Why People Buy: Creating Pull Instead of Pushing with Author Rob Snyder

Totally.

So this is a super common thing that I see in both product and service businesses, which is when you're having a conversation with a potential client.

What are you looking for? What are you listening for? Well, if you just listen to the words they say, they often say a lot of words.

And they will talk about pains.

They'll talk about problems.

They'll talk about desired end states.

They'll talk about all sorts of different things in there.

And so there's another, and we'll talk software still.

We can move to services.

But this example just sticks in my mind, where a startup was talking in a sales call to a potential customer.

The customer was complaining about Salesforce.

They had been using Salesforce forever and they have so clunky.

It was so difficult and they were complaining about it and they just wanted a better way to manage whatever it was that they were managing through Salesforce.

And if you just listen to that, that sounds like problems desired end state.

Okay.

That's what they want.

but they weren't actually listening using the poll framework.

So if you listen to what customers are saying, using the poll framework, what the actual potential customer said was like, that was a bunch of complaints.

There's a classic quote from Bob Mesto, one of my advisors who created Jobs To Be Done, which is, bitchin' ain't switchin'.

Not a nice quote, but it's, people can complain forever and not change.

They can have problems.

They can complain about them and talk about them, but not change.

In this call, they were just complaining about Salesforce.

What they said at the end of a very long complaint was, now that we're trying to raise money from funders, our current reporting isn't cutting it, and so we need better reporting.

But that was a thing that if you don't have this pull framework in your mind, You can hear all of the other stuff that's kind of a distraction and miss the, here's what I'm actually trying to do and why my existing tools aren't good enough.