Do I have a "PMF problem" or a "Sales Execution problem"?

Well, Rob, welcome back, man. It's been a while. How you doing?

New year, new me.

Just breaking state records for New Hampshire on bench press and shoulder press, I hear.

Yes, that is the goal in the under 10 years old category.

Yeah, exactly. Well, it's good to be back. We've been off for a couple weeks. You put the time to good use writing about the theoretical physics of capitalism in the most recent blog post?

I had like actually, I had so many plans for the time because I kind of blocked off my calendar for the time between like Christmas Eve and New Year's. And I literally just wrote that blog post that 7 people read probably 17 times. It was like, I was like, it's like at dinner, just like, you know, we're at like Christmas dinner and I'm just like, my head's in my hands. Just like, how does this work? The mechanics aren't right here. And my poor wife was just like, this— nobody cares.

Like, what are you, what are you doing? That's not true, Rob. We care. Or 7 of us care.

But yeah, I, I was funny too. Just as another funny thing is I sent that out and I was like, that's the best thing I've written. And my subscriber count just like dropped significantly after I sent it.

Oh gosh.

Break well spent.

Yeah. That's an incredible combination of events. Well, I think today we're getting, we are right back into the bread and butter sweet spot. Very practical. I think this might end up being the most helpful podcast we've recorded or helpful blog post or, or Substack that you've written. I'm gonna, I'm gonna start here with, uh, reading a couple paragraphs that you used to open it just to give context. And then we're gonna, we're gonna start jumping into your question or, uh, uh, discussing, um, when customers aren't ripping your product out of your hands, it's very hard to know why. Is it your messaging, positioning, pricing, product? Are you targeting the wrong ICP? Do you say something at minute 27 in a sales call that caused the perfect fit customer to turn and run away? I, as a side note, anybody that's been on sales calls that ended in ghosting, these are the exact questions that kind of like run through like, oh, if I wouldn't have said this white thing. There are infinite reasons it might not be working and infinite things you could change. This might be the hardest part of early stage before the business's physics are obvious. With so many possibilities, it would be weird if you fix the problem without a sharp diagnosis. So today we are going to discuss the difference between PMF, problems like where you don't have product-market fit and sales problems where you're actually— you have product-market fit, but you're executing it wrong. Rob, could you help us out? Like, why is this on your mind and who's this one for?

Yeah. So what's actually been super interesting is I've been getting pulled into like non-startups, which are like, why are you talking to me? But these are companies with tens, 20+ million ARR. Or not even software companies, and they're like, hey, could you look at our sales calls and tell us what the heck is going on? And so what, what I realized is that they— the questions that they have been asking are the exact same questions that we are asking in the early stage, which is basically like, I don't know if this is a sales tactic thing versus a kind of bigger scarier product-market fit type thing. And we feel like the answer might be in our sales calls. We just don't have the way to understand it. We don't have it. We don't have the, the way to see it. We're not exactly sure what to look for. And so what I realized, what we talked about a couple weeks ago, was how the pull framework is actually a very useful discovery framework, and it basically determines if someone's going to buy or not, assuming that we fit their pull. Well, it turns out you can zoom out and say, okay, basically pull and if it fits pull is kind of like a product market fit type question. And then everything downstream of that is a kind of sales execution type question problem. Right. And so This makes it— it goes from kind of infinite possibilities of things that could be breaking in our sales calls to, no, there's kind of— there's a couple of different categories, but there's really two layers of things.

Yeah. And what do you— let's say that the, you know, early-stage founder comes to you, like, what does it look like when there's uncertainty around why things aren't working?

Oh, it's the worst. It is. It's the worst feeling on earth. I mean, you tell me, how does that— how do you like— how do half of your sales calls feel? But it's— and I feel the same way before having this. Like, I feel the same way because I'm still building my startup. I'm still like figuring out what is going on. How do we just get people to rip the product out of our hands? It takes a while to figure that out. And like, what happens is it— you might have a pleasant call, but it doesn't feel like it's quite there. And it's, it, you know, you, you end the call and you're like, okay, we got a next call on the books, but I'm not exactly sure what they want. Worried they might ghost. I'm worried they might push this off. I'm worried it's not real. And I don't quite know why? Or, right, like, well, they said they'd go back to their team and then circle back with me. I don't— but like, I can't diagnose if that's real, if that's not, or what the heck is going on here, which makes it hard to know, okay, like, are we, are we on the goal line or are we on the, like, our own 1-yard line?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I very much resonate with, with that one. Like, the, the The amount of mixed signals that you get when you're talking to people in, uh, in sales calls can be like kind of overwhelming and difficult to interpret and understand what to do with. Um, let's, let's jump into, uh, this. You, uh, we're gonna start with PMF problems. We'll get into sales problems in a little bit, but PMF problems, um, you talk about force and fit. Uh, maybe a, a quick, um, Uh, just like a quick rundown of what those are. When it's a force problem, the customer, or when you have force, the customer is actively trying to accomplish something, uh, and they need help because their options aren't good enough. And then the fit question is, do we offer something that fits kind of the demand-shaped hole that they're, they're trying to fill? Um, but why don't you give, uh, a little more context on like what you're looking for when you're Actually, maybe Rob, let's take a step back. How do you, you're watching a sales call for the first time. What are you looking for before we jump into the minutia of this?

Yeah. Yeah. So force and fit are just ways to say, is there pull? And is, do what we offer, does, does what we offer fit pull? That's it. And so when I'm watching a sales call, I'm looking I'll look at what the customer says throughout the entire call and literally just try to fill out the pull framework basically as skeptically as possible. So are they articulating what are they trying to accomplish? That's the force that they are applying against the status quo, right? Are they trying to change? Are they trying to make something happen? That's P and U in the pull framework. And then L and L in the foot pull framework are like, have like, what isn't good enough about their existing option set? Doing it themselves, hiring somebody, like whatever the options they're considering, what isn't, why aren't those good enough? And what that gets me is this sense that they have this force that is being blocked. They have this potential energy that can't be released. That's a force problem. With the pull framework. That's what we diagnose. And then, okay, based on that, if we know that they are trying to— I don't know, they are trying to reach young families, but their existing options are too expensive and untargeted.

Mm-hmm.

Then what that inferred is that there is supply that they want, though, that they would pull, and that would be something that allows them to reach new families in a way that is more cost-effective and targeted. Those— so that supply would fit their pull.

And let's, let's hit this real quick. I'm going to take a step back, uh, for the new listener. Pull is the acronym that Rob uses to describe like this series of conditions that when they're met, the customer will rip the product out of your hands. P is for they have a project that they're actively working on. U is that it's urgent or unavoidable for some reason. They're looking for options and then the options are lacking for some important reason. And so that's kind of the list that Rob is running through right there. And Rob is alluding to my business. We produce family media. So that's why— that's where this is— that's where that's coming from.

I'm assuming they're caught up, but whatever. Okay. Yeah.

For me, it's helpful to just like recap. We do, we do add between 1 and 1.5 listeners a month. And so that person might be, might be listening to this one. Yeah. But so let's say, let's take 2 examples from my business. You and I talked through these yesterday. They're, they're, they on the outside, they look similar. One is a national organization that's focused on STEM education, science education. The other one is a national organization focused on environmental education. Both of them have a strong mission alignment with our media, which is science communication for families with children 3 to 10 years old. However, as you and I kind of diagnosed yesterday, I'm going through a similar process with both of them. However, one of them has a force and the other one does not. And the one that has force is that the CEO is getting direction from her board that they need to be more public, their brand needs to be more prominent, and they don't have fantastic options as in order to do that, which is where, you know, we have some partnerships with, with well-known national media distributors that we could use as well as media that like directly communicate. So on, on there, like what you and I were discussing was there's actually a, there's a force and there's an Armstrong fit on the other side. It's like, it's very ambiguous. It's like there's mission alignment. There's not an active project that we're directly addressing. And, uh, you know, if I try to do the mental gymnastics, I can imagine it working, but it's not a situation where they are likely to, uh, generate the internal, like, effort and momentum and enthusiasm to get, you know, like a $50,000 project across the line.

Yeah. Yeah. So like in one of these cases, somebody actively has a project of like, we need a better way to reach families. With kids between X and Y age about science and STEM and stuff like that. It's like, okay, that's exactly you. The other— you fit that perfectly. The other one is more of like a, like, education for trades to try to funnel people into trades and, you know, like those kinds of jobs. And so for them, they're not trying to reach people and families with kids from 3 to 10. They're trying to reach people in high school who are like considering different paths and don't feel like college is a fit for them. Right. And you don't like, you don't fit that.

Yeah. Yeah. And so looking at it, what you're saying is like looking at both of those calls, what you're, what you would be doing is diagnosing first, like What are they objectively— if I didn't exist, if my thing did not exist, what does their CEO or their, you know, director of marketing, what are they still trying to do in my, in my absence?

Yes. Yeah. And in the, and in both of those cases, I would say there is pull, right? They're both trying to reach a specific kind of audience and their existing options are not good enough.

Yeah.

But one of them, the thing that fits their pull would reach high school students.

Yeah.

Who don't feel like da da da da da, right?

Yeah.

You don't fit that.

Yeah.

The other one is trying to reach families from X to Y, which you perfectly fit. And so in both of those cases, there is force. They're trying to accomplish something, but there's not fit in both cases.

Yeah. Yeah. One thing I like that you wrote about when you're talking about how you're analyzing PMF, that I want to understand better. Um, you know, the second step is based on their pull framework, like what you understand them to be trying to accomplish. I write out what supply fits their pull at a high level. Um, and you do it, I think you say like you're doing it very skeptically, actually put it, put that in the first point. I fill out their pull framework very skeptically. What, um, what does that mean? Because I think that's super, super important. Like what? Yeah. Talk us through how you think about it from a skeptical point of view.

Yeah, okay. So when I'm fill— so let's start with like how I fill out the pull framework, right? Which is what I'm looking for is not organizational platitudes. Oh, it's a stated initiative of the organization to become more AI fluent, right? That is not that— like, if I hear that, that's like, We aspire to be, I don't know, better people. It's like, cool. Yeah, good luck with that. Right? So what I'm looking for is something that's like, I, person on other side of call from you, am the CEO of this thing. My board is forcing this down on me, wants to see results by next quarter on this. So I am trying to do X, right? Like that's That is, it's on my to-do list right now. And so, that's my level. That's kind of like how I look at pull very skeptically, which is if it is not on this person's to-do list right now, it is fake.

Yeah. Yeah. As somebody who has chased rabbits that were shaped like it's on our— it's one of the 4 strategic priorities on our 5-year plan. That is not— that rabbit is going to run faster than you can ever catch it. Or worse.

This is exactly where the industry is heading, which like, it's like, oh yeah, I've got it right. But what they're really saying is like, it's not on my to-do list right now. Yeah. And the core thing too here with this, with this level of skepticism, I have to like put a caveat in. It could work if you don't look at this skeptically. If you don't say it has to be on this person's priority list right now. Could work, but I don't want to do things that could work. I want to do things where it would be weird if they didn't work, where I actually understand why they work and can repeat them. And so that's why I look at it as has to be on person's— this person's to-do list right now.

Yeah, yeah, I love that. And it— as a person that should be impatient, like founders should be the most impatient people in the world that demand Like, because it's, I mean, it's your life and you're going to spend potentially months chasing things that could work. But if you find the other one, it'll, it's, uh, the frictions go away.

Um, let's talk about how you diagnose, uh, what did you want to hear about the fit piece too? About like how, like the supply side.

Let's do it. Yeah.

Uh, uh, so, okay. So when you fill out the pull framework, I've linked to another article here, but the pull framework is generative in that it, and this is gonna be hopefully next week's post if I can get it together, but what, but the pull framework generates everything downstream. It generates everything about your business from what your product needs to be to what pricing is to what onboarding needs to look like to what your sales process needs to look like. It is the highest level generative thing in your business. Okay, so if I've filled out a pull framework, For this person, I know what supply they will rip out of my hands. And it's basically— pull is I'm trying to accomplish something that, that's urgent or unavoidable now. I can't not do it. And my existing options are blocking me. They're not good enough for a specific reason. So what will happen is I will pull a product out of your hands. If you offer me something that overcomes my existing options limitations. Pull generates what supply will fit. What supply is needed such that they will rip it out of your hands. So in your example, let's take the one where you don't fit, right? Well, we have to know what supply would fit. So the, the example for you was I'm trying to reach high school students who are considering not going to college, but my existing options for reaching them do not get me enough targeted reach at the cost that I need. Right? That's pull. That you, that like, okay, wait. So before I say you don't fit it, we have to know what supply do they want? Well, it's generated straight from the pull framework. They want a way to reach high school students, this very specific kind of high school student, at an attractive cost per, I don't know, impression or whatever that is. That is generated from the pull framework. If you offer them anything other than that, it does not fit their pull. And they would be weird to buy it. You could say, hey, we have 3 leprechauns and 2, like, and whatever, like, and they'll be like, cool, that's totally irrelevant. I am trying to do this thing.

Yeah. And what they do is after the call, they go back to worrying about that specific thing that they're trying to accomplish and not yours. You know, Rob, on that one, I feel like they fall into the, it could work. Like, it's not outside of the realm of possibility that somewhere in their organization or at some point they're like, actually earlier in the pipeline is also important and we need to be expanding the, the people that we're, uh, or the types of people that we're communicating with. In that case, it's a separate project. It's not this one that's urgent right now. How, how do you advise? I, I'm sure there's a bunch of other examples where other people have that. How do you advise you? Like, is that a keep the relationship warm? Is it, you know, what, what do you do in that, in that case?

Yeah. So, so in that case, what will happen is they'll say, oh, you're for early. That's actually been something we've been talking about. It's something that's kind of on our roadmap for later this year. Okay. And then, then you say, okay, cool. Maybe tell me more. Right. And what you'll find is you'll have P, you'll have L, you'll have L, and you will have no U or the timeline. The urgency will be later this year.

It's like, cool.

Maybe let's write like, you can try to say, well, is this worth, if you had an easy way to just get this off your plate right now, would that be worth doing? And maybe you can cause them to say, well, if it's easy enough and I can just click this button, then yeah, great. Let's, we can check that box. But it's, what's likely to happen is they're like, listen, I get it. This sounds awesome. I only have so many brain cells right now. And so we're gonna, we're gonna push like Let's talk in Q3.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's the, uh, my, you've had, you know, watching the Founder Slack community, you've got, it's like a not infrequent one is somebody just reappeared after ghosting me 5 months ago. And I guess it's like, what's going on is the U, uh, like the urgency or unavoidability of the project has just, uh, like it occurred, something happened in their world and it went from not urgent to urgent.

Yeah. This is, this is basically why, um, What you'll find is that your sales cycles, let's like, let's say you're a $200K to $10 million ARR company. You look at your sales cycles and you just plot a graph, like a distribution of the sales cycle. And what you'll find is that there is a chunk that is, uh, like at 2 weeks or 3 weeks or 5 weeks or whatever it is. And then there is a long, long, long tail after that. And what's happening is your sales cycle is actually 2 weeks. But it's 2 weeks from the point at which the project becomes unavoidable, which is a variable. And so that's what everyone— that's like what everyone winds up seeing. They're scratching their head and like, well, how do we— well, yeah, it actually makes sense that it is the moment when a project becomes unavoidable, your sales cycle is 2 weeks.

Yeah, that's fascinating. You know, one other thing that you write that resonated with me, you know, both Forth force and fit exist independently of how well we execute a particular sales call.

Yeah.

If there's sufficient force and fit, buyers will often rip our product out of our hands even if our sales process sucks. And if there isn't force or fit, buyers generally won't buy even with a very good sales process run by an experienced seller. Where have you seen, like, what are, do you have an example or like a quick anecdote about both sides of that?

Yeah. So, okay. So I'm going to try to anonymize this, but a good friend of mine was doing a demo for a startup that is a hot startup with the head of sales who has been a head of sales at like multiple unicorns from the early stage up until then. And this friend is a salesperson, like probably one of the best salespeople I know.. And he, he was like, dude, I was like scratching my head. Cause this sale, I even gave the feedback that this sales, this demo, this, this was not useful. Like this was, this was bad. And so what, and, and, uh, what will happen a lot is if you're doing sales calls for products, like say you're doing sales, I don't know, a variety of products that are like from hot companies right now, what you'll find is that The sales calls, the sales process won't be very good and it'll be confusing to you because you'll be like, okay, I don't feel good going through this process. Like this isn't, this doesn't fit. Why are they so successful? And they're generally successful despite their sales process because they have such strong product market fit and brand. The sales process just works and it doesn't have to be optimized. It doesn't, it's like, it's not, it's not optimized. It's not very good. And it's fine because it just, it seems to be working. It's not the, it is not their bottleneck.

Yeah. And on the flip side of that, like early on, I think probably a lot of founders do this. We obsess over like, what do our slides look like and how do we run our demo? And you try to make that with the assumption that if I can make, if I can say the right combination of words in the right order or show the right thing at the right time, then they will buy. And you, you're actually, you're focused on the sales process rather than do I have product market fit? And so you're just like, and you're never gonna write something that's good enough in the absence of, in the absence of pull.

Yeah. Yes. And then the other thing I would say is this is why so many early sales hires fail. And it is not because they are competent or not. I've seen many examples where a very, very good salesperson is hired into a company, like objectively good, they have the receipts, they're hired into a company that has product market fit problems, and they cannot succeed no matter what they do.

Yeah. Let's, let's transition into sales problems. So let's say that you watch the—

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's—

Yeah.

So like, how do you get to a sales problem, right? If there is no force, it's a product-market fit problem. If there is force but no fit, it is a product-market fit problem. And you have to figure out some way to solve these, right? Like, I have a couple examples in the post of simple to complex solves here. The product-market fit problems are scary existential ones. But assuming there is force and there is fit and they aren't ripping the product out of your hands, then it is a sales problem. And this is a good thing. This is a great thing. I was just on a call with like a company that has scaled really far, is opening a new kind of product line, and they don't have product market fit problems. They literally just have sales execution problems, which are basically like forces there. Fit is there, but something we are doing is causing the customer to either believe we don't fit or just we're shooting ourselves in the foot in some magical and kind of heroic way.

Let's talk about that. So, you know, the way we've discussed it in the past, the way you've written in the past is that if you have product market fit, it almost doesn't matter, or it may, maybe a better, better way of saying that is it will cover a multitude of, uh, shortcomings if you do have very strong product-market fit, but not all of them. Uh, you can still be doing things that are on the execution side, uh, prohibiting you from, uh, like, or, or stopping the customer basically from pulling it out of your hands. What are some of those and what does that look like?

Okay. So here, here's, here's like the, the, the, example that is like excessive, but that is basically what happens. So if you have found force and fit, and I'm not going to say you have product market fit, that's a, that's a kind of like separate thing, but you do not have a product market fit problem in this sales call. Then let's say, um, okay, you, you filled out the pull framework, you know what supply they want based on that, and it's exactly what you have. And then you stop speaking English and start speaking Swahili for the rest of the call. You're not going to close that deal. And that is essentially, like, that is essentially what winds up happening, or something to that extent, where you just, where they don't know that you fit because you've just changed languages on them. And it is is often basically that stark. You fill out the pull framework and you say, okay, based on this, what do they actually need to know? And guess what? It is not the theoretical history of AI agents from the Middle Ages to present. And that's somehow what we tend to present. Or they don't— like, what demo do they actually need to see for it to click in their brains what it is and how it works? Oh, guess what? They don't need to see every single settings screen and how all of it works together and all the integrations pages and da da da da da. Like they don't need to see all of that. And so there's a variety of things that I just consider as generally us either not having the right language to help them understand that we fit their pull or us just take like taking the steering wheel and saying, thank you very much, driving right off the road.

In my case, having, this is where, this was my point of departure with the environmental organization, which was CEO had actually told me pretty clearly what her project was. And then I went into mission, like this is the impact. And I started talking about impact and which they would acknowledge is helpful, but it is not the project that they're trying to solve. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

At this point, right? Like at this point, if we filled out the pull framework and we fit the pull, we have Victory is within our grasp. And then we're like, okay, now here's what we're going to do. Let me lecture you.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. About to blow your mind. You're going to walk out of this so inspired that you will, you will rain money on this project. No. Yeah. And it's, you know, you don't, you don't realize you're doing it until, you know, you and I had a conversation. Unfortunately, like her project did not go away. And so we still fit it in the second conversation. It was much more targeted at that. And, you know, if the pull is strong enough, maybe it like helps that relationship endure because they can see it even if you've sort of missed it.

Right. And think about it this way, right? Like if this is— the board is like, listen, you are fired if you cannot figure this out, if you cannot accomplish this. You, honestly, and then you, your business is the only thing that can help her get there. And you're like, you, you hear that, you— she's like, okay, cool, it sounds like you're the only one who can help me. Can you, can you explain what you do and how it works? And then you're like, yeah, cool, let me do that. So what we're going to do is I'm going to do a 4-hour lecture series on this. Yeah, during which you're licking sandpaper, and I'm just— we're just gonna— and, and then after that— and by the way, this lecture series, totally irrelevant, it's going to be on kind of like what we— what I care about, what I'd hope and she's going to sit through it because she needs to keep her job. And then, and then you're going to write a sales book on the kind of secrets to sales. And that's where all of our sales or a lot of our sales ideas come from.

You list a couple things that are drivers for a sales execution problem. There's one that we haven't talked about that's fundamental. It's the top of your list. Founder not having sales meetings. Like you can't, you can't sell. Maybe this is, I don't know, this, this made me conscious of another book that I'm reading right now, but it's basically like if you're not in the conversations, you by definition are not like you're not executing sales. But why is that? Why does that even appear? Why isn't everybody having sales meetings? Or when do you, what is it? Maybe what does it look like from a not like sort of silly skeptical way of looking at it in a practical startup?

Yeah. So, so the reason I wanted to put this here is because one thing I hear quite often is, well, we couldn't schedule sales meetings, so we figured there wasn't product market fit there. And you didn't earn the right to say there's no product market fit possibility there because you didn't have conversations. And what tends to happen here is, um, you know, we've talked about outbound before and like scheduling sales calls before. You'll blast out 100 messages and nobody responds. Or you'll blast out 10,000 messages and nobody responds. It's like, well, okay, they didn't want it. It's like, uh, there's no product market fit there. Are you sure? We don't have the, we actually don't know enough there. What we know is that your outreach didn't work. And that's probably because you copied a 2017 HubSpot sequence that didn't work then and definitely doesn't work now and just spammed it out to everyone. And it's like, it's, it's, um, what's eat, what's What often happens here is if you can't schedule sales calls, you assume there's nothing there, and then you just keep pivoting and pivoting and pivoting, never scheduling sales calls because your approach to scheduling sales calls was like nonsense. And so, and so what happens is you just don't get the chance to find product-market fit. You're just always kind of going back and forth and Again, look, I have done this. I have done this. And every time it doesn't work, every time you don't schedule sales calls, what happens in your brain is, okay, cool. There's clearly no product market fit here. Otherwise they would have taken the call and ripped it out of my hands. And so what do I need to do? I need to go back to the whiteboard and think deeply about where there might actually, who might actually have a problem, who might actually have pull, who like, da da da da da, and what a kind of like new business direction could look like, what a variant, what variable here. And that stuff is so stupid. It is, again, I did that so many times and emerged with things that were totally logical and were destined to fail because they were like, the problem was I couldn't get people to talk to me. I just needed to get people to talk to me. That's all that I needed. 1, 2, 3 sales calls a day.

That's it. Yeah. And that, uh, maybe what we can do is link to your, uh, Pipeline Mega post about, about that because the, uh, end of the, the conversation we had, it's, it's rarely, uh, like your early outbound really has, it's tangentially related to your product, but it's not, it's not a, it's not a direct sale. Um, it's more about what makes you interesting. And so the,, that's where there is a disconnect between you can't test product market fit because you don't know how to talk about your product yet in a way that resonates with the project that the customer is actually doing, unless you have some kind of like insider, you know, deep industry knowledge that makes it more likely that you can hit there. Um, uh, and so your, your approach early should just be generate these calls in a way that that person would respond to and reasonably like give you time. Um, and that's more eccentric about you than necessarily about a direct value proposition related to the supply that you're offering.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like outbound does not test product market fit.

Yeah, that's a much shorter, more eloquent, more direct way of saying that, Rob. Thank you. Let's talk about some other things that can be going wrong in sales execution before we wrap up. You write a couple. Founder does— is not looking for pull. The product fits the buyer's pull, but the founder pitches it in a way that is not relevant. Pricing process? What are some other things that can be going wrong that are sales execution and not PMF problems?

Yeah, so it's usually just that we confuse them. We introduce it. If we look, products are generally big, the ideas are big, and they can be approached from a variety of different directions. And so we need some sort of a way to help this person understand it. And to like describe it in a context that clicks in their brain. The way to do that is to describe it, demo it, whatever, in a way that fits their pull. It's what they're trying to accomplish, blocked. And, but there are so many other directions that you could describe it from that if you come from an angle that is not fitting their pull, it's going to I think of it as like it's non-aerodynamic. Pull is a force in a specific direction that if we describe something that fits pull, they will pull it. But if it doesn't fit their pull, it's— it creates— they need to understand new concepts. They need to think about things differently. They need to— like, all this stuff is happening in their brain, and every additional concept, every additional screen they see, it just creates more work for them to fit it into their world. And so that's basically the default state of these sales calls is there's a lot of stuff that independently makes sense and sounds right and does technically describe our product, but it is— it creates friction in customers' brains because it doesn't aerodynamically fit their pull.

And so why do we do that? Like, what leads a founder to add a bunch of things that are not directly aerodynamically aligned with what they're trying to accomplish?

I think two reasons. One is that we don't realize that pull is the top-level generative function for the business, right? Like, it's the generative thing. And so if we actually embrace that, oh, obviously, we would describe it that way. The second is we feel like we need to explain the entirety of the thing to them. We feel like we need them to see it like we see it. And so it's like, and it's kind of, and it always feels like they don't quite get it when we do it that way.

Do you find yourself, Rob, when you're working with founders, adding things and taking things out? Is it almost always taking things out or adjusting? Like, what are, what types of tactical adjustments are you making when it's a sales problem?

Yeah. So usually it is the, the sales, the most common sales problems are that one, we're just not doing discovery well. We're not filling out the pull framework. And so that's a kind of, hey, you have a list of 17 questions that you're asking, none of which are useful. And so let's just replace those and fill out the pull framework. That's thing one. Thing two is how are you describing your product before jumping into a demo in a way that fits their pull? You have to create some sort of a cons— I almost think of it as like a slide that helps them conceptually understand what you offer. That is something that I almost always add. And that is a very hard thing to get right. You want to show a slide that basically they're like, yep, I get it. I get not only do I get it, I get why it's conceptually different from everything else that I've considered. I get that it's not a code review tool. I get it's not this other kind of thing. Like, oh, it's this kind of thing. Totally makes sense. That fits my poll. That's exactly what I've been looking for. I get it now. And then after that, scoping out— in the demo, I cut out basically 90-something percent of a demo, if not 100%. Like, at once, we don't even need a demo. And that's just what's the actual thing I can show here?

Yeah, interesting. So you're adding upfront more things that resonate with their project. You are helping us to remove things that are us talking about things that we think are important that are impeding their understanding of that after they've gotten there. Is that fair?

Yeah, and then adding stopping points, like check-in points, like, have I lost you? Does this seem like it fits your pull?

Yeah, interesting. We have one mailbag that I want to hit. It's related to sales problems. This one's from Archie1337. Sometimes on a call when I am at the U, which is the urgent or unavoidable step, and I want to move on to options, the prospect seems a bit bored with the fact that they keep talking about their situation and they start asking me, okay, but what do you do? But it feels too early to jump into the supply solution. So what should I do?

Yeah. So this again, I don't, I don't know, but I would bet that if I watched Archie's call here, P and U are basically two questions. What are you prior— what— there's a million things you could be focused on right now. What are you focused on? Why that versus everything else? My— this— that's, that's 5 minutes in maybe, right? My hunch is that Archie has a long set of intros and maybe a land acknowledgement or two in there. That are causing— this is like quite often, we feel like we have to do quite long intros and stuff. So you're asking this question at minute 15 when of course they're like, I don't know what you do yet. Like, I don't understand. Versus you should be asking this question at minute 3, minute 4.

Yeah. I know I had to eliminate early. My default used to be more like, hey, could you help me orient to like what you're responsible for and like your organization or stuff? Now I just don't, I just skip most of that and it's, hey, great, thanks for taking this. Why, like, why did you take a call from a stranger? And then that like gets us much faster into the, uh, into the body of it.

Yeah. And they'll usually provide all the relevant context you need in answering why did you take the call and they will fill out some of the poll framework as well. And then you just like say, cool. Okay. So it sounds like you're da da da da da, uh, What have you looked into and what's missing with your current options? Then you're literally asking two questions. Why are you here? Yeah. Why aren't your current options good enough?

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I had a conversation with our listener a week and a half ago, and she was telling me, like, telling me about the kind of visceral reaction she had to the idea of asking somebody why they had accepted a call. And then she was like, but I thought about it and I was like, yeah, that makes so much sense. Like, it's just like, it's, it's weirdly painful. Painful thing. It feels like it's going to be a painful thing to ask. And then it becomes like, this is such an obvious thing that I need to be asking that, you know, why didn't I think of this earlier?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. I've gotten messages from people too about that. Like this, I feel so uncomfortable asking it. I'm just like, just ask it this way. I'm sure you get a bunch of people reaching out to you. Why did you decide to take the call with me today or something? And what are you hoping to get out of it? And yeah, they're like, okay, I could say that. And they say it and they're like, I don't know why I have been doing anything else.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, the end— taking the indirect route. Um, actions that founders should take. We're going to wrap up here in a moment. Actions that you would say founders should take after listening to this, uh, maybe with the goal of figuring out if they've got a PMF or a sales execution, uh, problem.

Yeah. I think the first takeaway should be if you don't know if you have a sales problem or a PMF problem, that is your priority. That is the bottleneck to your business. You must focus on that right now. The way to figure that out or to take a first stab at figuring that out, for God's sakes, do not copy and paste this into ChatGPT and then say, hey, do I have a PMF problem or a sales problem? You have to listen to the sales call yourself and fill out the pull framework honestly and then say, okay, what supply do they want? Okay, given this, like, what should I have pitched? What is happening in this sales call? Is this a product market fit problem or a sales problem in this sales call? Then let me watch the others. And by analyzing each sales call like that, you'll start to generate a pattern. What is happening and what do we need to change? And from that, that'll tell you what to do.

Love it. Love it. Um, Rob, anything else we want to add on this before we, uh, start to start to wrap? No. Well, uh, you've got a PMF Camp, just as a PSA, PMF Camp coming up starts, uh, February 9th. If folks are interested, we'll drop the link in the description or on Rob's website. Rob, could you give like the, I don't know, 2 or 3 sentence like version of what's PMF Camp and yeah, who's it for?

Yeah, PMF Camp is a way to see all of my frameworks in action through other people's sales calls. So what we do is we review recorded sales calls. And say, what is pull? For example, what does pull feel like? What is this pull? What is pull in this call? Okay, based on this, how should we pitch? Based on this, what should our sales process be? What's going wrong here? And it's like a way to basically develop your own intuition for product market fit by hitting your head against the wall the least.

Yeah. Yeah. I like that. And, you know, we get, we get comments on our videos sometimes that are like, I'd love for y'all to do like live teardowns. That's, That's hard to do on like on an RSS, you know, public access like YouTube and Spotify channel that like appropriately maintains the anonymity to do that. But, but that is something you do with—

Yeah, I mean, like, like imagine, imagine that, like reaching out, reaching out and be like, hey, I know I just bombed that sales call. Do you mind if somebody publicly roasts me about it?

Yep, exactly. And like reveals all the things that the, you know, that the customer said about their business. And so there's, there's, it's hard for us to do it, but in the, in the founder community and, and during PMF Camp, founders have volunteered to share their, share their stuff. And so you're able to do more of that, like highly practical. This is what it looks like in real life stuff. Anyways, we'll drop the info in the, uh, in the show notes. Um, and if there's nothing else, Rob, uh, we'll catch you next week.

Catch you next week.