The 3 Consequences That Decide If Your Product Sells or Gets Ignored

Understand how People, Process, and Money shape buying urgency. Why translating pain into ROI is the only way to win B2B deals.

(Estimated reading time: 10 minutes.)

What Most Founders Get Wrong About Product-Market Fit

When early-stage founders say “we’re struggling to get sales,” what they’re usually facing isn’t a problem of features or even messaging.

It’s a deeper issue: they haven’t fully understood the consequences of the problem their product is trying to solve.

And in B2B sales, that misunderstanding is fatal.

Your customer may feel a pain point. But unless you connect that pain to measurable consequences, and ultimately to money and/or significant risk, they will not buy.

They might love your demo.
They might nod in every discovery call.
They might even say, “This is interesting.”

However, they will not draw out a budget unless they can justify the cost.

In B2B, that means translating consequences into financial logic.

Let’s Be Clear: Not All Pain Is About Money, But All Pain Translates to Money

Many founders make the mistake of thinking:

• “Our product saves time. That should be enough.”

• “This feature reduces mental load. That’s valuable.”

• “They’re using spreadsheets and hate it. We’re 10x better.”

But unless you can tie those benefits directly to a business outcome, something that justifies the budget line, you’re selling sentiment, not solutions.

Founders often ask me:

“If a problem isn't directly costing money, how do I frame it to get traction?”

Here’s the framework I use:

The 3 Buckets of Business Pain (and How They Create Buying Urgency)

All serious problems in a business, whether operational or cultural, fall into three categories of consequence:

1. People Consequences

These are human-friction problems that affect your internal team or external hiring.

Common indicators:

• It’s harder to recruit the right people.

• Managers are constantly firefighting.

• Your best team members are burning out or churning.
  
  

Why it matters:
People issues slow down your execution. A burned-out or understaffed team is less productive, makes more mistakes, and is harder to scale. Over time, this leads to failed deliverables, missed goals, and yes, revenue decline.

Translation to money:

• Cost of churn

• Recruitment costs

• Delayed delivery = slower revenue recognition

• Loss of team morale = opportunity cost

2. Process Consequences

These are operational bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or breakdowns in how work flows through the business.

Common indicators:

• Teams waste time on coordination or duplication.

• Execution becomes reactive, not proactive.

• No one trusts the data, the workflow, or the next step.
  
  

Why it matters:
Process problems compound. What seems like a “small inefficiency” today becomes a blocker for scale tomorrow. And once you’re trying to raise or grow, these issues reveal themselves in missed milestones.

Translation to money:

• Wasted hours = higher labor cost per output

• Missed deadlines = lost revenue

More tools/overhead = increased burn rate

3. Money Consequences

These are direct financial impacts, the easiest to justify and often the fastest to close against.

Common indicators:

• The company is losing money due to a broken process.

• They're missing out on opportunities to earn more.

• Existing solutions are too expensive or underperforming.
  
  

Why it matters:
When the problem is already a financial one, you’re selling directly into pain that’s already been budgeted, making urgency and purchasing speed dramatically higher.

Translation to money:

• Immediate cost savings

• New revenue channels

Budget reallocation from subpar vendors

(Check out my post on LinkedIn to see the rest of the graphics here.)

Bottom Line: If You’re Not Mapping the Problem to One of These Buckets, You’re Not Selling. You’re Informing.

And informing people doesn’t close deals.

You need to translate your customer's frustration into one of these buckets and then clearly map that to a financial implication.

The Practical Method: From Friction to Finance in 3 Steps

Most founders try to do this intuitively. That’s a mistake. Use structure. Here’s the step-by-step:

Step 1: Quantify the Cost of the Problem

Don’t just say “we save time.” Ask:

• How much time is wasted today per team, per person?

• What’s the blended cost/hour of those employees?

• What’s the cost of delay or churn due to that inefficiency?
  
  

Frame your value in terms of gains returned to the business. Not features. Outcomes.

Step 2: Find the Market’s Mental Price Tag

Even if you don’t have dozens of customers yet, you can use second-hand data to see what your niche pays to solve this problem today:

• Earnings calls: What do execs complain about publicly?

• Job boards: What roles are they hiring to patch this gap?

• Founder forums, Reddit, LinkedIn: What tooling do they say is “essential”?
  
  

This gives you a realistic range for how much the problem is worth solving.

Step 3: Price Your Solution Proportionally

If you’ve identified a problem that’s costing a company $1M a year, don’t offer a $2K/month tool and hope they take it seriously. You’ll be underpriced and overlooked.

If the problem is costing $50K, don’t try to sell a platform that takes 6 months to implement.

Right-sizing is everything.

• Right-sized problems → right-sized products

• Right-sized products → faster buying cycles

Faster cycles → more predictable revenue

How This Played Out For One of My Clients

They started with the wrong assumption: “Our product saves time for data teams.” Sounds good, right?

But “saving time” is vague and toothless.

Once we reframed the consequence, we realized that slow data workflows were slowing the entire iteration cycle of product teams. That meant:

• Delayed product improvements

• Slower time-to-value for their own customers

• And yes, longer sales cycles on their side
  

That’s not just a process problem. That’s a revenue delay problem.

Once we translated that insight, we positioned ourselves differently. We priced differently. And most importantly, we sold differently.

The result: shorter sales cycles and much stronger buy-in from cross-functional leaders.

If You’re Not Selling, Ask These Three Questions

1. What part of their business is your product helping improve—People, Process, or Money?
   
   

2. What happens if they don’t solve this problem? What breaks, who leaves, or what gets delayed?
   
   

3. Can they justify the cost of not solving it with a number?
   
   

If you can’t answer those clearly, your product might be great, but you’re solving the wrong shape of problem, or presenting it at the wrong scale.

Final Word

B2B buyers don’t buy features.
They don’t buy “better workflows.”
They don’t even buy time.

They buy certainty that solving this problem will help the business grow, survive, or protect what they already have.

That certainty comes from consequences. And your job, as a founder doing sales, is to illuminate them clearly, logically, and financially.

If you do that well, closing becomes a formality.