Selling the Unsellable: Sales Lessons from a Founder Who’s Done It Twice (feat. Viktor Popovic)
Building two unlikely businesses by treating every rejection as a missing data point—testing channels relentlessly, leaning on referral partners, planning deeply, and celebrating small wins.
Insights from a Snowpal Podcast conversation between Krish Palaniappan and Viktor Popovic, co-founder and president of Avendo
Viktor Popovic has closed two very different kinds of impossible sales. The first was convincing an old-school pressure washer manufacturer, in 2003, that people would actually buy heavy equipment over the internet. The second, twenty years later, is convincing payment processors to compete against each other in real time for the same merchant. Between those two sales sits a masterclass in what it actually takes to sell something the market isn’t ready to buy.
Podcast
How One Founder Cracked Two Impossible Sales — on Apple.
The first sale is never the one you planned for
Viktor didn’t set out to sell pressure washers. He’d built a list of roughly 40 products tied to the aviation industry — his original field of study — but a keyword analysis run by his business partner turned up an unexpected signal: “pressure” had unusually high search volume. One of the aviation-adjacent items on his list happened to be a pressure washer used for cleaning hangar floors. That accident of keyword research became a 21-year business.
“A friend asked me if I wanted to start a business. Without a second thought — yes, I'm ready. Why not?"
But finding the product was the easy part. The real sales problem was upstream: getting manufacturers to trust an unproven sales channel. In 2003, the standard model was regional reps who drove vans full of equipment around town, pulled machines off the truck, hooked up a garden hose, and demoed them live. Viktor was asking manufacturers to abandon that entirely and hand their equipment to a stranger promising to sell it through a browser. It took him six months to land his first vendor, a company called Cam Spray out of Iowa. The first actual sale — a cold-water diesel-powered pressure washer to a U.S. military base in San Diego — came down to a simple phone call and a fast, confident shipping quote.
The lesson he draws from it: the hardest sale often isn’t to the end customer. It’s convincing the party one step removed — the vendor, the partner, the gatekeeper — that a new way of doing business is worth the risk.
The second time around, he was wrong about what would be hard
When Viktor started Avendo, a fintech SaaS company that lets credit card processors compete for merchant transactions in real time, he assumed the sales motion would be straightforward. Merchants would obviously want lower processing rates. Processors would obviously want to compete for that business. “Why wouldn’t they love this idea?”
He was wrong. Payment processors have run the same playbook for 50 to 60 years: evaluate a merchant, assess risk off their statements, quote a flat rate, done. Avendo was asking them to shift into a model where they compete for the same merchant’s business transaction by transaction. That’s not a product objection — it’s an identity objection. It took Viktor seven or eight reworked pitches to find language that got processors past their blind spots and objections before the idea started to click.
“I thought the sales process would be where I need to worry, that everybody would be on board because the idea is great — why not? Man, was I wrong. It's actually the hardest part: getting payment processors to change the way they think, because they've been doing business this same way for the last 50-60 years.”
Notably, once it did click, it clicked fast — because the pitch to merchants and referral partners is genuinely simple: save 1% on a million-dollar-a-year processing volume, and that flows straight to net margin. Decision-makers get it in one sentence. The friction isn’t in the value proposition. It’s in getting the party whose behavior has to change to actually change it.
Referral partnerships beat cold outreach — but only after the failures teach you why
Before landing on what works, Avendo ran seven or eight different marketing motions in parallel: cold email, referral partnerships, paid advertising, and more. Viktor is candid that most of it didn’t work on the first try. One cold-email platform was pulling leads from what turned out to be a stale database — they were spending real money generating zero responses before they figured out the list itself was the problem. Email deliverability issues meant learning to run domain warm-ups, rewrite subject lines, and rebuild sender reputation from scratch.
What eventually worked was narrowing to three referral partner types who already understand net margin economics well enough to sell on Avendo’s behalf without much friction: business consultants and coaches, fractional CFOs, and accounting firms. These partners refer their clients into Avendo, and Avendo reciprocates leads back to them with client approval — a two-way referral loop built on partners who don’t need convincing on the math.
The broader point: there’s no way to know in advance which channel will work. The only path is running several simultaneously, tracking results honestly, and being willing to kill a channel that isn’t converting rather than defending the plan for its own sake.
80% planning, 20% execution — and still 70% wrong
A mentor once told Viktor that a well-run initiative is 80% planning and 20% execution — get the plan right and the execution mostly takes care of itself. He believes it, and he still spent months in heavy planning before launching Avendo. And yet roughly 70% of that original plan changed once reality intervened.
That’s not a contradiction. The planning wasn’t wasted just because the specifics changed — it forced him to actually understand the payment industry’s layers (network fees, acquiring banks, issuing banks, card types, government and gift cards) instead of assuming his merchant-side experience had already taught him the business. Planning, in his framing, isn’t about predicting the future correctly. It’s about doing the homework deep enough that when the plan breaks, you know enough to fix it fast.
Resilience is a skill, not a personality trait
Viktor doesn’t describe himself as naturally thick-skinned. He describes himself as built that way by repetition — pitching processors seven or eight different ways, absorbing rejection after rejection, and treating each “no” as information about a blind spot rather than a verdict on the idea. His practical advice for staying in a sales grind that isn’t paying off yet: celebrate small wins deliberately. Hiring the right person, closing one meaningful account, hitting a minor milestone — mark it, even briefly, because the wins that matter get lost if you’re only measuring against the ten-million-dollar outcome still years away.
The takeaway for anyone selling something the market doesn’t understand yet
Two sales, two decades apart, same underlying pattern: the product wasn’t the obstacle. The obstacle was convincing someone whose business model, habits, or risk tolerance had to change. Viktor’s approach to both is the same — treat every rejection as a missing data point, keep reworking the pitch until it lands, lean on partners who already understand your economics, and measure progress in small wins rather than waiting for the finish line to feel good.
“It's just trial and error, I think that's the bottom line. I don't think there's a secret to it, or a crystal ball you can look at.”
As he put it on the podcast: don’t get discouraged. “Not him — let’s go tweak something, do it this way.” That, more than any framework, is what got two very different sales across the line.
Summary
For sales engineers evaluating go-to-market motion design: the core signal from this conversation is that objection surface area scales with how entrenched the incumbent workflow is, not with product complexity — Viktor’s hardest technical sell wasn’t a feature gap, it was displacing a 50-60 year old risk-assessment heuristic (flat-rate quoting off a merchant’s statements) with a real-time, transaction-level competitive bidding model, which required rebuilding the champion’s mental model before any pricing conversation could land; his resolution path was iterative pitch-architecture testing (seven to eight distinct framings) to identify and patch objection blind spots rather than optimizing a single script, paired with a channel-attribution pivot away from cold outbound (killed by stale list decay in a purchased database, undetectable until response-rate analysis surfaced it) toward a referral-partner model selecting for partners who already carry the requisite domain literacy — fractional CFOs, accounting firms, consultants — so the value prop (basis-point margin capture at the transaction level) requires zero re-education before it converts, which is the throughline: reduce time-to-comprehension for the buyer by routing through intermediaries who’ve already internalized your unit economics, rather than trying to compress that education into the pitch itself.