Hey, Rob, how's it going, man? Good to see you.
Yeah, you too. One month when this comes out.
Until the book comes out. How's that?
How's it going? I've seen a bunch of activity on
LinkedIn and yeah, yeah, just like people about pre-order.
I guess I don't. I have no idea.
I I have no idea. One of our friends sent us a
picture of him having bought 1000 copies, which I'm pretty
sure was AI generated because it had the, it had the delivery
date in the past. It was like 2025 delivery date.
But when I first saw it, I was like, yes, I'm gonna, you know,
we're gonna make it. But.
Yeah, we're going somewhere. Yeah.
You know, I, I, I was totally fooled by that.
Yeah, I looked at it and I was like, what are you doing?
But he's also a partner at BCG. And so I was like, I don't know,
maybe that's the thing that partners at BCG do.
Yeah, For a second I was like, oh man, I need to send him a a
like a really big thing. We're gonna.
Send him a. Really, $1000 on Yeah on a.
Book yeah, but any you know, just in case anybody didn't
didn't see any of that. If you pre-order the book and
then send us a screen grab of your purchase, you get links to
Rob's Claude skill, which is a super helpful like sales call
review skill and stuff. I'll put a link just so that
people can see it, that anything you want to have, anything you
want to refresh on on that one drive.
If you preorder the book and tell people about the book, it
will make me feel less like I have wasted the last three years
of my life writing it. And so for no other reason,
perhaps like, you know, maybe tell people about it.
If if you care about Rob's mental health and self esteem
and and things like that. Speaking of self esteem, this
one, this was, is personally painful.
Like I felt like an idiot while I was reading this week's blog
and it's it's so good. It's called pilots, POC's and
trials, mistaken causality and never ending pilots.
This is a conversation we had in the in the founder community me
a couple weeks back. There was some back and forth
around like when, when does it make sense to do free pilots?
I am the king of free pilots that do not convert into sails.
And it's so that's been this reading this, it was like, oh
man, everything's so much more clear now.
So anyways, if, if the listener has ever done a free pilot that
didn't convert or is wondering about when do pilots make sense
or this is a super practical one that I'm excited to dive into.
Rob, there's probably other context that you want to hit
before we actually talk about that subject.
Yeah, this is so this is a chance to have two conversations
at the same time. We're going to have it at 2
levels. We're going to have it at the
the let's talk about pilots and then more deeply like let's talk
about causality. And the pilot conversation is
the practical. It's it's it's the brownie that
you that you get. It's the, it's the, you know,
it's the dessert, but the real meal is the causality
conversation, which is what I'm most excited to talk about.
And yeah, and it's just like, this is one of the Super common
things that I got backwards. Like I remember personally going
to like board updates or monthly investor updates and saying I
it's definitely going to convert in, in June and like, definitely
going to convert in July. And like August.
I have no idea why it's not converting.
And, and, you know, investors continue like, is this real?
Like what what's going on here? And so I've been in that place
where you have pilots that are just not converting.
And it's usually because we're thinking about the entire thing
backwards. Yeah.
Let's let's hit two parts of this real quick.
One is you start this off with a question from a startup that you
received just for context to so this is the type of thing that
other founders are, you know, wrestling with.
You're right, we are. This is from the question that
you received. So it's from another founder.
We are getting into pilots and they're going well.
Users are getting value out of the product and usage is going
up, but we're struggling to line a line on success criteria with
our champions and deals are kind of dragging along in the pilot
stage. What do we do?
And we're, I, I can't wait to dig into that because there's
like a, there's a fundamental thing at the base of that that's
like buried in it, but that's like what it feels like to be in
that situation. And then you do this, as you've
alluded to the Super annoying thing, which is not give the
answer directly, but you say we need to understand the
fundamentals of what's going on here.
And you write when you understand this, you realize
that fixing things that prevent purchases does not equal doing
the things that cause purchases. So let's let's start on that and
like tease the difference out between things that prevent
purchases or fixing things that prevent purchases and doing
things that cause purchases from.
Can you just like go off on whatever direction you want to
take that? Yeah.
So, so this is the kind of, so this is true when I talk about
demos, when I talk about group demos, when I talk about steps
in a sales process, which is that we conflate things that
cause a purchase with things that prevent a purchase.
They're just like 2 categories of things.
There's a bright line between them.
There are basically two things that cause a purchase.
Do they have pull, AKA are they trying to do something and
blocked by all their available options?
That's the first thing. Second thing is do we offer
something that they believe fits their pull?
It unblocks them so they can do the thing they're trying to do.
That's what causes purchases. There is nothing else in that
category in. But then there's a lot of things
that can prevent the purchase even if the causes are present.
Now, if the causes are absent, none of the things that prevent
purchases matter because nothing's going to cause them to
purchase. So on the list of things that
prevent purchases, you know, pricing, if you price really,
really like ridiculously high, more than the, you know, more
than the annual budget of Estonia, right?
Like you might, they might not buy.
They they won't buy even if they have pull because they're like,
yeah, we can't afford that. Or if you're sales process
convinces them not to buy or if there's a a variety of different
things, if you just give weird vibes, they might not they they
they could not buy. So there's all these different
things that can prevent somebody from buying.
They can prevent a purchase causes versus preventions the
POC. So given that a proof of concept
or a pilot or a trial is not on the causes, then it's on the
things that can prevent. Because another thing that's on
the prevent list is time, right? Time can prevent a purchase.
And so adding additional steps to a sales, Add all these like
it, it is something that prevents.
And so we can go the next step here, but you had something you
wanted to add. Yeah.
And and just to like emphasize the difference of this.
You brought up one that was interesting, which was like SoC
2 compliance. Like, yeah, that like compliance
is a really good one where nobody buys because you are
compliant, but they won't buy if you're, if you're not compliant
or if you know you don't, you don't meet something that is on
their like IT security or on their legal requirements.
And I, I remember in my outbound, early outbound, I, I
used to sort of SoC 2 is less relevant for us.
There's a regulation called Copa, a Child Online Privacy
Act, which it regulates kids and family media.
And I used to include Copa actually in my outbound because
it was like, that's relevant. Like they probably think about
that. And obviously no, like now in
retrospect, like it's it's literally like leading with
something that would prevent rather than identifying the pole
that would cause them to buy. And then as a one sentence
response to a question, maybe if it comes up, then it's like, Oh
yeah, we know, we know about Copa and we're compliant with
it. And you know, like that's but
that's so far away from it. I don't know Rob, like other
commentary on that or things you would add.
Yeah. So it's like like IT review,
security review, like these things are things that will not
'cause them to buy, right. So I have found a retail and
they're like, hey, yeah, we don't really have a champion,
but somebody passed us to procurement.
I was like, OK, cool, they sent you there to die.
Because procurement is not never going to say yes.
They can't say. They can only say no or not no,
right? They they can't say yes.
And so there's all of these other things that will not
'cause them to buy and in fact will probably prevent you
prevent them from buying. And so there there's those two
lists of things. So if you if the causes aren't
present, they're not going to buy.
If the causes are present then right, like the preventers or
whatever we'll call those the anti causes may prevent them
from buying. Still, if you just focus on the
preventers, the anti causes, you're not going to get
anywhere. It's not it's not it's it's like
going and again, pitching Copa compliance, pitching sock 2
compliance, right? It's easily like, OK, cool, I
don't or another example of this is making your product easier to
use or free to try. This is a common thing.
Does it matter if nobody wants it?
Nobody has pulled and so and so there's all of these things on
on there where they are preventers.
No, we need to approach causes and preventers extremely anti
causes totally differently. The causes are things that we
should focus on and emphasize. The anti causes are I don't know
if that's the right word. Anyway we we haven't figured out
the right word for this but. The the things that leave a
leave a comment with the brand name that Rob should use for
whatever the whatever that second The thing is the thing
that does not cause a purchase, that can prevent a purchase.
Yeah. Yeah, Yeah.
So the things that prevent a purchase, we want to avoid those
when possible. And if we can't avoid them, we
want to minimize them, make them as small as humanly possible.
Security review is the perfect thing.
You don't want to say, hey, by the way, hey, you forgot the
security review. Do you want to, shouldn't we add
14 steps of a security review? If they don't bring up a
security review, you don't want to bring it up necessarily.
You would like to avoid that. Yeah, with the with these anti
causes or TBD on on the brand, it feels like get out of your
own way is kind of like the the rule of thumb.
And the the trap I was I was falling into was you have to
spend time on like talk to compliance, like you have to
spend time on that for Copa compliance, like we had to spend
time on that. And so if I came at it from a
supply perspective, it's like this is something that I have
done and I should, I should talk about the thing that I've done,
but that's not that's like totally the wrong frame for the
conversation, which should be entirely pool focused.
And then addressing any of these to the, I forget exactly your
words there, but it's like what is the least I can do to get
these anti causes like out of the way to not prevent the pool
from like causing the purchase to happen?
It's like treating them like check boxes rather than like
open-ended questions. And we want to, we just want to
minimize their size and impact on the process.
And, and so right like now we can jump to POC.
So when you realize that what a pilot does is prevent a
purchase, right? They, they, you want to avoid
it. What a lot of people do is they
propose a pilot because it seems like the right thing to do,
because it seems like a smaller thing to say yes to.
But this is like actually shooting yourself in the foot.
If the customer does not request a pilot, do not.
Propose one. Yeah, God, I feel like this is
one of those interstellar moments where I'm looking at
myself from like 18 months ago and being like, do not say that,
dear God, please do not say that.
It's going to push this back four months and then it's either
not going to happen or it's going to be frustrating.
Yeah, that's so rule #1 if the potential customer doesn't
propose a pilot, don't propose 1.
You know, for it's also for me it was avoiding the like quote
UN quote scarier thing, which is actually expecting them to pay
like real money for rather than like doing it.
We're actually seeing if they had pole, like actually testing
whether they had pole and whether they thought we fit
versus like just giving them something easy to say yes to or
that they'd feel bad saying no to in hopes that maybe
eventually they'll finally get it and love us and, and you
know. Give our life meeting.
All right, that SO rule #1 just straight up do not go out of
your way to propose a pilot. You're just adding an obstacle
rule #2 if the potential customer asks for a pilot, don't
just say yes. And here's the here, It's a
super interesting way that you break this down.
It's like, all right, what if, what if they bring it up?
How do I navigate that? What's what's the right way to
handle that conversation? And what is going on, Rob?
Like when, when a pilot is asking or excuse me, when a
customer is asking for a pilot, you know what's what's going on
behind that? We don't know.
This is the thing we need to know why they're asking, right?
It could, they could be asking for a pilot because pilots are
just a required chat box. They have to say, yeah, we some
big enterprises do. The way that we buy software,
the way we buy AI tools is we have to demonstrate that we have
used them in a pilot scenario and we've done it.
And that's just part of our procurement process.
OK, cool. Right.
That's going to lead to a pilot that takes a certain shape.
On the other hand, it might be that they're, they're asking for
a pilot because they have no idea what we've been talking
about. And this is a good way to get us
just to like, you know, throw this, kick the ball down the
down the core, right? And, and, and, or they could be
asking for a pilot because they don't believe that what we're
saying is physically possible. And so they haven't made the
decision to buy. Once they see the results, then
they'll consider whether it's worth buying or not, then
they'll start thinking about buying it.
And so there's all of these different scenarios.
So we have to pull that out of them to figure out what's
actually what's the demand behind the request for the
pilot, the request for the supply, Why are they asking for
it and base and, and usually we have to, you know, test whether
it's like, OK, cool. We do a pilot usually after we
felt like you've described your poll and said, yes, we fit poll.
And we've gone through all the other kind of like checklist
items for you to assess fit. And then the pilot is like the
last step before purchase. So what else do you need to know
to assess fit first? So that feels like yeah.
There's kind of a spectrum here. There's the it's almost like the
customer doesn't even want to do the pilot.
They just have to do it like their pull is so strong that
it's like we have to jump over this and then I'm going to buy.
It's like how, how quick, you know, in that case, it's how
quickly can we get through this thing?
And then there's these two others that you've you just
talked through. One is maybe if you can prove it
to me, like like skepticism. There's but it's pull.
There's pull on the other side of that skepticism and that
there's a I'm I'm too nice to say no.
And if you want to do this free thing for me, I'll go see you
later on. But I like I don't want to do
that. I'm not I'm not going to say no
to you right now, which is like the wrong place to invest any of
your time or effort or energy. But before we get into how to
design the pilot, how do you specifically interrogate to
understand there's probably, there's probably a couple other
variations that are in there. Let's talk about how to
interrogate that. Not not like water board, but
how do you have a conversation that teases out what is going on
behind the request for a pilot? Yeah, I, I, you could, you could
literally just say, yeah, cool. What's going on behind the
request for the pilot? Like you can just ask that
question. The the broader question is,
hey, yeah, we, we sometimes do pilots, but that is after you've
confirmed that this fits your needs and like, you want to
bring this into the organization just so long as the pilot
doesn't go poorly. So what else do you need to
understand to make sure this fits your needs?
So you confirm that like, as long as the pilot doesn't go
poorly, like we're good here. That's a very specific wording
that we will get to in a second. There's like specific wording
that as long as it does like it's not what, what do you need
to see as success from the pilot?
It's it's like you're already convinced before the pilot.
So which is going to be like like as an example, if you frame
that with the pause, like what do you need to see from a pilot?
Or here's how we typically approach pilots.
It's like a three month thing or whatever they they might say,
listen, this is just a bot. Like in their mind, it's like,
OK, I'm just going to do whatever you say there.
Like if if this is how you've done it before, but I just need
to check a box. It could be a one week thing
that we call a pilot or a trial or whatever.
And we can just like, like we just get past that.
But they're not saying. So you have to get behind the
you have to get behind to figure out what are they like, Have
they already assessed that visit fits their needs?
And then what function is the pilot performing in their heads?
And it shouldn't be a if the pilot goes well, then we said it
should be as long as the pilot doesn't go poorly.
Yeah. And this is done.
Yeah, let's, let's go back to the original quote.
I want you. I want your reactions to this.
What are they doing? Like where did the thing, the
train go off the rails basically And in the original framing of
this, the pilot what what the founder struggling with.
I'll read it again real quick. We are getting into pilots.
They are going well. Users are getting value out of
the product and usage is going up.
But we're struggling to align on success criteria with our
champions and deals are kind of dragging along in the pilot
stage. What do we do?
What? What's going on there, Rob?
So, So what they are doing is before the pot, they're, they're
just offering up a pilot is what they're doing.
Turns out they didn't need to offer a pilot by default.
People now just buy, OK, that's, that's problem.
But problem 2 was when they were offering up a pilot, they were
asking the customer the potential the champion to come
up with success criteria and the in the champion's mind they were
already sold on it. And so they had to rack their
brains for success criteria. It took them a while to get
there. The startup would propose like a
three month pilot. And somewhere in that realm, the
champion, they still hadn't figured out what success
criteria was. Other priorities were popping up
and the deal was getting kind of like derailed the champion would
stop showing up to the weekly check insurance because they had
other things to do right? Like it's just all of these,
we've just what the, what the founder was doing here is they
were introducing a thing that can only prevent a purchase and
expanding it and treating it more like a audition where this
champion is the judge and should know what they're judging based
off of and need to think about what they're judging.
So you can see how what we're doing is we're just increasing
the surface area for things to go wrong.
Yeah, and it it's coming from them good place.
Like it's like I want to create value for the customer.
Like the way to create value is to define success criteria to
stay close to define, you know, and and it ends up like you
mentioned earlier, just being totally counterproductive.
You, you mentioned something else earlier in the post that I
thought was, was really provocative, which is sometimes
the pilot quote, UN quote works like that.
Sometimes the, the pilot, it might even start as something
else in it and it's something happens and it leads to a
purchase. You know, and in my case, I read
that and my biggest sale came after like a, a pilot.
And So what I did, I was a result of that was assume, OK, a
pilot is like the path to more deals that are similar to this,
which is, you know, but what you just talked through the example
was and they had, they had, they've the fire reason that
they had a three month pilot. It's probably like their
earliest, like needed to see it or something like that.
And it led to sales. And so it became, you know, the
pilot became part of a sales process.
And you were like, yeah, just like, you know, we're going in
and doing surgery and just like taking that part of of the the
process out. But there's like this dangerous
thing that's going on, which is pilots don't always fail.
Like, pilots can also succeed. And that can lead to
misinterpreting like what's what's going on?
Yeah, and it's it's when a person buys after a pilot, you
might think that the pilot caused them to buy when in fact
it might not have. And the they might have bought
despite the pilot, not because of the pilot.
Even if the pilot went well, it could have been a total negative
for them to have done. Right.
Like these are the things where you actually need this
underlying model of causality. Otherwise, what you're going to
do is you're going to just look at the things that happen
without a model in your mind, what causes and what prevents
and say, well, everyone we asked to lick sandpaper wound up
buying. Therefore, right?
Like, and, and this is like super like demos are the perfect
example of this. We think people buy because of
our demos. They often buy despite our
demos. Same with sales process.
A sales process does not convince somebody to buy.
The only function of a sales process is to convince somebody
not to buy. And so we have to design
everything knowing whether it is a cause or a opposite of A
cause, a prevent thing. And when we don't do that, we
wind up with these clunky and usually metastasizing, you know,
oh, you know, our first pilot went super well at three months,
but then our next three did it. Let's try a six month pilot.
Maybe that will convince them, right.
And it it tends to go in the opposite direction when you
don't know what causes versus what prevents.
Yeah, boy, you said like 6 things in there that just made
me cringe thinking about some of the things I've done.
Let's get into what you should frame this as and then we'll and
then we'll wrap. You know, you've you've
established at this point the question is not what do they
need to see in order to decide the pilot is a success, which is
closer to what that founder was framing it as.
This is what you write. We need the pilot to be closer
to what are the conditions under which won't buy as a result of
the pilot. And then assuming this doesn't
happen, is there anything else that needs to happen before you
purchase? What bring us like behind the
curtain? What's going on with those two
questions or like it are just like literally the questions you
would say like ask the person when they you know, when you're
before committing to it. Roughly like we would have a
conversation about, about what the exact question needs to be.
But what we're, what we're basically doing here is we, we
are no longer treating the pilot as a cause of success versus as
a potential cause of failure. And we're what we and the
customer have to treat it that way.
If we frame it to the customer as like what success criteria
would make you want to buy it, that implies that they haven't
yet made that decision leading up to the pilot, which implies,
well then maybe we should hold off on the procurement process.
Maybe we should hold off on all the other people who we need to
get thought in right like that, that has all of those negative.
So we need to make sure that we are both treating the pilot as
something that is a check box that is by default checked
unless like something bad could happen during.
If the users hate it, they don't use it at all.
OK, cool. Those are the negatives that can
take this train off the truck. Yeah, it can derail the train,
but the train is already headed there.
Yeah, it's like you've listened to a call of mine three days
ago, which you did not because the my framing was totally
flipped on that. But so they can it's it's almost
like, it feels to me like the client should sort of need to
kind of drag you into a client into a, into a pilot.
And you should only allow yourself to be dragged into it
if you know that on the other side is that is a purchase.
And also it should be as painless as possible while
you're going through the pilot. Like what?
What's how? OK, let's say that you
understand the pool, you understand what they, what would
cause, what would cause them to not purchase on as a result of
the pilot? How should you design the pilot
or like what principle should go into the way that you give or
what you give or something like that?
Yeah. It's basically like, what would
cause you to not buy and how quickly can we get?
Can we like show that that's not the case?
So you're designing around that thing?
Yes, exactly right. And so if it's like if the users
hate it, well, what if we do a training with the users, give
them two weeks with it where we're going to check in with
them and then get a final thumbs up, thumbs out from them, right.
And we're designing around the thing that can prevent a
purchase, not designing around the thing that would cause
purchase. Yeah, Rob, let's let's wrap this
one up pretty pretty soon. Are there other things we
haven't hit either related to pilots or cut this kind of
causality, anti causality that we haven't hit yet?
Yeah. So I would say this, this
causality, anti causality, whatever is, is the broader
thing that we are, we are exploring here.
And most of what we've been focused on is the causality side
effects pull, fitting pull, not not fitting pull, like, you
know, all those kinds of pieces. This is still like there are
some implications of this that I haven't yet that like I'm I
haven't found a way to articulate.
And so things like when you do discovery, you're looking for
the presence of causes, which means you need to assume the
absence of causes and test for the app like there's like that
kind of thing, which is makes sense in my mind.
But as I just said it, I saw like the white left your eyes.
And so we're we're we're going to keep working on on those, but
there's something fundamental here.
And and this is like AVV one of that.
You, you think that you're going to write a textbook about about
poll and about what you know about cells and startups.
You're actually going to write like a intro to Logic textbook
that's going to help dingoes like me actually understand some
of the things you say. Awesome.
Any actions that you would encourage founders to take after
after having listened to this? By the book.
Awesome by the book. One thing I this has me doing
personally is thinking through OK, what where am I conflating A
cause with something that could prevent or that could fail to
prevent or whatever the right way of saying that what is
actually causing and have I sneakily brought in things that
I am. It's kind of like, you know, a
wolf in sheep's clothing a little bit.
That's like kind of in my sales process that's actually
potentially, you know, sabotaging like my my sales.
And so that can be like a quick diagnosis for folks to do
anything else. Rob, we want to, we want to add.
Oh yeah. That just had a design.
You want to design in the causes and to the extent possible, you
want to design out or, or minimize the the preventions.
And so that's a yeah. All right.
I'm going to think about that for the next 4 days.
Awesome. Hey Rob, what's your what's your
deadlift at? Still four O 5.
I figured out. I figured out what I was doing
wrong. So this week heading 5 at four O
5, moving up to 410 next week, Mark my words.
Awesome. All right, we'll wait for that
for that update. Take it easy, everybody.
We'll see you next week.