I’ve worked with a lot of teams building analytics and insights products and decision-support systems. The pattern I keep seeing isn’t that the math is wrong or the ML / AI models are weak. Much of the time, the technology is fine.

The challenge is that all that [not always artificial!] intelligence is not surfacing as value to your customer. Dashboards look impressive. AI features demo well. Pilots get strong reactions. And then… usage stalls. Sales cycles drag. Teams quietly revert to spreadsheets. Buyers, or rather, prospective buyers, say they “like the vision,” but deals don’t move into the “closed” stage.

If your gut tells you the primary blocker is not your sales process, pricing/packaging, procurement, data quality, or risk/compliance, then you may be suffering from what I call the Invisible Intelligence Gap.

Your product’s intelligence simply isn’t visible to them. Three forces tend to amplify this gap. First, the value translation gap, which is when buyers and users can’t easily connect insights to their own goals. Second is the workflow alignment gap resulting from the product not fitting how work actually gets done. Third, the trust and control gap involves users lacking confidence in how the system reaches conclusions. My frameworks like CED, FOWA, and MIRRR are designed to close these gaps by making value obvious, workflows smoother, and AI more trustworthy.

Highlights/ Skip to:

• The challenge of insights not providing value to buyers, end-users, and stakeholders (3:20)

• How the invisible intelligence gap manifests itself (6:42)
• Common symptoms of the invisible intelligence gap (8:10)
• Examples of how changes in human behavior cause the gap (10:00)
  • The (3) amplifiers of the invisible intelligence gap (11:47)
• The CED framework for addressing the intelligence gap problem (18:28)
• Addressing the invisible intelligence gap with FOWA (20:14)
• Using MIRRR to solve the invisible intelligence gap (21:25)

I’m continuing my exploration of a hard truth many leaders of analytics software companies run into: deals don’t stall because the tech is weak. Instead, they stall because prospects can’t see the value soon enough or the risk of changing the status quo is too high. This is often a product problem, not a sales one, and obtaining Flow-of-Work Alignment (FOWA) may help you start closing more evals and deals. So what is FOWA? The idea is simple, but demanding: stop showcasing features and start designing experiences that fit into how customers already do their work, create value, and add delight when your product is added into the loop.

Getting to FOWA means tailoring demos with realistic, industry-specific data, reducing mental translation, and minimizing behavior change. In this scenario, improvements become small, testable bets tied to outcomes, not feature checklists. UX and usability are not cosmetic; they should shape trust, adoption, and buyability.

When prospects can clearly see themselves succeeding with your product, value feels obvious, evals progress, and deals close.

Highlights/ Skip to:

• Steps to implementing Flow-of-Work Alignment (FOWA):

1. Tailor your demo or POC to map to the prospects' world and their workflow (1:53)
2. Treat product improvements as bets that have to be tested so that observable outcomes are what you’re holding your product team accountable for (3:57)
3. Reducing perceived behavior change (6:39)
4. Realize that your product’s visual design are likely impacting your product’s clarity and its desirability (12:29)
5. Aligning your sales and product teams around customer outcomes and not feature gaps (18:03)

I’m digging into a frustrating reality many teams face: even technically superior analytics and AI products routinely lose deals—not because the KPIs or models aren’t good enough, but because buyers and users can’t clearly see how the product fits into their day-to-day work. Your demos and POCs may prove what’s possible, but long time-to-understanding, heavy thinking burden on the user, and required behavior or process changes introduce risk—and risk kills momentum. When value feels complicated, sales don’t move forward.

Adding to the challenge is that many sales efforts focus almost entirely on the fiscal buyer while overlooking the end users who actually have to adopt the product to create outcomes. This buyer–user mismatch, combined with status quo bias, often leads to indecision rather than change.

To address this, I explore the idea of thinking about the sales challenge as a product problem—and I introduce the idea of achieving Flow of Work Alignment (FOWA). The goal isn’t better persuasion—it’s clearer value. Strong FOWA means transitioning from demonstrating capabilities to helping customers see themselves—and their workflows—represented in your demos and POCs. The result? Prospects understand your value quickly, ask deeper, contextual questions, and deals move forward.

Highlights/ Skip to:

• Data products must work harder to expose value clearly to avoid the dreaded “closed-lost” deal stage in your CRM (1:38)
• Making your data product’s value instantly obvious (5:18)
• How the “old model” of selling based on capabilities and feature demos can lead to lost sales (7:22)
• What Flow-of-Work Alignment is and how it can help you unlock deals (13:02)
• How to know if you have achieved FOWA or not in your product and sales process (13:58)