Rob Snyder on why founders can't sell, the PULL framework, and what academia gets wrong

I don't know if you have any clarifying questions on this.

Yeah, so this unavoidable thing, because sometimes you feel people are going to interview their customers asking like, hey, what are the top three things? But is the top three always unavoidable or how do you make sure that unavoidable is not like their current ranking versus their actual ranking?

Yeah.

Yeah, so it's hard.

So my general thing is like, I don't trust whatever a customer says about the future.

I don't even trust what I say about the future.

And so the kinds of questions that I typically ask are like, does this need to happen right now? Is this your number one thing right now? Or can this wait? And that it's, it's almost like a binary.

It's a, I'm not, I don't care about their top three things.

Like what actually needs to happen right now? And why, why can't you not do that? Why can't you just delay that kind of thing? And so it's, it's way more about like, uh, I think one of the default assumptions we come in with is like when we hear, oh, it's a top priority for me.

It's like, great check box.

But, um, but I, I tend to take the other of like being way more skeptical of like, okay,

but prove it to me.

Why is that checkbox so risky? Because it resonates with me.

But what is the risk of assuming, oh, we got it and we can tally it in our Excel sheet or our canvas? Why is that so risky?

Well, it's risky because I can tell you, oh, wow, X is really important to me right now.

It's a super important priority.

And you can ask, well, why now? And you say, well, it's very important.

I can just give you a bunch of reasons why the thing is important to me.

But also, those things can be true and I can do nothing about it.

I

just came off a sales call trying to sell my mentoring services and we were talking about this particular founder.

They completely lacked a go-to-market strategy, like the sense of direction and also a structure to systematically do it.

So I felt like, hmm, that sounds pretty important to running a business, right? Yeah.

In the end, I wasn't able to close it.

It was very clear to me that he was postponing.