The physics of sales (pt 2) | w/ Rob Snyder

Rob, we're back. Welcome to another week.

Yeah.

What's going on, man?

Well, we just got back from San Francisco with some friends, so we had a, we had a wild weekend.

All right.

Putting you on the spot. What was your favorite part of our San Francisco trip? Cause I have one.

We, um, well, a couple things stand out. One, uh, the guys are cutthroat. We played a card game. What, what's it called? Um, Not Renaissance. Oh no, I'm forgetting the name of it. Basically, it's kind of like Mafia. It's like a version of Mafia. And I got wrecked. Everybody in our, in our friend group is really good at lying, which makes me very concerned about the potential number of sociopaths. But the true highlight from the Bay Area, I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. That place is nuts. If anybody is listening in kind of like Northern California, you literally just have to go. Like, there's— they have sharks and kelp forests and sea otters. Like, it is amazing. I love aquariums, and this one was probably the best aquarium I've ever been to.

So, yeah. So what I'm hearing is your favorite part of our trip was the part where we were not hanging out. You were not hanging out with any of us. So I guess—

look, wine country— wine country was great. I got to touch an octopus though when I was, yeah. And so that's, it's hard for, hard for human beings to match that.

That's fair. Okay. My favorite part of the trip, and I've been thinking about this ever since, was at one point, I don't know if it was I had too much wine or you had too much wine or, or what, but at one point you looked over unprompted and said, you know, I gotta start lifting barbells. And I was like, oh yes, because this podcast is just a long intervention to get you off the, off the Ironman stuff and I want you you to squat 300 and then you can stop doing this podcast.

That's, that's funny. You know, I did, I lifted weights this morning. However, I had like a 3-hour dream last night about training for an Ironman again. So I think that, I think that day is fast approaching for me to get back in the saddle. Um, but, uh, anyways, Rob, I'm excited for today's conversation. Uh, so big thanks first of all to Kanishka and to Nelson for, uh, a comment that they left. This is basically like, this episode is essentially a very long mail call, uh, or mailbag or whatever we're calling that, Kanishka, and I apologize if I'm mispronouncing your name, said, I think referring to the last episode that we, that we published was the physics of sales. And really in there we really dove into what's the difference between a buyer that's pulling and a seller that is pushing a product. And Kanishka said on that one, I think this is missing and what to do instead under each sign that you've got it backwards. Would you say the answer is covered completely in your Harvard Innovation Lab Path to PMO slide deck, Rob? And then Nelson jumped in as well, was thinking this too, a good, a good do this instead would really, really help. So Rob churned out an entire post focused on that, which I thought was super practical and great feedback. Rob, any other context for this one before we jump in?

Oh, I think like if you have other topics you would like for me to cover, comment somewhere and we will either see it or not. And if we see it, we will maybe get to it. So, uh, this was a good one. I was, I saw that and I was like, I feel like I've written about this before, but screw it. Let's write about the whole thing and let's put it all in one place for the sales process end to end. How do you do, what does push look like? What does pull look like?

Yeah. And this is when I see founders coming to you a lot for, so like some of the specific pieces that we're gonna jump into around like, okay, what happens after the first call? Or how do I prep for the first call? How do I structure that? We'll get into those. Recapped this briefly, but again, just in case this language comes up, seller push is something we'll refer to. It's when the seller has something that they want to sell and they're trying to convince basically someone to buy. That hurts. Like we will put the link for the last episode that we, that we published in the notes. Listen to that if this is new. And then there's the buyer pull approach, which is the buyer has a project that's on the top of their list. They're trying to accomplish. They don't have great options. And so they pull your solution, your product to help them solve, you know, solve their problem or their project. Anything, any other like base knowledge we want to establish, Rob, before we jump into this one?

Yeah, the base thinking on, on buyer pull versus seller push is that there is a force that causes a deal to get done. There is a, there is a just a core foundational force and it can either— in like most of our minds, when we think of sales, we think, okay, sales is me convincing you to buy something. That's actually not what causes deals to happen. And when you think in that way, you do a bunch of dumb things from how you try to schedule sales calls to what you do in sales calls to how you structure a sales process that don't work very well and make you hate yourself. And so when you instead realize that actually the thing that causes a deal to happen is the buyer is trying to do something. They're trying to accomplish something on their to-do list. My job is just to help them accomplish that thing. Then you design your sales process differently and it doesn't feel so bad.

I love it. I'm gonna someday, I will stop touting the praises of that approach, but it just, it makes so much more sense to me as, uh, as a sales methodology or approach to, to reaching and serving customers. Well, why don't we, why don't we talk, we're gonna really get into the, the process of, uh, what, what a sales process looks like with, for, for you personally, and then for founders that you work with. Um, I'm gonna go ahead and share, um, a page from the blog. Um, okay. So we've, we've got the sales process here. There's 4 big chunks that, you know, the call 1 has been divided into 3 chunks. Rob, you wanna, you wanna give us kind of the overview here of, of what we're looking at in the sales process?

Yeah. So we're, I guess you could call this technically the customer journey, right? Which is, um, how do we go from somebody who doesn't know about us to somebody who talks to us, to somebody who buys from us and keeps buying from us, would be weird to churn from our product. And so when we break down that entire journey into its kind of different components, there is the pipeline part, which is first, which is How do we get people to talk to us? Then there is, okay, what do we do on that first call? And then what happens between the first call and them buying? Then after that, fourth part is how do we, once they buy, how do we make sure they are successful and would be weird to churn?

I really, I really like how you frame the pipeline where we'll, or we'll jump in first about, um, it being a conversation. How do you get somebody to have a conversation with you, which is, which is essentially agnostic, like you have a hypothesis they might have demand, but it's agnostic to how do I get somebody to talk to me in order to buy from me? Like, that's not the framing at all. So let's jump into what a, like, a push approach versus a pull approach looks like at the pipeline stage, like at that initial getting somebody to talk to you.

Yeah. So, okay, so like the base approach to pipeline, it determines whether you get a 0% response rate or like a 50% response rate or kind of like something in between there. If you think, if you're in the seller push mindset, you're going to approach pipeline as I need to convince them to want my product and I need to pitch a sales call to this person. And guess how well that works? It works awful. It doesn't work because who wants to show up to a sales call from cold outreach? Like nobody wants that. Nobody's ever wanted that. Very few people want it. And so. Um, that leads to messaging that's kind of like, hey, I, you know, I, I saw you also worked at Facebook. Uh, have you ever considered AI agents in your business? Would you like to chat about how we could, uh, possibly save you 50% ROI and da da da da, like a bunch of nonsense, right? And like nobody in their right mind would respond. When I read founders outreach, the first question I ask is like, would anybody who is sane respond to this? And the answer is like 99% of the time, no. No, nobody who is sane would respond to this. And so they get no responses in a seller push mindset, but that's because you think one, that the job of my message is to convince them to, to like buy our product or to want our product or to have pain points. And second, that the job of my sales call, which is going to happen after this, is to convince them to buy my product, right? This is still seller push. Buyer pull says again, It's all about if they have a project on their to-do list that they need help with, then they will make that call a sales call. They will pull, right? And so my job is not to convince them to have a sales call. My job is to just have a conversation with them. And if in that conversation, it just so happens that they have demand, they have something on their to-do list with bad options that we uniquely fit. Well, hey, how about that? Right? They're going to turn it into a sales call. They're going to say, hey, wait, how do you help here? And so, like, what does that mean for messaging? For messaging, it means you don't have to pitch your product in the messaging. In fact, what works best is to just say, Hey, I'm a really interesting and weird person. Do you want to, like, I think you'd have something interesting to say. I think we'd have a cool conversation. Would you be open to chat? Right? Something in that realm. And okay, the immediate objection, and then I'll show up in a second. The immediate objection whenever I say this, oh, there's two. There's one, um, which is, isn't this a bait and switch approach? Like, what if you get on and try to sell them something? It's like, yeah. That's why seller push doesn't work. You have to do buyer pull all the way through. It's not bait and switch. If you just have an actual conversation with the person and it turns out that they have pull, awesome, cool. Second, how do we make sure we're not having conversations with people who don't have demand? That isn't something your messaging needs to solve. Your targeting can solve that. Who are you reaching out to? That's where targeting fits in here. And we want to reach out to people who almost certainly have demands and get them to talk with us in whatever the most effective way to get them to talk with us is. And it's almost never pitching our product. I'll shut up.

And channeling your, uh, it would be weird if energy, uh, into this, um, you know, it feels like it applies in two spots in the pipeline. One, it would be weird if a person had demand and this was a waste of their time for a conversation. Just like it's not this person could buy from me, it's it would be weird if this person were going through the thing and we didn't have a compelling value proposition for them. And then drafting your message in a way that it would be weird if they didn't respond, which, you know, some people have the benefit of having Snoop Dogg as an investor like we talked about in a previous episode. Hey, Snoop Dogg invested in my dispensary software company, you know, would you like to chat? There's other ways to do that, that show your interesting side and like make it very clear that it's, it's worth a conversation, kind of a low risk, get on, you know, have a, have a call and get to know each other and maybe you learn something, maybe it ends up being valuable or not. Yeah.

Yeah. And like, it's, it's going to be, we've talked about this before, it, this pit, like every single time some, everyone comes to me, it's like, well, Can you, can you fix my messaging? And we look at it and it's just in this uncanny valley of like, it says nothing interesting about us. It says, I would love to get your feedback for no apparent reason. And it pitches a product in a like weird roundabout way. And so it's just about figuring out what is weird about you that you can put in a message that makes you interesting to talk to. What would make you weird not to— another one of my friends, this also is not going to help anyone., but another one of my friends is meeting with the Dalai Lama, right? Like, maybe put that in your messaging, right? Like, that's, that's interesting. And people are gonna be like, oh wow, well, why not meet with this PhD who's meeting with the Dalai Lama, right? Uh, that won't be a waste of my time. That's super interesting. And, and so response rate totally changes when you come at it from this perspective of what's the messaging that only I can send where they would be weird not to respond.

How about, can we do a hypothetical real quick here, Rob? Like, what would it, what could it look like for, let's say somebody went to, I don't know, big state school. Oh, they went to Ohio State. Yeah. And they worked at Google for, you know, 6 years. And then now, you know, now they're starting their own backend AI agent. I don't know, like something in the software B2B SaaS space. What are you, you know, what could, how would you work with a founder like that on drafting an interesting enough outbound?

Yeah, I would just be like, what's weird about you? Like, what did you work on? Something interesting at Google? Is something that you did at Google relevant to what, like the people, like in the people that you're trying to reach out to's minds, is there anything that you're doing that is like interesting and relevant? Is there anything in your history that we can bring out? And you can almost always find something.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

So it's like an interrogation of what makes you weird or interesting or stand out and then removing, like, quieting every single instinct you have to try to convince somebody that your product is worth talking about. Let's jump into— let's jump into the next step on call. We're going to get into the 3 parts of call 1, which you've structured as demand, supply, and demo. Could you give us, maybe before we jump into specifically demand, like, why is it demand, supply, and demo? Like, why is that the approach for Call One?

Yeah. And just as a weird aside, I have this basement office with a window and a turkey just walked by and like looked at me through the window and kept walking. So I don't know if I might not feel like that might be a sign of impending doom. Anyway, that's a total aside. The— so Call 1, why is it structured that way? Well, because, okay, so what we naturally want to do in a Call 1 is we intuitively want to try to like convince them to buy our product. And so we think, okay, cool, I'm going to kind of like interrogate you about your pain points and problems and then pitch my solution and maybe demo and demo my product and show you how awesome it is. Like, those are actually the kind of like right structure of things that you are doing. It's just the wrong frame. We need to understand in order to like explain what we do in a way that would actually make sense to potential customers, we need to understand what is on their to-do list. What are they trying to do? And what are the options they've considered? And based on that, only then can we explain what we do in a way that will make sense to them. And only then can we show them something that's gonna make the light bulb click. So you have to start with demand, understand what their pull is, describe our product in a way that fits what their demand is, and then maybe it might be in call 1, might be in call 2, show something that like says, hey, we can actually do this.

And, and what's the bridge? Like you reach out to somebody. That says, you know, hey, Snoop Dogg invested in my company, or I met with the Dalai Lama, or I ride unicycles. Not really sure how, like, that's probably a good one, but what's, what's the bridge? Like, how do you go from, oh, this is an interesting guy or gal that I want to talk to, to starting a conversation that's relevant about their demand?

Yeah. So, so you can, it depends where you're coming from on this conversation, but it always starts with a, like, Hey, you're super busy. What caused you to take this call? What were you hoping to talk about in this conversation? Right. And they might say, oh yeah, well, Snoop Dogg thing was interesting. And I looked at your website and it seems like what you're working on is interesting. Right. Or they might say whatever. And then you say, cool. That's exactly what I was thinking we would, we would talk about today. Um, by the way, I'd love to get you to know you a little better. Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions? What's on your mind? What are your priorities right now? What's, what are you focused on? Right. And then you learn more about them. And in that process, you can kind of interpret what pull is and kind of talk a little bit, you know, and you can just like have a normal human conversation.

I love that. That's so true. Like a normal human conversation. I also, I love the question, like, why did you take this call? Like, you, I always learn interesting things. Um, and they might actually right immediately tell you what their project is like that hap— that'll happen sometimes. Or they'll tell you the thing that's jumping out and that's relevant to them. Okay, so we've got demand, supply, demo, demand. Take us into the— let's jump into the push approach versus the pull approach of, of talking about demand.

Yeah. So the push approach on demand side is basically you've been taught to do— ask discovery questions. What are we looking to discover? I don't know, maybe pain points, maybe problems. And so the way that we typically do discovery questions is we say, what are your pain points? What are your problems? And then we kind of like have an existential look off into the distance when they describe nothing that is relevant to what we do. And then we try to like say, well, what about over here? What about this other thing? And then, and then it just kind of like feels like we're pitching at that point. And so I've just, I've done this way too many times and it sucks. Instead, when we're, when we have a kind of like demand side conversation, We actually know what we're looking for. We're looking for the 4 components of PULL, right? What's the project on their to-do list? Why is it unavoidable now? What's the list of options they've considered and why are those, why do they perceive those options as having limitations? And so, right in that, we actually now know what we're looking for and we can ask kind of like broad questions like, what's on your priority list? Yeah, there we go. That's the beauty. Um, and, and so, uh, yeah, as we could look into like what's actually on their priority list and ask them questions in that regard. And whenever we figure out what their projects are, then we ask the ULL questions. The end of that, just, just, just to like wrap that up at the end of that, what do we do? Well, we confirm that with them. We just say, okay, cool. So it sounds like you're trying to accomplish this project for this reason. You've looked into this and tried this and bought, like, bought this, but it didn't work out because of this reason. So, like, it sounds like, and tell me if I'm totally off here, it sounds like what you're actually looking for is something that can do X without Y. Is that kind of what I'm hearing here? And I've just confirmed demand and said, is this, like, I understand what your demand is. Is this the shape of supply that you are looking for?

Yeah, I like what you write later on that the push approach and the pull approach compound. And so early on, like if we are using these pull approaches, like now with what you just said on, they've articulated what their demand is, what their project is, that narrows significantly. This is, it was a light bulb thing that had not clicked for me. That narrows what you demo later on, how you, how you approach the second call. Like it narrows everything around that. And that's the, rather than the, the, actually we're about to get into this, into supply, casting a very broad net, showing every capability that's possible.

Yeah. Yeah. Cause like we're usually, so yeah, what pull is what causes them to buy something, right? It's, it's what causes them to buy your thing. Right. And so when we are focused on problems and pain points early on, we're going to hear a bunch of things. When we focus on projects on their to-do lists, we're gonna hear narrow things. We hear these narrow things. We can just describe our product in a way that fits what they're trying to do. When what we're used to doing is like pitching VCs. When, and when you pitch a VC, what do you do? You talk about the biggest possible thing you could possibly describe. You describe all the elements of it. Right. And, and so, um, uh, again, like, that's like the intuition. I don't think that actually works super well with VCs, but, but anyway, like, that's the intuition is we have to pitch that it is bigger. And in fact, on the pull approach, you pitch that it's smaller. Oh, so you're just looking for a tool that can help you accomplish this without that. Well, that's what we offer is a tool that helps people just like you accomplish this without that. 20 seconds. Does that sound like what you're looking for?

I love that. And let's, I think that's a natural bridge. You're, you're already into like kind of bridging into supply with that. So how do you go from demand to supply?

Just, just that, like you give a recap of what you heard demand was. Is that what I'm hearing? Okay, cool. And it sounds like you're looking for this kind of supply. Okay, cool. Like I've now, I now understand the like shape that my supply needs to take. And all I have to do is describe my product that way. And so I put an example in here, right? It sounds like you're trying to move from an MVP to a production-grade product because you've got some enterprise pilots. You've considered hiring a DevOps engineer or figuring out AWS yourself, but you're worried that that's gonna take too long and, or it might not be the right thing. And so it sounds like what you're looking for is a way to build your infrastructure in seconds. That is the right infrastructure from maybe from a prompt. Is that what you're looking for? Okay, cool. We offer a way to build your infrastructure in seconds from a prompt. Does that sound like it fits what you're looking for? Would it make sense to show you more about that? Right. It's, I've described it very small when what I could have done is I could have gone super broad with the push approach, which is like, We're building the AI DevOps engineer for the future of agentic pro— like workflows. And we're doing— it's, it can do all this kind of magical stuff. And when I describe it the first way, it's like, yeah, that's exactly what I'm trying to do. That sounds like it fits what I'm trying to do. How do, how does it work? How can I see more? That's you pulling for more information. When I describe it the second way, it's just really big and it doesn't quite fit given the conversation we've had so far, given what you're trying to accomplish. And you're like, oh, that sounds kind of interesting. I, I'm going to pretend I understand it, but like, I don't know, maybe I'm going to start leaning back now. I'm not going to pull for more information.

Yeah. And if, and if it's obvious that there's not demand, like let's say that they, uh, two, two things in my mind right now. Like one, what if they're like, you describe the project back to them. They say, no, it's actually this. They, they reorient you to like, ah, actually not that thing. And your product, like that's not. What you've designed for, is that just an, is it an abort moment? Is it a Hail Mary moment? Like what's the, what's the guidance if you, if you, if you feel like there's like, I don't know, maybe you're not totally wrong on demand, but it's not a, it's not a clear, yes, definitely. That's what I'm looking for.

Yeah. So, so again, you're going to replay it back to them and make sure you understand. And then you're going to say, okay, it sounds like you're kind of looking for this kind of thing? Say, okay, we don't quite offer that. I can point you to a couple of those. Here's kind of what we do. Does that seem at all relevant to you? You could, you could go that route or you could kind of try to YOLO it and say, cool, I think we can probably build that in the next 2 weeks. Why don't we, why don't I just kind of like talk through how that would work and see if this is actually what you're looking for?

Yeah. Yeah. I love the YOLO approach. Um, Okay, call. Let's talk about the demo now. All right. So, you know, you learned what their project was in demand. You've, you know, kind of transitioned to supply. This is kind of what we offer. Does that sound interesting? Now it's, it's time to demo. What's— let's talk about the— let's maybe start with the push approach to a demo.

Yeah. So, okay. And then just again, caveats here. Sometimes in your sales process, you're not going to do a demo into a call too. Sometimes you're not going to do a demo at all. Everybody wants to do a demo. Every founder wants to do a demo because like in our minds, we're like, once they see it, they're going to totally get it. They will get it and they will want it and game over, checkmate. They, I got it. Right. Um, and we're kind of here now, right? We've seen how when we describe demand, we can describe supply in a super narrow way that fits exactly what they're trying to accomplish. Right? Then, you know what doesn't work super well? When we spend 10 or 20 minutes walking them through every single piece of the product, teaching them how to use it, proving them that it works, telling them about all these things that are unrelated to what's on their to-do list. That's the typical approach to demos that I've seen from basically every founder where it's like, listen, you asked for it, you're gonna get it. I'm going to give you Every screen in our product. And, um, and that was just obviously doesn't work. Every additional screen they see just, just reduces their likelihood to buy. It just makes it way more confusing. And so this is again where we flip it and say, okay, given that this is their demand, given that this is the supply that they are looking for, that they want, what's the least amount of things I can show in the product that make it click for them. That might be zero things. You might just show a mockup, right? You might just show a, I don't know, like a cartoon version of it. Who gives a shit, right? It's, it's about, it's not about proving to them that it works. It's about showing them that it fits their demand. And so, um, yeah, you don't necessarily need to do a lot and you almost always need to show a lot less than you think you do.

Uh, so we're now through the demo, we've had, we've finished call 1. How do you, how do you wrap call 1 to bridge to call 2?

Yeah. So basically you do the same thing that we've been talking about. You did a demand recap, you did a supply recap, demo recap if you're doing a demo. It's like, okay, it sounds like, like what I'm hearing from you is it sounds like you're trying to accomplish this. Consider these options. They're not good enough. You're looking for something like this. We walk through and it sounds like this does potentially fit what you're trying to accomplish.

Okay.

At this point, we have stopped selling, right? The sales, as it happens, is done at this point. And everything from here on out is kind of like project management. And so it's, we're now, we're definitely on the same side of the table, you and me. And so it's okay. Given this, what do you need to see or what needs to happen on your side from here on out? In order for you to kind of like make the decision on this and get started. And this is going to be different for each company. There are similarities based on contract values, but it's not necessarily the case that after this you're going to do, you know, you're going to do a business case call or you're going to do a deep dive demo or you're going to do whatever, right? It could just be that you're going to say, okay, cool. It sounds like this fits. You want to get started. What I can do And they're like, yeah, let's, how do I get started? Cool. Well, what we can do is we can send you a Stripe link. We'll schedule an onboarding call. And in that onboarding call, I'll help you do XYZ. When do we want to schedule that onboarding call? Cool. Are you the right email to send the Stripe link to? Da da da da. And boom, it's just a one-call close. You're done. Often more needs to happen on their side. Now, what we often want to do is we want to design Like our intuitions are like, okay, I worked at McKinsey. I can do some pretty cool spreadsheets. And so what I want to do is I want to create a business case for you to like convince you to buy this. It's like, I already like, if we're following the pull model, they already want to buy it. They already want to buy it. They might not need that. And so usually what we do if we have a second call is we structure the second call. We show up and we're like, hey, What do you want to do? I can show you more of the product. It's like, no, we don't want to do that. We want to design call to through close to be exactly what needs to have— it's surgical. What needs to happen for you to first decide, like answer any of the questions that are in your head that are kind of like preventing you from buying this. And two, what are the things that need to happen in your organization, whether that's a group demo, whether that's going through procurement or whatever, reviewing an MSA, right? There's a series of things that might need to happen and we just want to do those. And so the structure then from call to, to close is like, first, let's recap again. Here was your demand. Here was the supply. It sounds like this was the list of things that need to happen in order for you to like decide and then go through the purchasing process. Let's confirm that and let's plan out how to do that and let's knock off as many of these as we possibly can while we're together, and then I'll take the rest on after this conversation.

And how, how unique is it customer to customer? Is this something that it converges on a path? And so it's like one of the tips that I've picked up from you was like, this is the typical process that I run with customers. It's like X, X, Y, and then, you know, and then you, they sort of like follow that unless there's a real need. Is that the, the right approach or way, way to think about this?

Yeah, it's, it's like you will converge to a process. It might take 10, might take 20 customers, right? When you really figure out, it's not like, what do you want to do in order to convince them to buy in order to make the deal happen? It's like, what do they almost always need to happen? And okay, let's design the sales process around that. And we can put that up as a template. Say, this is what people in your situation, we have this demand, want this supply, say this could be a fit. They typically need to do these things. Which of these are actually important for you? What are we missing from here and what do you need? And then they don't have to think of it themselves.

You know, and one of the other things that I like in the way that you talk about it, it came to me in the business case is like, you know, your mantra on every screen that you show in your demo reduces the probability by 10% that they're going to buy. It's the business. It's like, Every unnecessary element that you insert into the call to, to close process probably has a similar, a similar law. 'Cause it, it's, each one has an opportunity for it to get more confusing, less relevant for you to, you know, misunderstand their situation. So it's just simplify it. It, you'll, it'll make your life easier actually as a founder seller.

And it just takes their time up too, right? Like it just, it just, every additional thing you do that's unnecessary takes finite time that they have. And so, you know, just do the least amount of things that it takes.

Totally. Um, let's talk, uh, real quick about onboarding and then we're gonna run up against time on onboarding and customer success. Uh, the, maybe starting with the push approach.

Yeah. I mean, the push, push approach to onboarding and customer success just says, okay, cool. Success to me is that you are using my product. And so what am I gonna do? I'm gonna just schedule a ton of onboarding sessions, a ton of check-in sessions, and I'm not entirely sure, like usually when you're doing the push approach, you actually don't know why they're buying. You don't know what they're trying to achieve. You know what their pain points and maybe problems are, but that's not what they're trying to achieve. And so you'll wind up just having a bunch of calls with them, onboarding them, trying to get them to use it and being confused when they don't, which is a lot of work for you. A lot of work for them usually leads to a lot of weird feature requests, which crushes everybody. And so, um, With the pull approach, what you're, what you're, you have in your mind, okay, you're trying to accomplish this project. You bought this because you're trying to accomplish this project and here's where it fits. My job is to help you accomplish this project, get this done. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to design our onboarding process to help you get there as quickly as possible, such that, and I believe that if I can help you get there. You would be weird to churn. Then you kind of like design it that way. We could go into a lot more detail, but we're running up on time here. Um, but basically you're, you're designing the onboarding process based on the moment when they in their minds say, okay, I would be weird to churn now. When they buy, by default, they're going to churn. There's a moment when that flips and that's no longer the case. And we're designing for that, for each customer to hit that moment.

Yeah. Yeah. And I, I think that might, I think pragmatically a lot of the people listening to this are probably focused on like, if you nail the first couple, then you can turn your attention to like customer, customer success. Um, so maybe for this one, having the focus be on the, you know, pipeline, call 1, call 2 to close, then we can revisit, uh, customer success at some point down the line. Um, final, final thoughts, Rob, on, uh, on like pragmatic things that founders should be doing after listening to this to kind of diagnose or to, to make improvements. Yeah.

So, okay. So this was to lay out how pull works all the way through a sales process, all the way through the customer experience and how to design around pull. What you want to be doing is you want to be observing how you feel and behave throughout all of your conversations and notice the points at which you feel like you're pushing, or when you feel like you're on one side of the table, they're on the other side of the table, and you're kind of like trying to twist their arms. That is a signal that you are operating under the push mode. You are operating in push mode and it's like, okay, At that point, I need to like, I'm going to place a flag there. I'm going to come back and watch that and think about why did I feel like in that moment I felt the need to push? That's a design problem with how I'm approaching the kind of like customer, customer journey here. And so that either means I need, that means I need to change something. Maybe it's I'm targeting the wrong people, people who don't have pull. Maybe it's like I got defensive instead of being curious when they were asking questions. Maybe it's like, it could be a variety of different things, but it's a signal that you will find in basically all of your sales calls. And, and it's, you know, look at it, even if they seem like nice sales calls, look for that, plant the flag there. And from just the, like, you can basically derive this entire end-to-end process just from the principle of deals happen because buyers have things on their to-do lists. So you can derive every single tactic from that principle. So just say, okay, if it's true that they're trying to accomplish something on their to-do list, how, like, and, and I'm not trying to convince them of anything, like, how would I approach this, this specific instance?

I love that just as a spirit to flow through your, your approach to working with customers. Uh, We've got a couple mailbags. I don't think we have time for it. Ariel, we will get to it, I promise. And Cody Duvall, both, I will carry these forward into the next episode. They're noted there. We're just running up against time. Rob, any final thoughts or?

No, no, no, no. Just, it's time to get under the barbell, man.

Totally agree. Totally agree. All right. Well, we'll catch you next week. The link, the link will be in the description. This blog post is called The Physics of Sales Part 2. Recommend pulling it up. Rob kind of breaks it down for nice refreshers that you can follow along for each of the, each of the steps of the sales process or the customer, customer journey. And otherwise, until next time.