I’m digging into a frustrating reality many teams face: even technically superior analytics and AI products routinely lose deals—not because the KPIs or models aren’t good enough, but because buyers and users can’t clearly see how the product fits into their day-to-day work. Your demos and POCs may prove what’s possible, but long time-to-understanding, heavy thinking burden on the user, and required behavior or process changes introduce risk—and risk kills momentum. When value feels complicated, sales don’t move forward.

Adding to the challenge is that many sales efforts focus almost entirely on the fiscal buyer while overlooking the end users who actually have to adopt the product to create outcomes. This buyer–user mismatch, combined with status quo bias, often leads to indecision rather than change.

To address this, I explore the idea of thinking about the sales challenge as a product problem—and I introduce the idea of achieving Flow of Work Alignment (FOWA). The goal isn’t better persuasion—it’s clearer value. Strong FOWA means transitioning from demonstrating capabilities to helping customers see themselves—and their workflows—represented in your demos and POCs. The result? Prospects understand your value quickly, ask deeper, contextual questions, and deals move forward.

Highlights/ Skip to:

Data products must work harder to expose value clearly to avoid the dreaded “closed-lost” deal stage in your CRM (1:38)
Making your data product’s value instantly obvious (5:18)
How the “old model” of selling based on capabilities and feature demos can lead to lost sales (7:22)
What Flow-of-Work Alignment is and how it can help you unlock deals (13:02)
How to know if you have achieved FOWA or not in your product and sales process (13:58)

187 - Can’t Close the Sale? The Invisible Reasons Prospects Aren’t Buying Your Technically Superior Analytics or AI Product (Part 1)

Experiencing Data w/ Brian T. O’Neill