There is a particular moment many founders start to recognise in their sales journey. They walk into yet another pitch with a corporate buyer in Kuala Lumpur, Riyadh, or Singapore, armed with a polished slide deck full of features, roadmaps and awards. People in the room nod politely, ask a few safe questions and seem generally positive. On paper it looks like a good meeting. Yet when the founder leaves the building, there is a quiet sense in their gut that nothing real is going to move.
Most of the time, the problem is not that the product is weak or the pitch is technically wrong. The deeper issue is that the conversation never made it clear what the founder and the buyer are actually fighting together. The entire interaction stayed at the level of tools and options, not at the level of tension and pain. What is missing is a clearly named common enemy in sales, something both sides can point to and say, this is the thing that must change.
A common enemy is the tension made visible. It is the problem that frustrates the buyer so much that they are willing to push against internal habits, take career risk and allocate real budget. Once you learn to sell by naming a common enemy in sales, you stop sounding like a hopeful vendor and start sounding like an ally who has seen the same war from different angles.
Early stage founders often assume the enemy is simply another brand in their category. They talk in terms of being better than a well known competitor or describe themselves as the regional version of some global success story. While this language might help investors position the company, customers usually do not care much about your rival. Your buyer cares about their own daily enemy. That enemy looks like month end chaos when numbers never tie up. It looks like angry customers spamming Instagram because deliveries went missing. It looks like a CFO in Jeddah or Singapore who only finds out the true margin three months too late.
The healthiest common enemies in sales are rarely people or companies. They are system patterns that cost time, money or reputation. They show up as manual spreadsheets that never match, revenue leakage everyone senses but no one can quantify, or shadow processes that depend on one exhausted team member who cannot fall sick. When you frame the enemy as a structural problem instead of a person, it becomes emotionally safe for your buyer to agree with you. No one in the room has to feel like the villain. You are criticising the chaos, not attacking their colleagues.
A clearly named enemy works in the sales room for several reasons. First, it creates emotional clarity. Every serious buyer is already under some form of pressure. When you describe that pressure accurately, they feel seen and understood. They do not need another optimistic founder promising to unlock growth. They want someone who can look directly at their reality and say, your team is bleeding here, here and here.
Second, a shared enemy sets up a natural alliance. Once you say that the real enemy is manual rework that keeps teams in the office until late at night, you and the buyer mentally move to the same side of the table. The key question stops being whether they should buy your tool and becomes how both of you can defeat this pattern together.
Third, a strong enemy helps you filter opportunities. If no one in the room feels the pain you describe, you are probably not facing a real prospect. That is not a failure. It is a useful signal that saves you from months of polite follow ups and stalled discussions. A well chosen enemy either wakes people up or reveals that you are talking to the wrong segment.
Consider a founder in Singapore selling workflow software to a regional retailer. For months she talked about automation, dashboards and modern interfaces. The CIO liked her. The team respected her expertise. Yet no budget moved. One day she changed the way she opened the meeting. Instead of starting with the product, she began with the truth she had heard from store managers. She told them that every week their teams were copying the same data into three different systems, doing three times the work and creating three different versions of the truth. She said that the real enemy was duplicated work that hid mistakes until customers complained.
The room went silent, then the regional head laughed and admitted that finally someone had said out loud what everybody quietly knew. From that point, the conversation shifted. People stopped asking product comparison questions and started sharing their own stories about late night reconciliations, frustrating WhatsApp messages and tension with franchisees. By the time she showed the product, the group had already agreed that the old way of working had to go. The software had not changed. Her willingness to name the enemy they all felt had changed everything.
Inside a startup, clarity about a common enemy in sales also acts like a spine for the entire commercial motion. It keeps messaging, qualification and even product decisions aligned. If your stated enemy is guesswork in pricing, everyone understands what a good customer looks like. That buyer is the operator who hates not knowing real margin, not the one who is only hunting for a pretty dashboard. If your enemy is projects that never move beyond pilot stage, then sales conversations will naturally focus on rollout risk, stakeholder mapping and internal politics. You stop chasing vanity trials that were never truly meant to scale.
New salespeople ramp faster when you tell them clearly who you fight for and what you fight against. They can test every script, slide and outreach line against that standard. Does this sentence sharpen the enemy or blur it. If it blurs, they remove it. For lean teams in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia or anywhere else, this kind of focus is not a branding luxury. It is a survival skill. You do not have the resources to fight on ten fronts at once. You choose one enemy and become very precise about it.
Choosing the right enemy is not the same in every market. A founder selling into Saudi family businesses might discover that the fear of losing face with partners is a stronger enemy than internal inefficiency. In Singapore, regulatory non compliance and the risk of fines may carry more weight than employee burnout because the downside of getting it wrong is immediate and concrete. The simplest test is to observe the reaction when you describe the enemy. If buyers lean forward, share their own stories and add more detail to your description, you are close. If they nod politely and change the topic, you probably chose something too abstract.
The way to find the right enemy is to listen closely. Ask customers what they secretly resent about the current process or what nightmare scenario they replay in their heads before key reporting dates or board meetings. Use their exact words, not your polished version, as the raw material for your sales story. The more specific the enemy, the sharper your sale becomes. Vague labels like operational inefficiency usually do not land. A description such as driving across town just to collect a physical signature from a director who is not even in the office paints a clear picture. Your product then becomes the way out of that specific, painful scene.
From there, you can turn the enemy into a simple, repeatable story. You start by naming the enemy in concrete language. You show the real cost of letting that enemy live for another year in terms of time, money and reputation. You point out how current workarounds are like weak weapons that only delay the pain. Then you introduce your product as a more powerful, realistic weapon that fits the buyer’s context. Finally, you invite the buyer to be the leader who finally retires that pattern of pain.
Imagine a female founder in Jeddah building a logistics platform and speaking to a retail client. She might say that the real enemy today is last mile uncertainty. Every delayed delivery forces staff into manual firefighting and exposes the brand on social media. The team is trying to handle this with spreadsheets, calls and scattered chat threads, which is like bringing a simple scooter into a Formula One race. Only after that does she walk them through what it looks like when the company has real visibility and control. Notice that the product appears later in the story. The narrative starts with the enemy, then the cost, then the failed weapons, and only then presents the upgrade. That sequence mirrors how the buyer already experiences the problem in real life.
At the same time, it is important to avoid the dark side of using a common enemy. If your sales culture rests entirely on mocking competitors or blaming internal champions, it will eventually poison the team. Healthy use of a shared enemy does not cultivate hatred. It cultivates focus. You are not asking your representatives to look down on people. You are asking them to be ruthless about patterns that waste human energy, money and potential.
You must also resist inventing enemies based only on fear. If you scare customers with unlikely catastrophic risks just to close a deal, you might secure a signature in the short term but you will damage trust over time. The goal is for your customer to look back after twelve months and say that the problem you named was real, and they are genuinely relieved to have solved it with you. That is how you earn renewals, expansions and referrals.
If your current deals are stalling, it is worth examining your pitch and sales conversations through this lens. Ask yourself whether you have clearly named the enemy your best customers are already battling, whether your sales stories begin from that enemy or from your product list, and whether your team talks regularly about beating that enemy instead of only talking about hitting monthly targets. If the answers feel vague, your issue is probably not a lack of templates. You likely need a sharper, shared enemy.
When you get this right, you start to notice a shift. Your marketing sounds less generic because it speaks directly to a lived frustration. Your salespeople feel less like they are begging for attention and more like they are recruiting allies for an important campaign. Your buyers feel less like they are being sold to and more like they are inviting a capable partner into a fight they were already tired of fighting alone. That is the quiet strength of having a common enemy in sales. It turns the transaction from a narrow negotiation into a shared mission and reminds everyone why the work of building and buying solutions matters in the first place.
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