Selling deeptech: how technical companies find their first serious customers

Selling deeptech is not enterprise software sales with longer cycles. The buyer is a plant, an OEM or an integrator, the decision is made by a group, and the risk they are weighing is production downtime rather than a subscription fee. The work splits into three parts: pick one market where the technology is urgently needed, reach the people inside those companies who own the problem, and make the commercial case in their language.

Most deeptech companies can serve ten markets and are urgently needed in one or two. Starting everywhere is the single most common reason a strong technology produces no revenue. The guides below work through choosing that first market, building the account list, and running the conversations that follow.

The second failure is timing the first sales hire. Founder-led sales stops working at a predictable point, and hiring a salesperson before the motion exists usually burns eighteen months and a salary. There is a section on that below too.

1. 01What is deep tech, and why does nobody tell you the selling is the hard partDeep tech is a funding category, not a customer category. Nobody buys deep tech. They buy a fix for a problem that costs them money, and they buy it slowly, thr
2. 02Europe does not have an innovation problem. It has a scaling problem.European deeptech wins the science and loses the sale. The missing piece is not more grants or better research. It is the boring, decade-long work of turning pr
3. 03Picking a beachhead market when your buyers are factoriesEvery deeptech deck has a slide with five industries and a giant TAM. Every successful deeptech company started in one narrow segment and stayed there embarrass
4. 04A go to market strategy for deeptech is one page. The hard part is what you leave off.Most GTM templates were written for software: channels, funnels, CAC. Deeptech sells twelve machines a year to committees. Here is the one-page structure that a
5. 05Customer discovery with industrial buyers: nobody has time for your surveyIndustrial buyers will not fill in your survey and they will not join your discovery call about pain points. But they will talk for an hour if you ask about the
6. 06Your first ten customers are three different jobs, not oneGetting from zero to one customer is a story everyone tells. Getting from one to ten is where deeptech companies actually stall, because customers two, three an
7. 07Your first industrial customer is not found. They are manufactured.Technical startups wait for the first customer to appear. Industrial first customers do not appear. They are built, meeting by meeting, through a sequence you c
8. 08Industrial B2B marketing when your buyer is a factory, not a feedIndustrial B2B marketing is not software marketing with longer cycles. What it is, how manufacturers actually get leads, and what a real industrial marketing st
9. 09Founder-led sales works until it does not. Here is how you know.Every deeptech founder sells the first deals themselves. That is right and necessary. The mistake is not founder-led sales. The mistake is not seeing the moment
10. 10Your first sales hire will probably fail. Here is why, and what to do first.Technical founders hire their first salesperson too early, for the wrong job, with nothing written down. The hire fails, and the company learns the wrong lesson
11. 11Scaling founder-led sales without hiring: the answer is a system, not a personThe founder is the best salesperson the company will ever have, and the worst bottleneck. Scaling without hiring means turning what is in the founder's head int
12. 12Enterprise sales, mapped: the meeting you are not in decides the dealYou are not convincing one person. You are helping several people defend a decision to people who will never meet you. The cast, the gates, and the endgame.
13. 13OEM sales: the design win is not the revenueYour part disappears inside their product, and your revenue arrives on their schedule. What the design-in window is, what OEMs really evaluate, and how to avoid