About Author
Joseph Griffiths is a Presales Educator and Coach dedicated to helping solution engineers, technical sellers, and sales leaders achieve greater success.
My career spans enterprise technology sales, solution architecture, and leadership roles where I built and implemented complex cloud and data center solutions. Along the way, I earned elite certifications such as VMware VCDX-DCV and VCDX-CMA, which give me the technical depth to match my business expertise. This combination of skills allows me to coach sales professionals on not just the how of technology, but more importantly the why — what truly matters to customers and drives business impact.
Through my technical sales coaching and presales training programs, I focus on building confidence, sharpening customer discovery, and creating measurable business value in every conversation. I help sales teams and individual contributors uncover customer priorities, frame solutions effectively, and communicate with impact. My approach blends proven frameworks with real-world experience to equip sellers to move deals forward faster and build stronger customer trust.
If you’ve been in technical sales long enough, you’ve faced this moment:
You discover something the customer won’t want to hear.
A requirement you can’t meet.
A feature that doesn’t exist.
A timeline that can’t be hit.
A problem that will create friction later if you don’t bring it up now.
A change in your company’s strategy that directly impacts a past sale or promise.
Most technical sellers hesitate. And I understand why — you don’t want to derail momentum or lose credibility. So you soften it, delay it, wrap it in disclaimers, or hope you can work around it later.
But here’s the truth:
Bad news doesn’t kill deals. Surprises do.
And the longer you wait, the more damage it causes.
Delivering hard news clearly and quickly is one of the most underrated skills in technical sales — and one of the strongest ways to build trust, not break it.
Why Technical Sellers Struggle With Delivering Bad News
Most sellers avoid these conversations for three predictable reasons:
1. Fear of losing the deal
You don’t want to be the one who introduces friction. But customers always uncover reality eventually — and when they do, they remember who was honest and who wasn’t.
2. Fear of looking incompetent
Technical sellers often feel responsible for having all the answers. Admitting a limitation feels like failure. But customers care far more about transparency than perfection.
3. Fear of disappointing people
We want customers to like us. We want to be helpful. But delayed truth doesn’t protect the relationship — it slowly erodes it.
The Myth That Hurts Technical Sellers: “I Must Solve Everything”
There’s a deep psychological pattern that many technical sellers carry — especially those who came from engineering or support roles:
We believe our value comes from fixing things.
When a customer asks for something, the instinctive reaction is:
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