When customers aren’t ripping your product out of your hands, it’s very hard to know why.
Is it your messaging? Positioning? Pricing? Product? Are you targeting the wrong ICP? Do you say something at minute 27 in every sales call that causes the perfect-fit customer to turn and run away?
There are infinite reasons it might not be working and infinite things you could change. This might be the hardest part of the early stage, before the business’s physics are obvious. With ~infinite directions, it would be weird if you “fixed” the problem without knowing what the problem actually is.
Worse: If you’re like me, you’ll have a long chat with AI or see some viral social media post and think you’ve got the solution. Then you implement it… and it doesn’t work, and you feel like you’re slowly going crazy. This compounds, and we all waste gobs of our lives hitting our heads against the walls, pivoting away from things that could have worked, always wondering if that idea could have taken off. (*stares into abyss*)
I have watched roughly 3,000 sales call recordings from startups, and here’s the method I’ve developed to diagnose what’s not working based on what happens in a sales call. Of course, a sales call doesn’t cover 100% of what matters (e.g., post-sales usage/retention)… but it is a really, really good starting point.
I consider there to be two layers of problems: (1) Product-market fit problems and (2) sales problems. We need to understand both, or else we wind up in a never-ending doom loop of shipping “fixes” that don’t work.
First layer: Product-market fit problems
I classify product-market fit problems in two categories: Force and fit.
Force is the most important. Everything downstream depends on it. Force is about demand or PULL: (1) Is this potential customer actively trying to accomplish something, and (2) Do they need external help accomplishing this because their existing options are not good enough?
Fit is only relevant if there is force. If the customer is trying to accomplish something, and their existing options are not good enough, do we offer something that *fits* their needs such that they should rip it out of our hands?
Force exists independently of whether our product or business exists – it is just an observable state of the prospective customer’s reality.
And both force and fit exist independently of how well we execute a particular sales call. If there is sufficient force and fit – buyers may buy our product even if our sales process sucks. And if there isn’t force or fit, buyers generally won’t buy even with a very good sales process run by an experienced seller.
Here’s how I analyze the product-market fit layer of a sales call:
- I fill out the PULL framework first, very skeptically – assuming by default they have no PULL for anything.
- Then, based on their PULL framework, I write out what supply “fits” their PULL at a high level (using the Supply Framework).
- I compare “supply that fits their PULL” to what we offer.
With this, diagnosis is fairly straightforward:
If there is no force, it’s a product-market fit problem.
If there is force but no fit, it’s still a product-market fit problem.
If there is force and fit but the customer doesn’t buy, it’s a sales problem.
…so what do you do about product-market fit problems?
Sometimes it’s simple: “Ah, these potential customers don’t look anything like our actual customers who pulled! Let’s target people who have demonstrated PULL, not people who we wish would demonstrate PULL!”
Other times it’s less simple: “There’s no force here, or there’s lukewarm force at best, and we have no clue where real force might be.” (This sucks, but it sucks less than hitting our head against the wall for months trying to push our product onto people who have no PULL!)
Second layer: Sales problems
If you have sales problems, THAT’S A GOOD THING. These are so much less complex to solve than PMF problems! You have force and fit – but:
- Prospective customers don’t believe you “fit” their PULL based on what you say in the call, and/or
- You shoot yourself in the foot in some way during the sales call / process
The most common high-level patterns of sales problems I’ve seen are:
- Founder can’t schedule sales meetings.
- In the sales call, the founder doesn’t look for the buyer’s PULL, and instead wastes a bunch of time asking random “discovery” questions that piss the buyer off.
- Founder doesn’t understand the buyer’s PULL, and despite having a product that fits the buyer’s PULL, spends the entire call pitching their product in an irrelevant way that causes the buyer to not buy.
- Founder shoots self in foot in a variety of different places in the call: answering Q&A poorly, saying “we’re looking for design partners,” or following some sales methodology that completely inverts the physics of sales.
- (One of my pet peeves: Awkwardly saying the prospect’s name a billion times throughout the call, because some sales influencer said to do it, and you’re creeping the potential customer out. This alone might not kill a deal, but if you’re doing this, it’s probably a symptom of a deeper problem.)
This is important enough to repeat: If you’re not able to schedule sales meetings, it is not indicative of a product-market fit problem! This is a sales problem, usually caused by bad messaging, often also caused by not actually trying. There may also be a product-market fit problem, of course, but you should be able to schedule sales calls regardless of product-market fit. If this isn’t intuitive, read my pipeline mega-post.
So what?
If you misdiagnose your product-market fit problem as a sales problem, you’re going to get a sales coach or hire a sales rep, and despite them being good at sales, it won’t help you!
It is very easy to not realize you have a “force” problem. Buyers will complain about their problems and pain points, which is easily misinterpreted as demand… but pain points and problems are not demand!
If you aren’t sure whether you have a product-market fit problem or a sales problem, nothing else matters!
And a final PSA: Please don’t feed this article into AI and try to one-shot a diagnosis. Actually watch your own sales calls and fill out the PULL framework yourself. AI will be subtly wrong, and you won’t build this muscle (which happens to be a load-bearing one).
Originally posted on the How To Grow Substack
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