Most sales advice aimed at founders is opinion dressed up as method. A recent Harvard Business Review analysis by Dave Rubinstein and Vincent Onyemah tries to be the exception. Rubinstein, a former sales leader at Salesforce and Outreach, now runs 100 Founders, a program built to help B2B SaaS founders move past founder-led sales. Onyemah is a professor of sales and marketing who chairs Babson College’s Marketing Division and leads its Sales Initiatives.

Together, they built their argument on two research passes taken roughly a decade apart, which is part of what makes the piece worth reading closely rather than skimming. The first pass was a 2013 study Onyemah published with two co-authors, based on interviews with 120 entrepreneurs across six countries. It found that founders tended to make one of two mistakes: over-polishing a product before showing it to anyone, or selling early, purely to generate revenue rather than to learn from the process.

The second pass is new. Between June and December of 2025, the authors interviewed more than 250 founders across more than 30 countries, running technology companies with between $500,000 and $10 million in annual recurring revenue. Their published conclusions are based on an analysis of the first 100 of those interviews; the full study, by the authors’ own account, is still in progress. Comparing the two data sets is what lets them separate what has long been true about founder-led sales from what seems to have gotten harder recently.

The Mistakes That Never Went Away

Some of the authors’ findings will be familiar to anyone who has watched a first-time founder try to sell. Many still believe they have reached product-market fit well before the evidence supports it, building on assumption rather than the test-and-learn discipline the 2013 study already recommended. One pattern the authors describe: a company celebrates a wave of trial users, only to watch nearly all of them decline to pay once the free period ends.

A second familiar mistake is chasing markets that are too broad, often under pressure from investors who want to see a large addressable market early. The authors describe founders who respond to almost every inbound request by expanding the product to fit it, rather than sharpening what the product already does well. Over time, the company can start to resemble a custom-build agency more than a repeatable software business.

A third finding is structural. Roughly four in five of the founders interviewed had no formal sales background, which the authors link to trouble running discovery calls, reading real buying signals, and managing a pipeline. That gap sometimes leads founders to hire a salesperson before the company is ready to support one. The authors also flag a subtler issue: a founder's credibility with early buyers is personal, and it doesn't automatically transfer to a new hire. In practice, that can mean prospects keep asking to speak with the founder directly, leaving an otherwise capable salesperson sidelined.

What the Authors Say Is New

The more interesting part of the piece is what the authors say has changed since 2013, and it centers on one specific confusion: founders increasingly struggle to tell real buying intent from polite curiosity. This is a problem they tie directly to AI-related buying in particular. Executives now take meetings and sit through demos partly to be able to tell their own leadership they are “evaluating options,” without much budget or urgency behind the interest. A pipeline can look busy and healthy while being made up largely of interest that was never going to convert.

The authors also argue that simply being better than the alternative, historically often enough to win a deal, isn't enough on its own anymore. They tie this to how crowded the AI startup landscape in particular has become, citing more than 90,000 AI-enabled startups now in the market. One founder they interviewed put it plainly: comparing a handful of legacy tools used to take an afternoon; comparing thousands of similar-sounding options now takes much longer, and rarely produces urgency by itself. Urgency, the authors argue, comes from tension — a buyer who leaves a call believing they need to rethink how they're handling a problem is far more likely to come back than one who simply found the conversation interesting.

The SPRINT Framework, in Plain Terms

Rubinstein and Onyemah organize their recommendations around six behaviors they found separating founders who converted early interest into revenue from those who didn't, using the acronym SPRINT. Stripped of the branding, the underlying advice is fairly concrete.

Speed is about how quickly a founder can make a buyer feel accurately described — in the first conversation, not the fifth. Problem is the discipline of naming the buyer's issue more precisely than the buyer would, anchored to something that recently changed for them rather than a generic pain point. Results means replacing vague value language with a specific, time-bound outcome the buyer could describe to their own board without the founder in the room.

Implementation is about answering a buyer's unspoken risk question before it surfaces — what happens if the system behaves unpredictably, or a workflow breaks in front of the buyer's own customers. Niche is the argument that a narrow ideal customer profile is a strategy for repeatable sales, not a ceiling on ambition. And Trust is the recognition that founder-led credibility is useful in the earliest sales conversations, but becomes a liability the moment the company needs to hand selling off to someone else.

The authors illustrate the framework with Mathis Stolz, co-founder of the German startup Nexwise, who had been cold-calling manufacturers hoping to stumble onto project work — arriving late to each opportunity, on someone else's terms. After applying SPRINT, he stopped opening with his product and instead named the tension his prospects were actually living with: chasing revenue growth while trying to protect service quality with a finite team. The shift, according to the authors, showed up quickly. Weaker leads disqualified themselves, earlier-stage conversations became his strongest, and his pipeline began mapping to a problem the company's own executives already felt.

What the Lesson Adds Up To

The throughline across both studies is that founders may overestimate how much a product's quality does the persuading, and underestimate how much a sale depends on reducing a stranger's uncertainty. That idea shows up elsewhere in startup research, too. CB Insights’ analysis of 431 venture-backed companies that shut down since 2023 found that poor product-market fit was cited in 43 percent of failures, more than any other single factor. Running out of capital topped the list at 70 percent, but CB Insights frames that as the final cause of death rather than the root problem — a company that never found real demand eventually runs out of ways to fund the search for it.

A similar idea shows up in Heroku's own early history, as co-founder Adam Wiggins has described publicly: enthusiastic users, a stylish product, and a funded round did not, on their own, add up to product-market fit. It took a deliberate narrowing of scope before the signal became one the team could actually act on.

Taken together, the lesson looks less like a sales technique and more like a form of discipline: resisting the urge to read every enthusiastic meeting as progress, and instead treating each one as a test of whether a specific buyer's problem is urgent enough — and the founder's answer to it clear enough — to survive contact with that buyer's own organization.

A Question Worth Sitting With

None of this means founders should distrust every enthusiastic room, or that investors should discount every early sign of interest. Curiosity is still, usually, the first honest signal that a market has noticed a problem worth solving. The harder discipline, for founders and the investors backing them alike, may be treating that curiosity as the start of a diagnosis rather than the end of one — asking what would actually have to be true for a specific buyer to act now, rather than counting a good meeting as progress on its own.

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