how to analyze your sales calls to find PMF

plus, a much-needed Stafford Beer quote

Founders FIND product-market fit in their sales calls.

Sales is research; we learn what & how to sell by selling. (Then, we learn by delivering - PMF is about retention, not just acquisition; that’s for another post.)

How do we do this? My patent-pending 3-step process:

1. Schedule a bunch of sales calls

2. Have those calls *and record them* (I use Fathom, it’s free)

3. Review each sales call and dissect it

After reviewing hundreds of my sales calls and watching 100+ other founders’ sales calls… it’s pretty straightforward how to review your sales calls.

Step 1: Find “bugs” in the conversation

Here’s what product-market fit should feel like in a sales call:

1. They are supposed to buy, more than we sell

2. It should be a no-brainer for them, and simple for us

How do we get there?

Well, we find all the places where the OPPOSITE is happening. I look for two main kinds of bugs:

1. Places where I feel like I’m pitching, persuading, or trying to convince them (aka: I’m pushing, they’re not pulling)

2. Places where they have questions and objections

These signal to me that something is wrong.

Step 2: System root-cause analysis + intervention

One of my favorite quotes is by Stafford Beer: “The purpose of a system is what it does.”

Stafford Beer also played Gimli in LOTR

The purpose of a system is what it does. Which basically means: Any of the bugs I find in my sales call are a DIRECT RESULT of something I’m doing or saying. My “system” is causing them to happen.

So my job is to analyze the call. Try to find the root cause. And then find some elegant way to fix it, ideally just by changing a few words on slides.

Sometimes it’s that I’m talking to someone who just doesn’t have demand; that’s fine, it tells me something about the shape of demand and my target market. Most of the time, it’s that I’m creating objections based on what I’m saying, showing, and doing.

Example

I’m building Waffle, which helps startups get their AWS accounts secure + SOC 2 ready in an hour. In one sales call, I found myself trying to convince someone that they should move their whole stack to AWS, where right now they only had a few services in AWS.

It didn’t feel right. As I reviewed the call, I realized that I had the wrong frame for Waffle in MY head, that caused me to think they needed to switch everything to AWS.

As a result of this bug, I presented Waffle in a way that caused this objection. Which caused me try to twist their arms into doing a big project that they didn’t want to do.

By changing my mental frame and a few words on slides, I’ve never had this kind of conversation again. (Plus, this change had product implications. Specifically: It makes it easier for us to get to “hell yes” post-sale with less product & less effort.)

This is one example of an intervention. In Waffle’s short life there have been 25+ just like this. And that’s the point. This is the fundamental process by which startups iterate towards “hell yes” pre & post-sale. It was not done on a whiteboard or from first principles; I would not have been able to figure this out from 1, 10, or even 100 “discovery” interviews; I had to run into this particular wall to know it was there.

As we sell and deliver, reality’s design constraints emerge. It’s our job to figure them out and design around them. The process is simple: Find bugs, design around them.

So what?

Couple of takeaways:

• Yes, I hate reviewing my sales calls. Yes, I still do it.

• Most founders believe the sales pitch is part-colonoscopy (“discovery”), then part presentation/demo. It is actually all conversation… if you don’t have a conversation throughout, you won’t find the bugs & will have no clue why they ghost you.

• This is a strange art. There are interventions that can extend your sales cycle by months, bring in 20+ other stakeholders, and lead to you getting ghosted at the last minute… and interventions that dramatically shorten your sales cycles and increase your contract size. For the same product.

• This is why there are two stages of founder-led sales: The “finding PMF” stage, then the “systematizing + handing-off” stage. It’s why sales consultants who haven’t been founders CAN’T help with the “finding PMF” stage (but good ones are extremely useful for the “systematizing + handing-off” stage.)

• This is why most books on post-PMF sales are counterproductive. “Challenger Sales” will make sure you never find PMF. (Though it’s probably a good book for later-stage sales, idk.)

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PS:

• Next PMF Camp launches September 30. I will help you find “pull” in your sales calls, and give you a ton of examples & templates. Every PMF Camp has sold out so far, this one is getting close. Learn more HERE and apply HERE.

• My new startup, Waffle, can help you get your AWS account secure + SOC 2 ready in ~an hour, for just $100/month (just for early customers!) Want to learn more? Email me at rob@reframeb2b.com

• I am considering launching a standalone service where I review your sales calls & meet with you every week to debug them. Want to learn more? Email me at rob@reframeb2b.com.