PSA: There’s now a companion podcast! We go into way more detail on YouTube / Spotify!
I have now watched hundreds of founders’ sales calls. And in every single founder’s call, I find the same foundational error playing out in a thousand different ways. It causes the founder (and the potential customer) a world of pain. If you feel uncomfortable selling, or if your sales calls don’t feel smooth, this is probably why.
We all seem to have the most basic misconception about sales, a backwards idea of what causes someone to buy something, or what causes a deal to happen. I think of this foundational thing - what causes purchases - as the physics of sales.
At root, we all seem to think that the core force in the physics of sales is “seller convincing buyer to buy.” I call this the SELLER-PUSH theory of sales. At first glance, this theory makes sense. It fits with the (not-so-nice) image of a pushy salesperson in our brains, and the (not-so-real) image of a successful seller portrayed online.
But the SELLLER-PUSH theory is dead wrong, for a simple reason: Nobody is going to say, “You know what? You’ve convinced me. Let me drop all my priorities and projects to buy your product.” This could happen, sure… but it’s so rare that you would be crazy to bet your startup on it.
Instead, reality more closely resembles the BUYER-PULL theory, which states that the primary force that closes a deal is a buyer trying to accomplish a project on their to-do list. Our job is to help this person accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish. What we’re selling needs to fit what’s on their to-do list better than their alternatives, and when it does, they pull it out of our hands.
BUYER-PULL is both more efficient and effective than SELLER-PUSH. Why? In a BUYER-PULL world, our job is to support and facilitate their motion, not to drag them to a purchase. This takes much less effort for us, and is much less annoying for them.
A simple visual of the difference:
Everything you’re taught about sales is downstream from SELLER-PUSH vs. BUYER-PULL. The fancy terms, automations, and methodologies only make sense and work in the context of pull.
This is easy to nod along to but extremely difficult to embrace, because we are so hard-wired to think “sales is about convincing” that it infects how we approach every aspect of our startup.
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