Feel anxiety about sales calls? Dread? Or find that you’re on a sales “emotional roller coaster” talking with customers

(if so, we’ve all been there)

Today we’re digging into the mindset behind feeling comfortable - even excited - about sales calls. And how to use customer demand and the formula from the PULL framework to make sales calls something you don’t dread.

This post: “The Zen of sales”

Post: The Demand Lens

PMF Camp / Group Cohort info: LINK

Links

• Rob's Substack: The Physics of Startups
• AI Rob waitlist: https://robsnyder.org/ai-rob
• Work with Rob 1:1: https://www.robsnyder.org
• Get The Power of PULL: Amazon (https://amzn.to/48KC1yv), Barnes & Noble: (https://bit.ly/4dyMTSv)
• Connect with Rob on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsnyder1/

If you could only take *one action* that would cause the fastest growth possible for your startup, what would you do?

Cue: The Case Study Factory.

Rob breaks down why this is the mental model the fastest growing startups use to cause their products to blow through all speed limits.

The key is in thinking about your startup as a factor for producing success case studies - and understanding the machines (Pipeline + Sales + Delivery) in your factory and how to optimize them.

Recommend checking out the Substack post: How to grow the fastest

Want Rob to help diagnose your bottleneck? Info here

Links

• Rob's Substack: The Physics of Startups
• AI Rob waitlist: https://robsnyder.org/ai-rob
• Work with Rob 1:1: https://www.robsnyder.org
• Get The Power of PULL: Amazon (https://amzn.to/48KC1yv), Barnes & Noble: (https://bit.ly/4dyMTSv)
• Connect with Rob on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsnyder1/

We're answering your questions in this bonus! These are all taken from comments in YouTube. Leave a comment on an episode or email me: rc@reframeb2b.com.

• What changes about PULL in crowded markets w/ competition?
• Are "Mandatory to buy" and "Weird not to buy" different?
• How has AI changed the outbound / pipeline game?
• What is PULL for Workday if it's not a good user experience? (HR software)
• Does PULL apply to B2C, or just B2B?

Links

• Rob's Substack: The Physics of Startups
• AI Rob waitlist: https://robsnyder.org/ai-rob
• Work with Rob 1:1: https://www.robsnyder.org
• Get The Power of PULL: Amazon (https://amzn.to/48KC1yv), Barnes & Noble: (https://bit.ly/4dyMTSv)
• Connect with Rob on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsnyder1/

This one is for all the analytical founders in our audience.
"Me-search" (the act of analyzing your own experience and projecting onto a group, like in marketing) is a villain in business schools, but Rob argues that it does hold an important insight within your reach:
Understanding how humans are not robots and more deeply grasping what PULL is and "feels like" - which is the driving force behind your startup.

We discuss when an analytical approach vs. "feelings" is appropriate, and how to do the "me-search" exercise in your life to build the instinct of looking for PULL for customers, not rational arguments.

Read the full Substack post: https://thephysicsofstartups.substack.com

Links

• Rob's Substack: The Physics of Startups
• AI Rob waitlist: https://robsnyder.org/ai-rob
• Work with Rob 1:1: https://www.robsnyder.org
• Get The Power of PULL: Amazon (https://amzn.to/48KC1yv), Barnes & Noble: (https://bit.ly/4dyMTSv)
• Connect with Rob on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsnyder1/

There's a frequent question that Rob gets from founders who are developing new technologies - it takes forms like:

• What if I'm creating a new category?
• What if the customer doesn't know they need our product?

Today, we're digging into the concept of "Latent Demand" - what a customer prioritize right now if only there was a way.

The critical concept here is that a customer is leaning against something. In this episode, we'll try to understand what that looks like and implications for founders who suspect they are targeting a "latent demand" in customers.

Blog post: Latent Demand in Rob's substack, The Physics of Startups

Links

• Rob's Substack: The Physics of Startups
• AI Rob waitlist: https://robsnyder.org/ai-rob
• Work with Rob 1:1: https://www.robsnyder.org
• Get The Power of PULL: Amazon (https://amzn.to/48KC1yv), Barnes & Noble: (https://bit.ly/4dyMTSv)
• Connect with Rob on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsnyder1/

There's a bug in a founder's brain (or at least mine) that likes to fantasize about all the benefits for customer (alleviating pain points, delivering value, helping differentiate, ...), while ignoring the more important question:

"Could they *not* buy?"

Rob helps us understand a different standard from what founders have historically used, which is requisite for a startup to find PULL at scale and hit hypergrowth: Is buying mandatory, or is it just optional?

There are some very subtle things that founders do wrong related to this, including:

• Focusing on "happiest / most satisfied / most valuable" customers rather than the ones for whom buying is mandatory
• Thinking probabilistically about customers ("4 in 10 customers with XYZ buy") instead of deterministically ("This very specific customer cannot not buy my product")

Hope this one helps you reframe the way you think about your ICP - because really, it's the most important early decision we founders make.

Rob's ICP AI skill: https://github.com/RSSnyder13/icp

Links

• Rob's Substack: The Physics of Startups
• AI Rob waitlist: https://robsnyder.org/ai-rob
• Work with Rob 1:1: https://www.robsnyder.org
• Get The Power of PULL: Amazon (https://amzn.to/48KC1yv), Barnes & Noble: (https://bit.ly/4dyMTSv)
• Connect with Rob on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsnyder1/

Customer discovery can be very intimidating. What do I ask? How do I build a connection? How do I improvise?

We're digging into how Rob thinks about discovery, common mistakes, and ways that Rob uses to uncover real customer PULL that leads to purchases. For anyone who has waded into the murky waters of untangling what customers say, hopefully this helps to develop your intuition around what you are trying to achieve and how to get there.

Topics covered:

• What we're really trying to do with customer discovery
• How to ask about "all of PULL" in one question, rather than breaking into pieces and wasting time
• The "fallback questions" to have in your hip pocket if early responses are frustratingly vague / not revealing PULL
• The "break glass in case of emergency" option
• How your approach to discover should change after you find PMF

Links

• Rob's Substack: The Physics of Startups
• AI Rob waitlist: https://robsnyder.org/ai-rob
• Work with Rob 1:1: https://www.robsnyder.org
• Get The Power of PULL: Amazon (https://amzn.to/48KC1yv), Barnes & Noble: (https://bit.ly/4dyMTSv)
• Connect with Rob on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsnyder1/

Every founder has a million different things they could be doing, but where should they focus? What will actually move the needle and unlock their business to take off?

In this episode, we get an inside view on how Rob works with a new startup that comes to him. Objective #1: Find the right place to focus. For you to run this same diagnostic on your startup or product, you need a conceptual model of what a startup is (the case study factory), a causal model of why startups take off (PULL) and then a practical approach that identifies where you should focus.

Resources for each spot you might find yourself in:

• Developing a causal model: Because / Despite
• Conceptual model of your startup: The B2B standard
• No idea or customers: Inverting the idea stage (with Cyberstarts)
• Can't get sales calls: Phenomenology of cold outbound
• Multiple different case studies: No more PULL hypotheses
• More push than pull: Are they pulling?
• Getting calls, not converting to sales: Buying is weird and rare
• Converting sales but churn: Retention is the hard part
• Attacking the bottleneck: Strict productivity

Links

• Rob's Substack: The Physics of Startups
• AI Rob waitlist: https://robsnyder.org/ai-rob
• Work with Rob 1:1: https://www.robsnyder.org
• Get The Power of PULL: Amazon (https://amzn.to/48KC1yv), Barnes & Noble: (https://bit.ly/4dyMTSv)
• Connect with Rob on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsnyder1/