The ABC of Sales: I is for Interest: Why Curiosity is the Ultimate Sales Asset in Tech and Sustainability

Part of The ABC of Sales series — Authentic, Business, Connection. Real stories, practical lessons, one letter at a time.

The CTO leaned back in his chair and looked at me with an expression I had not seen in a client meeting before.

Not scepticism. Not the polite tolerance that technical leaders sometimes extend to salespeople who have wandered into territory they do not fully understand. Something closer to genuine surprise.

“You have a great technical mind,”

he said. “How long have you been an engineer in this space?”

When I told him I had transitioned from media sales eighteen months earlier, he was stunned. And that moment — that specific pivot from polite engagement to genuine peer-level respect — was the moment the deal moved from possible to probable.

I had not become a technical expert. I was not, and am not, an engineer. What I had become was something more useful in a sales context: someone who was genuinely, obsessively, relentlessly interested in understanding the thing I was selling well enough to speak the language of the people who built it and the language of the people who would buy it.

I is for Interest. And in the high-complexity sectors of Fintech, Healthcare, Renewable Energy, and Life Sciences, the depth of your curiosity about your client’s world is the single most powerful differentiator available to a mid-career sales professional.

🔐 Cracking the Engineer’s Code: Becoming a Translator

When I transitioned from media sales into deep tech, I encountered what I came to call the Engineer’s Code. Not a barrier deliberately erected to exclude outsiders, but a natural consequence of the way technically deep professionals communicate: in the language of logic, precision, and specificity that emerges from years of working on problems where the details matter enormously.

Salespeople who do not speak this language are immediately categorised. Not maliciously. Simply accurately. They are vendors. People who know the features list but not the architecture. People who can describe what the product does but not why it does it that way. People who, when the conversation goes deep, reach the edge of their knowledge and pivot to a brochure answer.

In Fintech, Healthcare, and Renewable Energy, that edge is where deals are lost. Because the technical decision-maker — the CTO, the Chief Medical Officer, the Head of Engineering for a solar infrastructure project — is not just evaluating whether your product fits their specification. They are evaluating whether you are the kind of professional they can trust to guide an implementation they will be responsible for when the sale is done.

Becoming a translator means doing the work that bridges the gap between the technical depth of the product and the business language of the people signing the contract. It means spending weeks, not hours, asking your internal development team ‘why’ until you understand the architecture well enough to explain it in business consequence rather than technical specification. It means reading the white papers, not just the brochures. Attending the internal technical briefings even when they are not nominally for the sales team. Asking the engineers what keeps them up at night about the product’s current limitations.

This is not performance. This is genuine interest. And the difference between the two is immediately apparent to anyone who has been in technical client conversations long enough to have experienced both.

“In Fintech and Life Sciences, your knowledge is what you are actually selling. The product is just the vehicle it travels in. And knowledge without curiosity stales. It has to be constantly renewed.”

🎯 The CTO Test: Earning Peer-Level Respect Through Preparation

The high-stakes pitch with the client’s CTO was the culmination of weeks of deliberate preparation. Not rehearsing answers to expected questions. Actually learning.

I had asked our internal development team every question I could think of about our product’s deployment architecture, its integration protocols, the specific technical decisions that had been made and the reasoning behind each of them. I had read documentation that was not written for salespeople. I had attended two internal engineering briefings under the pretence of wanting to understand what we were selling.

When the CTO’s questions arrived in the meeting — specific, technical, and clearly designed to find the edge of my knowledge — I could answer them. Not perfectly. Not with the depth of someone who had designed the system. But with enough genuine understanding to demonstrate that I had taken the subject seriously enough to deserve the conversation I was in.

The surprise in his face was not at the quality of my technical knowledge. It was at the quality of my preparation. He had expected the standard sales experience: confident on the surface features, evasive or referral-heavy the moment the questions went deep. What he encountered instead was someone who had cared enough about his world to actually spend time in it before asking for his business.

That is what interest does. It does not make you an engineer. It makes you a salesperson who respects the engineers enough to speak their language.

🌍 The Danger of the Single Story: Why Curiosity Must Be Ongoing

There is a specific failure mode for salespeople who invest in sector knowledge: they stop.

They invest the time to understand the landscape at the beginning of their transition, build the foundation of credibility that earns them access to senior conversations, and then — because the effort was significant and the result was effective — treat that knowledge as a static asset rather than a living one.

In Fintech, Healthcare, Renewable Energy, and Life Sciences, the landscape does not stay still. It shifts daily. And the salesperson who understood it eighteen months ago and has not actively maintained that understanding is operating on a map that is increasingly inaccurate.

• Renewable Energy: A new government subsidy, a change in carbon pricing, a shift in grid infrastructure policy can transform a client’s five-year capital expenditure plan overnight. The account executive who knows about it before their client does is a strategic advisor. The one who finds out from their client is a vendor.

• Healthcare: A shift in data governance regulation, a change in HIPAA requirements, a new FDA guidance document can render a previously compliant solution suddenly problematic. Being the person who flags this to your Healthcare client before they encounter it in an audit is the definition of indispensable.

• Fintech: Regulatory changes in payment processing, open banking requirements, anti-money laundering updates — these are the developments that change procurement priorities and budget allocations in Fintech organisations with minimal warning. The account executive who tracks them is positioned as a trusted advisor in every subsequent conversation.

The single story — the fixed understanding of your client’s world that was accurate when you built it but has not been updated since — is not just a knowledge gap. It is a credibility risk. Because the client who asks you about a recent development in their sector and receives a blank look has just received the most important data point about your value as a professional partner.

💡 Your Advantage at 40-Plus: Business Acumen as the Frame for Curiosity

Here is the specific advantage that a mid-career professional brings to the interest-led approach that a 25-year-old genuinely cannot replicate: the ability to connect technical complexity to business consequence.

The young sales professional who becomes genuinely interested in the technical architecture of a Fintech product understands the architecture. The career-changer in their 40s who makes the same investment understands the architecture and can immediately map it onto the business problems they have spent two decades watching organisations navigate.

That mapping — from technical specification to business impact, from product feature to strategic risk mitigation, from compliance requirement to organisational consequence — is the translation work that turns a technical briefing into a conversation that a CFO or a board committee can act on.

Your curiosity is not starting from zero. It is adding a new layer to a foundation that already exists. And that foundation is what makes your curiosity so commercially valuable in the complex, high-stakes sectors where the most significant deals live.

🌱 The Growth Room: Three AI Tools That Make Continuous Curiosity Practical

The challenge with the interest-led approach is the time it requires. Staying genuinely current on a complex sector while managing an active pipeline, maintaining client relationships, and delivering against quota is a real constraint. The right AI tools make continuous curiosity practical rather than aspirational. In the Growth Room, we explore tools that help sales professionals stay genuinely informed. Here are three directly relevant to I for Interest:

🤖 Three AI Tools That Keep Your Curiosity Current

1. 🔍 Perplexity AI — Real-Time Sector Intelligence With Sources

Perplexity AI gives you real-time, cited research on any sector development, regulatory change, or competitive movement — with the specific depth that transforms surface awareness into genuine expertise. For the account executive committed to being the person who knows about the regulatory shift in Healthcare before their client does, or who can discuss the implications of a new green energy initiative in terms of their client’s capital expenditure priorities, Perplexity is the daily research tool that makes that level of currency practically achievable. Use it to read the white papers, not just the headlines.

2. 🤔 ChatGPT — Your On-Demand Technical Translator

The work of becoming a translator — of building the bridge between technical architecture and business consequence — is dramatically accelerated by ChatGPT. Describe a technical concept you have encountered in your product or your client’s sector and ask ChatGPT to explain it in progressively deeper ways until you genuinely understand it. Ask it to help you find the business language equivalent of a technical specification. Ask it to role-play as a sceptical CTO and probe your understanding of a deployment architecture until you reach the edges of your current knowledge. The interest is yours. ChatGPT is the tool that makes the learning faster.

3. 📰 Blinkist AI — Wide Reading in the Margins of a Busy Schedule

The business acumen that makes your curiosity commercially powerful is built through wide reading across disciplines — not just sector news but behavioural economics, leadership, systems thinking, and the broader intellectual landscape that shapes how senior decision-makers think about their organisations. Blinkist AI condenses thousands of non-fiction books into fifteen-minute summaries with AI-powered personalisation based on your role and goals. For the mid-career sales professional committed to the kind of wide intellectual engagement that distinguishes a trusted advisor from a well-informed vendor, Blinkist makes that reading practically achievable within the real constraints of a demanding role.

Explore all three — visit the Growth Room →

⚡ Your I-Challenge: Five Ways to Deepen Your Interest This Week

1. Identify a major policy change or market shift in your client’s sector in the last six months. Use Perplexity AI to research it properly — white papers, not just headlines. Spend thirty minutes understanding the second and third-order implications.

2. Ask your internal technical team one question you do not know the answer to. Not a product feature question. An architecture question. A ‘why did we build it this way’ question. Then ask the follow-up question that the answer generates.

3. Reach out to one stagnant lead with a curiosity-led message. ‘I have been following the recent regulatory changes in your sector and wanted to ask: how is your team adjusting your 2026 strategy in light of this development?’ No pitch. Just genuine, informed curiosity.

4. Use ChatGPT to deepen your understanding of one technical concept in your product or sector. Ask it to explain it at increasing levels of depth until you can describe its business consequences in plain language without referring to any notes.

5. Read one white paper this week, not one article. The difference between the depth of understanding you build from a white paper and the depth you build from a news summary is the difference between the CTO who looks up from the meeting notes and the one who leans back in his chair with genuine surprise.

🏁 Curiosity Is the Fuel for Everything Else

The CTO who asked how long I had been an engineer was not, in retrospect, complimenting my technical knowledge. He was responding to something more fundamental: the signal that I had cared enough about his world to actually spend time in it.

In a professional landscape full of salespeople who know the features list and can navigate a sales deck, the person who genuinely wants to understand — who asks the follow-up question, who reads the white paper, who tracks the regulatory development before the client mentions it — is genuinely rare. And rare, in sales, is genuinely valuable.

Your curiosity is not a supplement to your business acumen. It is the process by which your business acumen stays current, stays relevant, and stays worth paying for.

Stay curious. Read the white paper. Ask the follow-up question. The peer-level trust it builds is worth more than any closing technique you will ever learn.

👉 Next up: J is for Judgment — The Double-Edged Skill That Separates the Consultant from the Script-Reader. Don’t miss it.

💬 How do you stay genuinely current in your sector? What is the one resource, habit, or approach that keeps your curiosity alive in a demanding sales role? Share it in the comments — the curiosity strategies in this community always generate the most useful conversations.

I is for Interest: Why Curiosity is the Ultimate Sales Asset in Tech and Sustainability