An acquaintance of mine has been working with a climate startup for a couple of years now, and he and I were talking recently about his struggles to get the company started with customer discovery.

The startup offers B2B services, and their past contracts have been in the 5-to-6-figure range. They have extremely low win rates and very long sales cycles, and they regularly hear from prospects that “we love what you do, we just can’t buy right now.” The team was in the process of winding down engagements with an existing customer or two and hadn’t had a positive prospect meeting in months. My friend believed this meant that they had a product problem – namely, that prospective customers didn’t need their product – and the team had much more to learn about their prospects. He set his sights on building a discovery process from the ground up.

Around the same time, the founder hired an experienced sales leader in a desperate attempt to drive up revenues. The salesperson immediately went to work setting up an email campaign to reach out to tens of thousands of prospects, believing that all that was needed was leads. Identifying promising leads, gathering email addresses, and setting up the campaigns took a huge amount of effort, and by the time the campaigns were ready, almost two months had passed.

In the meantime, my acquaintance had successfully met with a dozen or so prospects and past customers and asked them to share their stories. He adjusted the process as he learned more about prospect needs, making changes to the company’s offering, and in short order he had received 6 requests for proposals. This was a huge deal – the startup had never before generated so much interest in such a short period of time.

Meanwhile, the salesperson’s email campaign finally launched with the help of several others at the company, and everyone crossed their fingers. A few days went by. A week. Nothing. They nervously checked to make sure messages were going out. They were.

A few weeks and thousands upon thousands of automated emails and follow ups later, the team tallied up the results. They had received 12 polite replies and zero meetings. That was it.

They learned a painful lesson, and are now pivoting away from heavy-handed efforts to sell their existing services and towards having conversations with prospects about their workflows and needs.

Investing in sales staff when you don’t yet have the right product like dropping a baited line in the water without knowing what you’re fishing for. It’s a terrible idea, especially if you can’t afford to shorten your runway. If you don’t have a product that customers desperately need, throwing money at sales is effectively throwing it away. Instead, invest in your discovery process. What are your customers most pressing needs? What needs are they aware of? What are they not even able to articulate?

[Tip: it’s this latter group that’s the source of real innovation. Identify the deep needs that customers can’t even describe and if you can solve them, they’ll revere your solution like it’s magic. And they’ll buy it.]

Your discovery process is the key to future product success. Without it, you’ll fail to get and/or maintain traction with your customers. Once you have learned what problems your customers will pay to solve, determined how much they’ll pay, recorded the language they use to describe their problems, created a solution that solves the whole problem, and have started making sales and getting positive feedback from new customers, THEN AND ONLY THEN is it time to scale up your sales team.

Until then, stay focused on learning about your customers and their work. That is the path to creating value that you can sell.