Stop Selling Your Technology

If you want to make money with tech, you need to start selling benefits, not features

Joe Procopio
6 min readMay 3, 2021

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image by yanalya

Take a few minutes to think about what you’re selling. The tech behind your product is probably pretty slick. But you’re probably selling the technology itself, and that needs to change.

Understanding tech is both a blessing and a curse. Company leaders who have a solid grasp of what’s fueling their product — whether it’s software, hardware, hard science like chemistry, or soft science like psychology— these folks can get a concept working and into MVP quickly. But they also tend to fall into the sales trap more often than others.

It happens to new and veteran entrepreneurs and leaders alike. It happens to me all the time.

A strong tech focus can lure us to lean on our technology as the core value proposition of our product. This not only makes our sales process daunting and unproductive, it can also lead to corrective measures that produce even more painful and costly mistakes.

When an awesome tech concept stalls out

Recently, I had a session with a promising tech founder. It took me a week to understand what her company did, but once I figured it out, it checked all the right boxes.

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Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. AI pioneer. Building TeachingStartup.com. Write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More about me at joeprocopio.com