Seeking causality

No coincidences allowed

Do companies buy our products because they have 500 employees, are on the IPO path, and just hired a new director of HR who came from Acme Corp?

Or do they buy our products because they implemented a new manager training pilot that was well-received, and as a result of their success they were tasked to roll it out to 1,000 managers on a shoestring budget?

One of these feels causal. The other doesn’t. The difference matters.

The startup world generally ignores causality: We blast out our fancy sales email to every HR department of a company between 500 - 1,000 employees and see what falls out. We then try to convince them they should want our product. Some buy fast, others drag their feet for months. “Nothing we can do about this, it’s just the way it works, we should just be content with our 10% close-rate and highly variable cycle time.”

But is that right?

When we think in case studies, we think first in causality: What forced this particular project onto this particular buyer’s critical path over ALL the other projects they could have done?

Then: Which other buyers at which other companies would be weird NOT to have this project on their critical path?

When we have a theory of causality, we can identify who almost certainly has demand. This changes everything:

• We can have conversations with people who almost certainly have demand UNDER ANY PRETENSE. We don’t have to use generic sales outreach. If they have demand, they pull for our supply.

• We waste a lot less time trying to convince people who don’t have demand that they should want to buy our product. They get much more efficient and effective as a result. As one founder recently told me: “I went from 15-20 sales meetings per week down to maybe 5-10. Now that I’ve targeted people who are most likely to have demand, I generate more sales opportunities per week now than before.”

• Importantly, we stop polluting our product roadmap with customer requests that aren’t rooted in real demand, and can build a much more focused product as a result.

Look across your customers and sales conversations; when customers have demand, what’s forcing this particular project onto their critical path? In other words, what’s causal?

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PS: With Waffle, we’ve recently helped a few early-stage B2B startups deploy their MVPs into a SOC 2-compliant AWS setup in a few minutes… without needing to be experts in security, devops, or AWS. Shoot me an email at rob@reframeb2b.com or check out waffle’s website for more info!