The Power of Pull: How Customer Demand Drives Business Growth

Speaker A: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Modern Customer podcast. I'm your host, Blake Morgan. Today my guest is Rob Snyder. He's an author, Serial Startup founder, and Harvard fellow. He has a new book out called the Power of what yout need to Know about customer demand to build a successful startup and why most founders get it wrong. Rob graduated from Harvard Business School and previously worked at McKinsey Company. He's an entrepreneur in residence and venture partner for Early Stage Venture Capital Funds, and he lives with his wife and daughter in New Hampshire. Today, we're talking all about the power of pull and how you can understand customer demand to make your products irresistible. Please welcome Rob Snyder. Rob. Ah, welcome to the Modern Customer podcast. It's such a pleasure to have you here today. All the way from New Hampshire.

Speaker B: Exactly. Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker A: Is it cold where you are because you're wearing a sweater?

Speaker B: I am. Um, I have a basement office that is always freezing. It's finally warm. We've, you know, you're in, you're in la, and so it's been nice for you forever, but we've had, like, three days of, of sunshine and warmth. Oh, and now it's, you know, mid June, so it's finally almost getting to summer here.

Speaker A: You're ready. Okay. You in the basement are ready. Um, hopefully that sunshine warms you up while we do the podcasts, so to speak. Um, hey, let's talk about your new book and let's talk about what inspired you to write the book the Power of Pull. What? In your background and your career, what is what most informed this new book that you wrote?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I was a consultant for big companies at McKinsey. I went to Harvard Business School, and I set out to build a product that customers loved. As an entrepreneur after business school, and I thought I understood how to build something customers wanted. Solve their problems, solve their pain points, add value to their lives. And turns out that I knew literally nothing about the, uh, enterprise. And I spent two years trying to sell and pivot around with a technology product that customers just wouldn't buy. And I couldn't figure out why, why they wouldn't buy. Despite me having an amazing product, amazing value prop, everything made sense on paper. They didn't buy. And so I've just been obsessed over the last five years of figuring out why didn't it work? And then when it did work, it went 0 to 4 million in revenue in two years. Why did it work then when the value prop was worse, the product was worse. Like it, it just didn't make any sense to me.

Speaker A: Oh my gosh. Well, of course, you know, I'm so interested.

Speaker B: What is it?

Speaker A: What did you find?

Speaker B: Well, so what I found was that nobody cared how pretty my product was, how well built it was, even, like the problems that it solved in theory or the ROI that it could generate for them. The only reason somebody would buy my product is if they were basically stuck trying to do something and they couldn't do that thing with any of the other tools, people, methods that they had available to them. If that wasn't the case, they, you know, I was trying to pitch a, uh, labor management software and turns out they were kind of. Yeah, their labor management process was like, not ideal. They could complain about it for hours, but they were okay just keeping on, keeping on with their existing tools. When a customer called me and said, hey, I am stuck. I can't hire employees. I am stuck. I literally can't hire employees. We might have to close the store. Can you help with that? That was a totally different experience. And I just did that in a spreadsheet. It was crazy. I did it in a spreadsheet. They were buying a software product that was supposed to be made. I had a spreadsheet. They couldn't log into it. I had a. I would just send them emails. It didn't make sense why the spreadsheet worked and the kind of fancy product that I had built didn't. Until I realized that it's about them being stuck trying to do something and me getting them unstuck, unblocking them from the thing they are trying to do. If that's not the case, they're not going to buy. If that is the case, they will rip anything I offer out of their hands. That gets them unblocked.

Speaker A: Yeah. And it really reminds me of Clayton Christensen's Jobs To Be Done framework. Like, what is the job the customer's trying to do and are you helping them solve that problem? Are you familiar with his work too?

Speaker B: Yeah, super familiar. Actually. One of his, um, collaborators on the Jobs to be Done framework is Bob Mesta, and he's an advisor for this book and kind of advised me as I developed the pull framework in this book where I had tried to develop jobs to be done. I tried to use the framework before, but where I kept getting stuck was I would come up with jobs to be done that they didn't have to do or that they could do without me. And so the pull framework, what we've come up with, there's a project on their to do list, which is kind of like a job to be done. Uh, the Pull framework specifies a job to be done that they can't not do and can't do with their existing options, where they are stuck and will rip a product out of our hands.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that is so smart. I love that idea that if you don't figure out what's relevant to your customer, if you're not listening 24 7, then you're not relevant because they're not just gonna buy from you to be nice. You have to really help them achieve something. And how do you do that? Well, you have to listen to find out.

Speaker B: And, uh, again, uh, it can't just be anything in theory they might want to achieve. It has to be the thing they are prioritizing right now. Because if they're not prioritizing it right now, they're gonna have to drop what they are prioritizing to buy your product. And they're never going to do that. And so, yeah, it's all about listening to them and figuring out what's on their to do list today. And is there anything that they're actually trying to do right now where they. Their existing options, methods, tools are not good enough, if so amazing. You found it, like, that's the thing to sell to them. And when you sell, it won't feel like a normal sales call. It'll feel like they are buying basically no matter what you said.

Speaker A: All right, so many of my listeners and people watching this on YouTube, they're probably nodding their head going, oh my gosh, that sounds so good. Rob, can you break down your book into a few steps that the audience could understand, like a framework if they want to start leveraging the power of pull?

Speaker B: Yeah. So I have in the book the PULL framework, which is an acronym. PULL is an acronym. M P U L L, which if these four things are true, somebody will rip a product out of your hands. And so the task is to fill out the PULL framework based on your hypothesis of, uh, who has pulled. Now, the PULL framework's four components are P, the project on the customer's to do list. What are they trying to do? What's their job to be done? U It's unavoidable. It's a thing they can't delay. They're in some sort of situation where they can't delay it. They can't do something else. They have to do this now. L is they consider a list of options. Maybe that's hiring somebody, maybe that's buying a new software. Maybe it's using their existing software tool. Um, and the final L is the limitations. Why aren't those good enough for most things? They can just delay them, they don't have to do them or their existing tools are good enough. If you try to sell into that scenario, it's going to be hard. It's going to feel like you are pushing. But if you find somebody who is prioritizing a project right now, they can't not do and their existing options aren't good enough, then they will rip the product out of your hands. So all you have to do is fill out the pull framework and go try to find somebody who has pull and have them explain their pull to you.

Speaker A: So you're a customer, I'm a customer, we're all customers. When you participate in an industry that notoriously has terrible customer experience and service and uh, not to be negative, but they really only have customers because there's no one else to do business with, are you frustrated in that? Like I'm talking about Internet companies, cell phone, uh, service providers, airlines, insurance. These are the most hated industries. Government. Are you, are you just racking your brain going, why don't, why are they not doing my framework?

Speaker B: Yes, it is. It is super annoying. And on the other side, whenever I have a, I have like this amazing business in New Hampshire which is just like this great little farm near me and everything about the experience is perfect. Perfect. I'm not a farmer, but it's a, you know, so it's a, uh, farm in the middle of nowhere that does wagyu steak. Just a single farmer raises the cows himself. He'll take you out to see the cows. It's picturesque, it's perfect, it's reasonable cost. Everything about the experience is magical. And then you go and get on a flight at some point and they spit on you as you walk to walk to the back or whatever. Um, and yeah, and so you get both ends of the customer experience. There's.

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, that's interesting. So, I mean you probably have more empathy for the business owner that, you know, rather than these big faceless companies where just the employees, they lose that connection with the pull, with what makes them relevant in the customer's life because they're just there to get their paycheck. So I think that's a really big challenge. The culture piece for these customer focused companies that want to scale customer focused culture, customer focused retail experiences, it seems to be really difficult. Like in the beginning of our podcast, you mentioned how managers needed to find staff to fill their retailers that they couldn't find labor. Like, I mean just put yourself in the shoes of that person totally super

Speaker B: hard and I mean you're, you're going to be the expert at this. Curious. Curious what you would say. What I have seen is that in a lot of cases there are a lot of well meaning rules for employees about what they should do and what they shouldn't do, but not a clear purpose of like, here's what we're helping our customers do, here's what we're helping them accomplish. Here's what a, here's what a case study is of a really excellent customer experience and we want to deliver at that level. It's uh, I've, at least what I've seen in this case is it's a lot of little rules. Do this, don't do this, do this, don't do this. Without a kind of governing way to think about things.

Speaker A: Yes. And it seems like what I'm seeing in the industry, Rob, is that people are optimistic that AI is going to help solve this industry problem that no one really had the resources to deal with anyway. So it'll be interesting to see how AI changes customer experience, customer service, if it makes it better, um, if these companies finally reallocate staff to create more human experiences. What are your thoughts from a call center perspective even? Have you had any recent experiences with call centers that really made you think?

Speaker B: Yeah, I actually do think that AI is going to have a really, it has the opportunity to be an amazingly positive like result of the customer experience. It has a way to make the customer experience amazing because think of just how much time is spent look with a customer service representative trying to look across four different systems to figure out what the heck they're supposed to be doing and what, what they are, what they're. And so entering in the same form multiple times. Like I've, I, I've had multiple calls into, to places where I have to give the same answer like seven times. And you get passed along from this person to this person. And those things are generally because it's very hard to just manage a massive number of people who are all taking in a bunch of different calls. In theory that there should be one person that I'm connected with and that person should have an agent or that person should, you know, that person could be an AI. I'm not entirely sure on um, that I've seen a couple of startups that are doing that, but that person should have an agent that's doing all the work across the relevant systems and Supporting them so that they can just focus on me and helping me accomplish what I'm trying to accomplish, rather than it being them having to enter four things on one system, realizing, okay, now we have to escalate to this other department and passing me along because there's 40 different systems and four different groups of people, it can all be kind of consolidated into one.

Speaker A: What's interesting now is this Agent assist that actually helps with these rules that you speak about. Like in the past, even a well meaning company, let's say for example Capital One, historically they're known for not having many rules for contact center agents, for allowing agents to go above and beyond for customers. And these stories have gone viral with contact center agents doing wonderful things for people that are in a point of need. But sometimes that can also be negative. Like for example, let's say someone doesn't want to be too chatty with customer service and customer service has been told you need to talk a lot, ask them how they're doing, what they're up to. Not everybody wants to chit chat. So because there's so much nuance to communication, the AI might be a better way to navigate with agent assist, helping these agents to figure out. You talk about the power of pull, like how much is too much, how much is not enough and then continue in real time directing the human.

Speaker B: Yeah, I, I think that's a. Yeah, I've seen a couple startups that are taking that direction where it's like, it's almost giving the agent real time knowledge of hey, what should we do next? What, what should we do next? What does this person want? I'm sensing things here. What do I suggest? Um, give it. Given as I'm listening to this and it's all, it's right. All in service. And I think we all have the same goal. It's just let's help customers accomplish important things and not make them angry in the process. And it's just so it's been, we can kind of look at this optimistically. That simple mission has been insanely hard to do with the last round of technology. I think we all still want the same thing and this round feels a little bit more human shaped and can help make that happen.

Speaker A: Right. Because the technology of the 80s, 90s and 2000s for the contact center, it made the experience much worse. Like I don't think anybody ever jumped up out of excitement to be greeted by an ivr. No, no, no.

Speaker B: There's this, even this concept of failure demand that John's from. John sedded where it's, you know, uh, 50% of the calls into a call center are people checking in. They're not actually, they're checking in on their past inquiry in a lot of cases. And it's not actually value demand, which is getting stuff done.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. That's why first contact resolution has been a really good metric for the industry for a long time, but it's just too hard to get. It's just been so hard to get problem solved that I think AI could really change everything about customer experience and make experiences more human. And let's go back to your book. Um, can you give us your favorite example from your book about the power of pull and when it works well, how it works? Yeah.

Speaker B: So, um, one of my really good, uh, like a good friend's startup, he was stuck for kind of two years trying to build something that, that people, you know, weren't wanting. And he, you know, he's a Stanford, uh, grad named Parker from Jump. And um, what he was trying, he was trying to push a product onto salespeople. They just didn't buy it. So he had done design partnerships, he had tried to, tried to kind of like get people to buy and nobody actually wanted it. And then on a chance encounter, he talked to a financial advisor and the financial advisor was like, wait a second, you offer something that can record calls and take notes on calls. That would be awesome for us. We've been trying to do that. We tried to use a uh, generic AI note taker and it kind of worked. It kind of didn't. Could you make this kind of specific for financial advisors? And he was like, well, I guess, I guess we could try. And so what he found was that financial advisors were all stuck. They wanted to spend less time taking notes from their client meetings. They had to take notes for their client meetings because of the sec, but they couldn't use a generic AI note taker which was already out at that time. And so uh, they had tried using dictation service, they had tried hiring secretary. They were just stuck. And so he realized that and they built a very simple product, an AI notetaker for financial advisors. And when they just described it like that in, you know, a 15 minute call with customers, they would buy it basically immediately. They rip it out of their hands. One of the, one of the customers was like, uh, this must be how Alexander Graham Bell felt when he invented the telephone. And it was just amazing to watch them go from it feeling like they were pushing something onto people who didn't want to buy it, even though it could solve their problems and whatnot. Two, they found really intense pull and grew. I think they got from 0 to 30,000 customers in two years or something crazy like that. They raised over 100 million in venture capital in that pace. And it was just because customers would refuse to not buy it. They would rip it out of Jump's hands, uh, really, really, really fast. And they loved it afterwards. It was just they, they found pull in this, like, place where people were stuck trying to do something and it changed everything for them.

Speaker A: It's become clear to me, just in listening to you, that a lot of what you do is how you talk about things, how you communicate what you sell, that you communicate in the way that you've listened to the customer, you've heard their problem. So is that, would you say that's a large part of the book and what you offer is just to change the way you think about communication?

Speaker B: Totally. We often want to describe what we do in the like, coolest possible way. You know, I'm, I'm the leading thinker on product market fit and da da, da, da. Uh, they don't care, right? Like, nobody cares. It doesn't mean anything. Or for startups, it's even worse. You know, we're building the future of agentic workflows. Okay, cool. I don't know what that means. And so it's all about getting your words out. Get your words out of there and focus on what is the customer trying to do and how do we, how do we describe our product in the least offensive way, given what they are trying to do and given how they are stuck? That usually requires way fewer words. Like, I watch a lot of sales calls and so I focus a lot on the sales side. When I come in and fix a startup sales calls, I usually cut out 95% of what they are saying and showing in the sales because they're just convincing the person not to buy with their words and with their demos.

Speaker A: I love that. I think that's so interesting. And I think everyone listening, especially if you sell customer service software, which is a lot of my audience, the amount of jargon, it's horrible.

Speaker B: Oh, it's so bad. People come out of the, like, people come out of these, these demos and they're like, I have no idea what just happened. I don't know. And they'll do demos with a bunch of different companies. They sit through some insufferable slideshows and then like, get a lesson on how to use the software. That takes an hour and A half. It's like the, it could have all been done in under 30 minutes and everyone would have been happier.

Speaker A: So let's do an exercise right now. Like if you could imagine my audience, they're in customer experience. Let's try to make it a very generic product that they're selling. If you had to put them through, let's say like a two step process to get them on the path toward pull. What, what are those two first steps?

Speaker B: Yeah, the first step is to actually write your pull hypothesis. Like who do we think is actually stuck? If you have a customer base already, it's look at your customers who bought the fastest, what was going on in their world. And so let's say it's somebody who's, I'm trying to scale my customer experience team. But something, I don't know, but, but we don't have enough, it's hard to hire people or something like that. And you're selling a, um, I don't know, a recruiting tool for customer experience teams or something like that. Well, what you'll find is, oh wait, the people who bought really fast for us were actually in this stage where they were trying to scale their team super fast. They had actually just raised a big round of funding and that's when. And actually what they didn't want, they didn't want my bespoke recruiting services for data. They just want a really fast and scalable way to recruit, uh, customer experience people.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And so you start with the pull framework of who do I think actually ripped the product out of our hands? What was their project on their to do list? And then given that you're going to review your sales calls, hopefully you've recorded them and say, okay, if what they're really trying to do is radically, like radically scale their CX hiring, what's the fewest words I can say and what are the fewest things I can show to let them, to make them feel like we fit what they are trying to do. And uh, so first step, write the pull framework. Second step, audit your sales calls and say, am I saying the fewest possible words, showing the fewest possible things, or am I showing the most possible words, most possible things? And try to cut back as much as humanly possible so that you can then have a conversation with them about if this is a fit or not.

Speaker A: Why is it so important to cut so much out?

Speaker B: Every extra word you say, every extra concept you talk about, every extra screen in your product you show is a reason for them not to buy. You are increasing the surface area of things they have to think about, things they have to understand and things they will ultimately object to. And so you want to minimize the surface area for objections, not maximize it. And when you show a ton of things, you maximize the surface area.

Speaker A: This could be an interesting way that AI is actually hurting people than helping. Like, I see it a lot on LinkedIn now because it's so easy to generate communication. People are just copy pasting out of AI so much that you could tell and it's not authentic. Do you think people should be using AI to create marketing messages or it's too much?

Speaker B: No, I would not do that at this stage. There are some tools out there that might be better than others. There are some specific things. But the hard part and the part where all of the value is, is figuring out the concepts that are worth communicating. And AI can be a sparring partner on that, but it should not be writing your messages. Um, um, every. Like everyone can tell. I don't know how we can tell, but we can all tell.

Speaker A: We know ChatGPT's voice. We can see it, Won't we?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: I, um, mean, I get it. I, I use it too for marketing and for content. Um, but the good thing about video is obviously, like, I can't use AI for video. So this is me. I'm not AI. There's no. All right, um, this has been really interesting and I'm so grateful you're here because you're a really good speaker that cuts down their words. Um, and it's just refreshing to talk to someone who is very to the point. So thanks for that. Uh, let's see how to the point you can be because we have rapid fire. Now, are you ready to take quick questions?

Speaker B: Love it. No one has ever described me as short winded, by the way. I love this. This is amazing.

Speaker A: You're short winded. Sorry, no one has ever told you that? I think that's part of your offering. Okay, first question. What's the most important part of your morning routine?

Speaker B: I was gonna say I work out first thing in the morning, which is a very important part of my morning routine. But I also have a 15 month old daughter who I play with in the morning, so I'm gonna put that one first.

Speaker A: Aw, congrats. That's so fun and exciting. Um, I'm gonna guess this also involves your daughter. But what do you do to relax at the end of a hectic day?

Speaker B: I have a 15 month old daughter who I, you know,

Speaker A: mornings and evenings are busy same.

Speaker B: They're awesome.

Speaker A: Um, what show are you currently streaming?

Speaker B: We're watching the George Washington documentary on Netflix.

Speaker A: Cool. What is your favorite leadership book or resource if you have one?

Speaker B: My favorite leadership book. I'd put this in the Leadership strategy. Good strategy, bad strategy.

Speaker A: Mhm. Okay, great book. What's your idea of perfect happiness?

Speaker B: Building something wonderful over a long period of time.

Speaker A: What is one mental health strategy for managing hard days?

Speaker B: Heavy deadlifts.

Speaker A: Uh, I took my nail off doing heavy deadlifts. I don't know if you can see. I have one fake nail. I literally jammed my nail and ripped it off by accident. Don't do that. Um, what's your favorite type of vacation?

Speaker B: I don't like vacation.

Speaker A: If you could have lunch with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?

Speaker B: Christopher Alexander, who wrote a series of architecture books that I am obsessed with.

Speaker A: No one's ever said that one. And if you had to describe your outlook in one quick motto, what would it be?

Speaker B: Be terrible at things and obsess over them until you are good at things.

Speaker A: I love that. I'm going to give that one to my daughter who's about to do a chess tournament, uh, tomorrow in Las Vegas.

Speaker B: Good luck to, um, that.

Speaker A: Thank you for, for being on the show. This was really fun. Um, if people want to pick up a copy of your book, the Power of Pull, is there a special place they should do that?

Speaker B: Anywhere you can buy books? RobSnyder.org book is where you can see all the places you can buy it too.

Speaker A: All right, well, everybody pick up a copy of the Power of Pull wherever books are sold. Rob, thank you so much for doing the show and everybody watching. Until next time, thanks for tuning in to the modern customer podcast. Thanks for watching. Please don't forget to subscribe to my channel and follow my content on social platforms where I post daily like LinkedIn, Instagram, X, tick Tock, and more.