For most of the SaaS era, a stalled deal had a clear diagnosis. The buyer wasn’t convinced. The product wasn’t a fit. Budget disappeared. A competitor won. But as AI reshapes buying behavior and go-to-market execution, that map has become less reliable.
More often than not, when a deal goes quiet now, it’s because the buyer got scared, and nobody on your side of the table addressed it.
According to Dave Rubinstein, GTM advisor and former sales leader at Outreach and Salesforce, many founders are misdiagnosing what’s actually happening in their sales process. After spending the past year speaking with more than 300 founders across 40 countries, Dave has reached a simple conclusion: The biggest obstacle in modern B2B sales has shifted from generating more activity to helping buyers feel confident enough to act.
During a recent session with Madrona portfolio companies, Dave shared why many SaaS-era playbooks are producing diminishing returns and where the real constraint actually sits.
Buyers Have More Information Than Ever. They’re Not More Confident.
AI has dramatically reduced the cost of information. Research is easier. Vendor comparisons are faster. Every company can produce content at scale. In theory, this should make buying decisions easier. Instead, many buyers feel overwhelmed. More information has not created more clarity. It has created more uncertainty.
As Dave put it, startups often assume they’re competing against other vendors. Increasingly, they’re competing against inertia. When buyers feel uncertain, doing nothing becomes the safest decision. That’s why so many opportunities appear healthy until they suddenly stall. Buyers stop evaluating the product and start evaluating the risk of being wrong.
The Wrong Response to a Confidence Problem
When response rates decline, companies increase outreach. When pipeline slows, they create more pipeline. When conversion rates fall, they publish more content. But if buyers are already overwhelmed, more activity rarely solves the problem.
The companies winning today aren’t creating more information. They’re creating more clarity. They’re helping buyers understand what’s changing, why it matters, and why acting now is worth the risk. To diagnose where that confidence breaks down, Dave developed a framework called SPRINT. This becomes particularly valuable in the AI selling era in that it isn’t simply another framework. It provides guidance for founders selling AI solutions, which is a very noisy market where many claim to be the best at doing everything
Dave’s SPRINT framework:
Speed
Bring a point of view that you can build upon quickly. The conversations that create momentum are the ones where buyers leave seeing their situation differently than when they arrived. Founders who connect market shifts, emerging risks, or hidden challenges create urgency because they provide insight, not just information.
Problem
Create urgency around why the problem you solve needs to be solved right now. This isn’t a new sales concept by any means, but AI era founders exchange the focus of solving a specific named issue for the chance to solve all the problems one can imagine.
Results
In this era, the result includes the journey, not just the ROI or value-based performance improvements. Everyone talks about impressive metrics these days. But few can articulate the journey to achieving those results. What they really want to know is how those results happened. What changed? What actions were taken? What obstacles were overcome? The more believable the path, the more believable the outcome.
Implementation
Late in the process, many decision-makers are quietly asking: “What happens if this doesn’t work and my name is attached to it?”
That concern usually shows up in three forms:
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- Who will own this internally?
- What happens to the investments we’ve already made?
- How quickly can we show value?
The best teams address those questions early instead of waiting for them to surface late in the cycle. When you are selling the implementation, you can’t just sell the steps; you have to sell to the fears that are really behind the implementation question.
Niche
Focus on your wedge, stop trying to sell the ability to do everything. You are making it too hard for your buyers to evaluate you. Remember, “land & expand” exists for a reason.
Trust
Founders naturally build trust through expertise and conviction. The challenge is scaling that trust beyond the founder. As companies grow, trust must be translated into repeatable stories, proof points, customer evidence, and frameworks that the broader organization can consistently use. Until you move beyond selling with founder gravitas, you can’t scale.
The Real Competitor Is Inaction
The founders breaking through have accepted that their biggest competitor is the buyer’s decision to do nothing. Buyers today have tighter budgets, greater accountability, and an endless stream of vendor claims. More information without a clear signal is just noise, and noise produces hesitation, not decisions. The job is to reframe the risk calculation. Trying something new carries visible risk that can be planned for. Doing nothing carries risk, too; it just stays invisible until it compounds.
Modern go-to-market is less about generating attention and more about generating confidence. The founders that win won’t be the ones creating the most content, sending the most outreach, or generating the most noise. They are the ones who create clarity and earn trust early, generating confidence where everyone else generates noise.