I have spent years studying behavioural psychology for business - experimenting across B2B, B2C, and D2C - trying to understand one thing: how is tech actually sold, psychologically?
Here is what I found.
B2B software is not an impulse buy. It is a rational, functional decision. So naturally, the industry landed on rational, functional language to sell it.
Two patterns dominate.
The metric emphasis - “This software increased efficiency by 30%.” Sounds rational. The problem: every firm says that.
The aspirational extrapolate - “Technology that elevates your infrastructure.” Sounds elevated. The problem: it says nothing about what it actually does, and gives the reader no reason to be curious.
Because the firms we look up to built their brands on this language, new B2B tech companies keep copying it. But the issue was never the website copy. It is the first impression.
Here is the thing about first impressions.
The person reading your email, your LinkedIn message, your cold outreach - they are the same person whose attention businesses spend millions fighting for every single day. Their brain is halfway active. They give it 2–3 seconds. If it clicks, they move on. If it doesn’t, so do they.
Tech marketing has ignored this almost completely. And the data shows it: open rates, reply rates, click rates - all at all-time lows across B2B email, LinkedIn, and cold calling.
It is not that people stopped opening. It is that grabbing attention with a technical product is genuinely hard - and nobody in the industry is set up to do it well.
Most creative talent gravitates toward B2C - that is where the brief sounds exciting. Tech marketing gets left with people who are either great at explaining tech but cannot make it interesting, or great at making things interesting but cannot explain tech. Marketing and tech have always been treated as two separate worlds. The result is predictable.
Hence the crisis.
There are many ways to fix this - training, better briefs, cross-functional teams. But the single most effective shift is simpler than all of them:
Explain what your tech does in a way that sounds abstract, incomplete, and leaves the reader with exactly one question: how?
Here is a real example.
A secure analytics product came to HolaCXO for lead generation. We sent thousands of emails - peripheral data analytics, no data movement, zero-trust network. The technical truth. But technically written.
Then we made it abstract:
Imagine your data analyst does not ask for data. It comes into your system, does the job, and then leaves with no memory of your data whatsoever.
Data never moves an inch. Analytics travels, finds insights, and leaves.
Regulatory deadlines will only catch you if your patient data leaks - but not you. Your data never left the system. And you still got the best insights.
Those three lines went into emails as the opening hook. Into cold calls as the first sentence. Into elevator pitches as the whole pitch.
Every single time, the next question was: how?
That is the only goal. Not to explain everything. Not to impress. Just to make someone curious enough to ask how - because that question is what books the demo.
The human brain is drawn to open, incomplete spaces. The tech founders who understand this - who make their value proposition a line of curiosity rather than a claim of capability - book the most demos.
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