Authors: Elena Vrabie and Adriana Spulber

There are many myths in B2B sales, such as the notion that a great product will sell itself. For early-stage founders, these myths can be costly traps. With small teams, limited resources, and unpredictable lead generation, simplicity and focus are survival skills. As Zoltan Vardy, B2B Sales Strategist and founder of The Launch Code sales blueprint, says: ”Nobody ever closed a six-figure deal because a chatbot understood their pain points.” 

A Cornell University graduate with a degree in European history and 30 years of experience in business development across media and technology, Zoltan has held senior roles, including Senior Vice President of Global Ad Sales at NBC Universal International. Wearing the entrepreneur and investor hats, he has had exits with eEuropeMedia and Brainient, pushing him to work with startups and scaleups, spanning sectors from Agtech and Medtech to AI and media. 

Since 2020, Vardy has advised over 200 startups from 26 countries, teaching tech founders how to win high-ticket clients and structure their sales to scale faster. His clients include UK-based Dexory – one of Europe’s fastest-scaling data intelligence and robotics startups –  who he guided from its early stages into becoming a scalable SaaS company in the warehouse automation sector. He recently published his book, The Launch Code: Master founder-led sales and accelerate your startup’s revenue growth, in which he reveals his B2B sales blueprint and brings it to life through examples of startup founders who applied his approach to scale their businesses. 

In this interview, Zoltan explains what drives successful founder-led sales. He encourages early-stage founders to focus on real customer problems, not perfect products, and move fast, learn, and build trust through action. From handling pivots to refining positioning and using AI wisely, Vardy shows that in B2B sales, curiosity and focus, not charisma alone, set the winners apart.

Underline Ventures: After your fireside chat with Andrei Dănescu from Dexory at How to Web this year, you shared that the #1 secret to founder-led sales done right is curiosity. A founder needs to ask, listen, and obsess over the customer’s pain points before selling. Can you elaborate on this? Why do you think some early-stage founders overlook this?

Zoltan Vardy: Curiosity is critical, and it comes out of the process of building a company. It’s about asking the right questions, listening to the answers, and learning from the process. You must be curious about what your customer’s problem is and how you solve it to create a sustainable business. So every question should uncover that pain point, that sense of urgency, which will drive the buying decision for any client. 

Unfortunately, many founders skip this step. They fall in love with their product, technology, instead of the customer’s problem. Real sales success starts when you obsess over understanding the customer pain points, which Andrei did. That will lead to trust, which in turn leads to strong business relationships and ultimately to customer success. 

UV: At the pre-seed to seed stage, you don’t have a large team to build all the features that a B2B enterprise customer might want. How do you find the right balance? 

ZV:  You find that balance through a process of elimination.  Early on, you’re distinguishing between surface-level problems and the fundamental issue that truly matters to the customer.  Let’s take Dexory as an example. What do they do? They enable warehouses to manage their inventory efficiently. On the surface, it may seem like counting boxes. But the real value – the fundamental problem they solve – is giving companies the data and visibility they need to make better decisions about inventory management and supply chain efficiency. That focus helps you prioritize what to build now and what can wait.

There is no perfect step-by-step process; it’s iterative. It depends on how good you are at getting in front of people and having those conversations. And it all starts with the mindset. You have to build something that suits a need in the market. You don’t start by building something because it feels exciting – you start by understanding a problem that truly matters. Once that’s clear, you build the product around that insight. The product absolutely matters, but only after it’s anchored in validated customer needs.

UV: Many early-stage founders struggle to identify the real problem when selling to enterprises. Often, they end up solving a minor issue that only gets them a small contract for a proof of concept (POC). Do you have any advice on how founders can dig deeper to find those high-value problems?

ZV: It all comes down to understanding the industry that you are targeting and its players. Curiosity doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but with an understanding of the overall picture that you are operating in. There is a wealth of information currently available about the medical profession and the agricultural industry, allowing you to identify trends through desk research and pinpoint specific issues.

I can give you an example of a company I worked with that did this backward and paid the price. They had a technology that was looking for a problem, rather than identifying a problem and then creating a technology to solve it. 

Bannerse had a technology that enabled efficient content streaming. This was during the COVID period when people were at home and streaming gym workouts. It wasn’t getting traction, so they switched to live-streaming sales online. It was big in Asia, and they tried to set it up in Europe as well. Next, they pivoted to interactive ads on websites, which is when we started our collaboration. We went through the whole process. They realized that they weren’t getting enough traction, and after their fourth pivot, they found their niche and scaled, creating interactive elements in sports broadcasts.

UV: Pivoting once, twice is not uncommon for early-stage startups. How do you shift your sales process during a pivot? What do you do when your product is not good yet as a founder? 

ZV: A pivot shouldn’t be a full reset. It’s a structured process where you reassess three things: who your ideal customer is, what problem you’re solving, and why your solution is better. You keep what you’ve validated, discard what you haven’t, and build the next hypothesis. That’s how you pivot with purpose.  

When you are resetting, you’re primarily selling the outcome – the future state your customer wants – because your features are still evolving. As you mature and start selling to enterprises, features matter more, but only after your value is clear. Vision first, features second. 

The founders who are capable of managing themselves in that process effectively and don’t panic are the ones who are going to be the most successful. If there is one thing that’s 100% certain, is that whatever you thought was going to happen is not what is going to happen. Some portion of it may be relevant, but it’s not going to be identical to what you thought it would be. So you have to be prepared to adjust in an agile manner and react to the market and the opportunities that come up to succeed. 

UV: Let’s dive a bit into advising Dexory. They have raised a Series C to accelerate the product roadmap and further expand into new sectors and regions. Industrial tech is a sector where implementation sometimes cannot keep up with innovation. How important is speed in sales?

ZV: Dexory began by exploring how autonomous robots could create value in customer-facing environments, including retail. When the market shifted during COVID and new needs surfaced in logistics, they recognized an opportunity: warehouses urgently needed visibility. Their pivot worked because it was customer-driven, not technology-driven. 

They had a conversation with a potential customer asking for help to figure out how to create visibility in their warehouses. And that’s when they started to pivot. What they did really well was identify that something wasn’t working and to focus on selling the results their technology offered, not the actual technology itself; they just happened to be doing that with autonomous robots. 

Another thing they did well was to have an incredible focus on speed of execution. It separates Andrei from other founders in having this maniacal focus on getting things done quickly, thinking about fast feedback loops and quick pilots, and inspiring his team to do hard work to create momentum and credibility. 

UV: When founders go through a repositioning exercise, it changes everything, from approach to messaging. What do you see as the biggest challenge for early-stage founders when it comes to positioning themselves effectively for sales? How can they get this right quickly and build momentum, especially when they are still figuring out their market?

ZV: First, it requires letting go of certain things and embracing something new. Identify that path A is not working, don’t put any more resources into that, and then shift to asking questions. What problem do you solve? Who do you solve it for? Why do you solve it better or differently than somebody else? 

It’s a process of building a value proposition, breaking it down into building blocks, and then putting those together will enable you to create a clear and powerful message for the market. And with it comes a certain level of clarity. 

Then you test it. You go out to the market, have conversations, and realize that while certain things are hitting, others need fine-tuning. At some stage, you reach a point where you say, ”This is good enough,” and you put that at the forefront of all of your communication. But I would say that your value proposition is never done. It’s an ongoing process.

UV: How long is too long? Should founders set a specific timeline to evaluate whether their positioning and sales approach are working? What are the signals they should be looking for?

ZV: That is perhaps the single most difficult question to answer for anybody building a business. What is the point at which you let go? I don’t think there is an exact answer. As a general guideline, most companies should see early signs of real traction – like customers paying something, even symbolically – within 12 to 18 months. The exact timeline depends heavily on sector and sales cycle length, but consistent forward motion is the key indicator. 

Free POCs often feel like progress, but they aren’t real validation. Until someone pays – even a symbolic amount – you don’t have proof that your value proposition resonates. Revenue is the ultimate signal. 

But after that, it’s not like things all fall into place. You are going to the next level, fine-tuning and building. Sometimes it’s not a black or white situation, all or nothing. There’s an English expression, ”You don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater”. You are taking one element of your proposition and shifting it. Maybe you have identified enterprises as the target audience, but their sense of urgency is not great enough to want to solve that problem. So you move to mid-market companies. 

UV: How does the sales process evolve from the moment you start as a founder, selling and developing a product, to scaling the product and building a sales team? Walk us through the most important challenges at pre-seed, seed, and series A startups.  

ZV: Pre-seed is all about founder-led sales as the core element. You are validating your problem-solution fit. Every conversation you have is part of a discovery process. This is the point at which you are laying the foundation for your business. And it all starts with defining your Ideal Customer Profile. Without clarity on who you’re selling to, every step that follows – problem discovery, messaging, outreach, proposals – becomes guesswork. It’s an incredible amount of iteration – I call it the “pain of sales” –  but it has to be done. 

When you enter the seed stage, you’re adding some structure and consistency. You’re creating a repeatable process involving reaching out, holding meetings, developing proposals, and starting to track your success rates. You understand how many of your actions are converting and which messaging is gaining traction. You’re also likely bringing on one or two junior team members to assist with particular aspects of lead generation or marketing.

One of the biggest mistakes founders make is hiring salespeople before they can sell the product repeatably. Your first job is to prove your sales process works, document it, and only then bring in people to execute it. If you don’t understand how to sell it, nobody else will.  

Another typical situation is scaling before validation, burning money and time. Series A is when you start scaling what has been proven. You hire your first salespeople only after your process works and is documented. Hiring a sales leader before you have the foundational stuff ready is a big risk, because until you, as a founder, don’t understand what and how you can sell, you can’t expect others to learn it, or they can, but it will be a long learning curve. 

With a playbook created, from Series B to Series C and beyond, it is not necessarily doing anything different, but having more hands on deck to execute the sales strategy, like a VP of Sales who brings structure. I would say that your founder role goes from seller to coach to strategist. You never completely remove yourself from sales. I am a firm believer that the founder of a company is the Chief Sales Officer from day one until the end; it’s the level of involvement that changes.

UV: As companies scale and move to their first sales hires, when should a founder step back, and when should they still be jumping on those calls, especially with big clients or at critical stages like the final sync-up before a contract is signed?

ZV: In my experience, it is often more common that the founders don’t want to get involved in sales anymore after they have outsourced it. There are some founders who still want to be involved in the process, which is absolutely fine. That’s the better of the two options. 

I think it depends on what the founders’ other responsibilities are. If they are, by nature, more of a product-focused founder, extra effort to show the company’s commitment toward a customer, or to show the founder’s vision, could be the difference between closing and not. A mistake would be if a founder at Series A is getting involved in early-stage conversations. That is not a good use of their time.

UV: How involved should a founder be post-sale, especially in technical or industrial contexts where the implementation is complex?

ZV: At the early stage, pre-seed and seed, there is nothing wrong with the founder being involved at that level, if the purpose is to get a better understanding of the customer and rolling that back into the product roadmap and sales messaging. But there is a fine line. 

Account management is not something that you want to be doing as a founder past the seed phase. By that time, you should have engaged enough people who are going to be managing that communication, identifying their needs, and making sure that customer success is working, and so on. 

As a founder, if you take a couple of days a month to go into the factory floor, whether it’s virtual or a real factory floor, and dig into understanding what the customer is thinking, that is a great source of information. But it should be more like the CTO, not the CEO. It is always a balance split between founders. There is no one-size-fits-all; many companies do not have a CTO as the CEO is also technical. 

UV: It’s common for early-stage companies to have one month where they close 5% of deals, the next month it’s 1%, then suddenly it jumps to 10%. Your book, The Launch Code, is an exact playbook for closing larger deals consistently. Can you share some insight on how founders can build that consistency in their pipeline?

ZV: Launching a company is like launching a rocket: the energy required to lift off is exponentially greater than the energy needed to stay in motion. The foundational work feels slow, but once it’s in place, everything becomes easier to scale.” The Launch Code applies this same principle to selling. The foundational stuff is the hard part. It is where you put a lot of energy into something that doesn’t necessarily have an immediate impact, but you can’t skip it. 

The Launch Code breaks down this entire sales process into three pillars. The first is focusing your offer and message. Here is the problem I solve, here is how you can buy it, and how I talk about it to get you excited to learn more. Once you have that in place, you move on to pillar two, or structuring your client acquisition into three channels: outbound, partnerships, and inbound marketing. 

In outbound sales, you are making the initial contact, targeting 50 to 100 customers who fit your ICP. After you get the market’s feedback, you can start adding new channels, like partnerships and inbound marketing. Third parties are going to give you additional reach and credibility, while inbound efforts create opportunities for customers to find you, whether it’s through content marketing, events, or PR. That is the kind of structured approach to client acquisition that you have to get into place. 

Then you get to the third pillar, which shows you how to scale your operations through goal setting, performance tracking, and team development. As a founder, your goal should be to focus on the long-term strategy while you empower your team with goals, KPIs, and how to track them. You have to go through each of these steps 

In enterprise sales, you target a company, you have a great conversation, and 12 months later, you are still asking, ”How do we move from point A to B?” So you need more. Creating optionality and opportunities through the sales process leads to consistency, and it’s the essence of B2B sales.

UV: How important is onboarding in having this consistency?

ZV: Onboarding is how you build long-term relationships. But to create velocity for sales, and make it easier for customers to buy what you are selling, narrow the choices to three options and three developed packages. 

Simplifying your product offering is going to make a tremendous difference in your ability to close deals as well. I can’t tell you how many times I have worked with companies that, by going through the process, we have managed to double their average contract value. It is a simple technique of tiering these different offers and creating the right relationship between everything in the middle option. 

UV: What’s your perspective on how founders can build that trust effectively with larger companies? 

ZV: Trust is fundamental to selling. When you sell to large companies, this becomes even more important because the main goal of any organization is to minimize risk. That is why corporations move slowly. As a startup, you are the opposite of that. You are about speed and breaking things along the way. And these two mindsets clash. You need to understand a couple of things. 

First, make sure that whatever you are selling is a problem that matters. Corporations don’t want to do business with a company that will help them save 100 euros a month. It has got to be something that has a meaningful impact on their business. When you are presenting your proposals, be credible, have polished materials, and clear KPIs. 

If you have relationships with existing corporations, put those front and center because corporations buy certainty, not promises. Borrow trust from warm intros and other partnerships that already have an existing relationship with that customer. Find also an internal champion, someone who believes in you and your solution. They can help guide you inside the corporate fortress and navigate internal politics. 

It’s like gravity. You can be angry about gravity, but it exists, and you have to live with it. This is how corporations behave, and it doesn’t make much sense to spend too much time being frustrated by it. The companies that win in enterprise sales are patient. They are persistent, and they make sure they drive value at every touch point. 

UV: What role do external validations, like awards, media features, and industry rankings, actually help founders build trust and close enterprise deals?

ZV: Human beings like to have the sense that they are working with companies that have proven their credibility in the marketplace, which can look like the type of industry benchmark as a listing on the top 15 startups. It’s a stamp of approval. But it is not the reason why companies will do business with you. It is just a box you tick. 

In this day and age, an overwhelming majority of buyers will not even reach out to you as a potential vendor until they have looked at your website, done online research, and looked for credibility factors of the business foundation. If all you are counting on is your personal charisma to close the deal, you are going to find it very difficult. 

UV: Let’s close with AI in sales. We have seen a rise in agentic AI products for sales. How do you feel about this? Can agents do more than automate tedious tasks for salespeople?

ZV: Over-automating the process creates this incredible AI illusion of connection, but I think that a lot of it is eroding it. If you are selling a poor product to the wrong audience on the wrong channel, AI is not going to help you fix that. It’s just going to help you fail faster. 

AI is a powerful accelerator, not a replacement for the fundamentals. Use AI to automate, analyse, and scale efficiency – but keep humans at the center of curiosity, trust-building, and relationship-driven selling. 

The winning formula is simple: human-led, AI-powered. It is using AI to scale efficiency, but keeping humans at the center of building relationships and closing deals. If you are selling something for 20 euros a month to a bunch of people, it could well be more valuable. Because it is a numbers game in that sense. But nobody ever closed a six-figure deal by saying, ”Hey, I really love how that chatbot understood my pain points”.