Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:41:37 · Rob Snyder, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:41:37] S0: Mostly two steps in a sales call. There's the pull discovery step, and then there's the kind of conceptual pitch of how we might help step. And so the theory behind a sales call is, again, it's like, if you have you're gonna rip the thing out of my hands. I don't come into this call wired up, ready to try to convince you to buy Super Ant. No, it's just if you have pull, you're going to convince me to let you buy. And so I approached this with the vibe of just leaned back, excited to chat, let's see if I might be able to help you. And so I have a very specific structure of a sales call that I recommend for getting into discovery and then transitioning out of discovery. Basically, you start the call, hey, thanks so much for taking the time. I'm curious. I'm sure [00:42:30] S1: you get a bunch of
00:42:30 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[00:42:30] S1: you get a bunch of [00:42:31] S0: people reaching out to you. Like, why did you take the call with me today? That's a chance for them to say, you know, you mentioned AI agents, and I've been thinking about this, and I've just been waiting, I looked at your website, whatever whatever it winds up being. And they they fill out the entire pull framework for you right there. That's ideal. And then you can say, Oh, that's interesting. Can I ask a couple follow ups? But most of the time, they'll say, I don't know, you reached out to me. Excited to hear what you have to say. Say, Great. You use what they have just told you and say, Okay, great. That sounds like a great agenda for today's call. We can do that. Does that sound good to you? Get their thumbs up on the agenda, and then you earn the right to ask them some discovery questions about their poll by saying, great. Okay. Before we get to those items you know, on our agenda, do you mind if I ask you a few questions to better understand your context? And that way, you've earned the right to ask questions. It does not feel like an interrogation to them because if it does, they're not telling you anything. [00:43:32] S1: Okay. A few tactical questions. One is just how long should you try to make this call? How long should your invite be for? And then where does where does the demo fit in? Do you recommend demo on this call or doing a separate call for that?
00:43:32 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[00:43:32] S1: Okay. A few tactical questions. One is just how long should you try to make this call? How long should your invite be for? And then where does where does the demo fit in? Do you recommend demo on this call or doing a separate call for that? [00:43:44] S0: Yeah. So this is almost always a thirty minute call on the calendar. Just I've found smaller calendar blocks they don't see on their calendar, and so they don't show. And so thirty minutes and then iffy on doing a demo. So if you're super early, you probably don't have a demo to show. And so... But later on, you might have a very short demo in in your first call. [00:44:09] S1: I I guess... Because I'm thinking about the Jen conversation I had, and her advice is wait to do the demo. But that's an enterprise sales sort of product, not like an early stage, just full hypothesis phase. [00:44:19] S0: Yeah. Totally. Totally. [00:44:20] S1: Okay. Got it. What's a sign that this meeting went well? Is it this kind of leaning in, pulling it from you feeling? [00:44:27] S0: Yeah. So so it's kind of you're able to surface pull, or you're able to say, okay. You don't have pull at all. Help me understand why this isn't relevant to you. What is? And so you come away with a either filled out pull framework of, Okay, I understand this person's pull and they are trying to pull, or you understand why they don't have pull. [00:44:51] S1: How many of these calls should you do before you're like, okay, there's no pull here. Time to move on.
00:44:51 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[00:44:51] S1: How many of these calls should you do before you're like, okay, there's no pull here. Time to move on. [00:44:56] S0: I don't have a hard... Like, what I tend to do is if you have five calls and everybody's leaned back and you learn nothing, then there's a sign that something's wrong. If you have... And I've seen people do, like, hundreds of calls where they still don't... How could they... So do five and then check-in and see what you've learned from the calls. Was there any pull there? Did we learn anything interesting? Like, I... At the start of I was just helping out. They had done, like, five calls into banking, and they just felt nothing. But they got an intro from one of the people. This is... Yeah. This doesn't seem relevant to me, but you might consider defense companies. And they got an intro into that. They know nothing about defense. In the first conversation in defense, the person's like, holy. Are you serious? And they're like, okay. Maybe there's something here, and they changed their poll hypothesis. [00:45:45] S1: It feels like a big part of this... Of your of your framework and approach is to just, like, be brutally honest with yourself whether there's something here. I imagine a lot of founders are just like so excited and convinced this is real. And your approach is just like, here's, here's a way to validate that and be really real with what's working or not.
00:45:45 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[00:45:45] S1: It feels like a big part of this... Of your of your framework and approach is to just, like, be brutally honest with yourself whether there's something here. I imagine a lot of founders are just like so excited and convinced this is real. And your approach is just like, here's, here's a way to validate that and be really real with what's working or not. [00:46:03] S0: Yeah, and I think it's thinking of it as we're selling to learn, not really to push something. Yeah, not to push. We're going to learn and we're seeing if they try to buy. If they don't, cool, we've learned something, we can kind of keep iterating from there. If they do, okay, great. Now we might have something, let's see if it repeats. [00:46:25] S1: The whole idea of calling us pull is so smart, because you always hear product market fit is you're feeling pull, you're feeling pull, this boulder is pulling you down, the wind is pushing you. And so not only is it this acronym of what you look for, but it's this reminder. What you're looking for is pull, something pulling. [00:46:43] S0: Yeah. And you can also tell, like, do I feel like I'm pushing right now? Do I feel like I'm convincing? That's a red flag that something either in your mind or in the conversation is off. And like, okay. Cool. Let's figure out what that is. [00:46:56] S1: Is there an example that comes to mind when you think about if a good sales call, what that kind of feels like, looks like, what a pitch would be?
00:46:56 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[00:46:56] S1: Is there an example that comes to mind when you think about if a good sales call, what that kind of feels like, looks like, what a pitch would be? [00:47:03] S0: Yeah. So what you're trying to do is you're trying to get, again, get the poll out of them. And so they say, I'm trying to make a website. But one of those typical point and click website design things are just too much effort for me. So you have something about pull there. You've pulled that out of them. They've described that. And so the kind of interesting thing is that once you have pull, your pitch is quite simple. What you're not trying to do here is you're not trying to describe this massive product vision or your theory of the problem. You know that they're trying to do X but blocked because of Y. And so your pitch in that case is, Okay, so it sounds like you're looking for something to make a website without all the hassle of a point and click thing. Is that roughly it? You describe it in a really, really small and simple way, not a really big way. You describe it in a small way, and they say, yeah. That's... That sounds like it. How exactly does that work? Like, tell me more. They're pulling more information out of you. And that's when you know you're, like, starting to be onto something. [00:48:15] S1: And are you in your head thinking through the pull framework of these four points and just thinking through, like, okay. Is this actually something we need right now and unavoidable? Are there... What are their alternatives and kinda thinking through all Yeah.