The Physics of Buying: Mastering the "Pull" Framework with Rob Snyder

Speaker A: Welcome to the Revenue Science podcast. I'm Rich Smith, cmo, founder, investor, and your host. Here we translate marketing and sales complexity into boardroom clarity for CEOs and founders building predictable growth systems. I'm really excited about today's guest. Uh, his name is Rob Snyder. He's the founder of Restack and a fellow at Harvard Innovation Labs. Rob is also the author of an upcoming book. The Challenge is one of the most fundamental, fundamental assumptions in business. Why people actually buy. In the Power of Pull. He argues that most of what we've been taught about demand, sales and growth is backwards. Instead of pushing products into the market, the companies that win are the ones that find real demand, where customers are already trying to solve something urgent and they pull the solution out of your hands. If you follow my work, you know, I'm focused on how systems and behavior drive predictable growth. Rob takes that a step further, introducing what he calls the physics of buying and why understanding demand is the only thing that actually matters. So today we're going deep into push versus pull, why traditional sales thinking fails, and how to build a system where customers don't need to be convinced they're already ready. Before we dive in. A word from our sponsor, American Solutions for Business. Full disclosure, I've used American Solutions for Business at two companies where I was cmo. They did outstanding work every time, and their pricing was the most competitive I've found anywhere. They're a top 10 national distributor of print promotional products and branded merchandise. And unlike most vendors, they actually manage your brand as a program, not just a purchase order. Visit americanbus.com rich to receive your free, private labeled online ordering site. That's American Bus.com rich again. Americanbus.com rich hey, Rob. Welcome to Revenue Science.

Speaker B: Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's great to have you here. I'm really looking forward to the conversation today. Uh, I think a lot of what you talk and write about is, uh, near and dear to my heart, so I think we're going to have a lot of fun with this one.

Speaker B: I feel like the student talking to the master after seeing all your work. So I'm excited to hear.

Speaker A: Not sure about that. We're going to treat you as the master on this show. Um, so you often argue that most traditional thinking about why people buy is backwards. What specifically are we all getting wrong?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good one. We typically think that we cause people to buy. So I as a founder, I as a seller, I as a company building a product, we think we and our product convinced A buyer to buy. And so I did that as a founder. I thought if I just, you know, find some sort of pain points they have, then build a really cool product, I can convince them to buy because they have a pain point. And, um, because I have a very cool product, it turns out that, like, I, I can't convince anybody of anything. And instead they buy. Like the thing that causes them to buy is they are trying to accomplish something in their world.

Speaker A: Yeah, 100% agree with that. Um, and I'm sure we'll get a little deeper into that later because that really underpins a lot of, uh, you know, what I talk to companies about as well. Um, you make the claim that demand is all you need. What exactly do you mean by that?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good question. This is a deep one. Um, so demand is basically what I was just talking about. Someone trying to accomplish something in their life, that if they are trying to accomplish something, they will buy something that helps them accomplish that. And, um, that thing, the. Whatever they're a person trying to accomplish something is demand. If you don't have that, then you are just pushing a product onto people who don't care. They might say nice words, they, they might like it. You know, it's really frustrating when you do that because they often like, wow, that's a great product. Oh, I could see how that'd be valuable. And then they don't buy it. And so demand is all you need, because without demand, you have nothing.

Speaker A: Yeah. And why is, um, defining demand as willingness to pay a flawed concept?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we typically, when we think of demand, we either think of demand as wanting a product or willingness to pay for a product. Now that sounds right in an economics class. Um, but it's totally not actionable, especially. And you especially feel this when you're at a startup building a product that people haven't seen before. It's like, how could people want a product that they've never seen before? How could they be willing to pay for a product that you've never. So that's, there's like a circularity there where it's like, well, if the product doesn't exist, how would they know if they want it? How would they know if they were willing to pay for it? And so demand can't be that. Uh, it can, it can cause that to happen. It can cause people to be willing to pay for something, but it has to be something else. It has to exist out there in, in the, the buyer's world. And so it, it, what I'VE found is it's basically them trying to accomplish something, but they blocked because their existing options, existing tools, products or whatever aren't good enough. If they are blocked, then they become willing to pay for something that will unblock them. But they are. They were unblocked before a product existed.

Speaker A: Yeah, you know, um, there's a famous quote, I think it's attributed to Henry Ford. Something to the effect of, well, uh, if I asked customers what they want, they would tell me a faster horse and not a car. And I think some people misread that as well. You don't really need to do research, which I'm not suggesting is the case. Uh, but I think the kernel of truth there is understanding what the real demand is. What is the burning need that they're looking to solve. And you may have a product that they never heard of before, but if it's great at solving that burning need, um, you're probably going to get traction in the marketplace. You know, you often compare demand to gravity. So, like, what are the physics of why people buy?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's, uh, a really good question. So we often think that people buy because, again, they have pain points or they have problems, but there are basically infinite problems or pain points that we have. You could consider life as a series of pain points that we don't do much about, most of them. And so when we're thinking about what causes somebody to buy something, what are the physics of a purchase? It is, you know, I, right now, in this moment, am trying to take action. I'm trying to take some. I'm trying to do something, I'm trying to accomplish something. But the things that I've looked into, uh, or my existing tools, my existing solutions are not good enough. So I can't accomplish that thing. That's the only situation in which somebody will buy something. If otherwise, you would have to basically believe that they're going to say, oh, uh, you know what, let me do this. I'm going to drop all of my priorities right now to buy your product. Or they'd say something ridiculous like, oh, you know what? I do have a relevant priority and my existing options are totally good enough. But you know what, I'll buy your product anyway. Right. Those things are just never going to be said. And so when you go to that, it's like, okay, they have to be trying to accomplish something and blocked. That's what makes a product relevant. That's. And if, if you offer something that unblocks, um, them, they will rip it out of your hands. Every other time you'll try to push it into their hands and they're just going to step away.

Speaker A: So. So, uh, understanding that, why do buyers ignore things that would actually benefit them?

Speaker B: Oh, that's such a good question. So there are so many things that would benefit me right now. So let, let's. I have a slow printer in my house is. It prints exceptionally slow. I would totally benefit from a faster printer, but I don't care. Right. There's, uh, infinite things like that. There are so many different, like high ROI activities that I could be doing for my business that I'm not prioritizing. They, they just. Yes, I realize I can make money in a bunch of different ways. There's a lot of different kinds of value, but it's not, it's about what am I prioritizing. Yes, that usually has some element of ROI or value attached to it, but it's not just like, you know, oh, I hear about some valuable opportunity and I drop everything I'm doing to go after that. Like, that's a, that's crazy talk.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, you know, one, one of the mistakes that we often make is, uh, you know, thinking that people are rational and they really are not. Uh, you know, I was, my, my undergrad degree was in economics, so I've been like, trained in classical economics. And, you know, you have the rational actor theory and you come to find out that that's really bunk. Right? Uh, the whole field of behavioral economics is less than 20 years old. But, uh, it explains a lot of that. You know, we tend to, uh, make decisions based on emotion and then rationalize them later.

Speaker B: And I'd add to that that a lot of the things that we should rationally want to do, we actively avoid doing too. So I tell a story in the book about this startup that came to me and they're selling this tool for security engineers and software companies that would help the security engineers find more security vulnerabilities in the startup's product, in their technology product. Like it finds 10x more. It's this amazing magical tool. And every security engineer they talked to was like, no, I don't want that at all. And then one of them was like, uh, finally told, said, uh, after saying, yeah, no, I do not want this. Explain. Yeah, if I show up and say, hey, I just found 10x more security vulnerabilities, I'm going to be asked what the heck have I been doing for the past two years in my job? And also my bonus is based on the number of security vulnerabilities going in the opposite direction. So. Right. Like if you look outside and say, what should this person rationally want? Well, yeah, in theory that person should want something that finds more vulnerabilities. In practice they want the opposite of that. Right.

Speaker A: Yeah. It's about the work and what it exposes. And you know, it's often a minefield, um, particularly in the B2B space. In thinking through how you uh, how do you approach a B2B buyer in a way that allows them to tell you what they really are looking for? You know, you talk a lot about, um, push versus pull. So what define that for us. What's the difference between the two?

Speaker B: Yeah, so there's I, I think a lot about sales because if we think about why people buy things backwards. Right. We think we cause people to buy. Well, you're going to approach sales in a way that is you pushing your product at people. You're poking at their pain points. You're describing this really, really big and game changing and magical product and then you're scratching your head when they are, uh, they're nodding along and then they don't buy. And so that's a, the push kind of approach to sales is I am, I'm on this side of the table, I'm going to convince you on that side of the table to buy my product. Sometimes people buy in that scenario. Often if they don't actually have pull, they aren't successful after they've bought because they know there's uh, there's not something they're actively prioritized. They, they purchased, but they really didn't either. They, they buy but they weren't sold. And so they're not successful post sale or they buy but not for the reason you think they bought. And so in the pull world, when you listen to a sales call, when you listen to a potential customer talking about, you know, they show up and you say, hey, why, why did you take this call? They usually have a fairly long monologue at that point that covers a variety of things. It covers what's going on at their company, maybe their cat's name, like a variety of things. Uh, but in that monologue they often describe what are they trying to accomplish, what options have they looked into and why are those options not good, good enough. And so in the poll world, what you do is you listen for uh, that and you just describe that back to them. So it sounds like you're trying to accomplish this. You've looked into these options. They're not good enough. So it sounds like what you're looking for looks kind of like this. And the sales call feels a lot less like you're pushing, you're persuading, you're convincing, but it feels a lot more like you're sitting on the same side of the table helping them get unblocked.

Speaker A: Yeah, um, I'm completely on board with that. And I often coach companies in a similar way. I use a slightly different terms, but you know, what I'd say is don't be a pusher, be a helper. Right. You got to go into a sales conversation as if this is a way to explore whether we have anything for you and frankly, whether you're a good customer for us. And as a salesperson, you're actually, you're actually interviewing your prospective buyer as well. Particularly in a B2B environment, you're interviewing them as well. Because if there isn't a real, if there's no pull there from the potential client, chances are good you're going to waste a lot of time. You're going to get happy ears because they're going to tell you things that they think you want to hear. You're going to string it along that that account is gonna stay in your pipeline for a long time and go nowhere, and you're just gonna waste a lot of time on it. But if you instead go into it as, hey, let's work together to see whether there's a good business opportunity for both of us here, that tends to be way more effective and it's a

Speaker B: lot less stressful too. That's it for the self. Like, you don't feel like you're trying to convince someone you're not worried about following up. And you don't take rejections personally either. I, you know, I come from the kind of tech founder background. And so whenever somebody says no to a early stage tech founder, we often take it as they don't like us or our product idea is stupid and it's neat. It's probably neither of those. It's. I'm not trying to accomplish anything relevant right now. And so it's just a lot less stress to approach it this way and it's way more effective. Yeah.

Speaker A: So why do companies resort to. Or they default to push?

Speaker B: Uh, I'd be curious your perspective on this. My sense is that there isn't really a kind of physics of business.

Speaker A: Like

Speaker B: we think that the way business works is we build a product and then we sell it. And that makes sense. Uh, but that's like the push model. That's how That's. We think that's just how business works. And so in order to sell things, you have to go and convince people to buy them. Right. And so that there's just this, like, mental model that we all have that needs to change. But it's kind of. It's just this default way of thinking about business that is kind of the water we all swim in.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's also, um, you know, there's the myth of the rock star salesperson, Uh, I think gets in a way a lot as well. And I'm not saying that there aren't rockstar salespeople out there. Like, hey, I'm a marketing guy, so the salespeople out there are gonna say, okay, marketing's talking bad about sales again. But I don't really mean that. Um, what I mean is that, like, if. If it takes a rock star salesperson to sell your product, you're probably going about it the wrong way. It really shouldn't be. It's not that it's easy, but it really shouldn't take someone who, you know, if. If they're personable and good at almost, uh, like being a problem solver. It goes back to what we said before. Being a helper, you got a vision that you are trying to help your client and your company get to a good solution together or not. And if it's not, we want to figure that out fast and move on to the next.

Speaker B: Totally. And like, there as. As you said, there are some amazing salespeople, and I, you know, we both watched them operate, and they are. They are way better than average. But they're doing what we're talking about. Right. They are not. They're not just conjuring deals out of nowhere. They are figuring out, uh, they're probably a little bit better than everybody else or a lot better than everybody else at, uh, first figuring out what exactly this person in front of them is trying to accomplish. What is a win for them and how do they make, you know, how do they offer something that fits?

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. So, um, so. So you, uh, have something called the pull framework. Can you break that down for us? What. What is the pull framework?

Speaker B: Yeah, so the pull framework is. Is roughly what we've been talking about thus far about someone trying to accomplish something but blocked. I've turned that into a framework, kind of like a fill in the blank kind of exercise that says that basically everybody would be insane to buy your product unless four things are true. Thing 1p. They have a project on their to do list. Think of they're trying to accomplish something. I'm trying to stop taking notes manually for my uh, uh, client meetings. For example, U is the second urgent or unavoidable. This is my number one priority right now because blank some for some reason, right? So it's I'm trying to accomplish something right now. The first L is I have a list of options that I've considered or tried or used or paid for in the past, right? So taking notes manually, using a generic AI note taker, hiring a person, right? There could are all kinds of options. But critically fourth L limitations of those options. Those options are not good enough. They are blocking me or I'm coping with them. They're not good enough for some reason. And so if those four characteristics are true, they would be weird not to buy something. Everybody else would be weird to buy something from you. And so uh, it's a really useful framework for basically everything for defining your icp. It's a discovery framework you can use in sales calls. Uh, and it's just I've found it to be massively helpful.

Speaker A: Yeah, I really like the way you broke that down and I think that's a great framework and a great um, process to think through. Um, how do you like. Sometimes there are bad options, right? Existing options that are not good. What role do they play?

Speaker B: Well that's a huge role. So if they're a really, really good um, thing to do is if you find people who are using an existing option that is a bad option and they are just struggling against it or they can't use an existing option, they're often struggling against that option. So an example is a uh, friend's company. It's a company called Jump. They are as I was kind of like alluding to earlier, they're an AI note taker, but they're an AI note taker specifically for financial advisors. Now financial advisors were trying to use generic AI note takers like ones that you or I would use. But those AI note takers had two things that prevented financial advisors from using them or using them. Well the first thing was and uh, it made, made their option them be bad options. First was that they didn't integrate with the financial advisors CRMs, so they couldn't put notes in the CRM where they needed to be. The second was it wasn't clear that they were compliant with the SEC requirements, which is probably a bigger challenge. And so when Jump comes around and says, oh, we're an AI notetaker specifically for financial advisors and has guess the two features we have. We integrate with your CRM and we're SEC compliant. Okay. These people had been struggling against their existing note takers. They couldn't use it or they were kind of like it wasn't. They were using it, but weren't sure. They were anxious about it. They ripped the product out of Jump's hands.

Speaker A: Yeah. It is remarkable how powerful being really clear on who and what you're for, uh, can improve your results. I mean, we're all looking for specialists. Ah. Not generalists. Right. If you have a knee problem and you need knee replacement surgery, you're a younger guy than me, so you're probably a ways away from that. Uh, I might be a little bit closer, but, uh, if you need knee surgery, you're not just going to open up the go on Google and Google orthopedic surgeon in your area. No. You're going to start talking to people. You're going to find, find out who's the best knee person. You're not going to go to someone who does knees and shoulders and elbows and feet and ankles. Right. You want to go to the person who does knee surgery every single day and does several of them. Right. So we're all looking for specialists, not generalists. And I think that's a big mistake that a lot of organizations make is they try to be too many things to too many different people or too many different categories instead of. I love the example that you just gave. You know, they dialed in on a specific universe. Financial advisors that have some very specific needs. It's a group that I know well as I've worked with a lot of them over the years, and they solved, you know, uh, uh, a really big problem for them. But they were very specific on who they're for.

Speaker B: Uh, exactly. Yeah. And you're, you're. And to your case too, right. You're not just going to go out there and search for person with saw. Right. Like, that's how we tend on the other side to pitch things is what is the biggest possible market I can target and what's the biggest possible way I could describe my product? What's the most ambitious way I could describe my product? And what that often does is that sounds really impressive. It allows you to raise a lot of money and like, win entrepreneurship pitch competitions. But what it doesn't do, nobody looks at that and says, oh, that's exactly what I want. Right. That, that exact. That fits me. That speaks exactly to my need. And so what I've found is we often kind of like skip the hard Truth that in order to sell to a million customers, you have to sell to them one at a time. Each one has to choose to buy. You never sell to the group of a million customers.

Speaker A: Yeah, right. They're all lots and lots of independent decisions. You know, um, I may get this, I may pronounce this wrong, but you talk about the idea of. I'm just going to say it. Larping. I don't know if you larping or do you say L A, R, P I N G. Um, can you tell us like what, what is that idea? What does it look like?

Speaker B: Yeah, I could tell by that question, by the way that you were way cooler than I was growing up. Because larping is this super nerdy thing where um, uh, if, if you're unfamiliar, larping is a activity pastime where like kids and grown adults go into the woods and pretend to stage like medieval battles. So it's a, it's a, it's a. Again, I have nothing against the activity. Uh, I don't do it, I'll tell you that. I do not do it. Um, but I have nothing against the activity. Startups and often a lot of companies often spend a lot of their time larping in the business context without realizing it. By which I mean we do a lot of business shaped things that get no results that keep us looking busy. And so an example of that in startups that I see very often is that we work on our brand, we work on our pitch deck, we work on our, you know, we go to pitch competitions, we do all these kinds of things before we have customers. And so all of that activity is all the stuff that it, that from the outside looks like things a business person does but doesn't actually cause the business to work. And so you just wind up doing a bunch of work, spend a ton of time. You can work, you can work 80 hour weeks making literally no progress and in fact tiring yourself out and avoiding making progress.

Speaker A: Yeah, it is amazing. Um, you know, how easily, you know, we can deceive ourselves by feeling like action is progress and action is not necessary. It can be, but it's not necessarily progress.

Speaker B: 100%. 100. The uh, you know, if you, if you watch, I don't know if you watch how Elon like approaches his companies. He's always focused on the limiting factor. And it's. There is one thing in the business that is preventing the business from working, that, that is blocking the growth of the business. That's blocking the system from, from, from producing more Output and he just attacks that limiting factor time and time again. And it's a very focused exercise that he just repeats and repeats and repeats. When you're larping, you're like the limiting factor is somewhere else and you're, you're in a different room playing with blocks. Like it's, it is just an absolute waste of energy and activity. And uh, unfortunately a lot of what we're taught about startups causes us to larp. That's what I'm against. That's what I, I like focus my teaching on. A lot of the things that we are told that we need to be doing are like the exact opposite of what makes progress.

Speaker A: Yeah, I really love that term larping. I may steal that one from you. I mean, I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons growing up. I didn't do medieval reenactments. But, uh, it's a great concept. Um, and I think another place that this shows up is particularly with founders. Uh, people that founded a company is they have this great product or service idea that they really believe in and it becomes their baby and they end up spending all of their time on product and very little of their time on distribution. And so because product is what they love, products what comfortable to them, product's what they know best. Um, but they're not really working on. All right, well, how are we bringing that product to market? How are we helping to create pull? Right. How are we going to tap into demand that already exists?

Speaker B: Yeah, I've, uh, first of all, I've done that. It is terrible and it is again a symptom of that, the wrong physics in our minds. It's, I believe that I can create an awesome product that will cause people to want it. And we all think that. Okay, but, but my idea is so good, people will want it. I actually, my recommendation is actually for startups to prove that people want something by having them buy it before it exists and only then starting to build it.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, that's what Sears did, right? With the first Sears catalog, he advertised products that he thought were a good idea. He didn't even actually have them. And if he got enough orders, he figured out how to make the product or turned their money and said that, hey, we just can't provide it at this point. So why do companies focus on things that don't actually drive revenue?

Speaker B: Um, uh, so, okay, uh, let's, let's assume that everyone is smart in the company and well intentioned. Why do we focus on things that don't drive revenue? It's we actually don't know. We don't have a system model in our head of how a business works and what causes a customer to buy and what are the things that we do that cause revenue to come out of it. Like in my head I have this model of, I think of the, I think of a business as a case study factory. And the factory has three steps to it. Pipeline step, how do we get people to talk to us. Sales step, how do we turn potential customers into actual customers. And the delivery step, how do we turn actual customers into people who renew or buy more or refer others or whatever successes after they've bought? If you have that factory model in your head, then the question is how effective is the factory and where is the factory's bottleneck and what do we do about that? And it's just such a simple model. But I don't think we actually have that model like most of us have that model in our head. We have, you know, oh, uh, marketing does a bunch of different activities. There's a funnel somewhere. There's a, you know, there's, you know, there's a sales process that's something different. And all of this is kind of complicated. And so I'm just going to push on things or we're going to, we're going to hire people and you know, they, it sounds like we need a product marketer. I'm not entirely sure why. I just think we lack that kind of causal model in our head of how a business actually works and how a factory, like when you have the factory model, you can figure out, okay, what's the factory's constraint, where are their defects, how do we push more volume through the factory, like what's, what's going on there? And it becomes a lot more intuitive.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's a really effective framework, um, for thinking about aligning sales and marketing as well too is it's not a, hey, oh, we get an MQL and we throw it over the wall and now sales is going to deal with it. It doesn't work like that. Right. And in fact, I don't really even like the terms MQL and SQL. Um, you know, sales's job is to work the traffic that's coming in.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Marketing's job is to make that traffic get there and then nurture it along, along the way. Um, I'm curious. So I often talk about, particularly when I'm talking to startups and they're asking me, well, where do we go to get started to begin to distribute Our product. I often think of the buyer continuum, and I'm just going to throw this at you and let you react to it. Um, so, you know, you start out over here on this side, which is your target customer doesn't even know you exist. They don't know that they have the problem that you're trying to solve. They're not even aware of it, all the way down to the exact opposite end. And in some ways I can think of this as like the pull continuum. Right. So this is low poll, high pull is down here on this other end, where people are, they know they have the problem. It's an urgent need, as you described, and they've got their credit card or their checkbook in hand ready to buy a solution from somebody.

Speaker B: Yeah. And my assumption is when you talk to startups, you say, hey, the people on that one end, the low pull end, don't talk to them, don't focus on them at all. Find everybody on the high end of pull and just focus there. And then once you're at a couple million in revenue and have kind of focused on that, see what happens. Maybe move to the next run.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. No, startups need to start over here where the, like the point of maximum pull. Yes, Right. Uh, and then as they begin to scale, they can move like further up the funnel and attack other points of that buyer's continuum until they get to the point where they're Apple or Coca Cola or Pepsi and they can advertise on the super bowl and Formula One and, you know, all those fun places. But startups don't, shouldn't be over here. That's a recipe for wasting a lot of marketing dollars and actually running out of cash. Right. And your company failing. You really need. Got to start over here where you get the maximum leverage for every dollar that you spend.

Speaker B: And then that again comes back to this theory of causality in a founder's brain, which is the number one question I get is, well, what if they don't know they have this problem yet? What if they, they've never seen this solution?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Which I just make the sign of the cross because it's, you know, we're about to bury a startup, uh, when they, when they think that way, they think that, oh, you know, I have to evangelize this thing because this thing is new. And that's not how startups work. Startups work, they eventually maybe evangelize things when they're on hundreds of millions in revenue and have a budget that can afford to tell, uh, like tell the World about stuff. But you find people who were convinced before you show up, they rip the product out of your hands and you just repeat that as many times as humanly possible. Otherwise you play on hard. Hard mode is even an understatement there. I'm sure you've seen that before. People trying to attack the kind of problem unaware kind of people. It's just like, it's, it's terrible. It, uh, doesn't work.

Speaker A: Yeah. So, like, given all that, how should a sales call be structured under your pull framework?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's super simple. My sense is that there are basically two parts of a sales call. There is the demand part of a sales call and there is the supply part of the sales call. The demand part of a sales call is we're trying to fill out that pull framework from earlier and we fill it out with the potential customer. So you ask my favorite question, which is, why are you on this call with me today? Um, and they usually give you a lot in the pull framework straight from that, it's say, oh, well, yeah, it's crazy you reached out at this particular time. We were actually just looking into AI note takers. We're worried that they wouldn't be compliant. Okay, cool. I've basically filled out the pull framework there. But you can, if you, if you know, if you have anything missing, that's where kind of discovery questions come in. It's to fill out the rest of the pull framework. You say, oh, okay. What were you trying to accomplish by looking into A.I. ah, note takers? What were you trying to. What was the impact you were trying to make in your business? You're filling out the P in poll, then you fill out the U in pull by saying, okay, and then why this versus all the other things you could prioritize right now? Like what brought this to the top of your priority list? Okay, cool. Then I have a full pull framework. Once I have a full pull framework, I know what they're trying to accomplish. I know why it's not urgent now. I know why their other options were not good enough. Then we jump to the supply side of the conversation where I say, cool, well, we offer an AI note taker for financial advisors that has two features. This and this. Is that what you're looking for? And then see what happens after that? Usually, yeah, that's exactly what I'm looking for. Great. Then we've moved to great. How do we help you buy?

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm glad you really got to that last question because that's what I was going to bring up, uh, when you were talking about that, I think that the, you know, from a, um, pull, if you will, perspective, it doesn't end right when someone says, okay, great, send me a contract. Right. Particularly again, in the B2B world, it's often a lot more complicated for your buyer than that. So, you know, asking them, hey, how does a company like yours typically buy? How does a company like yours typically process contracts? Right. This is going to require a legal review. Is this going to require, uh, it, you know, information, security review and then help your buyer with those things because you've probably been through it before with other buyers so you can actually help them. And a lot of that factory mentality that you were talking about before, to me, you know, what I think of is removing friction from every step of the process. And that I think is the key to long term business success, is thinking through how am I making it easier for my customer to buy at every stage. From your initial, the first hit on your website to contract coming up for renewal, how are you making it easy for them to buy?

Speaker B: I love that. I love that a hundred percent agree too. What I've seen. So working with a startup, uh, out of Europe that's selling into insurance. So talk about not easy to buy. Yeah, sell AI into insurance brokerages that are large. That's a fun one. And so they basically have to do 4,000 demos. They have to do, you know, they have to make an offering of a goat to the legal and IT teams and they just have to do a ton of different things. And so what we've found is we've been developing our kind of typical project plan that people in insurance brokerages typically need to go through these kinds of steps in order to buy. You need a business case, you need da, da, da, da, uh, da. And then instead of the potential customer having to think through, oh, here's all the steps. We provide a template that they can build off of and uh, it reduces, again, it's all about reducing the amount of cognitive and real world work that they have to do in order to buy. And they say, oh yeah, I want to do one for us. We need 1, 2 and 4 on this list. Great. Here's all the resources we need. Why don't we get these meetings scheduled?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's about lowering the cost, you know, and when I say cost, I don't mean in terms of price. I think that's something that many, um, you know, many people don't fully appreciate is the cost of your product is not the price of your product. The cost of your product is the price plus what it takes for them to make a buy. Like the cognitive pain that they have to go through to make a buying decision. Uh, in a B2B world, oftentimes there's political capital that needs to be expended by your champion in order to call in favors from legal and it to get the contract reviewed and moved through the process. When you think about how do you explain the value of what you do, you really have to take into account all of those costs. And with a lot of what we've been talking about today, it's about reducing that cost to buy down to, uh, a point where it works for your potential buyer.

Speaker B: Totally. And I would add on to that in the push mindset, you actually increase the cost to buy for people, especially with how you describe. And if you're demoing, like demo your product because in a push world, you want to make your product seem bigger. But what does that do? That, that creates more cost, it creates more cognitive load. Every additional screen they see, every additional feature they hear about, they have to process and think about how it fits and wow, this seems bigger and wow, maybe we need to include this other team in it. And all of that is increasing cognitive load, uh, increasing cost. And so you don't even get to the steps where you make it easy for them to buy because they, they have to go back and think and they're not going to do that.

Speaker A: Right. So what does a repeatable success story look like? And why does it matter?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we've talked about pull. We've talked about the kind of case study factory that I talked about before. And so the repeatable success story, repeatable case study is basically what are you selling? Who are you selling it to? I think of it as basically a startup is just one repeatable case study that you're repeating a bunch of times through your factory. It's a really interesting way to simplify all the concepts of business into just those two things, case study and factory. And so a repeatable case study says we serve this kind of person who is trying to accomplish X but is blocked from their existing options because of Y. We offer them Z, which gets, um, them these results. That's just, that's a case study. You can see it if it's on someone's website. All the startup does is repeats that one case study a million times over. And yeah, maybe eventually you add a second case study, but ideally you don't. Ideally you can just repeat the same one a million Times over and over again.

Speaker A: Yeah. And why do you think people are hesitant to do that? Because it's something. I have a theory on this, but, uh, I run into it a lot where, uh, you know, whether it's like messaging or um, like segmentation, market targeting, you know, people tend to not want to stick to it and they want to make changes. Why do you think that is?

Speaker B: So my sense is that choosing the hard part is not choosing a, uh, case study. It's saying no to all the other ones that could possibly work better and could possibly be a bigger TAM and could possibly. And, and so it's a, it's, it's emotionally hard, it's kind of intellectually difficult, but it's way more emotionally difficult. What do you think?

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think that's very true. Um, and there's a great Steve Jobs quote, or it's attributed to him, that innovation is saying no to a thousand things. And I absolutely believe, um, that I think another one, frankly, is just plain old boredom. Right. Like you, you know, you as your organization, you hear your messaging, you hear your pitches over and over and over and over again. And you tend to think that, well, you know, aren't we just boring our audience as we're saying the same thing over and over again? And what you're not realizing is that they're not really paying attention to you. You're not the most important thing in their world. And you may say something 20 times, they may hear it once.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Mm. Right. So that kind of like market consistency and repetition is really important. And it's typically right around the time when it starts to work that the marketing department gets bored of it and wants to do something else.

Speaker B: That's amazing. That is amazing. I love that. And I think that's like, the goal should be you're bored with the message, which means you figured out all of the pieces of it and it's working. Like that's the goal. The sales process should be boring.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Sales reps should be making a ton of money. Right. Like that's.

Speaker A: Yeah. You get to the point where the sales is boring, the message is boring. You probably have a formula that's working.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's the aspiration. And the key thing is it doesn't matter if it's boring to you. If your potential customer hears it and it fits exactly what they need and they say, papa, that's exactly what I've been looking for. And wow, this sales process is exactly what I was expecting. And this Product is exactly what I was expecting and this is great. And I'm not going to churn then what else do you need? Yeah, I agree.

Speaker A: So if a CEO finds or, um, kind of diagnoses within their organization that they're pushing instead of pulling, what should they do first to. To correct that?

Speaker B: My recommended place to start looking is watch your recorded sales calls. That is often where the biggest culprit is found, which is the potential customer comes into a sales call and explains what's going on in their world, why they took the call, what they're trying to accomplish. And then everything goes off the rails because you are pitching a product, you pull up a deck that's totally unrelated. It's trying to evangelize some random problem and uh, and a platform approach to whatever. Whatever. Right. And you see it go off the rails there. That's the starting point. And then you start asking yourself questions of, wait a second. If this is why people are buying, if this is when people are buying, if this is what they're trying to accomplish, what the heck are we doing on the product side? The heck are we marketing? What, what, what are we doing here? And you start to see how every, how your business is larping because you're doing a bunch of unrelated things to what your customers are trying to accomplish when they come to you.

Speaker A: Yeah, very, very, very well said. So, um, hey Rob, this has been a great conversation. I think you and I could probably keep going for another two hours, but, uh, I want to be respectful of your time. So how can people get in touch with you, find out more about what you do and connect with you if they have a follow up?

Speaker B: Yeah, so my book comes out in July of 2026, so depending on when you're listening to this, uh, it's either out or will be out. You can pre order it on Amazon or order it on Amazon. Um, I'm on LinkedIn and I write a lot there so you can add me and uh, and see what I have to say, then completely block me. Um, and then, uh, I actually have a newsletter, the Physics of Startups that is on substack, so you can check that out.

Speaker A: All right, fantastic. And we'll put all, all of that into the show notes to make it easy for audience to find you. Hey Rob, thanks again. I really appreciate, uh, you coming on today and I think we've had a great conversation. I think it's going to be really valuable to uh, to our audience. So appreciate that.

Speaker B: Thanks. And keep up the, keep up the good fight. Rich.

Speaker A: We will. Well, thank you, Rob, for being on the show today. Really appreciate your insights. And if people want to learn more about what we do, you can connect with me@richmsmith um.com or on LinkedIn. And also, you know, please subscribe to the Revenue Science podcast. It.