Learn from 2 *real* founder sales calls (Rob teardowns)

Hey Rob, welcome back. How are you doing, man?

Good. How are you?

Good. Wearing my national colors. I live in Mexico City and Mexico is playing, kicking off the World Cup today. So getting ready for la fiesta, as they would call it.

I don't appreciate any of this.

I like American football.

American football, steak. And light beer fireworks.

Yeah, we've, uh, a lot. Yeah. Anyways, it's, this is a red-blooded all-American podcast for anybody listening. Yeah.

I, I actually like the World Cup. It's, it's, it's, uh, it's gonna be fun.

Awesome. Um, well, we've got something really interesting and unique today. We're gonna keep this conversation with you and me relatively short so that people can get to the real, uh, like the real value. This, this week's post is called Watch Me Roast Slicks. Sales Calls, the first and only question mark time you'll see a public sales call teardown. Uh, Rob, this is, it's a real treat. Like every, everybody who's listening to this should check out the stuff that is gonna be in the show notes and check out these sales calls. But, uh, Rob, why don't you give some context on what you did this week?

Yeah. So, so I'll just like give some background context is as a founder, I never got the chance to watch another founder's sales calls or another company's sales calls because like back then, a couple years back, recording sales calls wasn't really a thing. Gong was just coming out, like it was a fairly new thing. So I had no idea when we were pivoting around, like, are we just terrible at sales? What's going on? Like, and then when we were scaling, I couldn't tell whether we were scaling because of or despite what was going on in our sales calls and like, Could we have gone from, I dunno, in the same time we went 0 to 4 million, could we have gone 0 to 10 million? I've, I just, I had no way to know. I had read sales books and got sales advisors who kind of would join occasionally, but it wasn't super clear. And so sales calls are now generally recorded, which is great, but basically nobody has watched another founder's sales call still because it's just like a, a weird thing to do or another company's sales call. And so. I kind of stumbled into reviewing sales calls and at some point I realized, holy cow, this, this is kind of where everything is. Isn't just about sales. It's where everything about a startup comes together or doesn't, where you're basically testing your startup against a potential customer who probably hasn't really heard of it before. And so It's where kind of your theory of your startup is meeting the reality of a potential customer and you're kind of, yes, you could see your kind of like sales approach in there, but you can also see, is this the right ICP? Are we positioning our product right? How is our demo landing? How do we think about, and how are we thinking about sales in our business generally? That all comes to bear. In a sales call. So I've been just like, you know, for the book and for a bunch of founders who have reached out, like I've just been tearing down sales calls for a couple years, probably done a couple thousand of them now, but these have all been private. And so, uh, I just, I just never expected somebody would be insane enough to say, yeah, you could just, I'll get permission from my potential customer for you to totally roast me publicly. And then I met Harold.

Yeah. Yeah. Not even, there's not even a relation there. Like, I don't know, Harold is a brave dude and we're really thankful to him for lining that up. Yeah, you know, from my perspective as a founder that hasn't watched that, I've probably watched a few dozen probably at this point, like with you that you've done in the founder community. And it's really like every single time it just holds a mirror up to how I approach sales and I watch somebody else the way that they do discovery at the start of a call, the way that they intro their demo, the way that they do their demo, the questions they ask. And it's, you know, I also watch my own sales calls and while I'm going through that, like, I can see some of my errors. But when I watch other people, it's both sides. It's like, oh wow, that was a super interesting way to open this and to like start this conversation. And then on the other side, it's like, oh, like this, this thing I see why that didn't work in that context. And even when the product is super different, like, yeah, you know, nobody else is like trying to sell kids' podcasts to other people, but it's still like there's a demo part of what I do. And, you know, there's like these, like the discovery part and opening up customers and learning about pull, like asking these questions, like the step to sales, all of these, like this formula is fairly consistent and there's a lot, even if the customer is totally different, like the sales call itself, always has lessons and it's fascinating, honestly. And something I think, honest, being close to you and your work, I probably started to take for granted that I had ever seen any of this. And good gosh, if I didn't have these as reference points, like, I mean, my sales calls can also, can still be rough, but they would be like 10 times worse.

I think what tends to happen is our sales calls are rough, our product, Or they don't— it's the kind of like most common error mode that I see is that sales calls feel all right, but they don't buy. And it's unclear. And so our product isn't easy to sell and it's unclear why that's the case. And so in that situation, there are a million different things that you could change, different tactics about how you ask questions. There's, it's just hard to know in that situation what's happening. And I was, I was just talking with a VC about this, a VC who comes from a sales background. And his perspective is like, if you ask Claude or you, you kind of like paste your transcript into Claude, you could get my, my like call teardown skill, the, if you preorder the book, plug. But, but if you ask Claude, it's going to come up with a lot of things. That all are plausible and they're probably wrong in your situation. And so, yeah, so that's, that's, it's just been super interesting to take a bunch of these sales calls, learn from them about the structure of a sales call, but more generally, like what makes a product easy to sell and what should, like, the whole goal is for us to get to a point where our product is easy to sell, where they buy in the sales call, they kind of rip the product out of our hands. And so just watching other people's sales calls is the way to get there. I think is like, if you need to watch other people's sales calls and you need to understand what's underneath them, like what's causing the sales call to work or not work.

Yeah, that's fascinating. And so, um, we've got two sales calls. Uh, so Harold is the founder of Slick L Sell IQ., and he brought two sales calls that he got the permission from the customers. And Rob, why don't you— we're going to put the links for this in the show notes. Highly recommend it. Well, it'll just be on YouTube because the video is helpful for folks to be able to refer to. But Rob, why don't you give context on maybe the two calls and like what your approach was or yeah, what you were doing in both of them. Yeah.

So the, I guess the context is we did this publicly. There's like 100-something founders there. Um, we recorded it, we totally recorded it. And the first half, for some reason, only recorded my face, which obviously YouTube wouldn't let us upload. Uh, so, um, I was like, that's, that's just wrong. I got a cease and desist letter. Um, so, so we split this out into two videos. The first video is me tearing down kind of one of his bread and butter. Sales calls for Slick. And in that one, what you'll see is how to think about discovery, how to think about how to describe your product before demoing it. That's just going to be a really useful one. There's a little bit of nuance there because there are 3 people who show up to the sales call. And so that one, because the original webinar recording only showed my face, which, you know, nobody wants to see that. The, um, I did, I re-recorded that solo. So you can actually just watch me taking notes and, and running through that and, and kind of tearing that down by myself. The second sales call is, um, it's actually kind of like a mix of, it's, it's actually kind of close to what I do in like a private working session with a startup where we're reviewing a sales call. Actually, interestingly, this one is really focused on the demo portion. The potential customer shows up and gives feedback on how she felt during the demo, which was really, really interesting. And it will kind of bend your brain on what do you actually need to show in a demo? Because it's often the exact opposite of what you think you need to show. And so you'll be able to watch that piece. And then we zoom out and have a conversation about their overall kind of like approach to their startup. Who should they— who is their ICP? How should they describe their product? What should their website say? And so that's kind of more like a one-on-one working session with me me where we start with a, uh, you know, like a deep dive into a specific sales call and then zoom out and say, okay, given what we're seeing here and comparing against the other sales call, what's the actual opportunity here and how should we think about attacking it? And how do we, how do we think about taking those lessons and applying them across our entire startup?

Yeah. And, um, for me, a couple other things maybe just to, uh, add to that. The first one, like you, you mentioned this, but having 3 clients show up to a first call is brutal. Like that, it's so hard. And so the conversation with the founders in that one was, where do I focus here? Because the 3, we start out that call and the 3 of them all articulate different projects. And, you know, Harold, poor Harold is like a 3-on-1. Like, like how, where do I play You know, offense, defense, what, what direction is up? And so it really, if, if you can figure out what do I do with that situation, a one-on-one conversation with, you know, with a customer becomes a lot, a lot simpler. And the second one, there's a lot more, you know, you get a bunch of comments from listeners about PLG and product-led, product-led growth. And this one, it it transitions like we hit the demo and we transition into, okay, what does that say about the identity of your product when you're— and what's the role of the sale for, you know, for founders who are aspiring to not have individual sales calls indefinitely and that they're going to be led by a website or an app or something like that. And so I think that like they're both— there's things whether— oh, and I guess maybe the third one is it's an AI product. And so they— Slick does outbound, you know, it automates your outbound motion, your messaging. Like there's a couple, you know, there's some nuance, nuance to that. But for founders that are, you know, developing AI and thinking about how do I communicate what AI is and some of the nuance, like we talk about like basically kind of sales tourism or AI tourism. It's like when somebody shows up and they're just like, I wonder what is happening in AI land. And so it's, you know, you hit, you know, you hit some fundamental themes about the sale, but there's also some interesting dynamics that I think your audience is going to, going to find super valuable.

On those. Yeah, I 100% agree. It covers a lot, like each one of— so I don't know if we're ever going to get the opportunity to do another one of these publicly. If we do, what you'll notice is each one is different. There are different lessons to take away from each one while we're building towards this like foundational understanding of what causes something to be easy to sell, what causes a startup to take off. Um, and so I do hope we can do some more of these publicly if you're listening or whatever, like, and you can get permission and you have guts like Harold has guts. No, they're not that bad. They're super helpful. You know, reach out and we will consider doing another one.

So. Cool. Awesome. Yeah. We'll keep this one relatively brief. Last piece and the links for both of them are going to be in the show notes. So just go there. Final PSA. Rob, you worked this in seamlessly a few minutes ago, but we'll also leave the link to preorder Rob's book. Rob Snyder, he also mentioned the Claude Skill. I've, I was actually just reflecting. I had a call yesterday that I put through that and it was just so helpful to be able to get like immediate feedback on a sales call with some of the areas that it was, it was pushing me on. I actually think my it has sped up how quickly I'm getting better at sales calls because it's, it's the right level of reflection and the right thing to be, you know, thinking about afterward. And if you, if you preorder the book and send a like a screenshot basically of your receipt or of your, of your order, you'll get access to the Claude skill, the Rob Snyder skill, and then also for some AMAs that we've got planned, potentially some other stuff down the line. Anything else you'd add there, Rob? Nope. All right, awesome. Let's wrap this up. Hope everybody enjoys it. Leave comments if, uh, either on, on the Substack or on, uh, Spotify, or just send us an email if you find these useful. Um, and especially as Rob mentioned, if you want to volunteer for a future one, we'd love— I'd personally love to see Rob do more of these publicly because they're so valuable. All right, other than that, uh, we'll see everybody next week.