Hey, Rob, welcome back. Good to see you man.
You too. How's it going?
It's going great. You've got Jonas Vanguard in
making his first appearance in your newsletter, the two time
Tour de France champion. So I was.
I was. Currently crushing the currently
crushing the Jiro. We had a great day yesterday.
Amazing. Amazing.
Well, I'm excited to talk. Today we're talking about arrow
mode, the two things that matter.
This one was like a gut punch to me at the moment, given where
given where it can bring my this, this is.
But before we jumped into the content, Rob, we hinted at this
on the last one or your books coming out soon.
Let's just quick PSA. What should folks do?
Yeah, so quick PSA, my book is called The Power of Pull.
It is the one by Rob Snyder, not the other Power of Pull by
somebody else. It has a red cover that that
should help. You can you can pre-order it on
Amazon, Barnes and Noble, kind of anywhere online.
You should be able to pre-order it.
And we are launching a thing where if you go to
robsteider.org/book and submit a picture of your pre-order,
you're going to get some cool stuff.
So we're going to do some private AM as with me where come
ask questions, hang out. And also we're going to be
giving away my clod codes skill or my clod skill that analyzes
sales calls that a lot of founders are using.
At some point I'm going to release it publicly.
But if you want early access to it, just go to
robsnyder.org/book, submit your kind of pre-order receipt there
and you'll get access to IT. People really find it useful.
You really find it useful and and I I find it useful too.
Yeah, I've used it on several of my calls and basically you just,
you know, you import the skill to Claude and then you upload
the transcript of a a sales call and it tells you was there pull.
It gives you helpful coaching. It breaks down like what was
what was the pull that it identifies using your frameworks
and probably a lot of folks listening like they can also try
to sort of back end create it just like upload all of your
content. But you've specifically refined
this one with, I don't know, a couple 100 sales calls probably
at this point. So that it's a much closer
approximation to like the way that you actually think in the I
found it that it's not 100%. It's like I'll have
conversations with you about the sales calls that I have and
usually, you know, there's often like a little tweak, but it's
very close and honestly, like it gets me really far without
having to just constantly badge for you width.
Would you watch this 35 or 30 minute or whatever it is sales
call, but anything else you want to add about about the book or
the code or the the skill or anything?
Just the only other thing on the on the skill is like pull is
pretty much a deterministic framework.
It's like it's getting there towards being deterministic.
And so if you just like use, you could, you could try to build
this yourself and use it and you will get things that are
plausible. The goal, though, is to get
things that are true and right. And so that's why I've been
working on the scale and why I keep refining it because like
more, more information is not making it better.
It's absolutely how do I compress the degrading rubric?
How do I, how do I compress and, and get it to actually
understand pull as I understand it?
And so it's been a fun challenge.
There's probably more skills and things to be built.
I have people asking me to just like, hey, can you plug into all
of my calls and maybe also my CRM and like also all this other
stuff. And so anyway, get, get the
skill. Let me know what you think,
reach out. And if you need more things in
that realm, let me know as well. Because I, you know, I would be
down to invest time in building something a little bigger there.
Yeah, and it's anybody that's tried to have a conversation
with TBT or cloud or whatever about about sales it without
Rob's framework. I find it like sort of counter
helpful. Like it's, it's just like it
leads you in the wrong direction.
It you know, it's I don't know how it it works on the back end.
I'm sure a bunch of your your audience does, but it's just, it
doesn't it's not it's not useful.
And so this is the, the first thing that I found that's like,
I actually want to, I finish a call and I'm like, I need to
upload. I need another opinion on this.
And, and it's helpful. And this is a way to get it, you
know, three months early like get the goat like basically
imported the PMF goat imported to your imported.
That's super interesting. That's my experience too, which
is that I, it's like just vanilla feedback sounds right.
And that makes it so dangerous. It's like so dangerous and so
counterproductive. Like, like I just have a bunch
of people who will reach out to me and say, hey, Claude gave me
this outbound message or whatever.
And it's the worst thing you've ever seen.
But it seems like it would be an outbound message that could
plausibly work. And it connects in an
interesting way. And it's like, yeah, this is
going to get 0% response rate. Or if you implement the, you
know, whatever call feedback you get from just a generic LLM or
from evil feel like a really good model, it's going to be
counterproductive. And so, yeah, we'll see.
Give it a try. Awesome, awesome.
All right, let's jump into into this one.
We're back into something very practical.
So again, this this 01 last thing we'll put the links to
Rob's book and to the whatever in the in the show notes for
anybody that wants to find them. Easy.
All right, arrow mode, the two things that matter, right?
This in this one we're talking about, you know what's going on
at the start of the business. How do you choose the ICP?
Rob, before we get into the details, like why is this on
your mind and who's this one for?
Yeah. So it's, it's just I've been
talking to quite a few founders who are in the stage where they
are growing but wanna be growing insanely fast.
And so the, the, they all kind of generally have the, the
realization that in order to grow super fast, we need to
actually narrow down further and do fewer things.
So that the things that we actually do, the people we
actually serve, like we can repeat that faster and faster
and faster and, and not have to worry about slow sales cycles,
not have to worry about churn. And so in my mind, there was
this, there's, I was actually writing this out and I was
talking to a start up that's, that's featured in here.
I kind of rewrote this as I was talking to and I showed them
like the party bike mode. It's like it feels like you're
in the party bike mode right now where you have all these
different features and seats and different kinds of people you
could sell to. There's a lot of moving parts
here and we want to get down to arrow mode where you are just
like on the on the drops and like minimizing wind resistance
and maximizing power output so that you could do like basically
riding a time trial bike. Yeah, yeah.
And for anybody that's not deep in the Cycling World, the the
party 1 is like if you've ever gone out on like a 12 seater
beer bike kind of experience, you're you're all pedaling in
the wrong direction. You're sort of probably moving
with a an A motor anyways. And then on the drops just means
like there's as little friction as possible hitting your body.
It's like that everything is designed for that.
And Rob, maybe before we get into like, what is it like to to
be in arrow mode to be like, you know, down low wind resistance,
just like flying? What are some of the resistances
like that what that you're running into when you're, you
know, before you get into that state?
Yeah. So the the resistances are
alike. If you have multiple different
Icps, multiple different personas, or multiple like
multiple different things, then you basically have to absorb
that variation yourself. And so let's say you sell to VPS
of sales and also VPS of customer success for as as like
one just super simple example, your entire pitch has to be
different, which means you have to switch between pitches when
you're selling to people and there might be a new person that
needs to be included in this case or right.
Like it's the same thing if you're selling to smaller
companies and bigger companies at the same time, there's like a
different process, a different pitch, a different, like
everything is different. And so you wind up having like
multiple different funnels, multiple different messaging,
multiple different website pages.
And it's just a, it's a function of adding complexity, even even
multiple different go to market approaches.
OK. We do outbound and we do SEO and
we do events and we do like, if you're an early stage startup,
it's hard to be good at anything.
And so it's basically impossible to make 5 things work.
And so the, the like basically everything that we do, every
extra thing we do is just hard to do.
It adds wind resistance because it's another thing we need to
think about. It's something we have to switch
between. It's something you have to get
good at. And then the final thing that
adds wind resistance is customers not pulling.
Your customers not pulling before and after they buy.
And think of it like, you know, if you're on a bike and you're
being pushed right, you're going to go faster.
But if you're on a bike and you're dragging somebody behind
you in a wheelbarrow or just on the ground, right, like you're
going to go a lot slower because there's a lot more drag.
And so when you find customers who have pull, they will help
you move more effectively, more efficiently with less with less
draft. When you find people that you
have to convince each step on along the way, you have to drag
each customer along with you before and after they buy, get
them to then try to get them to value it, try to get them to
understand it, educate them, like all that kind of stuff,
which just prevents you from getting the kind of rapid growth
that that you're after. Yeah, thinking about my early
calls, the the first half of the call wants education.
And that's just, it just doesn't want.
It's annoying for everybody, literally everybody.
It's insulting to them and it just doesn't work.
And there's a bunch of reasons for that.
Yeah. Do you your like the medicine
that you prescribed for this is 2 parts 1 is who has pull who
would be specifically weird not to buy?
And the second one is what's 1 pipeline approach that works?
And how do you get some subset of the people with pull to be
weird not to meet with you? So we'll hit we'll hit both of
those and we'll talk about a case study here.
We've you've written about these in the past.
Some some of the listener might be already familiar with these
both the toll booth and the weird not to buy the Rob.
Why don't Why are these two things the most important and
can you may it? Let's just start with weird not
to buy after that. Like what does that mean?
Because it's subtle, but it's super important the difference.
Yeah. So, so the, the, the recent
realization that led to this post was actually on the
pipeline approach, which is basically once you figure out
the pool of people who would be weird not to buy, there are a
variety of approaches you can get to get them to maybe talk
with you. And so the we have to layer on
we're not to buy and we're not to meet with you.
And when you can do those two things, that is the like most
efficient method that I have seen that causes startups to
grow super fast. And so it's the combination of
these two things. That.
Actually matters. And it's like, OK, once we know
who is weird not to buy, then let's think about the pipeline
approaches that would make that specific person and that
specific situation weird not to meet with us.
Yeah, let's talk about it. Let's bring it to life with this
AI SEO example. So let I'll I'll read a little
bit of the context that you have and then and then let's get into
it. Let's really use this to tear
apart weird not to buy versus could buy what you write.
You met with this. It's a a friend of yours.
He started starting an AISEO company.
He started by selling to customers of all shapes and
sizes, tech startups, mortgage brokers, manufacturers,
healthcare services companies. Some of their customers are
startups that still think self mode is the thing.
Others are decades old multinationals that sounds
probably sounds very familiar to a bunch of like early stage
because you don't you don't know yet.
Like who's weird not to buy? And then what you what you do
after that is you list off and then I'll shut up, Rob, because
everybody wants to listen to you, not to me.
You you list this off. This leads us to a simple killer
question. Who would be weird not to buy
and renew? And then you list four options.
Somebody who wants to grow, somebody who gets that AI search
is the future. Somebody with a marketing team,
a new startup that's AI native Rob.
Any other anything else you want to layer on his contacts or
these like people that could buy that examples that you give?
Yeah. So this is this is like the
hardest thing for a start up to accept which like in this
situation we were looking at their customer list and and when
you look at their customer list and then you look at like
they're they're kind of like sales pipeline.
And you see, OK, why didn't these people buy?
Why did these people buy? What's common across these
different people? There are so many different ways
to cut that, to try to figure out what to do and like, how do
we grow super fast based on that?
And so you can ask the we kind of went in circles until we got
to the like, OK, wait a second. Who actually would be weird not
to buy and and we're new and, and be successful after they've
bought. And so when you ask that
question, you can think about the like all the different
permutations of people who could buy.
And AISEO is like the perfect example of this because it's
hyped up, it's like hot, it's the new thing.
A lot of people find it interesting.
A lot of people think it's the future, right.
And so in that's in that situation, there are many people
who could buy, many people who should buy even anybody who
wants to grow their company, right, in theory should buy a
ISEO tools or as whatever, right?
Like those, those things are just like, it's just, yeah,
don't you want to grow your company?
Obviously you should want this, but that's not like that's not
the right lens because so this is actually the my favorite
thing that I have written recently.
Not everybody who should want it buys.
Not everybody who buys is sold. Not everybody who benefits
renews. Plus many customers who do buy
could have not bought and many customers who do renew could
have not renewed that like once you.
Understand the transcript for for that one and just visit
that, visit the blog and and read that just like stare at
that for three minutes. So once you get to that, you're
looking for the person who basically can't not buy and they
can't not renew. They they must buy, they must
renew and it would be it, it just, And so for people who, you
know, just want to grow, it's OK if they don't buy because they
can grow by other means. They could invest more in
traditional SEO or they they they've never done SEO in the
past or or like. You know.
So there's a variety of different things there.
There's what you've written in the in the past on that, is
there? There's 200 things that they'll
consider that they won't buy and they'll buy one thing.
And so they're, it's not weird that they don't.
Buy you or 0 things being made by zero things and just keep
doing what they're currently doing.
Yeah. And so like you could, so you
can imagine and in here there are people right there have, so
who would be weird not to buy. There's basically only one kind
of person who would be weird not to buy while everyone else could
buy. The person who'd be weird not to
buy is the person who has historically relied on SEO.
So SEO has worked and they all reliant on it and their results,
their results from SEO are going down and that person is in a
situation where they would be, we're not to want to replace the
traffic that they are losing on SEO.
Yeah. And that person has had SEO
historically work. So they know what works, what
people are actually searching for.
And so if you have those characteristics not be present,
you see, like you wind up with somebody who could buy, could be
successful. And they had examples of
customers who did buy and were successful, but they could have
not been successful and they could have not bought.
And so when they tried to sell to more people, like the ones
who were successful but might not have been successful, who
did buy but might not have bought, most of the time they
didn't buy. And, and it was just like
scratching their heads based on that.
And then once they switch to like, no, OK, these are actually
the characteristics of somebody who is weird not to buy, then
it's basically like, OK, almost everybody buys.
Like it's weird if somebody doesn't buy now and it's weird
if they don't buy fast because we know the the characteristics,
the situation that makes somebody weird not to buy what,
what are what are the forces that are present there that are
not present elsewhere, even though they could buy and could
be successful? Yeah, I think that's my deepest
founder NB is hearing about, you know, some of the the teams that
you've worked with that are like, we know within three
questions at 90% certainty if somebody's going to buy because
it it fits into that category of of weird not to buy.
Like it's just like it's that clear what's going on with them.
And so Rob, we we break this into two parts.
The first one, and I think you have to approach them
sequentially like that. The first one is know who would
be weird not to buy? And it's almost like suspend the
second question until that is hyper clear and tell us about
the the OR let's jump into the second question of how do you
make it weird for them not to meet with you?
Yeah, yeah. So you you can.
So if you think about all the people who could buy a ISEO and
you know, should buy would benefit from it and then it and
you start with that as your starting point and then say,
well, how do we get people to meet with us?
How do we generate pipeline? You're going to come with a lot
of ideas and most of them are going to kind of work and mostly
going to be a waste of money because they're the ideas that
everybody else is thinking of. And again, you're going to get a
bunch of people who meet with you who could buy, which is
great, but they also might not buy and probably won't because
of that. And so once you know, OK, I know
that when somebody's numbers are going down in SEO that they have
historically relied on SEO, that that person would be weird not
to buy from me, Then the question is, OK, how do we get
that person in that moment to be weird not to meet with us?
So how do we own that moment in some way, shape or form?
And so ideally, and that AISEO case would basically be like
you're looking in Google Search Console and seeing the numbers
go down and as. When it notices that you're just
staring at the screen in desperation, there's an ad that
pops up that says, hey, have you ever considered AI SEO?
Because it can replace some of this, right?
That's like the ideal or something near the ideal.
Like if you had that, they would click it or like if they had
that you presented it reputably it would be and they didn't
think they were going to download a virus, they would
click it. Yeah, basically that.
If you owned that, they'd be weird not to meet with you.
You probably can't do that, but that's the way to start
thinking. And you work backwards from
there to like less ideal, less ideal ways.
And eventually you might wind up with a yeah, the best we can do
is kind of cold call a targeted list and we can do a bunch of
volume of that. And OK, that's fine.
But you want to start from the like, what's the method that we
can do that would be weird not to work because it'd be weird
not for them to meet with us, right?
Like that's, that's kind of, that's the approach to pipeline
here that you can do once you understand who is weird not to
buy from you, it gives you weird things that you can do from
there. And that's what I called a
tollbooth historically. But the way I envision it and
this actual and the, the graphic that I include in here for how I
thought about this in my own business, my own world was
basically you take the category of people who'd be weird not to
buy, just take that as a circle. And then you kind of like layer
on you, you think of it as, OK, I can't get all of them, but I
could get a sunset of them by doing certain things.
And so I just kind of like, and, and, you know, and then by doing
those things, I'd also get some people who aren't a fit.
And, and so I just thought of it as like, you know, there's this,
this base of people who'd be weird not to buy in there.
There are tactics that you can layer on top of it that have
different levels of fit and, and like will work in different, you
know, they'll work better or worse.
And, and like, that's the, that's the hard thing.
That's the creative thing that you have to to do here to figure
this, to figure this part out. Yeah, and let let's get into
some of the practical stuff before we we wrap.
One is, let's say hypothetically, you're talking
with the founder who, who still struggles with the, I've got,
you know, 345 Icps that are potential.
There's there's some sales there, there's some tractor,
there's some evidence, but hasn't nailed the, you know, 1
limited. This is the the buyer who would
be weird not to buy for you. How did they like, how do you
work with it? What do you tell that founder to
do? Yeah.
So what we do in that situation is we will list out the three
different ones, the five different ones and just try to
destroy, like literally just try to kill them by saying by, by
testing them specifically on the, the couldn't this person
not buy? Is it OK if this person doesn't
buy? And, and like how many of the,
if they, it survives that, then like how many of those people
are there And do we want to serve them, right?
It's, it's questions like that. You just try to kill, you don't
try to make them work. You try to get rid of them and
the ones that survive based on your proof, based on your sales
call recordings, based on how the sales have felt.
Then you kind of like pick one and you go all in on it and you
see you, you try again, you try to kill that one in the next
week. You do, you do it in a very
short period of time. How do I get five of these
people to talk to me like as soon as possible so that they
can tell me and I'm specifically going to go to them and and try
to convince them not to buy essentially and see if they
fight against me? Yeah.
And so like that's the, that's the kind of approach when you
have multiple different Icps that all could work and all kind
of makes sense. Yeah, it's like flipping from
wishful thinking to almost like I actually don't even.
It's like putting everybody through a furnace on the and
like seeing who like all the fats going to burn off like
everything that that was, you know, not going eventually not
going to work. It's a time saving mechanism
that let's talk about the second one.
OK, you found your ICP. You know who's weird not to buy?
How do you develop the like the make it weird for them not to
meet with you? Like what?
Tactically, what do? You do.
Jeez, this, this is the hard, hard one, which I'd say I'm I'm
I've I have many examples and they're all weird.
So like Datadog scaled from zero to 100 sales reps literally only
doing conferences. Zapier owned SEO for connect X
system with Y system. These are all permutations of
the thing. There's the samurai sword
example too. These are all permutations on
the thing and so. In my samurai sword example was
somebody that identified that CE OS that were going through like
public crises needed to receive a samurai sword in the mail that
said I'm on your team or I'm willing to go to battle with
you. And then that made it weird for
them not to call them back. Anyways that it was I think it
was like podcast number one or two or something like that that
we didn't anyways for anybody that's newer.
All right, Robin, so you're saying like every, all of these
examples are bizarre, Like they're, they're weird.
They're they're almost always weird and and they might be less
weird, right? Like you just have like 1, you
nail one partnership, right? It could be the thing, right?
Or, or something like that. In in my case, it turns out, I
think the pull framework is a tollbooth.
Like it's, it is the best piece of it's the best framework out
there, the best, best tool out there for product market fit
sales. It's like it's this kind of
upstream thing that you need that everybody's going to need
to nail. And so that just happened to be
a a tollbooth that randomly emerge, but is, you know, it
couldn't be content. It could be IP, it could be
something like that. It's we have to like sit down
and look at the pull framework and make sure the pull framework
is right in terms of this would be this person is weird not to
buy from us. And then there's the question
of, OK, cool. The situation that is defined by
you here. There's a situation as the you,
how do we own that situation? What are different things we can
do to own that specific situation?
And that's where you start kind of like thinking about different
things. Yeah, love it.
Well, let's not carry this on too long, Rob.
Anything else on your mind for what founders should do with
this? Yeah, the the hard part about
this as you are are are thinking about, yeah, is is you have to
kill good things, things that could work that sound
compelling. Yeah.
And it's you. You kill good things to get to
things that are We're about to work.
Yeah. And and, you know, you lose a
bunch of gadgets, you lose a bunch of a lot of your ego has
to get thrown in the gutter too. Like of here's here's the list
of awesome things that I really want to do that we are not doing
in service of we're not to buy, we're not to meet with us and
making that just repeat and and scale.
Like, yeah, it's it's it is mostly an ego thing of I want to
be, but I envision da da da da. It's like, I don't care who's
weird not to buy. And how do you grow as fast as
possible? By getting those people to be
weird not to meet with you and make that system just work with
the minimum wasted effort with the minimum track?
Yeah. You know, the other thing that
I've been going through recently is like reducing the footprint
of our products because our products were getting like in my
case it's media, in other, in other cases, I'm sure it's, you
know, software code or whatever. But basically we, we eliminated
25% of what we were producing because at the end it was like,
I'm doing this so that my team has something to do.
It wasn't actually like, because that's what was being demanded
and pulled and that was hard. It just, it hurt like, you know,
abandoning things that you're excited about, you invest about
are really difficult. But all right, Rob, anything
else on your mind? Nope, Kind of rock.
All right, awesome. Well everybody the the link to
the to the book is going to be in the in the show notes and
otherwise we will see y'all next week.