The demand hairball

I regret to inform you this is a useful framework

In your founder-led sales calls, there’s always a 3-minute chunk where the customer kinda, sorta, maybe explains what their demand is.

Sometimes this happens at the beginning of the call, when you ask, “Why did you take this call?”

Sometimes it happens at minute 26-29, because they saw a screenshot of your product and some synapse fired in their brain.

They usually say about 47 different things in this monologue. They talk about their current state, their problems, their pain points, their cousin-in-law, and maybe a project they could use your help with.

I now think of this monologue as “them hacking up a demand hairball”.

When this happens, we might look at the hairball and think “uh, gross”, and ignore it, as if the hairball is a distraction to what’s in our shiny pitch. Or we might assume we know what demand really is inside their hairball, so let’s move on.

Instead, we need to (ugh) reach in and untangle their hairball. We need to understand EXACTLY what the “project” on their to-do list is, why it’s relevant now, what options they’re considering, and what’s missing. We do this by (ok last one) deconstructing their hairball, showing its contents to them, and making sure we understand the different pieces.

AKA: “Ok, so playing back to you what I heard. You have XYZ different things going on, which is causing ABC different problems. The thing you’re really trying to do is X, by DATE, and you’ve considered DEF different options but you’re missing Z. I’m sure I missed something, what did I get wrong there?”

This seems tedious, elementary, gross. It’s necessary, possibly the most important thing to do in a sales call. Untangle the hairball. Get your hands dirty. It’s the only way.

—

PS: Book delivered to publisher! (The hairball didn’t make the cut.)

Thought about which meme best describes how I feel about the current state of the manuscript. I started with this one:

“It’s my editor’s problem now”

But I am realizing that it is actually this one: