Threedy’s Playbook: How to Strip Down Complex B2B Messaging Into Scalable Sales Motions

Threedy’s Playbook: How to Strip Down Complex B2B Messaging Into Scalable Sales Motions

Your sales team knows the product. They understand the technology. They can articulate the vision. And they’re still not closing deals.

This is the invisible killer of technical B2B companies: death by possibility. When your platform can solve dozens of problems across multiple industries, the instinct is to arm your sales team with every possible angle. More ammunition means more shots on goal, right?

Wrong. Christian Stein, CEO of Threedy, learned this the hard way. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, he shared how his industrial 3D platform spent years struggling with sales execution—not because the product wasn’t working, but because they were asking salespeople to do the impossible.

The Research Institute Trap

Threedy’s origin story created a dangerous advantage. Spinning out from the Fraunhofer research organization with existing enterprise customers in German automotive meant they had validation before they had a company. They knew their visual computing infrastructure worked. They had paying customers who understood the value.

But this early success masked a fundamental problem: those customers found Threedy through academic and research channels. They were the early innovators, the people building cutting-edge solutions at major automotive manufacturers who actively sought out emerging technology from research institutes.

“Coming out of the institute, I think we thought that it’s going to be very easy to replicate that way of finding these people,” Christian admits. The assumption was simple: if these sophisticated customers got it, surely others would too.

The reality proved much different.

When Comprehensive Becomes Paralyzing

Here’s what Threedy did wrong initially, and what most technical founders do: they tried to communicate everything.

Their platform is middleware that enables “the development of fast and scalable industrial 3D and mixed reality applications.” It fundamentally rethinks how 3D data works in distributed systems. It can serve engineering teams, manufacturing operations, sales configurators, service technicians, and mixed reality applications. The use cases span industries—automotive, aerospace, industrial equipment, consumer products.

All of that is true. All of that is valuable. And all of that became a weapon against their own sales team.

“When we hire the first guys for the sales to go out and share the vision and sell the technology, I guess we overburdened them with the complexity of talking to different ICPs, of delivering, let’s say the full story and kind of going into detail on all the different aspects and possibilities,” Christian reflects.

Think about what this means in practice. A salesperson sits down with a prospect. Should they lead with the manufacturing efficiency angle? The sales configuration use case? The mixed reality training application? Each conversation becomes a branching decision tree with dozens of possible paths. Each path requires different proof points, different case studies, different technical explanations.

No sales process can scale when every conversation is a choose-your-own-adventure novel.

The Multi-Year Simplification Process

Fixing this wasn’t a single decision—it was a multi-year evolution. “The core learning there, I guess, was that over the first years now we kind of stripped it down into different core use cases, into sweet spots where we can deliver very strong values,” Christian explains.

Notice the language: “over the first years.” This wasn’t a quick pivot or a single strategy session. It was continuous refinement, probably involving painful customer conversations, lost deals, and frustrated salespeople who couldn’t figure out why prospects weren’t converting despite strong demos.

The solution emerged through pattern recognition. Which conversations converted fastest? Where did Threedy have the clearest competitive advantage? Which use cases had the shortest path from demo to contract?

These “sweet spots” became the foundation for restructuring the entire sales organization. Instead of generalist salespeople who could theoretically sell anything, Threedy reorganized around specificity: “having our salespeople work on very specific topics, specific core customers, and a lot more successful with that.”

The Engineering Mindset Applied to Sales

What makes Christian’s approach particularly interesting is how he thinks about sales organization as a systems problem. For technical founders who struggle with go-to-market, this mental model proves surprisingly useful.

“For me, as a technical guy, at least the same way that you would build your software, you need all these small parts that fit into each other,” he explains. “You need to have very clear understanding on how your processes should be structured, how the information flows, where, which kind of departments should be involved. So really building a machine that continuously optimizes the way it works.”

This isn’t about reducing sales to an algorithm—it’s about applying engineering rigor to a process problem. In software, you define clear interfaces between components. You understand data flows. You identify bottlenecks. You test and iterate.

The same principles apply to sales. Each role has clear responsibilities (interfaces). Information flows from marketing to SDRs to AEs to customer success (data flows). Conversion rates reveal where deals stall (bottlenecks). You continuously refine based on results (iteration).

When you think about sales this way, the solution to the complexity problem becomes obvious: you can’t build a scalable system with unlimited variables. You need to constrain the problem space.

What Simplification Actually Looks Like

The practical implementation of this strategy means saying no to possibilities. It means a salesperson who specializes in manufacturing efficiency use cases at automotive suppliers doesn’t also try to sell mixed reality training applications to aerospace companies.

This feels wrong to technical founders. You’re leaving money on the table. You’re not maximizing the platform’s potential. You’re creating artificial limitations.

But you’re actually creating the conditions for sales execution. A specialized salesperson can:

• Develop deep expertise in specific customer pain points
• Build a portfolio of relevant case studies
• Refine a pitch that resonates with that specific audience
• Understand the competitive landscape for that use case
• Learn the procurement process for that customer segment
• Build credibility through demonstrated expertise

Generalist salespeople can’t do any of this at the level required to close complex enterprise deals.

When Founder Expertise Isn’t Enough

The final piece of Threedy’s transformation came from recognizing when to bring in outside expertise. During their Series A process, they made a crucial decision: “We decided to restructure the whole commercial side of the company and get a very senior expert on board who can handle this and bring the company to the next level.”

Christian frames this as a maturity moment: “I think the core decision was understanding and accepting that given all the understanding that we might have as a Founder, there’s a point in time when other expertise is also required.”

Technical founders can understand the problem. They can recognize the symptoms. They can even intellectualize the solution. But implementing a scalable commercial organization requires different skills than building technology or landing early customers.

The Underlying Principle

Strip away the specifics of Threedy’s journey, and you’re left with a principle that applies across complex B2B sales: optionality kills execution.

The more possible paths your sales team can take, the less likely they are to master any single path. The more customer segments you target, the less expertise you build in any specific segment. The more use cases you promote, the harder it becomes to demonstrate clear ROI.

Simplification isn’t about limiting your product—it’s about enabling your team. You can always expand to adjacent use cases once you’ve mastered the core motion. You can broaden to new industries after you’ve dominated one vertical. You can add sales capacity as the machine proves it works.

But you can’t scale complexity. You can only scale clarity.

For Threedy, this realization took years and required restructuring their entire commercial organization. For you, it might start with asking a simpler question: if your sales team could only pursue one type of customer with one specific use case for the next quarter, which would create the most value fastest?

The answer to that question is probably where you should start.