Specs Don’t Close Deals — Solving Pain and Making Customers Feel Understood Does

November 1, 2025

A few days ago, I came across a LinkedIn post that said:

“Never ever sell on specs. Show the customer that their pain experience will be reduced. That you understand them. Do not lead with what you have. Average salespeople do that. Don’t even sell. Solve their pain and you’ll never ever have to ask for an order.”

That one stopped me cold. It wasn’t some polished marketing headline or corporate slogan — it was raw truth.

I’ve spent years in pre-sales, and I’ve seen it time and time again: the moment you start talking about speeds, feeds, or architecture before you understand the customer’s pain, you’ve already lost the room.

The Specs Mirage

Specs are comfortable. They’re quantifiable, defendable, and make us feel smart. We love our latency charts, our throughput graphs, and our redundancy and cyber resiliency acronyms.

But the second you lead with them, your customer tunes out.

Why? Because they don’t live in your world. They don’t measure success in IOPS or uptime decimals — they measure it in nights of sleep, weekends not lost to outages, and how many times they didn’t have to explain to their boss why something broke again.

When you start with specs, you’re talking at them. When you start with empathy, you’re talking with them.

Selling Is Easy. Solving Is Hard.

Anyone can sell. All it takes is a discount and a Power Point slide deck.

But solving? That takes curiosity. That takes shutting up long enough to really listen.

Ask where it hurts. Let them vent. Build space for the uncomfortable silence that follows — that’s usually when the real pain shows up.

Then, instead of responding with features, respond with understanding. Map their world to the outcome, not your product. Don’t “position.” Don’t “differentiate.” Just help.

If you can make their pain feel smaller, they’ll trust you forever.

The Sales Call is Not a Date (But It Should Be)

Let me put this in a different context. Think about dating.

Now, I’m going to borrow an idea from Simon Sinek here, because it’s a brilliant way to see this problem. If someone talked like that on a date, we’d all agree that person is appalling. They’re self-obsessed, and there is no chance of a second date.

Imagine you’re trying to meet someone, and on the first date, you launch into a relentless monologue about your accomplishments. “I’m really successful. I’ve got a beautiful house, you should come by sometime. I’m good-looking, which is great because I go on TV all the time, and I know a lot of famous people.”

But then, we go and do the exact same thing on a sales call: “We’re the largest company in the market. We are in the top-right corner of the Gartner Magic Quadrant. We have made billions in revenue last fiscal year.”

If that approach is a catastrophe in a bar, why do we think it’s a good strategy in a boardroom?

The core truth is the same: bragging about your size, your revenue, or your features is just talking about yourself. It’s transactional, not relational. People don’t connect with what you do; they connect with why you do it—with your passion and your belief.

Start with your company’s purpose, or better yet, share a specific story about why you love what you do. That passion is what gets people to lean in, to feel a connection, and to believe that you genuinely care about solving their problem, not just closing their wallet.

Human Engineering 101

It’s funny — as engineers, we spend our careers tuning systems. But the one system that truly defines success in sales engineering is human.

Your real job isn’t to configure arrays or container clusters — it’s to configure trust.

The secret is this: people won’t remember the product demo, the performance numbers, or that clever thing you said about data reduction.

They’ll remember how you made them feel when they realized you actually get it.

Maya Angelou famously said:

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

That’s not philosophy — that’s field strategy.

How to Make Them Feel Understood

Here’s the part they don’t teach in SE onboarding:

• Ditch the acronyms. You’re not impressing anyone.
• Lose the marketing buzzwords. Nobody wants to hear “synergy” or “digital transformation” over lunch.
• Speak their language. Use their words for their pain — not your vendor’s for your features.
• Watch body language. If they’re scrolling through their Android under the table, stop talking. You lost them. Ask a question instead.
• Mirror emotion, not information. If they sound frustrated, match that tone — not with sympathy, but with partnership.

When they finally put the phone down and start telling you the real story — the political one, the cultural one, the “we don’t have enough staff” one — that’s when you’ve earned the right to talk about solutions.

The Takeaway

Stop trying to sell. Start trying to understand.

Specs fade, architectures change, products evolve — but trust outlasts every roadmap slide you’ll ever present.

So, before your next meeting, forget the pitch deck. Bring curiosity instead.

Because when you solve their pain, you’ll never need to ask for the order.