AKA: What I’ve learned about selling impact when you don’t have every feature — and why that’s usually enough.
One thing I picked up fast as a Solutions Engineer: your product will never check every box. And that’s not a problem — unless you let it be.
MEDDIC Triangle Method: instead of competing line-for-line, you shift the conversation toward the criteria where your solution delivers the most impact. Then deprioritize features that either (a) don’t matter or (b) only your competitor solves, but don’t change the outcome.
At AlphaPoint, we had a feature-light release that was up against some louder, flashier competitors. Some sales reps wanted to push every checkbox — whether we had it or not. That led to mismatched expectations and rough client calls.
I built internal enablement materials — showing reps how to map our differentiators to real outcomes. We didn’t win by listing more features. We won by showing how our KYC automation, multi-tenant security, and fast onboarding solved what mattered.
“Sell the pain relief, not the ingredient list.”
We once deployed a chatbot PoC that reduced support tickets by 35% in less than a month. Was it the most customizable chatbot? Nope. Could it integrate with Slack and 17 languages? Not really.
But I framed it as a support load reducer — not a conversation engine. I paired it with data and clearly defined the success metrics upfront: lower ticket volume, faster onboarding, no agent needed. It passed with flying colors because we didn’t let it get judged on the wrong scale.
Our IDM integration didn’t handle every single edge case — especially for lesser-known ID documents from high-risk regions. A client security stakeholder flagged it.
So I asked them to show me how often this would come up. Their estimate? Less than 1 in 200 users. We walked through our fallback flow. I ran metrics to show how many hours we’d save monthly — and how little risk that corner case posed.
They nodded. We moved forward. Impact > Purity.
We didn’t have the flashiest supplier messaging tools. But I pulled ELK dashboards to show adoption drop-off and used it to frame a reactivation strategy. That got client buy-in — even when we weren’t top of market in outreach automation.
Sometimes, clarity beats capability. Visibility into what’s broken = trust.