From Blockchain Hype to Enterprise Sales: How Cygnetise Learned Customers Don’t Care About Your Technology

From Blockchain Hype to Enterprise Sales: How Cygnetise Learned Customers Don’t Care About Your Technology

In 2016, blockchain was going to revolutionize everything. Every pitch deck mentioned it. Every tech conference featured it. Every investor asked about it. Steve Pomfret built Cygnetise on blockchain technology, spent months learning its intricacies, and discovered something that would reshape his entire go-to-market strategy.

His customers didn’t care.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Steve Pomfret, CEO and Founder of Cygnetise, a signatory management platform that’s raised $8 million in funding, explained how leading with technology lost deals while leading with benefits won them. The lesson applies far beyond blockchain to any technical B2B product.

The Technology That Doesn’t Matter

Steve’s honesty about this disconnect is refreshing. “I’ll be really honest, the customers actually don’t care.”

Wait—don’t care about blockchain? The technology that was supposed to revolutionize banking? The innovation that justified the entire product thesis?

“They don’t care about the technology, they don’t care about the main blockchain. They do care about the facets that it provides. So the benefits.”

This distinction matters because most technical founders make the same mistake. They’ve spent months or years understanding technology. They’ve made architectural decisions. They’ve solved complex engineering problems. And because that technology is central to how they think about their product, they assume it’s central to how customers should evaluate it.

It’s not.

What Customers Actually Buy

When Cygnetise sells to banks, treasury departments, and financial institutions, the conversation isn’t about distributed ledgers or cryptographic verification. It’s about three specific benefits that blockchain enables:

Immutability. Once information is recorded, it can’t be altered without detection. For authorized signatory lists, this creates an audit trail that manual processes and spreadsheets can’t provide.

Data ownership. Organizations control their own information rather than relying on centralized databases operated by third parties. For financial institutions that won’t access each other’s internal systems, this solves a fundamental sharing problem.

Peer-to-peer sharing. Updates propagate directly between counterparties without intermediaries. When someone leaves an organization, all counterparts see the update immediately rather than waiting for quarterly PDF emails.

These benefits matter to economic buyers. The underlying blockchain architecture? “The actual users, they’re interested in the application and the benefits that it provides. They don’t care about the underlying technology.”

The Technical Due Diligence Exception

Steve makes an important caveat. There is one stakeholder who cares about the technology: “When we go through technical due diligence as part of the sales cycle or the onboarding process, that the tech people are quite interested in the technology.”

This creates two distinct conversations in enterprise sales:

The economic buyer conversation focuses on business outcomes. What problem does this solve? What’s the ROI? How does it compare to our current process? Why should we change?

The technical buyer conversation validates that the solution actually works. Is the architecture sound? Does it meet security requirements? Will it scale? Can we support it?

Mixing these conversations loses deals. Leading with blockchain architecture to treasury department heads generates confusion, not excitement. They don’t have the context to evaluate distributed ledger technology. They have the context to evaluate whether quarterly PDF emails are a terrible way to manage authorized signatory lists.

The Evolution of Market Messaging

Steve’s perspective on blockchain has evolved alongside the market. “How you seen the conversation around blockchain evolve? I know in 2016, it was probably a very different story than it is today.”

The hype cycle matters here. In 2016, blockchain was revolutionary, cutting-edge, worth mentioning because it generated interest. By the time Cygnetise started closing deals, the hype had matured into skepticism. Mentioning blockchain could hurt more than help.

The solution wasn’t to hide the technology. Technical due diligence would reveal it anyway. The solution was to reframe what mattered in the sales conversation. Benefits first, architecture later, only to the stakeholders who care.

The Underlying Principle: Match Message to Stakeholder

The blockchain lesson reveals a broader principle about technical B2B sales. Different stakeholders care about different things:

Economic buyers care about business outcomes. Does this solve a problem? What’s the value? What’s the risk? They evaluate solutions based on impact, not implementation.

Technical buyers care about architecture and feasibility. Does this actually work? Will it scale? Can we support it? They evaluate solutions based on implementation, not just impact.

End users care about application and workflow. Is this easier than what we do now? Will it make my job better? They evaluate solutions based on usability, not architecture.

Leading with blockchain—or any technical architecture—conflates these stakeholder types. It answers questions that technical buyers have but economic buyers don’t. It creates confusion where you need clarity.

How to Translate Technology to Value

The framework Cygnetise uses applies to any technical B2B product:

Start with the problem, not the solution. Banks email PDF lists to thousands of counterparts quarterly. This creates lag, version control issues, and error risk.

Define the outcome, not the architecture. Real-time sharing of authorized signatory information with immutable audit trails and peer-to-peer updates.

Explain the benefits that matter to the economic buyer. Reduced operational risk, faster onboarding, better compliance, elimination of manual distribution processes.

Save the architecture for technical due diligence. When technical buyers ask how it works, then explain blockchain, distributed ledgers, and cryptographic verification.

The sequence matters as much as the content.

When Technology Actually Matters

This doesn’t mean technology never matters in positioning. It matters when:

Your buyer is technical and evaluates solutions based on architecture. Selling to CTOs or engineering teams requires different messaging than selling to treasury departments.

The technology itself differentiates you in a crowded market. If everyone offers similar benefits, architecture becomes the tiebreaker.

Your technology enables capabilities that competitors can’t match. The “how” matters when it’s the only way to achieve the “what.”

Regulatory or compliance requirements make architecture relevant. Certain industries care about specific technical approaches for legal or regulatory reasons.

But even in these cases, benefits typically come before architecture in the sales conversation.

The Message That Actually Works

Steve’s approach now focuses on application and outcome. When prospects ask about Cygnetise, the conversation starts with signatory management challenges, not blockchain innovation.

The pain: Managing who can do what on behalf of your organization, sharing that information with counterparts, and keeping it updated when people join or leave.

The solution: A platform that provides real-time, immutable, peer-to-peer sharing of authorized signatory information.

The benefits: Reduced operational risk, faster counterpart onboarding, elimination of manual distribution, better audit trails.

The technology: Blockchain-based architecture that enables these benefits through distributed ledger technology. (This comes later, to technical stakeholders.)

What Other Technical Founders Can Steal

The playbook works for any technical innovation:

Map your technology features to business outcomes. For each technical capability, define the business problem it solves.

Create stakeholder-specific messaging. Economic buyers get outcome-focused messaging. Technical buyers get architecture-focused messaging.

Lead with the problem and outcome in all initial conversations. Even technical buyers appreciate understanding the “why” before the “how.”

Save architectural details for technical due diligence. Let technical stakeholders pull this information when they need it.

Test messaging with actual prospects. If you’re losing deals or getting confused reactions, you’re probably leading with technology too early.

The Irony of Innovation

The ultimate irony of Cygnetise’s story is that blockchain enables everything the platform does. The technology isn’t marketing fluff. It’s fundamental to the solution. Peer-to-peer sharing without centralized databases requires distributed ledger technology. Immutability requires cryptographic verification.

But that technical truth doesn’t make it good marketing.

Steve spent months in early 2016 learning blockchain technology because he knew he needed to understand it to build a solution. “I realized that if I was going to continue doing what I was doing, I need to understand more about innovative technology.”

That understanding mattered for building the product. It didn’t matter for selling it.

The lesson for technical founders: master the technology to build great products. Master the benefits to sell them. Know which stakeholder cares about which conversation. And never confuse your excitement about how something works with your customer’s interest in what it does.