See show notes for this episode: S 02 | Ep 47 Why Customers Don't Buy Pain Points or ROI.
0:03 Alex Shevelenko: Do you mind clicking the accept button if you see it?
0:07 Rob Snyder: OK.
0:08 Alex Shevelenko: Yep, got it.
0:09 Rob Snyder: All right.
0:12 Alex Shevelenko: Welcome to Experience-Focused Leaders.
0:16 So this weekend, I was on Audible listening to a book written by our guest, Rob Snyder.
0:24 The book is called The Power of Pull, and it will blow your mind if you're an MBA graduate, an undergrad business graduate, a graduate of startup accelerator programs, or a general consumer of business knowledge on how to actually go to market with a new offering.
0:46 Rob, over to you. Tell us about the book and why you wrote it.
0:51 Rob Snyder: Yeah, thanks for having me.
0:52 The book is the result of a lot of pain.
0:57 When I came out of Harvard for my MBA, I thought I knew how business worked. I worked at McKinsey before, so I wanted to start a startup. I raised some money, did all the things you're supposed to do, and then just got punched in the face for years when it didn't work—even though it made sense that it should work.
1:17 Then we took off to $104 million in revenue in two years, and I didn't understand why it worked then either. It's like everything seemed objectively worse.
1:26 Since that moment, I've been pulled into a bunch of other startups—usually ones that are near death, right? They have also hit their heads against the wall for years. I try to figure out how to make startups take off.
1:41 I've done that hundreds of times now, and the book is the result of what I have learned—the red pills I have taken on the journey to figure out why startups actually take off.
1:53 Alex Shevelenko: Well, I salute you. I didn't go to as prestigious schools or consulting programs, but I had a roughly similar outcome. Whatever business school you attend, there tend to be mannerisms that come out and startup lingo that you don't really know the exact meaning of, or you think you do, but you don't.
Even great organizations like Y Combinator have mantras like "Build something people love." We hear stories about companies like Lovable, which you know, and we assume they must be building something that people love and figuring it out. We make these assumptions from conventional wisdom about what actually works, which tends to be a bit more product-centric.
2:51 A lot of people start with technology or product people building stuff, but I think your approach is quite clearly different. It starts with unlocking and unblocking something inside the customer.
3:05 So, tell us about the Pull framework that you've developed and created. How does it work? Then we'll get in and start testing live examples of where it works and where it doesn't.
3:17 Rob Snyder: Yeah, I love it.
3:18 Let me walk you through the whole framework of unlearnings that I had to go through. We come out of these programs, read the startup books, read the YC mantras, and think, "OK, I think I know why startups take off."
3:31 We have a lot of plausible-sounding reasons for why startups take off:
They've built something people want.
They found a big problem.
They've found big pain points.
They've added a ton of value and ROI.
All of those things make a ton of sense and are totally wrong—like, totally, totally wrong.
3:49 If you pursue them, what happens is you go looking for a pain point or a problem, and you'll find one. You'll do discovery interviews and run experiments, and people will say, "Yeah, big problem, huge 10-out-of-10 problem, massive ROI." You'll have objective ROI, and then nobody will buy your product—or it'll be a slog to sell it to a couple of people, and it won't make sense why.
4:13 Alex Shevelenko: On top of that, once you sell it, it may not even get implemented properly because only one person cares, and that person may be gone in a year's time. You feel like all that work was churned into something, right? All that work, building something that's objectively valuable and technologically impressive after raising money for this massive vision, and the world doesn't care. The world just...
4:41 Rob Snyder: But I have my TechCrunch article! I have my TechCrunch article, so I must be doing something right. You went through YC, did all this stuff, and every single day feels like pushing a boulder up a mountain.
Everyone you talk to makes you feel like you're being gaslit, too, because they'll say, "Wow, this is amazing! This is so interesting, so valuable."
5:06 Alex Shevelenko: "Rob, you went to McKinsey and HBS!"
5:11 Rob Snyder: Yeah, but then they won't buy. They'll say things that sound like they're going to buy, like, "Oh, I can see how useful this would be..."
5:20 At the root of all this is that we don't know why people buy things—which is a crazy thing for me to say, but it's the truth. We don't actually know. People don't buy things just because they have pain points.
5:35
Rob Snyder: That's just not the case. They don't buy things because they have problems.
5:37
Alex Shevelenko: They don't buy things because the things offer value, right? You can—that's one way to look at it.
5:41
Rob Snyder: But I've found that in every single case where a startup has taken off, or when somebody actually buys things, there's a different explanation for why they buy—which I call pull.
That's where the Pull framework comes from. It's a far more accurate description of what you're looking for in their mind and in their world than a pain point, a problem, or an offer of ROI or value.
6:10
To walk you through the core concept: the reason pain points and problems don't work is because you have a ton of pain points and problems throughout your day and throughout your life, and you mostly do nothing about them.
6:27
So if you find a pain point that's annoying—even a really, really big pain point...
6:32
Alex Shevelenko: Yeah, yeah.
6:33
Rob Snyder: By default, they're not going to do anything about it, because we're focused on the wrong thing.
6:40
What we need to be focused on is what they are trying to do. You could think of this as a "job to be done" if we're talking about development terms, but it's really: I'm trying to do something, and it's a project on my to-do list that I'm prioritizing right now.
6:58
So it has to be action-shaped. Then, if I'm trying to do something and my existing tools, options, and methods are good enough, I'm not going to buy your product.
7:10
It needs to have these two components:
I need to be trying to do something.
My existing options are not good enough to do that thing.
It's almost like a force pressing against a wall—I'm being held back. Only in that situation will somebody buy something; they will pull it out of your hands. That's what the concept of pull is.
7:35
Alex Shevelenko: What I'm thinking of as one framework—sorry, I know you're a Harvard man, but Stanford came out with BJ Fogg's framework, which is about combining motivation and ease of doing something.
7:49
So I'm motivated, I have a project, and it's easy to do, right? That fits a little bit into your framework of being doable. Then there's a trigger.
8:01
A lot of times we think the trigger is something external—like Alex shows up and tells you how the world will be different. But what you're saying is that the trigger is internal. The really important dimension is that it's internal because you have to do this thing every time, and every time you do it, it frustrates you. So of all the things you're motivated to do, it stays at the top of your list. The reason you haven't been doing it is because you thought it was difficult, right? The alternatives aren't great, and it feels complex.
8:48
So what I hear you saying is that as you must do this thing, the next level is that you're reducing the complexity and unblocking someone from doing it. Is that right?
8:57
Rob Snyder: Yeah, though I don't love framing it as "ease of doing the thing." That's not the exact way I would describe it, because I've seen many cases where someone is trying to do something, but the existing option is actually too cheap or too simple.
9:15
In a lot of enterprise software companies, the cheap product-led growth (PLG) option is not perceived as a viable option for the enterprise.
9:25
So it's more about the fact that existing options don't work for me for some reason. That reason could be that it's too easy, too hard, too expensive, or too cheap—it could be a variety of different things.
9:42
Alex Shevelenko: Right, right. So the main theme is just that the current set of options they're aware of doesn't work.
9:50
Rob Snyder: Yes, yes.
9:52
Alex Shevelenko: OK. How often do you find that—especially for new products when people start looking for solutions to this?
10:11
At least from my perspective, sometimes the inbound requests coming into your business are a little bit easier because clearly somebody has enough of a problem to research something. They know what they want to do, they clearly don't have an in-house solution, and their outreach is a sign that they're already further along on this journey.
10:40
Is that true? What have you found?
10:44
Rob Snyder: Sometimes, yeah. The most important thing I have learned about startups and about the world is that this pull dynamic we talked about—where they're trying to do something and they're blocked because their existing options aren't good enough—exists independently of your startup's existence. That is just a thing happening in their world.
11:11
So if they show up inbound and that presence is in their lives—they're trying to do something, they're blocked, and they've done research—they're going to buy very fast.
11:23
But if they show up and that isn't present in their world…
11:27
Rob Snyder: ...they're going to waste your time.
11:29
Alex Shevelenko: Why would they show up? Why else do people show up for these things?
11:34
Rob Snyder: Oh, I've seen the most absurd things come inbound. It's like, "Oh, I heard about the product, and I thought I'd sign up for a demo because I thought it'd be interesting." I see stuff like that all the time.
11:46
Alex Shevelenko: Self-education! Yeah, self-education. "I saw it at a conference," "I'm looking for a job," or "I'm just curious," right?
There are so many reasons people press that schedule button. And with AI right now, it feels like everybody is a little paranoid about what's going on out there, so the people who have the time may have more curiosity. Is that a fair way of thinking about it?
12:12
Rob Snyder: Totally. But it's always been the case. This is why when you take a demo call with Salesforce or any of these big companies, you realize the first 15 minutes or the first call is explicitly to disqualify you.
When you go inbound, they're just like, "Are you sure you have money? Are you sure?"
Ideally, with inbound you want to qualify, but what we're looking for—whether inbound or outbound—is the person trying to do something who is stuck and needs help. It doesn't really matter the source; what matters is finding that person. That person will rip a product out of your hands. If that's not present, it would be weird if they bought from you. Not impossible, but weird.
13:05
Alex Shevelenko: Got it. Love the framework. Let's nail the acronym and then start digging in.
P is for Project, right?
U is for Unavoidable—like it must happen.
L is for List of options.
L is for Limitations.
So, there's a project that you're prioritizing right now, unavoidable needs, and your list of options has limitations that prevent you from getting the project done.
I like that in the book you bundle the first two steps together and the second two steps together, making it easier to follow.
So let's say—I imagine the majority of where you've worked through this is in a B2B context, although I could imagine this works broadly...
14:00
Rob Snyder: I've actually done a bunch of B2C as well.
14:02
Alex Shevelenko: B2C as well, okay! But let's say we're moving into the enterprise B2B universe. That universe is a little bit messier when it comes to a single person having unavoidable needs, because that person may have a great problem but no control over budget or no idea how to buy anything inside their company.
In some companies, you need to get that first person to get you in, get you on a credit card, and then they need to find another person with the same problem who actually knows how to get it approved. I remember that being really bizarre for us when we tried to get into Salesforce as a startup. We almost had two of these people who were both innovators, but one actually knew how to navigate vendor security and internal processes, while the other was on the periphery with concrete needs.
Then there are organizations in regulated industries popping up AI committees—people figuring out what AI is, who are almost incentivized not to do anything. There's just a lot of friction despite best intentions.
How do you navigate through that?
15:38
Rob Snyder: Yeah, I like the word "friction" that you used there. We have to think in terms of physics here.
For a deal to get done in a small or mid-size business, the physics are straightforward: you find the CEO or the VP of whatever department, and that person has pull. They're trying to get something done, they're stuck, and so they pull you in. The buying process is just sending a Stripe link or something similar.
16:08
As you go into bigger businesses—into enterprises—the physics are the exact same. I helped one pre-product, pre-sale startup sell into a Fortune 100 media company we both know. From a cold outbound message on LinkedIn, the deal closed in two months. That’s when you realize enterprise physics aren't fundamentally different.
16:41
You have to find the person who has pull. That person is going to exert the effort internally to get the deal done.
However, because it's enterprise, there is so much more friction. That person often has to recruit additional people onto the buying team.
17:05
We have to separate the person who has pull (who is going to cause the deal to happen) from all the friction trying to prevent the deal from happening.
It's the same core physics; you just need to have more pull with that person. Often they need to recruit a couple of other people and genuflect 47 times at different committees to get the deal done, but ultimately, you are helping that person.
17:38
Alex Shevelenko: It's interesting. My experience has been that sometimes the person who is most interested and has the problem may be your champion, but they're not going to be the one pulling, right?
You don't want them pulling—you want them to get you to the person who can actually do the pulling. That could be their role given the nature of the challenge, but you still need their help to reach the person with the pull.
18:13
So I'm often asking: "Who are the people in your organization who are on the same wavelength as you, but actually have more incentive to get this across the line?"
Are you finding that as well? It's not always the first person you get into the enterprise with who becomes the final champion, right?
18:40
Rob Snyder: Yeah. I basically think of it as finding the person with pull who can productively exert force internally. If it's not the first person you talk to, the whole goal of that conversation is to get that person excited and use them to reach the real pull-holder.
18:57
Alex Shevelenko: Got it. So it's basically networking up until you find who that person is.
How do you think about pilots that help you get to that person?
In the AI world, the friction of trying a product is lower than it used to be. There is still complexity around mockups and demos, but I think buying purely off a PowerPoint is becoming harder in many cases than it used to be. Logically, in a world where you aren't as constrained by a mockup, having something real is better than just a slide of a mockup.
What are your thoughts on this?
20:16
Rob Snyder: What's interesting is that once you understand pull, it changes how you think about the physics of sales.
Of the startups I help, I typically eliminate 90% to 100% of their demos, and I eliminate 90% to 100% of their proof of concepts (POCs) or pilots.
20:45
What founders typically come in thinking is that the demo or the pilot is the main character of the sales process: "We have to structure the call around the demo, create a tailored demo with their data, and run a pilot to prove that people will use the product."
All of those things sound right and make intuitive sense, but they are almost always entirely backwards. The sales process works way better when you cut out the demo almost entirely, cut out the pilot almost entirely, and only include what is absolutely necessary.
21:27
To give an anonymized example: there's a startup in Europe that sells into big insurance agencies. They sell AI software that helps analyze insurance policies.
Originally, they were doing what most of us do: get on a call, do a little bit of discovery, show the product to demonstrate how awesome it is, and then ask for a pilot.
22:01
Rob Snyder: ...we're going to propose a pilot where you can get users using it, prove the value internally, and da-da-da-da-da, right?
22:07
Alex Shevelenko: And that leads to 6, 12-plus month sales cycles. It's just default there.
22:12
Rob Snyder: That's what we think of: 12, maybe even 18-month sales cycles. Especially, I would say, in insurance—they just love a little bit of innovation tourism, you know?
22:25
Alex Shevelenko: Totally, totally.
22:25
Rob Snyder: But we changed it, and their sales cycle is now under three months because they've almost entirely eliminated all of that.
22:31
Alex Shevelenko: So what's the first thing that happens in that first meeting?
22:35
Rob Snyder: In the first meeting, what they're trying to figure out—the discovery—is no longer focused on pain points or problems. It's focused on pull:
What are you trying to do?
What have you tried?
Why isn't that good enough?
It's almost always: "We've tried using AI—like Microsoft Copilot—to analyze these insurance documents, and it's kind of right, but it's not super accurate, so we don't really use it internally."
23:01
And it's like: "OK, cool. But what you're trying to do here is reduce the time to review these policies from 40 hours or two weeks down to 10 minutes, right?" That's what everyone is trying to do.
"OK, great, that's exactly what we do. Here's a quick 30-second demo of how it works."
First, it's a description of what it is, and then it's the tiniest little demo showing only the tiny piece that makes it click. Anything they show beyond that causes more unproductive questions.
23:34
So it's this tiny 30-second demo, and those 30 seconds have to be exactly tied to the project they have. Otherwise, it distracts and involves more people in the sales journey, requiring more approvals.
23:49
Alex Shevelenko: Because in an enterprise, typically their response is: "Well, we have 15 vendors, and Duck Soup could do this, or some other insurance tool could do that, and we have Cloud licenses that can do this..." Is that what you're seeing?
24:15
Rob Snyder: Yeah, 100%. Basically, once you understand what their pull is—what they're trying to do and where they're blocked—that tells you exactly what you need to pitch and how to pitch it.
If you add anything other than that—if you talk about your vision or features they didn't ask about—you increase the surface area of things they need to understand. In physics terms, that increases friction, increases drag, and reduces the aerodynamics of the deal. Demos are really dangerous.
24:55
Once you've scoped down to the exact shape of what they need to get unblocked, the question becomes: what is the purpose of a demo or a pilot?
25:10
What they found was that they were running 3-month pilots just to see if users would use it and like it. But that's not the relevant thing to test. If it actually reduces the time from 40 hours to 10 minutes, users are going to be required to use it—there's no question about whether they will.
25:38
The only thing they actually need to prove in a pilot is accuracy or something similarly small, which can be evaluated by one expert in 24 hours or less.
25:50
So they went from those long drawn-out processes... You can see the entire physics of their sales process was non-aerodynamic because of how they were pitching, because they weren't focused on pull, because they were pitching the broad platform, and because they were proposing pilots focused on irrelevant things.
Tightening all of that to focus strictly on pull is what compresses the sales process.
26:22
Alex Shevelenko: Interesting. It almost feels like the same things that help you expand within a client will hurt you when you're trying to land them.
26:34
Rob Snyder: Yes.
26:37
Alex Shevelenko: If you try to sell too much too broadly, you run into that issue.
Before the call, you and I were chatting about a scenario: let's say you know the client well—the persona, for lack of a better word (I know you don't like that word)—and the type of organization that is your ideal potential client. You have a few success stories where the Pull framework worked for previous clients, but you don't know which priority applies to this specific prospective client. That's pretty common, especially as you navigate higher up in an organization where there are multiple ways to align with top priorities.
How do you discover that in the meeting without giving off a interrogation-style "discovery vibe"—which makes people sensitive—and without pigeonholing yourself to the one solution that person happens to mention at that moment, when it might turn out to be something else?
28:02
Alex Shevelenko: Well, yeah, it's a priority, but it's still too much effort to bring in one vendor that can only solve this single burning platform project right now, right?
Because the larger the organization, the more likely they have a portfolio of related projects as well. What are your thoughts on that?
28:27
Rob Snyder: I'll tell you what doesn't work. You're typically taught to have a fixed list of discovery questions, or follow frameworks like BANT, MEDDIC, or MEDDPICC.
28:42
Alex Shevelenko: Right, right.
28:42
Rob Snyder: When you start with BANT and say, "So, what's your budget?"—they're thinking, "Who the heck are you?" You get people defensive, and discovery starts to feel like a colonoscopy.
28:56
What I find works is just asking: "Hey, what is it that you're prioritizing that caused you to take this call and think we might be able to help?"
Then you can poke at that a little bit: "OK, cool. Help me understand—is that actually the main thing, or are there other priorities that are more important?"
You stay open-ended until they lay it out, and then you say: "You're a busy person—rank these for me. Which one is the number one priority where it's 'gun to the head'?"
29:28
Alex Shevelenko: Yeah, like: "What's the thing you were hoping we'd be able to help with? How are you prioritizing that, and is it that important or is it a side project?"
29:41
Rob Snyder: What I'm not trying to do is create artificial urgency, because—and you've probably found the same thing—I can't convince anybody of anything. I'm not going to be able to convince someone to drop their number one priority in exchange for buying my product. That's just absurd.
30:05
Alex Shevelenko: Let's agree on that. But look, these people are meeting you for the first time. You may be consultative and friendly, but they aren't going to say: "Rob, actually, my number one priority is getting promoted because I have a wife, two kids, tuition, and a mistress..."
They're not saying that out loud, but they're thinking it! There's something underneath.
30:44
Typically that's taboo to bring up, unless you talk to hardcore enterprise salespeople who say: "Yeah, this is how we win. We get you on stage, get you promoted, get you an article in a magazine..." Or if you're in marketing: "We help you win a bunch of marketing awards so you get famous, land your next gig, or get promoted."
Have you found a way to uncover those underlying motivations as well?
31:22
Rob Snyder: Yeah, I think of those as second-order or underlying outcomes—the "so that" statements.
To describe the project on my own to-do list that made coming on this podcast relevant: I'm trying to explain the Pull framework to as many founders as possible, so that people stop suffering in the pain cave of pushing a product... so that I feel like I didn't waste my finite time on this earth...
Yes, it's important to know all the "so thats" that follow, but there has to be a primary project first.
32:22
If you understand that initial project, you can get into the personal motivations over drinks or when you fly them out. You want to massage the product and experience based on what all the "so thats" are for that person, because those are going to be the real driving motivators. You don't want to fight against one of their "so thats," which will make the deal feel wrong to them for reasons they can't quite articulate.
32:51
Alex Shevelenko: By the way, everyone, we'll link to Rob's website, but definitely check out his book—it's great and available on Audible, so if you're a busy founder, no excuses!
If we go a step further, Rob: let's say I've bought into your framework. I have a lot of options because we started with a horizontal product with great technology and a few success stories. Now I need to quickly prioritize: where do we find more of these people who have pull that fits us? How do we go about it?
Take a classic B2B scenario with a mid-to-high price point where you can talk to prospects on the phone or Zoom. What have you found works?
In your case, I happened to discover your book. If my business were just this podcast, I could have guessed you'd be open to an interview because you're publishing a book to get your ideas out there. What is the equivalent of that for most businesses? How do we spot the pattern or interrupt people where they show signs of having pull?
34:35
Rob Snyder: Right, so there's the stage where you have revenue and you're growing, but you have a bunch of different case studies across completely different use cases...
34:44
Rob Snyder: The most important thing to take away from this stage is to avoid the whiteboard.
What happens at the whiteboard is that, as a smart person, you'll go write out all the theoretical possibilities. That didn't work well in continental philosophy, and it doesn't work well for startups.
35:14
Where you have to start is your actual customer data. Look across your current customers and focus specifically on two types:
The ones who bought weirdly fast.
The ones who ghosted you and then bought weirdly fast months or years later.
35:30
Go back to them, talk to them, watch the sales calls, and figure out what their pull was at the time. From that, you'll form hypotheses like, "Oh, I think we're experiencing two or three distinct types of pull."
Then you test that hypothesis in a set of five sales calls. Use those case studies and present them to other prospects who look exactly like those customers to see how they behave. Those people should rip the product out of your hands. If they don't, something is wrong.
36:15
For the customer who bought all of a sudden after ghosting you, you're trying to figure out the compelling unblock—what changed?
36:27
You don't want to hear about your product's features or ROI. You want to hear about things that had nothing to do with your product at all, but caused your product to suddenly become relevant: "Oh, what happened is we hired this creative strategist who was doing X, but got stuck on Y."
That is what pull was. It wasn't your marketing that made your product relevant—it was their internal situation pulling it in.
37:03
Alex Shevelenko: Rob, when you think about regulated enterprise inertia—where exposing a surface area is highest—it takes a lot to get in. But once you solve a meaningful problem despite that friction, you're in for a long time. You can build a great business with room to expand into adjacent areas.
However, that initial inertia tends to be higher due to the risk aversion of the industry and users. Where have you found pattern breakers—where you get three weeks of validation instead of three months—just because of how things get done in that organization or industry?
38:15
Rob Snyder: That's a really good question. It's important to come back to physics here, because there are two forces:
The champion internally exerting force to make a deal happen.
The internal friction working against the deal (policies, compliance, etc.).
38:35
In regulated spaces, yes, there is more friction against a deal happening. But the actual hard part is finding someone who wants to exert the force internally to do anything.
It's way easier to do nothing in those environments, so you encounter a lot of people who don't have pressing projects. And if they do have a project, their existing options are generally good enough. Everyone is in equilibrium, not really needing to change. Or, if they want to change, they look at the required effort and decide it's not worth it.
39:27
My wife works at a university, and it's almost the opposite of a startup. At a startup, you have too many projects, and the hardest part is prioritizing them. In a regulated, calmer environment, there are things to do, but no burning projects.
So the hard part is actually finding the person who has pull in those organizations. Like you mentioned, there are changemakers internally—the person who came from McKinsey or elsewhere and is asking, "What on earth are we doing here?"
39:57
Rob Snyder: It's finding those people who can still navigate internally, but have firepower under their ass, so to speak—to use a crass expression—because they need to get stuff done. They're a change agent of sorts.
40:16
What I've found in those organizations is that you either find that kind of person somewhere in the org, or you go as high as humanly possible. The people at the top are often looking at things thinking, "It's going to take so much effort to change X, Y, Z, but I want to change." Then you come in, and they'll say, "OK, cool—you are our catalyst."
40:37
Alex Shevelenko: Rob, I think this is wonderful. As our audience can see, I'm super interested in the framework and your learnings from it. It's counterintuitive to conventional wisdom, and I think it has tons of applications.
I'm already thinking about how I can use it to bring Relate to the world inside these regulated industries, which have really important ideas that sometimes get stuck and don't see the light of day.
This is a call to all changemakers and entrepreneurs who want to drive change: check out what Rob is doing.
Rob, where can people find you?
41:19
Rob Snyder: I'm at RobSnyder.org.
41:22
Alex Shevelenko: All right. You've given us a few mic-drop moments, but as we wrap up, what's the one thought you want to leave us with?
41:32
Rob Snyder: If you don't find pull, nothing else matters. If you do find pull, everything else solves itself.
41:40
Alex Shevelenko: Beautiful. Rob Snyder, thank you so much for joining us.
41:44
Rob Snyder: Thanks, Alex.