Are they pulling?

Hey Rob, how's it going, man?

Good. How are you?

I am doing great. I'm, uh, running on too 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, uh, Colombia 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, uh, one of my friends has created like his Vine coded this, uh, 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, 6 months. Cause 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 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 takeaway 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 maybe it's even more experienced folks. But it's, you know, for when I was reading this, I was like, okay, these are common things that I was hearing that gave me opt optimism that slowly petered out and like died a very slow, long death. Um, but Rob Snyder, before we jump into the actual, excuse me, jump into the actual content, why don't you give us context for why this is on your mind?

So I've basically, I just review a ton of startup 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've found that I am more often right. Um, which is to say, we tend to be overoptimistic 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've found is that there isn't, I, 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 are not gonna get confused by something that looks like it could be pole, but actually isn't?

Yeah. And this actually clarified something that is in your Claude skill for me. Your Claude skill, the very first thing that like, you'll take a transcript, 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, oh, okay, this is what— this is why Rob Snyder starts there instead of like jumping 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 write, 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 are 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 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, um, when you work with founders, um, or maybe let's just sort of 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 gonna hear words and you're gonna 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 autocomplete in our heads to being, okay, 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 gonna be two things that you're going to do that are gonna just, they, they can just wreck your startup. Thing one is you are going to keep following up with these people believing that this is real. Which means that, 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 coming out, this is where demos get 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 what's in our head is, oh, okay. They did have pull. They should have bought it. It would've benefited them. I'm just executing something downstream incorrect. And that's like, you could 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 journey, basically being helping researchers with their science 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 uni— 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, uh, yeah, it's, for me, that was, it was probably like a solid 9 or 10 month, like, setback that as soon as I, you know, 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 or like trying to not be mean, which is weirdly the meanest thing that they possibly could have said to me. But where, what are some other that maybe like, can you bring this to life? Like I was selling into, you know, large organizations. You write about two things., or, uh, startups that are selling or founders or, or whoever selling into startups and selling into institutions and how those are different. Why don't we, uh, break apart what does pull look like?

Yeah.

Um, in both of those cases, it may be an example of each.

Yeah. So, so, okay. So pulling is like, so if you think of pull has many different, uh, 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, whatever it is. It's just this kind of objective phenomenon out there where the reason startups take off is because they find that, that pull, lowercase pull. Capital Pull is the framework. P-U-L-L. 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 gonna be, everyone's like, but enterprise or whatever it is, or, but the product isn't ready yet. It's like, okay, I'm getting there. Calm, calm down. So, and if you're selling to a startup 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 them 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— now, okay, cool. But enterprise, but deep tech, but whatever, right? Okay, 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 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 data. I could show you, we could do a free POC, like you proposing all of these things. It's them saying, okay, 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 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. Brendan Farmer had a case where basically every single one of his first 10 customers didn't buy in the first call, but they'd basically bought in the second or third call. And circumvented procurement to buy, and then it 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's the way I was interpreting it while I was thinking and reading it, um, 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, like 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 fir— so, um, a classic example, there's, there's a couple of startups 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, um, is what I've seen in some of the fastest growing startups that are selling into that stage. And then eventually the startups also have a self-serve option that people can do themselves.

Hmm, that's interesting. And so that's the step to like PLG is the— 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 are your words on this? Like a purchase-shaped action? Like what are— are there 2 or 3 things that if a founder hears it or sees it, They're like, oh, okay, this is, this is legit. Like they're, you know, it's not something else.

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? Um, uh, things like, okay, 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. Um, those are kind of like purchase-shaped actions. Those are them leaning in. There is some nuance here because what I have often seen is them saying, oh yeah, could 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 when you get you want to kind of double-click into it to, to what 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 understand what's like, is this because you want to buy? Like, I, I, help me understand here. Um, but it is, it is like, think of it as them leaning in, pulling your product into their world. And almost like defining what needs to happen so they can purchase it.

Hmm. Let's hit a couple of these things that founders might hear that they might mistake for pull. Uh, I'll read through these, Rob Snyder, and then why don't you choose a couple of 'em that are most relevant or most confusing? Um, 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 moved forward— oh, this one's interesting. If we move forward, what would the process be? Are there a couple of those, Rob Snyder, that you see founders like stumbling over more frequently that are worth like dissecting?

So the pain point one is the common one, the one that I always like rip on and, and, and, uh, 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. Um, and so cool. Like that's a common one. 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?

Mm. 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've been, you know, our, the number one problem we've been facing. It's like, okay, cool. You can also not buy it in that case. And so, um, the other one that's like super common and then we can get to the, to the last one is the, the. Clear ROI. Holy cow. This would save us $1 million per year, $10 million a year, $50 million. This would earn us an extra $2 million 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, Heart of Innovation, a really good book on that talks about this specific thing is, um, 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, um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna resist the urge to dig into that one specifically. Why don't we hit this last one? Um, 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, um, 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.

Mm-hmm.

And so when you hear, if we moved forward, what would the process be? That's essentially saying, okay, let's, I'm not gonna 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, okay, 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 gonna move forward.

Yeah.

And so you don't wanna 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, you know, I, those are probably kind of the customers that show up randomly in your inbox. 6 months later on when it actually does hit. 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 like that one I think is confusing. 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 or the things that we do or the way that we describe our product. This is why, 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, uh, at least in my case, it's 100% true. Is there, is there a, why do we, can I, 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, I, this is like 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.

Mm.

And so you could think of how that infects basically the entire call, which is like, oh, the questions that I ask in discovery are super leading questions.

Yeah.

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 gotta be, um, like permeate through sales scripts, like basically through everything, through the logic that's built into it. Um, I'm looking forward to that one. I, you, you made a comment about that, I think 2 or 3 podcasts ago as we were trying to figure out some of the language on it. And I've been thinking about it since then. Anyways, let's talk, um, here before we wrap. You write about playing dumb. Um, and, uh, like when you hear one of these other things, which might precede a call, but also might not like it. It's, it's basically like 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 are they trying to do?

Yeah, so I'm a natural, clearly, at this. I don't know.

No, play people that need to play.

Then yeah, for those of you who are smart enough, who need to play dumb, Um, 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, okay. 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 it. And also it's the way to figure out what Pol really is.

That's fascinating. 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. Yeah, I know what the process— I wish that they would pull me toward, and I have to like almost physically restrain myself basically from doing it. And I'll either just like let there be some silence to see if they fill 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 creates space if they want to propose them, but that might even be the wrong thing to do right there.

Yeah. So I actually like coming at it from the direction of, and again, 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 of days ago where person came to me and they described two things they're trying to do with our business, with their business. And I described our product and, and they're like, oh, that's really interesting. I was like, yeah, but, um, you described two things that you were 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, no. Okay. 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 superset of those two things. Here's da da da da da, right? And so that was a really, 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 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 okay if not, you just tell me.

Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. And when there's not pull 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 mind. 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. Like 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 know, they think I'm not aware of it or it's, it's, 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 our, the, the way we describe our 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 gonna buy and we're not sure why, and you're just describing the product bigger and bigger and bigger, you're just, it's just like, that's not how startups grow fast. It's just not how it works. And so, uh, 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, um, for that reason. And so like all of the searches for how do we, how do we find something that, um, basically grows itself. Uh, Rob, why don't we, uh, wrap here pretty soon? Uh, any, uh, final takeaways or recommendations for founders that accidentally listened this far?

Um, 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 in 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 purchases the book and then sends a screen grab and then also access to the quad skill. Um, which again is like, I can't recommend that enough. Um, all right. Well, if there's nothing else, Rob Snyder, why don't we, uh, wrap here and we'll see everybody next week.

Sounds good.