Hey, Rob, how's it going, man? Good.
How are you? I am doing great.
I'm running on 2 little sleep because I can't turn off World
Cup games as it turns out. Like they they start and then
they just have to go all the way through to the end.
So last night was a good one with Columbia pulling it out.
Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah, that's that started
after my bedtime. So I have no idea.
I have no idea. My, my one of my friends has
created like his vibe coded this, this wake up call app and
he's like, I'd like love for you to test it out.
And I was like, dude, my alarm has been irrelevant for the
past, I don't know, six months because my daughter is now the
alarm at 5:29 every morning. It's it's time to freaking rock.
And so I go to sleep early. Amazing, amazing.
Well, hey, Rob, we've got a super valuable one to talk
about. Very practical again on this
one. Your your post this week is
called are they pulling? How to identify pull versus
seems like pull, but isn't. I would I would call this one
try to buy is is like the like big take away from this.
And what we're going to talk about are basically some of the
things that make sales confusing, especially I suspect
for, you know, first time founders or or maybe it's even
more experienced folks. But it's, you know, for when I
was reading this, I was like, oh, OK, these are common things
that I was hearing that gave me optimism that slowly petered out
and like, died a very slow, long death.
But Rob, why don't, before we jump into the actual, excuse me,
and jump into the actual content, why don't you give us
context for why this is on your mind?
So I've basically I, I just review a ton of start-ups, sales
calls like that's how I spend a lot of my time.
And what I've noticed is that there is a very big difference
between what they see as like pull in a call and what I see as
pull in a call. And unfortunately, I found that
I am more often right, which is to say we tend to be over
optimistic when we listen to a call and when we hear things, we
hear things that sound like they are the things that you would
say before buying. And in fact, they are things
that could plausibly be things you say before buying, but often
they're just things you say without buying.
And So what I found is that there isn't.
I've been talking about this for a while, but I haven't just
formally written this down about what does pull actually look
like in a sales call. What does it mean?
How do you know if it is pull or not, and how do we define it in
a way where you're not going to get confused by something that
looks like it could be pull but actually isn't?
Yeah, and this actually clarified something that is in
your clod skill for me. Your, your clod skill, the very
first thing that at like you'll take out a transcript, put it
into, put it into Claude and Claude will analyze it like with
your perspective. And the first thing is, was
there a pull action or a purchase action or something
like that? And reading through this, I was
like, OK, This is why. This is why Rob starts there
instead of like jumping into into a framework, into the pull
framework. Let me read a couple of things
that you write early in this post and then we'll jump into
more of the details there. You're right, if they have pull,
they will try to buy even if you don't have a product ready yet
or even if you bumble around in the sales call and then a little
bit later. Here's the most important thing.
Anything other than trying to buy is not pulling.
If you think they are pulling when they're not, they're
probably not going to buy. Worse, you're going to think
they'll probably buy and as the deal extends, you're going to
keep pushing and following up rather than trying to figure out
who will pull. This is how startups waste waste
precious months or years down a dead end road.
Sigh. Been there, not fun.
Also have been there and not fun.
Can confirm. Rob, when do you when you work
with founders? Or maybe let's just sort of like
like why do we do this? Like why do we mistake things
that are not pull for pull? I think it's so in a sales call,
you're going to hear words and the hard part is interpreting
what those words mean. And so we tend to think that
things that are shaped like enthusiasm are the same things
as things that are shaped as pull.
And so you're going to hear words and you're going to
interpret like, oh, interesting. They said this would save them a
lot of money. They said this would solve their
pain points. They said that.
And like those things we kind of auto complete in our heads to
being OK, therefore they're going to buy.
But those things are not they're going to buy.
And, and the really important point here is that if you
misinterpret this, there's going to be two things that you're
going to do that are going to just they, they can just wreck
up your startup thing. One is you're going to keep
following up with these people believing that this is real,
which means think of the opportunity cost of doing that.
You're pushing on somebody who actually doesn't have pull, but
they were enthusiastic in some way, shape or form.
And so it's like it's so what's in your head is this is a real
deal. How do I get it across the line?
You're not finding the people who actually do have pull and
just selling to them. But then the second thing, and
this is where I see a lot of stuff come together.
This is where demos get bigger. This is where value props get
bigger is you're going to misinterpret this situation as
oh, I need to get sales help to drive urgency here.
It's an urgency problem or I need to, you know, demo more so
that they get it. I need to do all of these kinds
of things because we're what's in our head is oh, OK, they did
have pulled. They should have bought it would
have benefited them. I'm just executing something
downstream incorrect. And that's and like you can just
see how both of these things are going to waste your time and
lead you to do a bunch of work that won't help.
Yeah. And an example from my business
was I chased a rabbit for probably a year.
You were there for part of this dirty basically being helping
researchers with their sites communication that when they
were applying for NSF proposals and what it looked like
pragmatically to me was creating a bunch of materials, reaching
out individually to a bunch of you know, like all of my
outbound was targeted at offices of research at universities.
I went to a conference. Like, you know, you're, you're
spending money like you're doing a ton of things and and like
you're saying like there's a huge opportunity cost with that,
which is there was pull somewhere else.
I just wasn't focused there. And yeah, it's for me that was
it was probably like a solid 9 or 10 month.
Like set back that as soon as I reading this, like I wish I
would have read this blog before then.
I would have seen some of the exact quotes that you that you
talk about that they were saying to me that I was interpreting
that they honestly, I think they were just being nice.
We're like trying to not be mean, which is weirdly the
meanest thing that they they possibly could have done to me.
But where what are some other that maybe like, can you bring
this to life like that I was selling into, you know, large
organizations. You write about two things or
startups that are selling and refunders or or whoever selling
into startups and selling into institutions and how those are
different. Why don't we break apart?
What does pull look like? Yeah, and both of those cases,
it may be an example of each. Yeah, so, so, OK, so pulling is
like, so if you think of pull has many different flavors,
lowercase pull is basically people trying to RIP a product
out of your hands. It's like that.
It's like market pull, product pull, what whatever it is, it's
just this kind of objective phenomenon out there where the
reason start-ups take off is because they find that that pull
lowercase pull capital pull is the framework PULL project on To
Do List unavoidable list of options limitations.
The the pull framework describes what is present in a buyer's
life before you show up such that when you show up with
something that fits their pull that unblocks them so they can
get their project done, they will pull it out of your hands.
So pulling the verb is is what we described as trying to buy it
is them initiating a purchase shaped activity.
Now this is going to be everyone's like but Enterprise
Oregon whatever it is or but the product isn't ready yet.
It's like OK, I'm getting there. Calm, calm down South in if
you're selling to a start up or a small business, so I sold my
first company was selling into restaurants.
They would basically say shut up.
How do I buy that is a that is basically I am trying to buy the
opposite of that is me saying. So in terms of next steps, would
you like to see a demo, Right. That's me proposing next steps
and I'm saying yeah, I guess I'll say yes.
And my yes is either that I'm interested, but it also could
just be I'm being polite, right. So what we're looking for is
them initiating some sort of purchase shaped action.
Them trying to no, OK, cool, but enterprise but deep tech, but
whatever. OK, fine.
So that's not always going. They're not always going to pull
up their credit card and say, how do I pay right now?
Because that's a the nature of a small business.
For example, in bigger businesses, it doesn't.
So they still have to initiate some sort of an action that is
purchase shaped. What it doesn't look like again
is you saying, well, would how would you like a deep dive demo?
They're like, well, I've got nothing else going on in my
boring corporate life. So why not?
Right? Like that's so again, down that
path, there could be pull they could wind up buying, but that's
not what pull looks like. Pull looks like them initiating
the next set of steps that lead to purchase.
So it would be basically, instead of you saying, well, you
know, I could, I could, I could run this on your date.
I could show you, we could do a free POC like you proposing all
of these things, them saying, OK, yeah, this seems exactly
like what we are. What what I'm looking for, what
I haven't been able to do internally.
Here's what needs to happen on my side.
I have a couple questions that I'd like to answer.
And then we're going to have to go through da, da, da, da to
bring this into the organization.
It does that and and like them, them proposing those set of next
steps. That's what you are looking for
here. And yeah, it's not them pulling
out their credit. They can't necessarily pull out
their credit card, although sometimes they will.
Friend in pharma had a case where basically every single one
of his 1st 10 customers didn't buy in the first call, but they
basically bought in the second or third call and circumvented
procurement to buy and then went for went to apologize later and
went to fix it later because they had such pull.
It was that person in the organization has to do something
stuck and so they are going to pull it out of your hands.
So does that clarify the kind of trying to buy them trying to
buy? Yeah.
And if you're selling it as if there is, the way I was
interpreting it while I was thinking and reading it, what
you wrote was if there's no reason for them to have to go
through procurement, they should be actually purchasing or I
don't know, but maybe it's a small business.
I mean, do you find, Rob that it sounds like the ideal when
you're selling into smaller organizations is like it's
purchase, it's designed to be purchasable in the first after
the first conversation more or less.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the first, so a classic
example, there's, there's a couple of start-ups that I've
seen that are selling into smaller businesses.
They buy in the first conversation and and it's
usually 5-10 minutes into the first conversation, maybe 15 and
then the rest of the first conversation is basically
getting them set up. So it's a mix of sales and
onboarding is what I've seen in some of the fastest growing
start-ups that are selling into that stage.
And then eventually the start-ups also have a self-serve
option that people can do themselves.
That's interesting. And that, so that's the step.
Like PLG is the and, and so, and then with larger organizations,
what does, what are some examples of a when you see them,
you immediately recognize that, oh, that is a what?
What are your words on this? Like a purchase shaped action?
Like what are what are there two or three things that if a
founder hears it or sees it, they're like, oh, OK, this is,
this is legit. Like they're, you know, it's
not. So the most important thing is
the potential customer initiating an action and that
action, there's a variety of different actions that might be
right. Things like, OK, cool, here's
what I need to understand. Can we schedule another
conversation, right? Like here's here are the things
that are my, this seems like a fit.
Here's the things I need to know and I need to assess in the
future. Those are kind of like purchase
shape access. Those are them leaning in.
There is some nuance here because what, what I have often
seen is them saying, Oh yeah, can I get trial access, which
may or may not be a purchase shaped action.
That might just be a way for them to say, yeah, cool.
Like. And So what we're looking for
it, when you get something like that, you want to kind of double
click into it to, to what we we'll talk about later is if you
hear something that may or may not be a purchase shaped action,
you want to kind of play dumb and, and understand what's like,
is this because you want to buy like I, I help me understand
here, but it is, it is think of it as them leaning in, pulling
your product into their worlds and almost like defining what
needs to happen so they can purchase it.
Let's hit a couple of these things that founders might hear
that they might mistake for pull.
I'll read through these, Rob. And then why don't you choose a
couple of them that are most relevant or most confusing?
One is wow, this is exactly what the industry needs.
Another one is this would solve our biggest pain point or this
would make my life so much better.
And then two more real quick, This would save us $10 million
per year. Or if we move forward, oh, this
one's interesting. If we move forward, what would
the process be? Are there a couple of those,
Rob, that you see founders like stumbling over more frequently
that are worth like dissecting? So the pain .1 is the common
one, the one that I always like RIP on and, and, and so
hopefully people are used to me talking about how pain point,
like pain points are not predictive of purchases and
talking about pain points is not predictive of anything.
And so cool really that that's a common one.
What, what you want to look through as you read these and as
you think about the conversations that you had with
potential customers is can they say this and not buy?
Yeah, wow. This would solve our biggest
pain point. Oh my gosh, this would solve our
biggest pain point. Even said with a ton of
enthusiasm, Oh my God, this is amazing.
This would solve exactly what we're, we've bet, you know, our,
our the number one problem we've been facing.
It's like, OK, cool. You can also not buy it in that
case. And, and so the other one that's
like super common. And then we can get to the to
the last one is the the clear ROI whole account.
This would save us $1,000,000 per year, $10 million a year 50.
This would earn us an extra $2,000,000 a year, right?
These things all sound like they are things that are said before
purchasing, but they are not. They are mirages because in the
words of a book of heart of innovation, a really good book
on that talks about this specific thing is they have a
bunch of other ways that they could save $10 million or make
$100 million that they're not doing right now.
And so just an objective kind of like unbelievable offer
unbelievable ROI that they exclaim, wow, this might
increase our sales by 5%. Cool that you probably have a
bunch of other ways to increase your sales by 5%.
Is this actually something you need to do or not right.
Like that's that's where we're trying to get to so you can get
it. When you hear these kinds of
words, you don't even have to have happy ears to be like, oh,
that sounds like a thing that someone would say before buying.
Yeah, and sometimes does say before buying.
Right. They sometimes do say that and
we will misinterpret these words as the reason they are buying.
They're not, they're like, not, they're not necessarily the
reason they are buying. Yeah, let's, I'm going to, I'm
going to resist the urge to dig into that one specifically.
Why don't we hit this last one? If we move forward, what would
the process be? And then we'll talk about if you
hear one of these things, what do you do with it?
But if we move forward, what would the process be?
Why isn't that like that? That feels like it's initiating
an action, like what's going on there?
That so that is close, but because think of how much waste
think of the 9 or 10 months you spent down a path where there
wasn't pull, but there was enthusiasm.
We want to be as skeptical as humanly possible when hearing
these quotes so that we don't waste our lives.
And so when you hear if we moved forward, what would the process
be? That's essentially saying, OK,
let's, I'm not going to give you any information about this, but
let's construct A hypothetical scenario in which we move
forward a hypothetical world. Tell me more about the process
in that case, right, Which could be, it could be OK, we want to
move forward. What is the process or
contingent upon the process on what the process is, we would
like to move forward. It could be those things, or it
could also be a. I'm just curious if we move
forward, what does the process look like even though we're
probably not going to move forward?
And so you don't want to get into the go down the path of
misinterpreting something like this that seems so close to
pull, but is it? We have to be skeptical by
default. Yeah, I'm thinking of a couple
examples with ours and what they were saying there was, this is
not urgent for me right now. I could imagine it becoming
urgent at some point. And then that also.
Yeah, I those are probably kind of the customers that show up
randomly in your inbox six months later on when it actually
does it. But until they experience that
moment of urgency when it's you talk about it as being
unavoidable or it's the right now element of it that nothing
is going to happen and it doesn't matter.
And so it's that like that one, I think it's confusing that, you
know, one other thought reflecting on some of these are
a lot of my I've spent an embarrassing amount of time
frustrated at customers. Like why do they not, they're
saying these things like why aren't they doing the right
thing for their business or something along, you know, with
that shape And it feels like a lot of it is grounded in this.
I yeah, 100% agree. I think there's there's two
pieces of this. One piece is that we think that
the problem here when when we hear these things and then they
don't buy is solved by something in the words that we say are the
things that we do or the way that we describe our product.
This is why I like basically every startup that comes to me.
They think they have a positioning problem as if in
these calls there was another set of words you could say that
would cause them to have bought. No, there isn't.
You just have to find the people.
So, so you just can't misinterpret what people are
actually saying. The second piece though, is that
we design our sales calls to get these kinds of exclamations that
sound like pull and aren't. And then we design our the way
that we interpret the sales calls to basically gaslight
ourselves. That is so deep, Rob.
And at least in my case, it's 100% true.
Is there, is there a, why do we, can I just let's not extend this
too far. Let's wrap up here in a little
bit, but why do we do that? Is it like a validation?
Like what? What's going on?
Why do we do that? So, so earlier in the post, and
this is what deserves its own like entire post, but I just had
one throwaway line that I couldn't figure out where to put
where it's like a sales call is just a see if they try to buy
call like that's what it is. And we it's it comes back to
this psychology thing of like, I want to sell to you.
I want you to want this. We need to design our sales
calls assuming the absence of pull with this person so that
they convince us that they have pull when they have it.
And we don't get, we don't try to convince them that they
should have pull. And so you could think of how
that infects basically the entire call, which is like, oh,
the questions that I asked in Discovery are super leading
questions that they will answer that will give me The Mirage of
pull versus I want to ask them questions and design the
discovery process so that I don't waste my time trying to
sell to somebody who doesn't need my help.
Yeah, golly, that's got to be like permeate through sales
scripts, like basically through everything, through the logic
that's built into it. I'm looking forward to that one.
I you, you made a comment about that, I think two or three
podcasts ago as we were trying to figure out some of the
language on it. I've been thinking about it
since then. Anyways, let's talk here before
we wrap you right about playing dumb.
And like when you hear one of these other things, which might
proceed a call, but also might not like it's it's basically
like a, a kind of a non information statement.
You recommend that founders play dumb.
Can you talk to us a little bit about like what does that look
like for you? Or when a founder plays dumb,
like what? What are they trying to do?
Yeah, so I'm a natural, clearly no play for people.
That need to play then, yeah. For those of you who are smart
enough who who, who need to play done, what I find is that we
will connect multiple logical dots in our heads in these calls
by default. And so we'll hear, oh, this
would save us $10 million per year.
Like, cool, you're buying it now.
So like, let's move on. What I haven't heard or seen is
a pull shaped action here. And so I'm confused.
Like I should just be actually confused.
And what I hear from a lot of founders is they are genuinely
confused on sales calls and they don't behave confused.
They behave as if they know what they're what's going on.
And we just lose a lot of information because we do that.
And so the playing dumb is just, huh, you OK, So what you're
saying is save you $10 million. But what I'm not hearing is
therefore we need to buy this right now.
Can you maybe help me understand what's going on in your, your
mind here, how you're thinking about this?
And it's just like, that's a thing that makes me feel dumb
saying. And also it's the way to figure
out what poll really is. That's that's fascinating.
Yeah. And another one I'll do is like,
and this is more of a restriction on me is like lean
back, like intentional. I almost have to like handcuff
myself from doing the active proposing.
Like, oh, I heard something. I know what the process I wish
that they would pull me toward. And I have to like almost
physically restrained myself basically from doing it.
And I'll either just like let there be some silence to see if
they feel it because they're trying to do something or
sometimes I don't know, is this the wrong thing to do?
Rob? I'll be like, all right, well,
do you want to do anything with this?
Like something that's that's, you know, that doesn't propose
steps that createspace if they want to propose them.
But that might even be the wrong thing to do right there.
Yeah. So I actually like coming out at
from the direction of OK, we haven't figured out how to
describe this yet, but it's almost leading questions away
from purchasing. And so I had one a couple days
ago where person came to me and they described 2 things they're
trying to do with our business with their business.
I described our product and and they're like, oh, that's really
interesting. I was like, yeah, but you
described 2 things that you're trying to do with our, your
business, none of which we help with.
Like I don't, it doesn't sound like this is actually relevant
to you. And then he said, no, no, no,
no, OK. And and so he fought against
that to say actually, no, here's where it's relevant.
Here's why it's actually more important.
It's like the Super set of those two things.
Here's da da, da, da da, right. And so that was a really that
that was kind of like a case study of this of me basically,
either you can either play dumb and just say it doesn't, these
things aren't adding up in my brain, you tell me, or you can
go negative or, or leading questions away.
Again, I'm not like, it doesn't seem like what we do is relevant
to you. I might have missed something,
but like, it's totally OK. If not, you just tell me.
Yeah, yeah, fascinating. And when there's not pool and
you've given me that feedback on a couple occasions and I've done
that sometimes they actually, they appreciate the off ramp.
They're like, like they don't actually want to buy from you.
When you tell them that they're they're, it's already what's
going on in their minds. Like in my case, it's all right.
So why would you purchase from us and not do like a meta
campaign And they'll be like, yeah, like we're that's probably
the best option play that they'll basically like they'll
take it when you give it to them, but they won't.
They wouldn't have surfaced it earlier probably because I don't
really think I'm not aware of it.
Or it's it's that I I'm not actually sure why they don't
surface those things. But all it prevents like all the
frustrating follow up and like broken dreams.
And what this just what this, what I'll say is what this helps
you do is get to ground truth of who actually has pull and what
you are selling. Because our goal is to minimize
or the, the way we describe a product, what it needs to do,
who we target so that we can only sell to people who have
pull, who RIP the thing out of our hands.
That's the way we grow super fast.
If you're always following up with people who aren't going to
buy and we're not sure why, and you're just describing the
product bigger and bigger and bigger, it's just like, that's
not how startups grow fast. It's just not how it works.
And so this is entirely counter to what causes a startup to take
off. Yeah.
One thing you've written in the past that I think about
frequently is it's in many ways easier to build a fast growing
startup than a lifestyle business or like a slower
growing startup for that reason. And so like all of the searches
for how do we, how do we find something that basically grows
itself? Rob, why don't we wrap here
pretty soon? Any final takeaways or
recommendations for founders that accidentally listened this
far? If you haven't bought the book
yet and you're listening this far, what the heck are you
doing? And if you haven't, if you
haven't told other founders to buy the book yet and you're
listening this far, how dare you?
No no, the book comes out in like 2 weeks so that's exciting
and terrifying. Yeah, awesome.
Well, we will leave the link for that and the show notes and
again, reminder you'll get access to a series of, I don't
know, is there like 4 events that we're going to do live with
you for anybody that signs up and then or who purchased the
book and then sends a screen grab And then also access to the
quad skill, which again is like, I can't recommend that enough.
All right. Well, if there's nothing else,
Rob, why don't we wrap here and we'll see everybody next week.
Sounds good.