How to figure out 0-1 sales
(and, by extension, everything else)
Can you help me? Are you connected with someone well-known in startups (e.g., Sam Altman, Zuck, David Cancel, etc.) that should blurb my upcoming book? Email me at rob@reframeb2b.com!
Can I help you? I do 15-min PMF chats HERE, and have 1-2 openings for startup advising starting in September (info HERE).
I regret to inform you that we are still recording a video/podcast about these posts. Spotify link HERE, video below:
The best way to figure out 0-1 sales is… drumroll… by selling. But when you start to sell, you run face-first into the unfortunate truth that it’s actually a much broader task than “here’s my product, let’s figure out how to sell it.” You have to:
Determine who, in what situation/organization, actually has demand (out of a bunch of different potential “beachhead” customers who might have demand)
Figure out how to get them to talk to you
Understand your real competition - what options and workarounds they’re considering or what they’ve tried - and how you compare
Describe your product in a way that actually makes sense to them
Show them something - a demo? a business case? - that helps them decide to buy
Navigate their buying process and actually close a deal
Onboard and retain them, usually scrambling to build the product that actually fits what they are trying to accomplish
Each of these things, individually, is difficult. And you have to do all of them, simultaneously, with an eye towards eventually finding repeatability… when your initial direction is almost always wrong in some unpredictable way.
If that’s not hard enough, you have to battle your own psychology to become the “Sales Founder”, when it would be much more comfortable to do basically anything else.
Fun, right? Yeah, this part wasn’t in the brochure.
Many startups die because they spent their time LARPing at pitch competitions, VC networking events, crafting strategy on whiteboards, and/or praying for viral product-led growth.
Many more die after they try to sell using the 2019 Oracle sales playbook, which doesn’t work for the 0-1 stage and leads to awkward sales conversations that send you straight into an existential crisis.
How do you avoid this, and figure out sales / PMF / 0-1 ASAP?
While I generally believe the process doesn’t matter, I have come to appreciate a ruthlessly simple process that forces you to do the important thing and nothing else. To that end, here’s a very simple process you can force yourself through that will help you find demand and figure out all the 0-1 sales variables.
It’s a four-step process you run as fast as you can schedule 5 sales calls - maybe that’s 2 days, maybe that’s 2 weeks. I call this process a Sales Sprint.1
The four steps:
Craft a hypothesis of who would be weird not to buy.
Schedule five sales conversations with people who fit your hypothesis.
Execute those five sales conversations.
See what happens, and maybe run another sprint.
Let’s go step-by-step:
1 - Craft a PULL hypothesis: Who would be *weird not to buy?*
Most people, most of the time, would be insane to buy your product, given what’s on their to-do list. And EVEN IF they are prioritizing something relevant, their existing options and workarounds are usually good enough.
This is true even if they “have pain points”, “have a big problem”, “would objectively benefit from your solution”, “should want your product,” “think your product is exactly what we need”, etc.
Any fancy sales methodology you use generally won’t work with these people. And yet, you will have a conversation with them that feels like a sales call to you… then they won’t buy, and you will follow up forever, never sure what lesson you’re supposed to have learned from the experience.
0-1 is about figuring out who, in what situation, is weird not to buy. This is the hard part that makes everything else easier. This person - who needs no convincing, rips the product out of your hands, then finds success and renews - forms your Ideal Client Profile (ICP).
I recommend using the PULL framework to craft your hypothesis of who would be weird not to buy:
PSA: If you can’t fill out this PULL framework based on a real person, GOOD! That’s a signal that you need to go find a real person who has PULL. My recommendation is not to go do a bunch of customer interviews, or spend hours asking ChatGPT to do your research for you; it’s to go in-person and do the job with your potential customer.
2 - Schedule 5 conversations
This is a common sticking point: Can you schedule 5 conversations with people who fit your PULL hypothesis?
I recall sending hundreds of emails manually and getting a 0.5% reply rate (0% if you don’t count out-of-office replies); I did a ton of work to send what I now see was spammy sales outreach (“Did you know AI agents can get you 10x ROI?”), then to send messaging in the uncanny valley between sales and begging for feedback (“Would love to pick your brain on our AI agent that can 10x ROI”); no matter what I did, I heard crickets.
What I’ve learned: Scheduling sales calls at this stage is not really about fancy outbound tech, or about investing lots of effort in personalization, or even about your value prop; the message you send is not supposed to explain everything or sell your product. You just have to sell the conversation - and that leads to a particular approach to messaging.
I recommend doing outreach that’s weird, about being an interesting person to meet with. Here’s a longer post on how to do that: LINK.
A HBS founder messaged me saying, “Wait, so with like 30 mins of work I scheduled 5 sales calls this week?!” Yeah, great, that’s pretty normal when you’re not overthinking it. But even if it takes you hours upon hours, or if you have to go door-to-door, or go into a shopping mall, or if it takes 2 weeks to get all 5 calls on the calendar… what else matters? Nothing - do whatever it takes. It doesn’t have to scale, you just need five.
Wait, why five sales conversations? You can learn a TON in five sales conversations. Five is the perfect number of reps (proof), but a few less or more is acceptable. The minimum is probably 3-4 to be able to compare and contrast across calls; the maximum is probably 7-8 before you are just going through the motions of conversations without serious analysis.
3 - Execute 5 conversations
These conversations are NOT to show your fancy product, or your vision for how the world should work. I’ve had plenty of those conversations, and by the time the clock runs out, you’ve had a pleasant call where you’ve learned and accomplished nothing.
Instead, you are trying to “test” your PULL hypothesis - basically, you have the PULL framework in your mind, and go step-by-step through it to see if they *fit* your PULL hypothesis or not, and why.
If they don’t fit your PULL hypothesis, that’s interesting. If they do fit your PULL hypothesis and don’t try to buy, that’s interesting. If they fit your PULL hypothesis and try to buy, COOL! Your hypothesis might not be wrong!
Most founders think about sales calls backwards - I definitely did. Sales calls aren’t about pitching, persuading, convincing, or poking at pain points,2 nor are they about training the potential customer how to use every piece of your product. You don’t need a fancy demo or even a feature-complete product; you might only need a single slide or two.
Good sales calls feel like you’re sitting on the same side of the table, looking at your PULL hypothesis together, and having a nice conversation about how they’re similar or different. If they have PULL, they should try to buy from you. If not, they almost certainly won’t.
Here’s a deeper-dive guide to running a sales call: LINK
Your first couple will be awkward. That’s normal, this is a new muscle. Record your calls and have a founder friend give you some pointers. (I’m around!)
4 - Analyze conversations; return to Step 1.
Ideally, your hypothesis is totally right, and you now have five potential customers who are trying to buy from you, in which case, cool! You’ve graduated from sprints and can now focus on delivering and building your repeatable case study and factory. (The nice thing is that these sales sprints convert with ~0 modification into the “front end” of your sales process, and will tell you what needs to be on your website, etc.)
BUT - more likely, you’ve had a mix of calls where some pulled and others didn’t… or maybe nobody actually pulled.
I’ve found it’s useful to do a compare-and-contrast exercise across the calls - here’s a visual to show what you’re doing:
Reviewing a sales sprint, you’re asking simple but difficult questions:
About individual calls: Did Jane have any demand? If so, what exactly was her demand, was it the same we hypothesized, and did our supply fit her demand? If she didn’t have any demand, what does that tell us?
Across calls: Why did Steve and Jim have demand, while Jane didn’t? And why did Steve pull our supply while Jim didn’t? What does this tell us about our hypothesis?
“So what?” - Should we adjust our hypothesis and run another sprint? Or should we run a sprint targeting a totally different hypothesis?
And you decide what to do, then run your next sprint.
This is the process. It is brutally simple by design: So you (and I!) have zero excuses for not doing it, and zero chance of getting lost down rabbit-holes.
PS:
Can you help me? Are you connected with someone well-known in startups (e.g., Sam Altman, Zuck, David Cancel, etc.) that should blurb my upcoming book? Email me at rob@reframeb2b.com!
Can I help you? I do 15-min PMF chats HERE, and have 1-2 openings for startup advising starting in September (info HERE).
Shoutout to the classic Design Sprint
Someday sales calls become about persuasion, sometimes, but that’s usually because a rep has been given a territory and a quota, and needs to do whatever it takes to hit their quota, CS be damned