip, I’m a Senior Account Executive here at ComX.io, I’ve been helping people like yourself get results for the past few years now, so if you have any questions during this demo just interrupt me and I’ll answer them.”

Nothing lands. Everything is the same speed. People switch off.

Strategic pacing:

“Hey — my name is Philip Ströhemann. I’m a Senior Account Executive here at ComX.io. I’ve been helping people like you to get results... for the past few years now. So if you have any questions during this demo — just interrupt me, and I’ll answer them.”

Same content. The pauses before “for the past few years” and “I’ll answer them” give those phrases weight. The listener’s brain registers: that part matters. You can do an enormous amount with pacing alone, without changing a single word.

2. Pitch

High-pitched voices tend to signal lower authority. The two are connected: when you speak fast, your pitch rises naturally. Slow down, and it drops.

Don’t force it into something unnatural — calibration, not performance. A few practical things that actually help: your voice is naturally lower in the morning, so schedule important calls earlier in the day if you can. A back stretch before a call — hands on lower back, look up, stretch backwards for a minute or two — can drop your voice by an octave. I picked this up from yoga and use it regularly before recordings.

The reference point here is Morgan Freeman. Slow, deep, with an almost conspiratorial quality that makes you lean in. What’s less well known is that it wasn’t accidental — he developed it deliberately, dropping an octave and slowing his delivery right down. That sense that he knows something you don’t comes almost entirely from pacing and pitch.

🎧 Listen here. It’s worth twenty minutes of your time to study how he does it.

3. Posture

Upright posture signals higher status. This is subconscious and immediate — people register it before you’ve said a word.

Think about how a security guard stands outside a jewellery store. Never hunched, never checking their phone. Upright, still, present. That posture communicates control of the space without a single word being spoken.

In Denmark, standing desks are essentially standard — most companies have them by default. My business partner Chris and I adopted them early in our careers and have been standing more than sitting ever since. Chris is the clearest example I know of what good posture actually does: tall, always standing straight, and there’s a quality to his presence the moment he walks into a room that makes people curious. People are drawn towards someone who stands like they own where they are.

You don’t need an expensive desk. I currently use a small night table placed on top of my regular desk. Books work just as well. It’s also genuinely better for your back and blood flow — the status signal is a bonus, not the only reason to do it.

4. Using Your Hands

Using your hands when you speak signals that you’re comfortable and in control of your environment. It tells the room: I’m at home here.

This feels counterintuitive — surely staying still looks more composed? In practice, the opposite is true. People who stand rigidly or keep their hands fixed by their sides read as tense and constrained. Movement, used naturally, communicates ownership of the space. And people assign status to that.

This applies on camera too — outbound prospecting videos, demos, conference calls. Your hands are still visible, still meaningful, and still worth being conscious of.

The Six Tones — and When to Use Each

These tones are tools, not styles. Each one serves a specific moment in a sales conversation. Using the wrong tone at the wrong moment undermines everything you’ve built — you can have perfect pacing and posture, and still lose the room if you’re enthusiastic when you should be certain, or demanding when you should be curious.

Here they are in the order they tend to appear across a call.

1. Enthusiastic Tone — intro, thesis, feature demos

High energy, high volume. This is the charismatic fire tone — the one that lures people in at the start of a call and brings excitement to a product demonstration.

Example: “John — let me show you what this actually means for you. You get message-market fit when you start focusing on the real problems of your target group. Normally you’d have to spend years figuring that out. With ComX, you can do it in 10 to 14 days. Let me show you how.”

One critical rule: do not use this tone when closing. When you move into the close, the energy drops entirely. Enthusiasm at the close signals uncertainty. It makes you sound like a puppy — eager and harmless, which is the last thing you want when asking someone to make a decision.

2. Inquisitive Tone — qualification

Raise your voice slightly at the end of questions. This makes even personal or probing questions feel non-threatening — playful, not demanding.

During qualification, you need honest, sometimes sensitive information: your prospect’s revenue, their real blockers, what’s actually keeping them up at night. People are reluctant to share if they feel interrogated. The inquisitive tone removes that friction.

Compare these two versions of the same question:

“So what motivated you to join me today?” — Low, flat. Feels like an interrogation.

“So — what motivated you to join me today?” — Slight lift at the end. Curious, open, easy to answer.

Other examples:

“What does your recurring revenue look like today — just ballpark?”

“Why do people buy your product or service? What’s the big promise you’re making to them?”

The higher the pitch, the safer the prospect feels answering. You can ask almost anything if the tone is right.

3. Empathetic Tone — pain points, deeper qualification, some closing lines

Used when the conversation enters difficult territory. A struggling pipeline. A business that hasn’t grown in two years. A founder who hasn’t made a sale since the pandemic.

Think of a doctor taking a patient’s history. You need the full picture in order to help — but the patient has to feel safe enough to give it to you.

For example, a prospect tells you:

“Philip, honestly — since COVID, I haven’t sold anything. I don’t know what to do.”

The response isn’t a pivot to your solution. It’s:

“Wow. Okay. That must have been incredibly hard.”

Then silence. Let them feel heard before you move on.

This tone also crosses over into certain closing lines — moments where you’re asking someone to make a meaningful commitment and you want them to know you understand what’s at stake for them. The emphasis on “genuinely” matters. You should actually give a damn about the prospect. If you don’t, this tone doesn’t work — people feel the difference.

4. Reasonable Man Tone — thesis buy-in, logical case-making, negotiation

Calm, logical, completely non-threatening. This is how you’d walk a friend through something that seems obvious to you — patient, clear, unassuming. You’re not pushing. You’re laying out the logic and letting the prospect arrive at the conclusion themselves.

Examples:

“Does that make sense?”

“Wouldn’t you agree that these steps are already a pain point for your team?”

“Come on, John — doesn’t this make total sense? What other solution would you prefer? I’m genuinely curious.”

The last example is particularly useful in negotiation — when you’ve done all the ROI justification, the logic is airtight, and the prospect still hasn’t moved. Said with warmth and genuine curiosity, it’s disarming. It simply invites them to explain their own hesitation out loud, which often resolves it.

5. Declarative / Certainty Tone — closing, pricing, offer presentation

If you take one thing from this article, take this:

Your script doesn’t close deals — your certainty does.

Lower your voice at the end of sentences. Speak slowly. Convey absolute certainty — not aggression, not pressure, just the settled confidence of someone who knows exactly what they’re talking about.

A prospect will not sign if they are not certain. Certainty is not something you can explain into them with more information — it is something you transfer through tone. When you are rock solid, they feel it, and it becomes contagious.

Here’s what this sounds like in practice, during an offer presentation:

“John — here is exactly the tasks and resources for your team. There are multiple ways to achieve these results.

In the old way: if you were to build an inside sales unit with a VP of Sales, you’d need to pay them at least 15 to 30 thousand euros a month. If you outsourced the process to an agency, you’d be paying around 10 thousand euros a month. With either of those methods, results usually take at least six months — and often more than a year.

With ComX — you onboard within days. And you see results within hours of launch.

ComX is a SaaS tool on a 12-month licence. Every customer can start with a six-month proof of concept. And if ComX does not perform, we reimburse your full licence fee.

The offer: you start within days. ComX Professional is 5,000 euros a month.”

Notice what’s happening: the pricing and the guarantee don’t get rushed. They don’t get softened. The voice drops, the pace slows, and every word is placed deliberately. That is the certainty tone.

Once you master it, it works far beyond sales — in any situation where you need to transfer conviction to another person. Use it carefully.

6. Whispering — feature reveals, thesis buy-in, drum-roll moments

There’s an old saying: if you want someone to listen, raise your voice. If you want someone to really listen, lower it.

Whispering creates curiosity — the sense that something important is about to happen. Used at the right moment, it’s like a drum roll: it loads the anticipation before you open the curtain.

Example, before a feature reveal:

“Let me show you a feature... but before I do — I want to show you the results you’ll actually get when you use this.”

Then pause. Let it sit. Then reveal.

Morgan Freeman does this instinctively — that slight drop into near-whisper that makes you lean forward and wonder what he knows that you don’t. It is an advanced technique and it must be authentic to land. Practise it before you use it live. But when it’s real, it is extraordinarily effective.

What Now

Stand up for your next call. Slow down. When you present your offer, shift consciously into the certainty tone — lower your voice, place the words deliberately, and don’t rush the pricing.

Then record yourself and listen back once. You will immediately hear where you sound rushed, hesitant, or apologetic — and you’ll know exactly what to fix. Small adjustments here compound fast.

Tonality and body language are not performance skills. They’re communication skills — the mechanism by which everything you’ve prepared actually reaches the person you’re talking to. Master the physical foundations, match your tone to the moment, and your closing rate will change.

If you’re working on your sales process and want to go deeper — on script, tonality, or the full go-to-market motion —reach out here. I work directly with a small number of founders on exactly this.

What tone do you default to under pressure? I’d love to hear from you.

Phil

The core issue isn’t the channel: it’s the positioning. When your offer sounds like every other recruiting pitch, no number of emails will fix it.

Three moves worth making:

• Narrow your ICP: Stop chasing everyone, focus only on your highest-value customer segment.

• Change the angle: Find the specific frustration your persona has that nobody else talks about, and own that topic.

• Pick one channel first. Get it working before spending on ads or trying everything at once.

Most of the time, the demo isn’t where things go wrong. It went wrong before you even got there, in the moment the prospect decided whether you were worth listening to, or whether this was just another meeting they’d sit through politely.

This is Part 2 of my Sales Training Series. We’re focusing on what happens right at the start of every meeting. Get this right and everything that follows actually lands. This applies to sales and, to be blunt, to most other areas of your life as well.

Why the First Minute Matters

Most founders want a working sales team, but aren’t willing to do the work themselves. So when they do get on a call, they wing it. They haven’t thought about structure, they haven’t thought about what they need to achieve, and they definitely haven’t thought about the first 30–45 seconds.

That’s where it unravels. Here’s the context that makes this concrete:

In the 7-Hour Rule, we established that prospects need roughly seven hours of exposure to your company or proposed transformation before they trust you enough to buy. Your sales calls count toward that, but only if the person on the other side is actually paying attention. If they’re not, those minutes don’t count.

No attention → no value transfer → fake alignment → wasted time.

Corporate buyers are especially dangerous here. They’re paid to be on calls. Presence is guaranteed, attention is not. They can sit there, salaried, half-checked-out, and you get no return for your efforts.

That’s why the opener matters. Before you even think about pitching, it’s about capturing the room, earning attention and providing value.

Why Founders Avoid Control (And Why That Backfires)

In many cultures, taking control of a room feels rude.

So many founders get on with senior stakeholders and over-index on being nice. No enforced agenda, vague small talk, no structure.

From the founder’s side, it feels polite. From the prospect’s side, it creates cognitive load:

• What is this meeting about?

• What’s expected of me?

• Will I get the information I came for?

That uncertainty is exactly when people mentally check out.

Here’s the reframe: if you want my time and you want to convince me of something, I expect you to guide the call. I regard that as competence rather than dominance.

When I’m in any meeting and I notice attention slipping mid-call, I call it out directly: “Are you all with me here? Should we take a break?” You’d be surprised. People appreciate that level of ownership.

Setting the Scene = Removing Ambiguity

As we’ve established already, people disengage when they don’t know what a meeting is for.

So in the first 30–45 seconds, you need to cover five things:

• This is me: short intro with a status delta signal.

• This is you: who’s in the room and why.

• Anything you want to cover today? acknowledge their agenda 👈 Crazy important!

• Here’s what we’ll do: your agenda and sequence.

• Here’s the outcome: decision / negotiation / collaboration.

Ideally seed all of this in the meeting invite, and then reiterate it at the start of the call.

Here are two frames to guide you:

Discovery:

“Today it’s about your unique situation. I’m trying to figure out whether there’s a fit to what we offer and whether we can create value for you.

For that, I need to understand a couple of things about your business — what phase you’re in, what’s currently blocking you.

Then we’ll check whether I can even help, because there may be other providers who are a better fit for your specific situation.”

Demo:

“I’m going to show you the product today.

I’m keen on your feedback — and I also want to understand whether you’d be willing to sign up after the session.

At the end, I’ll take your questions and then I’d love to discuss next steps.”

Both frames do the same thing: explicit intent, prepared outcome. No ambiguity. No hidden agenda.

💡 Ambiguity kills trust while clarity and a clear mandate build it.

Getting Control = Owning the Structure

Control means owning the structure: what you’re covering, in what order, how you move between sections, and roughly how long each part takes.

Here’s what it sounds like in practice:

“To start, I’d like to understand your situation a bit better — what we call qualification questions.

Then we’ll move into our thesis — why we’re doing what we’re doing.

After that, we’ll look at the product and how it could apply to your organisation.”

That’s it. Thirty seconds. Done.

The payoff: prospects don’t get lost. Dominant personalities are far less likely to derail things. And you avoid the classic disaster where 60 minutes are up and you’ve barely started pitching.

Most people aren’t running structured meetings. When you do, you reduce their cognitive load and signal competence. That’s not just good for you — it’s a genuine favour to the person on the other side.

What 45 Seconds Sounds Like

When we put it all together — status delta, scene-setting, structure — we get a powerful opener. Here’s an example of what that could sound like:

“Welcome, everybody. We’ll jump into the agenda in just a moment.

Quickly — so you know me: my name is Philipp Ströhemann. I’ve been building companies for the last 20 years, specifically focused on go-to-market, which I’ve done for hundreds of businesses — most of them actually in your sector.

I’m very keen to learn about your case today. Let’s kick off with a quick introductory round.”

Under a minute. Here’s what it does:

• 🎖️ Signals status: why you’re worth listening to.

• 🪟 Sets the scene: what this meeting is and where it’s going.

• 🧭 Takes the wheel: how the call will run.

You’ll go deeper on your background later (that’s what the thesis section is for). This opener is just enough to earn the room’s attention before you need it.

What Now?

Before you optimise your demo, fix your first minute.

• Write your opener.

• Practice it.

• Use and refine it with time.

📩 What’s been your biggest challenge in setting the scene on sales calls? I’d love to hear from you.

Phil

The honest answer: most founders ask this question too early. Revenue fixes cash flow problems. Fundraising doesn’t.

When you do need outside capital, the order matters:

• Bootstrap first: Taking investors changes the nature of your business completely.

• Grants and awards: More accessible than you think, roughly as hard as pitching VCs.

• Debt: Cheaper than equity over time, but you need to nurture that bank relationship.

• VC last: Most South African VCs are Series A in disguise, whatever they call themselves.

Prospects don’t show up to demos. Or they show up, but aren’t transparent; you get polished answers instead of honest ones. Sales cycles drag for reasons nobody can articulate. Follow-ups go quiet with no clear explanation.

The explanations you will hear from your sales team will be: bad timing, budget constraints, the wrong product, the usual. And they are true at times. But they are not the full story.

In my experience, a large percentage of these failures share a common root: the prospect never fully accepted you as someone worth listening to. And without that, nothing else in your sales process can land.

👉🏼 That root has a name; it is called a status delta.

If you don’t have it, the rest of your sales process will underperform, even when everything else looks right.

Rapport Is The Wrong Word

Sales training loves the word “rapport”. Connect to your buyer, build it early, keep it warm, be likeable, make them comfortable.

But that is not the mechanism. Rapport is actually the recognition of a status delta. From the first moment a prospect encounters you, whether consciously or subconsciously they are asking the question:

“Why should I listen to this person?”

Status delta is how they decide this. It determines whether they are actually with you, or merely present. It is silently operating whether you are conscious of it or not, and has nothing to do with how much the people in the room like you.

Being likeable and creating a status delta require completely different things. One is social effort. The other is structural. If you confuse this, you’ll waste a lot of time on deals that were never real.

The Badge — And The Rule You Cannot Break

The clearest way to understand status delta is with an example:

A police officer walks up to a stranger’s house and flashes a badge. There’s immediate compliance. Not because the stranger likes the officer, or because rapport has been built with the individual, but because the badge signals authority and role. Instant, structural, no relationship required.

Now flip it. The officer turns out to be an actor. The badge is fake. The moment the stranger learns this, the dynamic reverses completely; both compliance and trust disappear.

That is exactly how status delta works in a sales process. They are perceived, but only work if they are true and authentic.

Which brings us to the one rule that sits above everything else in this article: never lie. Do not exaggerate credentials, fabricate results, misrepresent client relationships, or claim access you do not have. If you get caught, the status delta does not just disappear — it actually flips against you. You will ruin your reputation.

There is also an important inverse: saying “I don’t know this, but I do know this”, with genuine honesty about where your knowledge sits, can itself create a status delta. Self-awareness implies competence. That combination is rarer than most people realise, and prospects respond to it.

Anyone Can Build It

Most founders assume status delta belongs to senior people with impressive careers behind them, and that if you are young, early-stage, or relatively unknown, you simply cannot create it. That is not true.

When I was building sales teams at ComX, I watched one of our youngest reps, a 24 year old who was just out of university, walk into a room of seasoned CEOs and entrepreneurs in their forties and fifties - a group of aggressive people, accustomed to dominating any room they entered.

Ten minutes into the qualification section, the dynamic had completely shifted. Nobody interrupted, or tried to take control. Every single one of them was still, watching closely, following his every word through a full hour-long demo. A few hours later, they became customers.

That was not charisma, or not luck. That was a well-constructed status delta — and it is something that can be learned.

It Is Always Compounding Or Eroding

Status delta is not a tactic for the opening of a call. It needs to be present from the first piece of marketing a prospect encounters, all the way through to the moment they sign… and nurtured even beyond that.

Wherever the prospect encounters you (your website, your outreach, your LinkedIn, the demo itself) the delta is either compounding or eroding. There is no neutral ground.

When it is genuinely strong, something interesting happens: prospects sometimes do not even know what exactly you’re selling, but they know they need to take the call. They cannot explain why. They just know. That is the goal state.

This connects directly to the 7-Hour Rule: prospects need roughly seven hours of meaningful exposure before they trust you enough to buy. Sales calls count toward that, but only when the person in front of you is actually paying attention. Corporate buyers are a specific danger zone. They are paid to attend meetings, so their presence is guaranteed, but attention is not.

Your status delta is what earns attention. Without it, the hours you invest together count for far less than you think.

The Puppy Dog Trap

A status delta can be lost mid-process. And when it goes, the dynamic inverts.

The founder becomes the puppy dog: endlessly accommodating, adjusting the price, extending the scope, proposing one more introductory session. Whatever it takes to keep the door from closing.

For founders who are naturally extroverted and relationship-oriented (and I include myself here) this is an easy trap to fall into. The instinct to connect, to smooth things over, to stay agreeable actively works against you. The moment you start bending over backwards to keep the prospect comfortable, you have signalled that their approval matters more than your credibility.

Once you’re in puppy dog mode, the deal is functionally over. The prospect may keep showing up, but the buying dynamic has gone.

The reframe: status delta is not ego. It comes from clarity, relevance, and intent. You need to learn to be disagreeable in the right moments — to withstand the heat of someone not liking you for a beat — without becoming aggressive or unprofessional.

Recovery is possible. Demonstrate one or more of the Status Delta Creators below and the dynamic can shift again. But be aware that the time to build the delta is ideally before you need to rescue it.

The 8 Status Delta Creators

There are eight routes to a status delta. All of them must be truthful, or none of them will work.

1. 🏆 Credentials and track record

The most direct method. Your results, your client work, your outcomes all stated plainly, without hedging.

In German culture this feels like bragging. I’ve learned that it is not. It is giving the prospect a concrete reason to take you seriously. Pull from your full background, not just your current company. If you are young or early-stage, find the honest edge and use it. Something true and specific will always outperform nothing.

2. 💰 Capital

Uncomfortable for many, but real. Access to capital, or evidence of it, creates an immediate unconscious signal. Steve Jobs put it plainly, “If they think you’re rich, they think you’re right.”

You do not need to make this the centrepiece of every conversation. But do not hide relevant financial credibility if it exists. Buyers are constantly asking themselves whether you will survive long enough to deliver. Your capital status answers that question quickly.

3. 🤝 Alignment with others of status

Association transfers credibility. Employers, clients, board positions, investors, credible partners: if you have worked with or been endorsed by names your prospect recognises, say so. It’s the same mechanism that makes using client logos on a website so powerful, just applied in a real-time conversation.

Name-dropping, used honestly, is not vanity. It’s signal.

4. 👔 Clothing

The thing prospects act on and never mention. Clothing and visual coherence matter; all of it communicates something before you have said a word. You don’t need designer clothing, but you do need to dress in a way which is deliberate and consistent with what you are claiming.

Nobody will tell you your outfit made them uncomfortable. They will simply disengage.

5. ✂️ Grooming

Grooming matters more than most people want to admit.

Tidy hair, shaving if you’re a guy, looking rested, basic hygiene — it all affects how credible you feel in the room. Unfair or not, people pick up on it. So you might as well be aware of it and use it.

6. 🏢 Environment

Your workspace signals status, especially on video calls. You need good lighting, a clean background, and order. Avoid having things like laundry in sight, or poor lighting and clutter; this breaks rapport immediately.

7. 🏃 Physical health

People have an unconscious bias towards associating with someone who appears to look after themselves, because it signals discipline and reliability.

You do not need to be an athlete. But if you operate in serious rooms, staying healthy is part of the job. This matters for your own performance in any case; the status delta effect is just a secondary benefit worth knowing about.

8. ⌚ Tokens of success

Objects that signal achievement (a quality watch is the clearest example) carry subconscious weight in certain circles. Understatement reads better than flash, particularly with buyers who are successful themselves.

If you do not have this yet, though, don’t worry. Build first; the rest will come with time.

Now, how will you know if the Status delta you built is working?

Here are a few differences between a room where Status delta is present, and one where it is not:

What Now

Before your next call, ask yourself one question: Have I given this person a concrete reason to listen to me?

Not a reason to like me. A reason to listen.

If the answer is not clear, start there, before you change your deck, your pricing, or your pitch.

📩 What has been your biggest challenge establishing credibility quickly with a new prospect? I would love to hear from you.

You can reach me here.

Phil

Not because I think the world needs another sales course. There are thousands. Most of them are recycled American content repackaged with a new logo and a higher price tag.

I’m publishing this because I built something that actually works, and I’ve sat on it for too long.

How this started

Back in 2018, I wasn’t a natural salesperson. I was charismatic, sure. I could wing a meeting. But I had no system. No mechanics. I was shooting from the hip, and it showed in the numbers.

So I bought every course I could find. Nick Kusmich, Grant Cardone, you name it. I spent thousands. And then I realised something: they were all repurposing the same ideas: Cialdini’s influence principles, Jordan Belfort’s Straight Line System, the Wolf of Wall Street stuff, Russell Brunson, Dan Kennedy, Zig Ziglar. It had all been solved decades ago.

The frameworks were brilliant. But they were built for the American market — fast-talking, high-pressure, transactional. If you tried to run a Straight Line close on a German Mittelstand CEO or a South African founder, you’d get laughed out of the room.

So I didn’t copy. I studied the principles, pulled out what was universal, and rebuilt the training for my reality: European B2B, South African entrepreneurship, and the kind of trust-based selling that actually closes deals outside the US.

What happened next

I used this training at ComX — the company I co-founded, bootstrapped through COVID, scaled to 150+ people, EUR 18M+ ARR, and eventually sold to PE. Every single sales hire went through this programme. It was the backbone of how we sold.

Then I started sharing it with the founders I work with. Every time, the same pattern: smart founders with great products, completely flat on sales. They’d been told to “just get out there and sell.” Nobody had taught them the mechanics.

The results when they got the training were consistent:

“Phil’s sales training transformed how we approach client acquisition. The structured methodology gave our team a repeatable process that actually converts.”

— Robert Tepass, CEO, AntragPlus

“We went from winging sales calls to running a structured process. The difference in conversion was immediate.”

— Björn Möller, CaraLegal

“The sales script framework Phil taught us was the missing piece. We had the product — we just didn’t know how to sell it systematically.”

— Julian Philipp Nagel, ALong

“Working with Phil on our sales process was a turning point. He didn’t just give us theory — he gave us a system we could implement the same week.”

— Philipp Hartmann, The Factory

“Phil’s approach to sales training cuts through the noise. It’s practical, it’s proven, and it works in the South African context.”

— Schalk van der Merwe

“The structured sales methodology Phil shared was instrumental in how we approached our go-to-market — from first call to close.”

— René Hartmann, Proco

“Phil coached me through building a sales process from scratch. That foundation carried through to our exit.”

“But what about AI?”

Fair question. AI is changing everything about how we sell. Automated outreach, AI-generated follow-ups, call transcription, lead scoring — half of what used to take a sales team a week can now happen in minutes.

So why publish a sales training in 2026?

Because AI automates the mechanics. It does not replace the understanding.

If you don’t understand why a customer says yes, no amount of AI automation will save you. If you can’t read a conversation, identify where someone is in their buying journey, and move them forward with the right question at the right moment — your AI tools are just sending faster garbage.

The founders who will win are the ones who understand the principles AND use AI to execute at 10x speed. That’s the combination nobody is teaching.

This is also why we wrote these articles in a way where you can completely feed them into your Claude, GPT or Openclaw.

What’s in the series

Over the next weeks, I’m publishing the complete training:

1. Introduction to Status Deltas — why people buy

2. Setting the Scene — getting control of the conversation

3. Qualification — finding out if this deal is real

4. The Power of Case Studies — proof that closes

5. The Thesis — framing the problem

6. The Mechanism — explaining how your solution works

7. Closing & Micro Conversions — getting to yes

8. Objection Handling — when they push back

9. ...and more.

Each part comes with the framework, examples, and — this is new — an AI skill that helps you adapt the script to your specific customer calls. You feed it your call transcript, and it restructures your sales approach based on the principles in the training.

Want the AI skill?

Send us a message and we’ll send you the Claude Code skill that turns these principles into your personalised sales playbook: Get in touch →

Why free?

Because this knowledge shouldn’t sit in a drawer. Because the founders I work with in South Africa and Europe deserve access to what actually works — not another $997 course that recycles Robert Cialdini without crediting him.

And because the best founders I’ve ever backed came from communities where people shared openly. That’s what Unleash is about.

Part 1 drops next week. Follow along.

Phil

First, nail your customer’s real problem hierarchy, because your solution may sit lower than you think. Then document the conversion mechanism, build the script, record it, and only then bring people in to imitate what works.

The four non-negotiables for any B2B deal:

• A real problem.

• A budget.

• A decision-making process.

• And, most critically, an impending event.

He ran a recruiting business. Solid product, clear market, but his outreach simply wasn’t converting. Emails were not landing. Social selling worked, but only off his personal LinkedIn profile, which the platform capped before it could scale enough. He hadn’t tried cold calling and was beginning to wonder whether something was fundamentally broken with his go-to-market.

But nothing was broken. The business was fine. The problem was the positioning. He was operating in what I would call a Red Ocean, a market so crowded that every competitor was selling the same pitch, at slightly different prices, to the same buyers.

When buyers can’t tell you apart, they don’t buy from any of you. Here’s how to solve that.

When Everyone Tells the Same Story

Russell Brunson, in his Secrets Trilogy, makes a point that most founders learn the hard way: the moment you start competing on features, you’ve already lost. His solution is what he calls the “Blue Ocean” shift: stop comparing yourself to competitors and instead position your product as an entirely new opportunity. As Brunson puts it in Expert Secrets:

“By changing your positioning, you’ll pull your opportunity out of a red ocean and plunk it down into a blue ocean.”

I’ve been in this exact position myself. At ComX, in 2016 and 2017, we were selling a turnkey solution for outbound LinkedIn and email — a pitch that worked back then because the market wasn’t saturated and buyers hadn’t yet heard it from everyone else.

Then the market shifted. Outbound became the standard playbook across the entire industry. Every competitor had the same story. And this is exactly what Brunson warns about: once your Hook, Story, and Offer look identical to everyone else’s, buyers stop listening — not because your product got worse, but because your story stopped standing out. Our conversion rates fell for precisely that reason. We hadn’t changed. The market had gotten louder, and we were no longer saying anything different inside it.

This is the pattern in every red ocean:

• Your messaging looks identical to every competitor.

• Buyers stop listening.

• The ones who respond choose whoever is cheapest, or they just don’t decide at all.

The Two-Part Fix

When ComX hit this wall, we made two changes. Most founders I see only make one.

The first change was to adjust the product. We went upstream. Instead of helping companies run outbound campaigns, we figured out how to make outbound radically easier to set up before a single campaign launched. We tackled the friction that existed at the very start of the process and turned that into a platform. The product evolved from running outbound for clients to solving their real problem: why setting up outbound is such a mess in the first place.

The second change was to completely rebuild our positioning. We found a topic that we could talk about in our marketing that nobody else was talking about, and we became the absolute experts on it. We stopped selling our product in our marketing entirely. Our messaging shifted from outbound LinkedIn and email to: we find message-market fit for you in three days. We did not sell the tool, or explain the process. We just talked about the golden result that would come after working with us.

Those two moves have to happen together:

• ✅ Adjust the product so it solves a real friction, not just the obvious problem.

• ✅ Reposition your marketing around the outcome, not the mechanism.

• ❌ A better version of your current pitch will not work in a red ocean.

Finding the Angle Nobody Else Owns

So how do you find the topic? You go back to the biggest frustrations your ideal customer holds, and you ask yourself, “What problem is everyone in my market dealing with that nobody is talking about clearly yet?”

In a red ocean, you cannot win by saying what everyone else is saying, just with better copywriting. If your essential product description does not differentiate much from your competitors, your marketing must find a new angle. Something specific and frustrating enough that when your ideal customer reads it, they think, “Finally, someone who actually gets this!”.

For the recruiting founder at our dinner, the current pitch was essentially talent at cheaper prices, a message that has existed since the first Eastern European developers came online in 2013. Buyers have heard it thousands of times. It doesn’t move them anymore, that’s the harsh reality.

So:

1. Find the answer to the question: “What problem is everyone in my market dealing with that nobody is talking about clearly yet?”

2. Have that conversation, and

3. Build your marketing around it.

This is how you stop sounding like everyone else, and stand out from the crowd.

Ask Who Your Best Customer Actually Is

Nevo Hadas, one of our mentors that evening, made a point that is easy to overlook when founders are focused on messaging: Before you reposition your pitch, ask whether you are even selling to the right customer.

Who are your most valuable customers? And what if you stopped targeting everyone else and just focused on them?

Nevo has seen this pattern before, in businesses he has worked with directly. Revenue was flat, growth was stuck, and the fix had nothing to do with product or messaging. The problem was the customer.

He described taking a business where revenue was anemic, and making one change: they changed who they sold to. They stopped chasing customers they could never scale with, went up-market, and narrowed the focus. The revenue picture changed completely.

For the recruiting founder, his highest-value customers are outsourcing companies between 100 and 400 employees, where the CEO is the decision maker and they hire the same roles repeatedly ie real long-term value per customer. The question Nevo left him with was this: “If you know that, why are you talking to anyone else?”

Position for the Buyer Who Cannot Ignore You

A red ocean does not mean the market is broken. It means you have stopped being differentiated within it.

• Find the angle nobody else has claimed.

• Own it completely in your marketing.

• Get ruthlessly specific about which customers you are actually built for.

Want to implement these learnings directly into your start-up?
Join our next free founder Q&A!

Phil

But six months later, the deal had still not closed.

I’ve seen this frequently with the founders I work with, and it came up at our first Unleash Dinner in November 2025 too. A founder was describing their situation, selling into universities, with access to the right decision-makers and users who genuinely wanted the product. And yet they were stuck, waiting, watching a deal that should have moved, go nowhere.

So, what were they missing? Let’s dive in.

The Third Persona Nobody Maps

One of our mentors for the night, Nevo Hadas, made an observation that landed with the room.

Most founders map two personas when they enter an enterprise account:

1. The decision-maker, who can approve the budget and sign the contract.

2. The end-user, who has the problem you are solving and will actually use your product.

Get the first one to say yes, get the second one excited, and you think you’re done. Except you’re not.

There is often a third persona in the middle, Nevo explained: the administrative persona. They cannot say yes. And they don’t really have the power to say no. But they can cause your deal to stall, possibly forever..

Nevo shared a story from a project with one of the big South African insurers. The company was launching a new product into its HR departments. When the team mapped the personas, one emerged that nobody had planned for: the HR manager.

The HR manager often has, especially in midsize organisations, a great deal of power over whether something actually gets implemented. The CEO can agree to implementation, but if it is not a burning strategic imperative and if the third persona (in this case the HR manager) just drags their feet, the deal just never happens.

This is the hidden blocker. Not the person who rejects you outright. The person who, without ever saying no, ensures the deal just never quite happens.

The Transformation Trap

This connects to something I have seen repeat across enterprise deals: The more transformational your product, the more likely you are to hit a blocker like this.

Think about what high transformation actually means for the person who has to implement it:

• New workflows.

• Behaviour change across a team.

• Training schedules.

• Integration with existing systems.

• Compliance sign-off.

Every one of those is a task that lands on someone, and in most case, that someone did not ask for this change and was not hired to implement it.

If you are selling something lightweight, a tool someone signs up for and uses individually, the friction is low.

But if your product requires organisational change, you are creating unpaid work for someone in the middle of the buying centre. And that person will find reasons to deprioritise it, not because they are obstructive, but because they are already running at full capacity.

Understanding the Buying Center

This is where a concept most B2B founders underuse becomes critical: the buying centre.

The buying centre is not just who approves your deal. It is how the organisation actually buys things:

1. What cadence their approvals follow.

2. How structured their procurement process is.

3. Who influences each stage, formally and informally.

4. And where the blockers tend to live.

The larger the organisation, the more important it is for you to understand how it works.

In a mid-sized SA corporate, the buying centre typically includes:

• Decision-makers with authority to approve and sign.

• End-users who own the problem and will live with the solution daily.

• ⚠️ Implementation and admin personas who will do the actual work, and who can quietly stall everything.

• Budget holders who are often not the same person as the decision-maker.

• Compliance or legal who can veto quietly on technicalities.

One of our founder guests for the night added a useful angle here. He pointed to the technology adoption curve, and the importance of identifying early adopters within your buying centre. These are the people who are already engaged with new ideas, who tend to be active and visible on platforms like LinkedIn. They are your best entry point, not because they approve the deal, but because they generate momentum inside the organisation for the people who do.

The SA Corporate Reality

This dynamic plays out everywhere in enterprise sales, but it has a specific shape in South Africa.

SA corporates tend to be hierarchical in their formal structure but relationship-driven in how things actually get done. They are not execution machines where a CEO decision cascades down and ships by Friday. They are relationship networks with process constraints layered on top.

What this means for your deal: even when the authority sits at the top, the execution depends on goodwill that runs sideways across the organisation. Everyone knows everyone, and informal influence matters enormously.

If you bypass the HR manager, the IT lead, or the procurement officer, you don’t just slow down the deal - you damage the relationships that make it possible in the first place.

You want to identify that early, so you do not get dragged out. Because that is where those long deal cycles come from, and cost you money.

The founders who close enterprise deals in SA are the ones who invest in the implementation persona before the ink is dry, even when that person is not technically the buyer. Nevo summed it up:

“If they have to do the work, you have to be really nice to them.”

Understand their constraints. Reduce their burden. And make them look good - internally.

Before Your Next Deal Stalls

Map your buying centre before you need it. Identify the third persona in your current deals, and invest in that relationship now, before the CEO enthusiasm fades and the implementation quietly stops.

What is the one person in your active enterprise deal who you have been under-investing in?

I’d love to connect - you can reach me here.

Phil

Then weeks pass. You follow up, and get the response “Let’s circle back next quarter.” You follow up again: “We’re still aligned, just caught up internally.” Another month. Same deal, same answer, same vague warmth.The deal is not dead, But it isn’t moving either.

I’ve made this mistake myself more times than I care to count. At our first Unleash Dinner in November 2025, one of our mentors for the evening, Nevo Hadas, said something that crystallised the fourth requirement in a way I had not heard it articulated quite so cleanly before: An impending event.

The Lesson from a Cisco Sales Giant

At the dinner, Nevo shared a framework from someone who had spent decades doing enterprise B2B sales at the highest level, a former Global Sales Director at Cisco. This is a person who had pattern-matched across thousands of deals at one of the most complex selling organisations in the world. Not theory, but real pattern recognition from the field.

The framework is straightforward. For a B2B deal to close, four things need to be true. None are nice-to-haves. All four are non-negotiable.

• Your customer needs to have the problem that you solve. Not just any problem, specifically the problem your product addresses, and it has to be among the top priorities they are actively trying to solve right now. A customer can have ten real problems. If yours is number eight, it is not relevant.

• They need to have a budget for your solution. It’s not enough if they are just a large company. They need to have actual budget that can be allocated to this category. A premium solution in a market with no allocated budget is a dead end.

• They need to have a decision-making process. In B2B especially, they need to know who signs off, how the approval works, what the procurement flow looks like. If they cannot tell you that, they are figuring it out as they go, and that is a problem you cannot sell your way out of.

Those three feel like enough, and most founders stop there. But the fourth is where deals either happen or die…

The Fourth Non-Negotiable

The fourth non-negotiable is an impending event.

“If there is nothing that is going to go horribly wrong in their life tomorrow unless they do this, if there is not a bonus they are going to miss or a big thing that needs to happen now, it will never happen. You need that impending event to really make a deal come together.”

- Nevo Hadas

An impending event is anything that creates a real cost to delay. It could be a compliance deadline, a quarterly target they will miss without your solution, a competitor moving into their space, a contract renewal coming up, a budget window closing at month end, or a senior leader who has committed to a specific outcome. Whatever the form, it makes inaction painful in a concrete, near-term way.

Without it, even a perfect-fit deal becomes a nice-to-have. And nice-to-have has a way of never becoming yes.

The reason founders miss this is because the first three non-negotiables feel solid already. The customer agrees it is a real problem, they have budget, and have explained the approvals process. So everything looks like it’s in place.

But if there is no burning platform, no real cost to waiting, the deal drifts. Indefinitely.

The hardest thing about being a founder is resisting your own sales optimism. Not seeing every glimmer of warmth as a confirmed deal. “There is no deal here” is a sentence more of us need to be willing to say.

Run Your Pipeline Through This Right Now

This is where the framework becomes a practical tool rather than just an explanation for why deals stall. Take your three longest-running almost-there deals, the ones where you feel like it is just a matter of time. Run each one through the four questions honestly.

• Do they have the specific problem your solution addresses, and is it in their top priorities right now?

• Have they confirmed budget, or are you assuming because of the company size?

• Can they articulate who signs off and how the approval process works?

• What happens if they do nothing in the next 30, 60, or 90 days? What is the actual cost of delay to them?

What you will find is that most of your stuck deals clear questions one, two and three. Question four is where almost all of them fall apart.

If a deal has the first three non-negotiables in place but not the fourth, it is not an active deal -it is a warm pipeline. Stay visible, stay in touch, but do not burn your best energy trying to push it across a line that is not there yet.

Dr Zane Stenning added something at the dinner that belongs in every sales toolkit:

“Never accept a ‘no’ from someone who cannot give you one.”

The person who declined one quarter may not be the same person who can say “yes” the next. And the deal with no urgency last quarter may have a very different impending event this quarter. Your job is to stay present in the right way, without burning your best cycles on a deal that has no real catalyst yet.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Your Pipeline

Most B2B pipelines are not what it looks like. It is full of people who understand your product, acknowledge the problem, and could probably find budget. But without an impending event, “probably” never becomes a signed contract.

The proposed framework of the 4 non-negotiable questions keeps you honest about what is real in your pipeline…and what is just occupying space in it.

What is the impending event for your three best deals right now?

I’d love to connect - you can reach me here.

Phil

Dr Zane Stenning is a medical doctor turned entrepreneur. He founded Mia Healthcare, a vertically integrated dental startup that began by trying to bring affordable Invisalign to Africa, and pivoted into one of the more compelling mobile healthcare businesses in South Africa.

He has raised from friends and family, angels, VCs, a bank, and an impact funder - and pitched between 55 and 65 people to get there.

At our first Unleash dinner in November 2025, Zane spoke about why most founders are already set up to mismanage money before they ever earn it - and what it actually takes to change the mindset.

Your Money Story Was Written Before You Could Read

Most people believe their financial decisions are rational. According to Zane, they are not. Every founder in the room was already operating under a money narrative they had inherited long before they understood what money actually was.

He maps it across three formative periods:

• The first is childhood, watching your parents handle or avoid money, absorbing their anxiety or abundance, and internalising what wealth means before you can articulate it.

• The second is early adulthood, the moment you start earning for the first time and have to connect money to purpose. What are you actually working for?

• The third is ongoing, the stream of money scripts playing out every time you open your wallet.

To make it concrete, Zane shared a moment from his own household. His wife spotted a bikini on sale and said: “Look how cheap this is! I am basically saving money!” He explained that spending less than expected is not an investment. To be precise, spending money is never an investment unless it generates a return.

This may sound obvious. But his point is that these small distortions compound over a lifetime. If your money story says that buying things on sale is financially smart, what does that same story do when you are making decisions about cash runway? About when to hire? About whether to raise at all?

The Cognitive Traps That Make You Poor

Even if you can identify your money narrative, Zane argues, you are still running a set of cognitive biases that will quietly sabotage your financial decisions.

He starts with survivorship bias. In World War II, planners analysed the bullet holes on planes that returned to base and reinforced those areas. But the crash rate did not change. Why? Because the planes hit in the truly fatal spots never came back. The planners were studying the wrong data set.

Founders do the same thing. You study the companies that raised capital. You model your pitch on the startups that made it. You benchmark against the founders who succeeded. But you are not seeing the full picture - you are only seeing what survived.

Then there is loss aversion: the fear of losing money so paralysing that it prevents the risks necessary to create wealth. Zane argues this shows up in subtler ways than most founders recognise: in the reluctance to spend on marketing, to hire ahead of revenue, to make the bet that is necessary but uncertain.

Confirmation bias is especially dangerous for founders. You have decided your idea is good. Now every piece of evidence confirms it. The same mental pattern that keeps you going through hard months can also keep you going when you should have already stopped.

And finally, there is what Zane calls emotional state bias. You should not make lasting financial decisions when you are angry, stressed, overly excited, or in any heightened emotional state. These conditions alter the way you process risk and reward, and the consequences far outlast your mood.

You Do Not Have to Chase the Unicorn

The risk-reward spectrum runs from salaried cash at the low end (safe, stable, slow) - to starting your own company at the high end (maximum upside, maximum risk). Every founder at the Unleash dinner was sitting at the high end of that spectrumBut Zane pushed back on the assumption that high risk requires a billion-dollar ambition.

“You can have an amazing life if you build a business with a five million dollar exit. Or a two million dollar exit. Whatever that number is for you.”

You do not need to be chasing Y-Combinator valuations. You do not need to raise at a fifty million dollar valuation before you have found product-market fit. You can create genuine impact, serve your community, build real upside, and still live a life that is actually aligned with what you wanted.

This, Zane argues, is one of the most dangerous things the startup ecosystem does to founders: it makes one version of ambition the only legitimate kind. In doing so, it nudges founders toward funding structures, growth rates, and personal sacrifices that were never aligned with their actual goals.

The Fundraising Reality Nobody Tells You About

Mia Healthcare did not start as a funding success story. They bootstrapped. Zane had made capital elsewhere and could self-fund the early stages. When they eventually went to market for external funding, the reality was nothing like the version you hear at pitch competitions.

To get to two friends-and-family investors, three angels, two VCs, a bank, and one impact funder, Mia Healthcare pitched between 55 and 65 people. Most were full due diligences, not quick calls, but rather the full, exhausting process of opening up company data, finances, and strategy to external scrutiny. Each investor had their own spreadsheet, their own nuanced questions, their own requirements.

The VC raises alone took roughly 14 months each, from first meaningful interest to money in the bank. Zane describes signing his first term sheet and thinking the money would arrive the following week. It did not. A signed term sheet triggers full due diligence, followed by weeks of contracting.

Learning: The deal is not done when you sign the sheet.

Impact funding (the non-dilutive, grant-style funding many South African founders chase) was harder still. Super attractive in theory. But funders rarely have a clear mandate, screening processes are long, and the contracting phase can arrive more than a year after your first conversation.

What Mia Healthcare learned was that different funders want fundamentally different things, and the structure of your company needs to reflect that. So they split their vertically integrated dental ecosystem into four separate entities. The deep tech aligner business sits in a VC-funded vehicle. The mobile clinics attract soft and impact funding. Revenue-generating assets go to banks. The same investor who loves one product would walk away from another -- not because the business is bad, but because it does not fit their mandate.

The lesson: your corporate structure, and the way you pitch your business, needs to speak to what each investor wants to see and hear. Not everything. Just the part that fits.

Design the Life First

After nearly twenty minutes of frameworks, fundraising war stories, and cognitive bias breakdowns, Zane landed on a final, simple truth:

You can get all of the business strategy right, and still get your life wrong.

The only protection, he argues, is a clear picture of what you actually want -- not a vague ambition, but specific goals: personal, financial, family. What does the twenty-year version of your life look like? What does this year need to produce to make that possible?

When he was in high school, Zane was failing. His average sat around 50%. He wanted to study medicine. So he created what he calls an honesty sheet: a simple goal-setting tool that starts with your twenty-year goals at the top and breaks them down, year by year, into what needs to happen right now. He went from a 50% average to above 90% in 18 months.

He forgot about the sheet for ten years. Then his mother sent it back to him. Most of what he had written as a teenager had quietly, subconsciously come true.

Starting a business, Zane told the founders in the room, is not something you walk away from easily. It is like a marriage. It is going to be hard, stressful, and costly - financially and personally. The question is whether the opportunity cost is one you are genuinely willing to pay.

Start with the sheet. Work out what you actually want. Then reverse engineer the life to get there.

Did this resonate with you?

If you’d like to connect, or attend our next Unleash dinner, reach me here.

Phil