How to figure out 0-1 Sales | w/ Rob Snyder

All right, here we go.

We're back. Yeah.

What's going on, Rob?

Good. Good. Last week went a little more viral than expected.

And we'll, we'll get into that in a second. But first things first, Buffalo Bills starting this weekend with the New York Giants. Um, actually we have a, we are expanding our strategy. So like number 1 is founders, number 2 is weightlifters, and number 3 is Bills fans. Um, because we're, we're trying to further limit the oversect or the, the intersection. Of potential audience members.

Yeah, I can think of like literally one person who fits in that besides me at the intersection. So fortunately I am not focused on the preseason. So you've got my attention for maybe 4 more weeks and then, then all bets are off. Like then, then we're just going to take a, take a solid 16, 17 week hiatus and I'm going to do nothing.

Hopefully longer than that if y'all are going into the postseason. But we'll, we'll worry about that down the line. All right. Let's talk about the last video. You got some feedback on that one.

Yeah. Feedback is a very nice way of saying I got slammed. So someone very kindly posted on Hacker News and it went somewhere. And so a lot of people saw that. A lot of people read that. And the interesting thing I found was that basically I got slammed privately, publicly, basically from every direction. I took swipes at two kinds of people. There. One is the get-rich-quick influencer who just says like, "You can just use AI agents to figure out your business now." And then the second is the kind of academic. And so I got slammed very publicly and privately for the academic one, which probably makes sense. Like, get-rich-quick people aren't necessarily reading my— and nobody's like defending them. But the thing I found interesting, the thing I kind of have thought about is I think if you read some of the kind of get-rich-quick people and kind of like read them in depth, you find they're kind of directionally right and often wrong in some of the details and kind of like the sequencing or whatever. What I find is like when you read a lot of the academic stuff, it is like highly precise and usually directionally wrong. And so Um, yeah, I mean, I, it's just interesting that I got pushback on the academic one, probably just because of the reader base and whatever. But, um, but yeah, so now just to dig myself even further in the hole by doubling down on it.

But, uh, let's, let's lean into it. Uh, is there any more salt that we want to pour on, pour on the wound?

Um, but I think, I think we'll leave it there.

Yeah, maybe you've had, you've, you know, said some interesting things in the past about which of the sales books that you've read have actually been valuable. And frequently it's like less sophisticated, just like get stuff done kind of folks that have a bead on like what demand is and how to actually sell products.

Yeah. Yeah. I actually found that's like pretty true. Like, so Demand Side Sales 101 is the best sales book out there. There's one called Fanatical Prospecting, which is just like literally telling you Prospect all— like, do outbound all the time, and it's like a book that just kind of repeats that. Great book, just telling you the basics and just like, go do it. It's more than that, but, but it's great. And so there are ones like that that are just canonical, and then, um, and then there's a lot of ones where I followed the advice and basically gotten punched in the face. And maybe it's because I didn't follow the advice perfectly, um, but like, I had a— I followed, uh,— I'm not going to say the sales methodology just so I don't get dragged through the mud on this one, but I followed a very popular sales book's sales methodology in a very important meeting with my head of sales and the biggest potential customer. And they were like so offended within the first minute or two of the call that the next 58 minutes were just them like, like destroying us. And it went so badly they took our presentation, gave it to a competitor, and asked them to build it. And so we probably did it wrong. But, but yeah, I just kind of found that a lot of these things are kind of like, look, locally precise and accurate and rigorous and detailed. And then the second you zoom out, it's like it just runs you straight into a wall.

That's, that's an incredible story about like taking your IP and approach and being like, these guys are really onto something. However, we hate them. Like, golly. Um, uh, well, I think that's, you know, a nice way to, to get into what we're talking about today. We're continuing. I really, I like the cadence that you're on with the way that you're writing lately. It's like to the fundamentals. What are we actually doing when we're early in startups or when we're selling as founders? And in this one, this blog post is called How to Figure Out Zero-to-One Sales. Before getting into the actual content there, why did you write it? Like, what's, what's going on in your head?

Yes, I've seen, I've seen kind of two categories of startup errors that are both kind of lethal. The first is that we delay sales. Thinking that it's complicated and that we have to figure out a lot of things before we start selling. And we need to create a bunch of collateral. We need to make fancy demos. There's like a huge checklist of things that we need to figure— we need to set up a CRM, right? There's just, we just don't get started. Then the second is that we do it wrong, but in preventable and kind of predictable ways when we do start selling.. And so it's either we're executing the conversation wrong or we're going through the motions and having a ton of calls that extend indefinitely and we're not really making changes to, like, you know, based on what we're hearing. And so the goal here was to, uh, it actually, it was kind of like inspired by the Starting Strength stuff we did on barbell training, which, which is Is there a ruthlessly simple process that you can put into place that just forces you to do the things that matter and gives you no excuses for doing other things? And so that was kind of like, that's the goal with this post.

And the challenge there that you're seeing with, you know, digging, you said two problems that we're really focusing on that second one. Which is, you know, first one, how do we get started? Second one, how do we focus on the simple stuff? What are you seeing founders do? Like when they're trying to sell, like what are they actually trying to accomplish? Like how does it get more complex?

Oh, there are a variety of different things that happen. The, like, one of the things that I have seen just like quite often when people just take the kind of vanilla advice, you should start selling. Is that they'll have probably 20, 50 sales conversations without really taking a step back and saying, okay, who actually has demand? What have we learned here? And they'll wind up kind of just doing a bunch of sales calls and kind of pushing deals forward without, without iterating on who they're selling to or what their pitch actually is. And so that's the kind of core thing this is designed against. Uh, that said, right, there's a lot of other errors. We sell to people who might want our product or could want our product. We kind of have a sales call that kind of feels more like a root canal to them and it's just awkward to us. There's like a lot of different things there, but the core thing we're trying to solve for here is like, what's the minimum set of things you can do to figure out if a specific kind of customer wants to buy your product.

Yeah. And then, and for folks, I really recommend checking out this, you know, the blog post, and in part because you've brought together basically like 2 years of writing into this one. I, this is probably the post where you have cross-referenced stuff more, but it's really like your ideas are converging on this is the single most efficient way to get to like, you know, to get to product market fit, to find demand, to understand demand, to understand customer outbound. Why don't we talk a little bit about the, you know, the approach that you're recommending? You know, you call it a sales sprint. What, at a high level, what are we trying to accomplish with the sales sprint? And then we can get into what are the steps of it.

Yeah, I don't know if we should call it a sales sprint. I call it a sales sprint because there's this like design sprint that, that I think is like a good process for designing things fast. Um, but it could be, I don't know, we could call it a sales set. We could call it, there's a variety of things we could call it.

Put the pin in the branding at the moment.

Like, yeah, I hate branding. Um, so, um, so yeah, like the sales sprint works like this. You basically craft a hypothesis of who would be weird not to buy your product. We'll get into that in a second. Then you schedule 5 conversations, sales conversations, with people who fit that hypothesis. Then you execute those conversations. Then you figure out what to do next. And by figure out what to do next, I mean you kind of like say, okay, we just had 5 sales conversations where people should have bought. What actually happened? What did we hear? And do we then adjust our hypothesis and run another sprint? Or do we like turn this into our sales process because it worked and let's just scale this?

Yeah. And we'll, we'll get into those, uh, each of those elements, but at where are we as founders? Like when is this relevant? It feels like it's maybe after you have a product.

Are you doing this like, yeah, you can do it before you have a product.

When is it most relevant?

So it's basically when you have a hypothesis of who would be weird not to buy. And you don't need to have a product yet. You can use this to sell a service that will eventually turn into a product. You could use this to sell a book. I don't know, like whatever your kind of like first thing is. And so you don't need to have a product ready. You basically just need to have an idea about kind of what kind of product or service-shaped thing do you want to deliver and what's the demand side of that? Who actually would potentially buy it? And you're testing that. That said, let me, let me, let me zoom out on that too. Right. Like you actually might do this after you have a set of customers and you have happy customers and you're growing, but you don't really have your ideal. You don't know who exactly is your ideal customer. And so, right, like this is, this is a way to figure out who is our ideal customer? When do they have demand? What is their demand? And what can we put in front of them such that they, they pull? And how do we quickly figure that out?

Yeah. Yeah. Let's get into the, uh, each of the, each of the steps. The first one is creating a pool hypothesis. Tell us more, like what is involved in a pool hypothesis?

Yeah, so, okay, so what we usually do is say, oh, there's a bunch of people out there who would benefit from our product. And we're not wrong. There are so many people out there who, you know, would see ROI. They have relevant pain points. They have relevant problems. We could deliver measurable results for them. But when we have sales conversations with those kinds of people, they typically have all the feel of a sales conversation and they don't buy. The reason is because they don't actually have demand, even if they have problems, even if they have pain points, Even if we could, even if they like our product, that doesn't mean they have demand. Demand is something very specific, which is they are trying to accomplish something. That, think of it, the project on their to-do list versus the kind of like problem on their backlog. And so when somebody has demand, they're trying to accomplish something. When they have bad options, and you show up as a better option, they should pull the product out of your hand. It basically, in that scenario, they would be weird not to buy your product.

So this, so the hypothesis that we're developing is about who is, um, you know, it feels like it's part targeting. Who's the person that we're reaching out to? What's the project that's on their list? How am I communicating with them? Or, you know, why do they— what is the demand that I'm going after that I have the supply to match? And so it's, you know, you're starting off with, you recommend the pull framework, which I'm going to pop up for anybody that's listening on audio, you won't be able to see this. But, but basically, do you just tactically, like, is this just the form that, that people should be filling out at the start of these sprints.

Yeah, it's basically like you just say, who is it? Who is this person? It's this person is the head of DevOps at Series B SaaS company. Okay, this person is trying to accomplish this specific thing for this reason. They can't, they must do this kind of thing for this reason. And they consider doing it themselves. They consider hiring somebody, but those options don't work for them because of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Therefore, and then like the therefore is therefore they will rip the product out of our hands.

Yeah. Yeah. And this particular format being like a super helpful structured way of getting at the key elements of it. You know, one of the things that you write earlier in the blog, your is that your initial direction is almost always wrong in some unpredictable way. And so like this, using this framework to me feels like a way to identify what parts are wrong rather than like the chaos of the many different variables that might be going on.

Yeah, it's, it's a way to kind of structure a hypothesis about the important pieces, which are like the demand pieces. We believe, right, it's not like we believe they want the future of cloud computing, right? Like that's a, that's supply side. That's like a, it's an almost untestable hypothesis because they'll like come to the call and like nod. Now what I'm focused on is on the demand side, they are trying to accomplish something in their world that has nothing to do with our product, but it makes our product relevant and irresistible to them.

Yeah. Okay. So we're starting off the, you know, the sprint. We've got our pull hypothesis. The second step is schedule 5 conversations. I like some of the things you've written in here, but tell us more about that. Like, why is that hard? Why is that, you know, a challenge? Or how does that relate? Maybe start from the hypothesis. What's the connection to 5 Conversations? Yes.

I mean, there's a question of like, why do we want to have conversations at all? Why aren't we happy enough with a hypothesis? It's like, well, we want to have a business. So if we have a hypothesis that when we talk to these kinds of people, they would be weird not to buy from us or try to buy from us, even if we don't have a product, then it's like, okay, cool. All we need to do is get in front of these people. And, and if they don't buy from us, then we've learned something interesting. If they don't try to buy, we've learned something interesting and need to revisit our hypothesis or change something. Right. And so 5 conversations is a good number because more than that, 10 conversations, right? Like you're, you, you can do more. It's totally fine. I've just found that like, less than maybe 3 or 4, you don't really start to see the patterns. And more than 8 or 9, that just kind of starts extending really, really far into— like, it extends as a long time and you start forgetting what happened in the other conversations.

Yeah, yeah. Um, you know, one of the things you write, and we, we probably— I'm sure at some point we'll get into a deeper dive with what outbound looks like, But I liked this way of characterizing what the approach should be for scheduling those 5. Scheduling sales calls at this stage is not about fancy outbound tech or about investing in lots of effort and personalization or even about your value prop. The message you send is not supposed to explain everything or sell your product. You just have to sell the call and that's all the messaging. What does sell the call mean in this, in this context?

Yeah. So one thing we do when we start to get in our mind, okay, I need to schedule 5 sales calls. Right? In our mind, we're like, oh, it's a sales call. Therefore, I need to sell the product in the message. Therefore, I need to buy all the latest go-to-market tech and the CRM and, you know, do all this kind of waterfall enrichment and all this kind of stuff. When really, I just need to get 5 people to talk to me. And if they have demands, they're going to turn it into a sales call. If they don't have demand, nothing I do is going to turn it into a sales call. Cool. That makes it easy. So, so, okay. What do I do? I could try to message about my value prop in the outreach, but then one, my value prop might be wrong, in which case they're not going to buy. They're not, they're not going to respond, which is the usual case. And two, I'm going to sound like a salesperson, in which case they don't want to have the conversation anyway. And so the approach to outbound here is like, Hey, I'm an interesting person. You seem interesting too. Let's chat. And when you change it to that, then you can at least have a conversation with them. You get to meet somebody interesting. And again, if they don't have demand, nothing you could do in that call would flip it into a sales call. If they do have demand and you mention, hey, by the way, we've been working on, you know, when I've talked with other CTOs, What I've heard is they're trying to do da da da da da. Holy shit. That's exactly what I'm trying to do. Wait, tell me more. Right. And then they will start pulling and they will turn it eventually into a sales call. How does it work? Wait, is this real? Like, tell me more.

Yeah. When, when I've done outbound, what I've found is that you need to use very few words. Um, and so like editing and re-editing is a thing important. Um, and I, you know, I have a tendency to be like, look at all, but look at this overwhelming body of evidence for why we do the thing that you should pay, that you should care about. That's my instinct. Maybe like, because that's what I'm spending all my time, you know, trying to build the best, best product. But that's like the totally wrong way to approach this at all. Like people just, they don't read it. They don't care about it. They don't really know There's not enough space to give them context. So they just don't, you know, they're getting a lot of these folks are getting flooded with these types of messages and you have to be like super succinct in particular for LinkedIn outbound.

LinkedIn. Yeah. LinkedIn email can be a little bit different, but the core thing is we, we often think we need to logic them into meeting with us. Yeah. Like, and like, yeah, I actually just got a sales outbound message this morning from somebody who was giving me like 47 different reasons why I should talk with them. It's like, I just need one that you're actually interesting and worth talking to, and I'll get on a conversation. And, you know, whether or not I have demands is a separate thing.

Yeah. All right. So let's say that we've got 5 conversations scheduled. Execute, and you've jumped into this a little bit. One thing I've appreciated about being close to your ideas is that it's taken some of the pressure off of, off of the early sales calls. And you write about it. You've alluded to this, but you write about it as like you're not trying to sell. It's like the goal is to sit on the same, same side of the table as them, in particular early on, so that you're understanding and empathizing with them and they feel understood and empathized with. And you can't force somebody to have demand like so that cannot— like trying to sell in order to try to make them aware of demand. It's like you're actually discovering if they have the demand that you think exists. And if they don't, you're learning. And if you do, then you're learning, and that's cool too. But talk a little bit more about executing the 5 conversations.

Yeah, well, I want to hear too about your— because your transformation on this has been interesting to watch in your world. So like, maybe give me the before-after on your experience with this.

Yeah. And for context, we do— I have a small agency that produces children's media. And so what we do is work with universities, museums, you know, STEM parts of the federal government to— who are with the objective of reaching the public with STEM messages around career awareness and things different. There's a couple different ICPs. But basically, early on, Yeah, the goal was like I was talking a lot about my product. I was, yeah, trying to— boy, trying to tap into my brain from maybe a year ago. But the goal was really to demonstrate this value that I thought that they should have or that, you know, to project onto them. And then when I started using your approach, The start of the conversation started to be much more around like, okay, what's going on with your, you know, in your university if they're applying for federal grants, you know, what are, what are the, what's the grant strategy that you're approaching this with? Here are some different universities and how different researchers that we've worked with have been applying these types of things. Do those sound familiar or not? And sometimes they're just like, you know, like none of it is landing and you just, all right, that was, that was cool. And you never talk to them again. That's like kind of totally fine. And other ones are like, they're, you know, their eyes light up a little bit. And, you know, they start to see words and respond to things that they're talking less about your product, and they start talking much more about, here's the thing that I have been trying to accomplish that I haven't found, you know, the right solution for that plugs in for X, Y, or Z reason. And in our case, thinking about specifically for like offices of research at universities, It's like, we have this problem of there's researchers that want to reach the public, but really what they're incentivized to do is to communicate or to like perform original science. That's what they care about. But we also need to do this other thing. So it has to be an easy fit into, you know, into their world and flexible. And that was only discoverable because we had conversations where we were trying to like, you know, bring you know, our solution to that.

Yeah. Yeah. And like, that's, that's pretty much the typical experience, which is when we start out, we have all these associations with a sales call. I don't know where they come from. I have no idea why. Like, I mean, we both went through HBS. I don't remember anyone sitting us down and being like, all right, here's how a sales call works. You grab them by the arm, twist it behind their back and give them like, beat them senseless with all the reasons why they should buy your product. Right. But it does, it did, it does feel like we're supposed to kind of poke and prod at their pain points and tell them why our, our solution is, is magical. Again, I have no idea where that came from. Maybe we've just all bought cars and that's what it felt like, or I don't know. But, um, but how it like really feels is they are trying to accomplish something in their lives. Or, or maybe they aren't, but if they are trying to accomplish something, that's what's important to them, and our product is only relevant to the extent that it fits that thing they're trying to accomplish. If we basically just say, listen, I don't control whether they have this item on their to-do list or what the exact item is on their to-do list, then we're not trying to persuade them of the desirability of our product and convince them they should wanted. Instead, we're looking for people who are trying to accomplish something in their lives, and we're just having a conversation to say, you know, I don't know if what we have fits that. Let's explore it together. What are you trying to accomplish? Are these the options that you've considered? Like, what options are you considering? What are the downsides of those? What do you like? What do you dislike? Why didn't that work for you? Right, okay. And then here's the kind of Like based on that, it sounds like the shape of thing you're looking for would be kind of like this. Is that right? Okay, cool. Well, that's kind of what we're, we're building, right? And that's how a sales call goes. And the force, the physics of sales is basically if they are trying to accomplish something and don't have good options that you can uniquely fit, they will pull, they will do the work, they will schedule the next meeting. They will ask for the relevant information. They'll bring the right people around. They will make stuff happen. Otherwise, the way it most works most of the time is you're pushing, you're following up, you're saying, let me send all the recaps, let me do that, and you send non-stop follow-up emails. And like, that's— and it feels uncomfortable for them because they feel like you are trying to convince them at every step of the way, and you're sending breakup emails and stuff like that. It's, it's just It's just, it's just because we misunderstand the physics of a sales call.

Yeah, that, that part, it feels, it really does feel awful when you're like, this is something that I think is good for you and I'm dragging you along like every step of the way.

And yeah, and then you like, so I've done that before and what it, what the symptom in your mind is, is you're like, I haven't figured out how to create enough urgency. On their side, or I haven't figured out how to make our products seem more desirable. And so what you do is you kind of like go get a sales coach who promises to increase urgency and they like, not all sales, like there are very good sales coaches. I recommend everyone get one, but like, you know, some, some people will just like give you a bunch of tactics to create urgency when urgency is a symptom of them not having demand. Hmm. Or you spend a bunch of time and money on product development to make what you're building shinier and you raise more money and it just goes— it's just nonsense.

Yeah, yeah. For, for us, it was like there was— I had to come to the realization and accept that our audience was never going to be big enough that it would actually change the demand circumstance. Like, no matter how many, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of, you know, families we were reaching, if they didn't have demand, like, the statistics just did not matter. Or even, even the experience of producing with us, like, um, if when we would, we would do the equivalent of like a design partner, which is like produce for free with them. And that even that, like, they could love it, could have a great experience, and then ghost because there wasn't like an imminent project that we fit well into.

And let's play the flip side of that, which is even if you didn't have a big audience and even if the experience of working with you was kind of shaky. If they had enough demand, that stuff wouldn't matter.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And it's been, you know, some of our bigger opportunities have been people that I just like kind of just said, okay, I'm gonna take my hands off the wheel, gonna disappear, like kind of forgot about it, assumed it wasn't gonna work, and then boom, like it, it reappears when there's, you know, in our case, like they were coming up on a new budget year and they were looking for things that they needed to, you know, put a budget that they needed to put toward education that actually had, you know, efficacy and some other things that we could bring. Let's move into analyzing conversations. So at this point, we had our hypothesis, we scheduled 5 conversations, 4 to 8, something like that. And then we executed the 4 to 8 conversations. Let's move into the analyzing, like where we really get the bang for the buck. And we kind of wrap up this initial circle? What's going on with analyzing?

Yeah, I mean, like, there's one kind of analyzing, which is, holy cow, we now have 5 customers or 5 people who are desperately trying to buy this. Let's figure out how to deliver it and all this kind of stuff. That's the kind of analysis and like, okay, how do we do more of that? How do we get more people in? How do we get them to hell yes? Right. That's great. How do we send Rob and RC a bottle of whiskey? Because this was awesome. And this was really helpful. Like, Yeah, cool, love it. That is, you know, I've seen it happen. I haven't seen it happen often. Usually what it takes is a couple of iterations. And so what will happen is you'll kind of, you kind of want to compare each call one against another and say, okay, we had 5 calls. 3 of them seemed to have demand. Of those, 2 of them, what we're selling, seem to fit. Why those? What was going on on the demand side? What's, what is it about them? And how do we compare and contrast them versus the others? And that's essentially it. Like, what have we learned here? And how do we take that into another hypothesis that we can then run another sales script on? And what we're trying to get to is like, we're just trying to get to a solid answer on Who would be weird not to buy this that we can talk to? And what's the work? Like, that's, that's essentially it. And in the sales comp, like, we're just using the pull framework for this. Um, I feel like I had another thing there, but I've lost it.

Maybe like tactically, is this something that founders go do on their own? Is this something that, you know, maybe they have the luxury of, of co-founders or, or something like that, or maybe it's with other founders. Like, how do you recommend that founders approach this?

Yeah, I mean, like, ideally you have co-founders who are listening to all these calls and you can kind of sit in a room together and say, what have we learned here? Sometimes, right, like getting another founder who has no experience with your business but can look at the calls or getting somebody who like knows sales, right, and can look at the calls. I think there's demand there. All are good, right? What you're just trying to get to ground truth here.

Yeah. And so we're, you know, we ran this like 4-step process and where it sounds like in step 1, creating the hypothesis and step 4, analyzing. We're back to that pull framework. We're probably like literally looking at that, either that or a version of that template and thinking about, okay, for the next iteration. And then what you're saying is you probably have to run this a couple of times as you move away from things that are wrong toward things that are hopefully more right, but it might take time to, you know, bounce a little bit. So it might be 3 or 4 iterations of this, of this cycle.

Yeah. And what actually might happen too is you might just come and say, I don't know. I actually, we just had 5 sales conversations and I literally do not understand why these people like it, these people don't. Okay. The answer there is not to just throw shit against the wall and create a new hypothesis. This is one of my hobby horses. The answer is to go in person and figure it out. Why? Right? And so that's the kind of other piece of this, right? Where, where if you don't know, if you can't craft your, your hypothesis, the answer is not to just do a bunch of kind of interviews and try to figure it out. By reading the tea leaves. No, it's to go get some sort of firsthand understanding. So a friend, uh, a friend messaged me and said, I've been doing hundreds of discovery interviews. And then I just asked a potential customer, can I just come shadow you for a day? And in that day, he learned more than he had learned in like months of interviews. And so that's, that's the thing. He's like, if you don't know, go in person and try to extract a poll hypothesis from the experience of being in person.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, you're doing that soon too, aren't you?

Yeah, that's right. Uh, headed, uh, got some travel coming up. And so whenever I travel, we produce with, uh, zoos, aquariums, universities. And so I, I always try to take half a day and go visit, walk around, see what's going on, talk with the people that are, um, either directly or tangentially related in the related to the media that, that we're doing, which helps from a relationship standpoint, but also from the, like, really understanding what their priorities are in the, in the environment that they're operating in. So the 4 points, just to recap one more time: create a pull hypothesis, schedule 5 conversations, execute 5 conversations, and then analyze, and then repeat as needed. Let's talk about Okay, you do it a couple times, you hit it, like you find the ICP, you feel really good about pull. And now it's time to transition to like, let's scale this. Are you still running, you know, running these sprints? Or like, how do you recommend that people transition after they've found PMF?

Yeah, so we wrote at some point something about the repeatable case study and case study factory, right? And like, that's kind of how I see startups and I think a good lens for seeing business. And so what happens is that this transitions, right? You have a method for scheduling 5 calls with potential customers, which you can just do more of or scale that up or just keep it up. I don't know, keep doing that, right? That's your pipeline system. Then you have the first call with them kind of figured out where it's like, hey, here's my hypothesis of Pol. Is this right? And they're like, oh my God, that's exactly what I want. Yes. Pull it. Like, okay, cool. Then there's probably a step or two after that of like, how do we actually get them to buy? Sometimes you can just send a Stripe link. Other times you have to kind of develop a sales process after that because they have to get their manager's approval or they have to go through procurement or whatever it winds up being. Right. And so that's the sales step of the factory. And then the really important one is through the, the, delivery step, which is how do we, after we have sold to them, how do we make sure we deliver on the promises of the pull framework? The project they're trying to accomplish actually gets, gets accomplished with help from our product and they renew, they stick around, they, they're happy, they refer others. And so what you're doing is you're basically just taking this, which is think of the front end of that, kind of like validating demand. Side of it. And you're adding on the backend and just putting more volume through it.

Gotcha. Yep. Yep. And so it, it kind of slips into that. You might also tell me if I'm wrong. You might also have sold but not feel like you had totally nailed that. And so some of those things might be happening in parallel, like, okay, we've got some customers that are pulling, like we have an indication for demand, but it's not perfect. So we're actually going to continue running some of these sprints even while you're starting to to deliver and run through the factory with other customers. Yeah.

And what you're doing, the factory model is like a really useful framework to have in your mind, because what you're trying to do is you're trying to standardize the factory, right? And so what you're trying to do is you're trying to come up with a sales script, sales approach that when the right person comes to it, they say, hell yes, without you having to work much magic. And they turn into successful customers afterwards, right? And so you're trying to kind of standardize these pieces as much as possible so that then you as the founder can step away from them and put other people in those and they can kind of run a more standardized playbook and then you can scale. And as you scale up pipeline, more people can run the sales process. And as you nail delivery, you're confident that anybody you sell to who fits the case study profile will turn into a successful customer.

Yeah, love it. Love it. Let's talk about takeaways real quick. Maybe for, for founders, what would you say a founder listening to this should like tactically go do?

Or like, yeah, yeah. I mean, the reason I designed this to be so brutally simple is so that you can look in the mirror and say, do I have an excuse for not getting started on this today? Do I have an excuse for not going spending an hour and creating a couple of hypotheses of pull and then picking the one that I would bet on and going and test scheduling 5 sales conversations for that, right? Like there's The only excuse is I don't have a hypothesis and I need to go in person to find out.

How about for like VCs? How about for investors that might be thinking about how to move their portfolio toward using this methodology? Like, what do you— you talk with VCs, you know, from time to time, like, what do you, what do you tell them? Or what would you tell them?

Yeah, I think so. I think VCs should just forward this to founders and say, do this. Or, um, that's an interesting one.

Maybe we need to revisit that one.

I think what VCs can do is basically when you get a sense that people are avoiding sales or delaying sales for a bunch of different reasons, point them towards this approach in theory, because it is like, from, from VC's perspective, you actually might not have clarity as to whether somebody is going all out towards sales or just talking about it and like saying, yeah, we've got deals in the pipeline, but they're kind of stalling. They're kind of big deals. They're going forever. And so you might not actually have the visibility. And so this is kind of a, I don't know, this is a thing to have founders look at that might push them in the right direction. It's just, it's just like hard from the VC standpoint to be able to actually see, are they not? If they're not succeeding at sales, what is actually the reason behind it? There, maybe there are good reasons. Maybe these are long deal cycles or maybe it's because they're not really trying or not really approaching it the right way. And so, yeah, it's hard from a VC's perspective to see this.

Yeah, maybe. And maybe, like, if we flip that and we said, if you had a fund that, you know, let's say that you had 10 startups that you had invested in, like, your expectation would be they're all— until they have PMF, until they're fully running the factory, that they're running these sprints.

Yeah, yeah, my expectation would be either they are running these sprints, or they're in person with their potential customers.

Yeah. Interesting.

Trying to figure it out. And that would be like, that would be like pre-seed stage. But like, I will— I don't want to raise a fund.

Yeah, yeah, that— yeah, was just trying to, like, put ourselves in that investor spot. All right, well, Rob, any other thoughts we haven't covered with regard to the sales sprint?

Or no, well, so sorry, one last thing. If I was a VC, I would expect them to do this, but I would, I would find the people who wanted to do this, not impose it on people.

Oh, that's interesting. Like, um, well, they may not, may not know it exists.

So yeah, yeah, I'd share it with them probably before investment and see what they think of it, right? Oh yeah, that's exactly what I need to be, right? Like, I think this is actually, I've been, this is an article that's been on the back burner which is I think we misunderstand the VC's role as founders. And, um, if you understand what VCs are looking for and what their job actually is, a lot of the things you hear out of their mouths make a lot more sense. And you can like better take action based on that. You can raise money better. You can do a bunch of— you, you don't have misaligned expectations with them once they've invested in you.

Yeah, the founder has the misaligned expectation for very interesting—

We often talk past our VCs. I totally did. I know, like, people complain to me about this, and VCs also complain to me about this. And it's just, we just— the founder doesn't understand the VC's role very well.

Yeah. Well, let's explore that in the future. Other things that are on your mind, Rob?

No, just the, the, I like the brutal simplicity of this and like the, the, you kind of have to look in the mirror and say, why am I not doing this? And it's almost certainly not because you're an exception to the rule. Yeah.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah. I mean, you, you run a kids media company and you're doing this, right?

Yeah. Very different from B2B SaaS in some ways, but very similar in other ways, like the concept of demand. Translates and that the frustrations of selling when there's not demand, you know, translate. And also, you know, one thing we haven't really talked about is what it, what it feels like in the, in the founder shoes when you're doing this. And there's like, in my experience, the way you write about this, Rob, it's not so dissimilar. But before I started, I really dreaded it. And then when I started, I got a lot of energy out of out of doing these types of sprints, these calls, these analyzing, thinking across it. Like it felt so much more productive than what I've been doing that I got a bunch of energy from that. It was just a matter of like actually starting to execute this, this type of system.

Yeah, I think that's true. And I think the second thing is there is a liberation moment for you when you realize that demand has nothing to do with your product.

Yeah.

And that you don't create it, which is you're just, you're going into these conversations just with a hypothesis and you're just looking for something that is objectively out there in the world, in their world, like that you can't control, you can't force. And so it reduces the stress level of sales generally because it's not, you're not showing up to these conversations like I've got to find some magical way to convince this person to buy.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah, it becomes much less personal. Very much agree with that. Well, highly recommend folks check out this, this blog post. I think you're like really doing some high quality stuff right now, bringing together some of your, your ideas, whether it's the factory that we talked about today, the, you know, the sales sprint. Yeah, don't worry.

Next, next week we're going straight to the gutter.

It's going to be terrible. Yeah, that's right., which is where we're much more comfortable. Um, if folks want to work with Rob, uh, Rob, you know, if you'll let me put a plug in here real quick, Rob, um, Rob runs these, um, sprints. And so if you want like another perspective, Rob, how many, if you had to guess, let's do a McKinsey market size. How many sales calls have you, like founder sales calls, have you watched?

A couple thousand. I actually did count for the book and it's like, It was in the more than 2,000 range.

Yeah, which is insane. Also, you watch it like 1.8x or 2x or 4x or something like that, which I— your command of the English language is better than mine, I think. But anyways, visit RobSnyder.org if you're curious or just drop us a note. No mailbag this week, but if you— if folks who are watching want us to address a question, just leave it in the comments on YouTube or in the blog.

They all tuned out when I slandered academics again. So that's right. The defense of business academics. I never, never thought that that would be the final stand.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, all right, cool. Well, Rob, anything else?

No. See you next week.

All right. See ya.