My demos go well and then the deal stalls. How do I stop that?

Explains why the deck that impresses a VC actively repels a buyer: different positioning, different proof, different ask. If your demos go well and then stall, this is usually the reason and nobody tells you.

Why Your Investor Pitch Is Ruining Your Sales Pitch

From aprildunford.com by April Dunford short read

• Founders often do 10x more investor pitches than customer pitches before product/market fit, and it warps the sales pitch.
• Investor positioning argues you could win a huge future market; customer positioning has to sit in today's alternatives.
• Disruption language that excites investors makes buyers freeze, fearing what they buy will be obsolete.
• The asks differ: an investor pitch wants another meeting, a sales pitch wants the next stage of the process.

The reference explanation of all eight letters from the people who own the methodology, free to read. Use it as a deal checklist: the letters you cannot fill in are exactly where your deal will die.

MEDDIC / MEDDPICC Sales Methodology and Process

From MEDDICC long read

• MEDDPICC is eight checks: Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Paper Process, Implicate the Pain, Champion, Competition.
• MEDDIC was created inside PTC in 1996 by Dick Dunkel, and the P and second C were added later.
• The problem it targets: 20 percent of reps produce 80 percent of results, and time to quota attainment can run past 12 months.
• A 2026 US federal court ruling confirmed MEDDPICC is generic, so no vendor owns the method.

Covers ICP definition, the PBC structure for running a sales call, pilot design and weekly forecasting in one place, with templates for the call scorecard and the forecast model. The most useful single page for a founder building their first process.

The Most Common Go-to-Market Questions This Expert Gets from Early Founders

From First Round Review by First Round Review with Emery Rosansky long read

• Define ICP by operational signals, not size: for an onboarding tool, companies with 20+ open remote roles on LinkedIn.
• Keep pilots under 90 days; if value takes six months to show, only run it as a paid pilot.
• At ACVs of 10K dollars or less, margins look far healthier on a self-serve motion.
• Run a monthly 90 minute forecast review plus 30 minutes a week on opportunity hygiene and close dates.

Settles the most common argument in early sales: 11,331 opportunities show win rates rise when price comes up on the first call, and that waiting for the buyer to raise it does not help you. It also pins down when in the call to do it.

When to discuss price and budget according to data

From Gong Labs by Devin Reed short read

• Discussing price on the first call goes with a 42 percent win rate, versus 5 percent when price never comes up.
• Raising budget on call one lifts win rates to 49 percent, against 7 percent when budget is never mentioned.
• Top performers introduce pricing around the 38 to 46 minute mark, not at the open.
• Based on 11,331 B2B opportunities with at least three recorded calls each.

Matt Dixon's research on recorded sales calls found that most lost deals are not lost to a competitor, they are lost to a buyer who cannot decide. If your demos land well and the deal then goes quiet, this conversation explains what is really happening and how to lower the buyer's fear of choosing wrong.

Overcoming Customer Indecision and Challenging Conventional Sales Wisdom with Matt Dixon

On April Dunford by April Dunford and Matt Dixon 40 min