Freddy Galindo built Sprint Suite by selling the way mining contractors buy: face to face, boots on site, and prospecting by driving around with a camera.
Key takeaways
Align the sales motion to the buyer’s culture, not to software convention. After COVID, “everything on Teams” was wrong for this vertical. Going back to in-person produced the biggest month of appointments, then the biggest month of new revenue.
Sprint Suite budgets to fly sales development representatives and product staff to mine sites. You can’t sell “we solve X” convincingly if you’ve never seen X.
Culture lives in details. Walk into a workshop in brand-new boots and the general manager’s first words are “first time on a mine site, mate?”
With AI collapsing the cost of building product, the winners are vertical specialists. What can’t be copied is the knowledge of doing the work, and everything wrapped around the product.
Learn to say no. Early yes-to-everything diluted focus. And invest in the sales engine early: Freddy’s first agency once took two months to follow up an inbound lead. That lead was Luigi.
Founder advice in two words: be coachable.
Development now is a commodity. It’s cheap. Where we’re investing more is into our people, flying people out to actually learn what our customers do.
Freddy Galindo, founder, Sprint Suite
The way we do prospecting is we drive around taking photos of companies, because you can’t find them on Google Maps or Sales Navigator.
Freddy Galindo, founder, Sprint Suite
How do you sell software to a market that doesn’t buy software?
By becoming part of it. Sprint Suite began when Freddy Galindo joined the family mining services business and found manila folders everywhere. He asked a supervisor what would happen if he deleted one spreadsheet. The answer was that the business would stop. There was no mining contractor software to buy, so they built it, and other contractors with the same problem came quickly.
The harder lesson was how to sell it. Mining contractors are used to a bloke walking through the door and sitting down over a beer. They aren’t used to a demo link. So Sprint Suite leaned away from looking like a tech company and toward looking like a contractor. Fishing trips get scheduled around site visits. Freddy is honest that he knew this deep down early on, and it still took time to trust it.
Why fly a sales development rep to a mine site?
Because credibility is physical in this world. Freddy describes taking a product team member to a workshop in the Pilbara and telling him to dirty his brand-new boots first. He didn’t. The general manager clocked it instantly. That’s the kind of thing a script can’t teach, and it’s why Sprint Suite spends on getting junior sellers out to clients rather than scaling headcount and handing out talk tracks. Luigi Prestinenzi saw the effect in a call block: one insight from Freddy about how a client actually operates, and the rep’s conversations changed tenfold.
What’s the moat when anyone can build the product?
Not the product. Freddy’s view is that the software crash sorted winners from losers along one line: whether they served a specific vertical. Development is a commodity now, so Sprint Suite has moved money from engineering into sales, customer success, and site time. The next three years are about doubling down on mining contractors and expanding into Canada. They’re also about shifting from vendor to adviser, as an industry typically 12 to 24 months behind on technology meets AI for the first time. His advice to founders is the same one Luigi has drilled into him: be coachable, be a sponge, and don’t let ego make the mistakes for you.
Questions this episode answers
How do you sell software to a non-tech industry?
Match how they already buy. In mining that’s in person, from people who have visibly done the work. Position the product around reducing operational risk, not around features.
What’s the competitive moat for vertical software now that building is cheap?
Domain depth. Product can be replicated in weeks. Understanding a customer’s compliance burden, site culture, and daily reality can’t be.
Why did Sprint Suite move away from virtual selling?
Because their buyers didn’t want it. Returning to face-to-face meetings and site visits delivered their strongest appointment and revenue months.
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