Isaac Correa · Madrid
I am Isaac Correa, and I learned this selling, not building. It is the difference between two sentences, said to the same person about the same product, and only one of them worked.
Early on, when I sat down with someone who might become a client, I explained what we had built. A company that uses artificial intelligence to automate a business with its own data. Every word of that is true, and to me it is the most interesting sentence in the world.
To the person across the table it is nothing. I remember saying it to someone who sells property, and I remember the answer, because I have heard it in several voices since: I love the idea, tell me about it some day. That is what people say when you have described yourself instead of them. It is a kind answer, and it is a no.
So with him I stopped, and I did not mention artificial intelligence again. I asked whether his customer management system gave him trouble. It did. I told him we had solved exactly that for several companies already, and that if he wanted, we could look at his.
That was the conversation. Same company, same product, same afternoon. The only thing that changed was the sentence: his problem, named, with proof that it had been solved before. You do not go to a client with the technology in front. You go with their problem in front, and the technology stays behind it until they ask.
The lesson underneath is short. A product is aimed at one specific person, or it is aimed at nobody. Not a segment, not a market, not “small and medium businesses”. A person with a job, a tool that gets in their way, and a Tuesday afternoon when it got in the way again.
When you can describe that person, everything else follows: what the product does first, what it refuses to do, what the first screen says, what the first sentence of the sales call is. When you cannot, you end up describing yourself, and you get told how much they love the idea.
This is why, when we take on a company, the first thing we write down is not what the system will do. It is what the business already does: the rules it follows, the actions it takes, who approves what. The agents are then given a goal and an intention, not a chat window. They are aimed at a job that a specific person in that company already has, and their success is measured by whether that person’s afternoon got easier.
Three hundred dashboards taught me the first half of this, and I wrote that down in what selling taught me. The property seller taught me the second half in one conversation.
Isaac Correa, Madrid. ORCID 0009-0003-0657-4419.
Isaac Correa elsewhere: ORCID · GitHub · Crunchbase · LinkedIn · X · Medium · Hashnode · Substack · blog · Peerlist · Hellomatik · Kodalogic. The full list, with identifiers, is on the home page.
What selling taught me that building never did — three hundred commissions, and the lesson underneath.
The people I look for — two signs, neither of them on a CV.
The cliff of innovation — the point where the hard part stops being building and becomes integrating.
The tool exists before it is built — what two months of screens turned out to be worth.
Your company already has rules — what happens in the first week of automating a business.
The questions people ask, answered — short answers, each with a source.