The dichotomy seems real but hard to actually do anything with if you're in sales. I've done some penny-ante sales work in my past life in what I would call buyer-pull situations. It's great! People find you and they want to spend money, so all you have to do is not discourage them.
But once you get past "I'm selling something so manifestly useful that people find me to pay me for it", it sure seems like the things you, the sales rep, have to do to get their dollars skew rapidly toward the "seller-push" side of things. What else works? Folks gotta know about you and they gotta know you can solve their problems, right?
I don't think there's anything else you can do, other than reinterpret 'manifestly useful' more widely as 'desirable'. Other than just having a legitimately useful product, the options I can see are:
- 'Make the product mandatory in some way' (eg. getting on large companies' preferred equipment lists, getting named as required equipment in a standardized testing procedure, providing an accessible interface to an impenetrable government department, etc.)
- 'Make more people aware of the product (in a non-pushy way) so they can choose to buy it' (eg. sponsoring crazy stunts the way Red Bull does, running an F1 team, becoming associated with celebrities etc.)
These still require an actually desirable product, of course.
You try to understand the needs of the buyer, and see if what you are selling aligns with those needs. This is needed for effective buyer-pull, because they might not understand what they really need, or how what you are offering might fulfill those needs.
This blogpost describes sales strategy as obvious as it is annoying, just like described seller-push. Written in a fashion of trying to sell me something.
Just stop manipulating for a second, ok? But I guess the profession would not exist then.
And bonus: you get to keep a job sheltered away from the grotty truth of how the money is made that funds your salary.
I find this situation toxic, but that's just sad truth of the world.
Not them disqualifying you, but you actively saying, "Hey, not sure we are the right solution for you. Seems like you're trying to achieve X, but we're really better fit if you're trying to achieve Y."
This is in lieu of trying to convince them that you're a good fit for X, or that they should actually really be wanting to achieve Y.
Quick disqualification is sort of a counter-intuitive idea for a lot of throughput maximizing engineers. Shouldn't we want to optimize every lead?
Perhaps, but I think the better frame is optimizing productive seller-minutes. And time spent on deals that should die (and probably will die, eventually) is definitely not optimized.
Also: “Coffee is for closers”
If you don’t give sales bonus for clients that later canceled due to engineering or tech support fuck up, do you expect regular sales people also to do engineering and tech support management in your company?
I’ve always hated “team objectives” as such tend to be far outside an individuals control.
- Close-rate differences between push vs. pull strategies.
- Win rates for deals where urgency was “created” vs. “aligned with existing urgency.”
What data would or could exist in this case beyond the hundreds of calls the author is apparently basing their observations on? That seems like a reasonable qualitative data set to me.
On the other hand, what you're asking for doesn't make much sense. Any push/pull strategy difference is going to change who takes a call in the first place. You're not doing a RCT on a random sampling of the population.
The point is simply that you're going to have a better time doing sales if your supply matches some pre-existing demand. You don't need a quantitative study to understand why that may well be the case.
It's the same reason that, despite being bombarded with advertisements, we don't all go out and buy 16 meals a day or 10 cars a year simply because someone tried to sell those things to us. We act when we have a need, and founders need to understand that as a physical reality when trying to sell their products.
The author has presented a fantastic and intuitive narrative with the "BUYER-PULL" model. Your analogy is spot-on: you can't sell 16 meals a day to someone who only needs three. The qualitative insight is powerful.
My request for data comes from the next step. How do we know this narrative is not just a "just-so story"? How much does this effect matter on the margin? In the complex world of B2B sales, where needs aren't always as clear as hunger, can "push" tactics sometimes be effective at helping a buyer crystallize a latent need?
Asking for metrics like close rates isn't meant to demand an impossible standard of scientific proof. Instead, it's an attempt to test the boundaries of this framework and understand its real-world impact. Great insights often come from quantifying the effects of a powerful story.
It’d be nice if you could just build something useful and have people beat a path to your door, and most of us would probably prefer that, but it’s not reality.
I challenge my customers and attempt to convince them they have the wrong approach to achieve X all the time.
Attaching to buyers pain is the only way you’ll ever get anything meaningful done.
Identifying and building the pain and knowing you have the solution is how you create urgency. If you’re doing it right that work is valuable for your customer and your company.
Most people need to see something before they’re willing to invest team time mapping solution to pain / use cases.
Some customers completely drop the ball on deployment. People get fired. People leave and the project gets abandoned. Shit happens. It’s rarely the vendor’s fault, unless it was a complete mismatch, and that’s everyone’s fault.
Yes. Under the one precondition that you can actually provide a solution. Your customer might know that pain better than you do and they may sometimes know the solution space better than you do.
That is rare, but I have been on the reverse end of that multiple times. And while it isn't a catastrophe if the sales person is just that, they may need to convince someone with an actually hard problem that they (and their collegues) have the competency to solve it.
Some problems are just genuinely hard. Not in a "we would need to restructure some things"-hard, but rather "limited by the laws of physics"-hard.
If that is the case with a customer all you can offer is to try together.
> We are taught to do “discovery” to find their “pain points” and “problems.” So we waterboard potential customers with a series of questions to try to understand their current state... then try to surface their problems + pain points
And PULL this way:
> What are you trying to accomplish right now, or this quarter? Why this project now, vs. all the others you could prioritize? What options have you considered or tried, and what do you feel like is lacking with your existing options?
Those sound very similar to me.
So, their salesperson was shooting a penalty with no goalkeeper: All they needed to do was send an offer, and we would negotiate and close the deal.
Instead, they called my CTO multiple times, all at awkward times, like during his lunch. When he didn't pick up, they started calling HIS WIFE. The CTO eventually unplugged the vendor, and we had to find an alternative.
Ironically, another competing vendor we contacted did the same: they never stopped calling, they never wanted to schedule a proper meeting by email, and when you picked up, they didn't want you to hang up, even when you were busy.
I don't know how sales in tech can be so bad. Not even car dealers are like that. If I see a form stating, "Contact us for pricing," I am never doing it. I don't want to be grilled for 30 minutes on BDE calls: "Can you even pay us?" and then another hour of death by PowerPoint until they finally give you a price. That is, if they don't spam calls first.
They always called during lunch hours (three times). When I finally had a short moment, there was (1) nothing substantial the sales person could tell me about their products or their prices, (2) they had no idea how we (public sector) have to buy things and wanted me to make an exception and when I asked them to just email me their offer to my publicly available email address (3) they didn't.
By that point that company would have been better off not having a sales person. And that type of experience was up to today nearly the only thing that happened with sales, except for one time where the company sent a technician to have a look at our circumstances which worked great.
No response for a week. So I emailed an email address that was included in the onboarding email.
No response for another week. So I sent their CEO a message on LinkedIn. Hey, I really want to buy, let's talk.
No response for another week (and four months later). So I gave up.
Also, in niche industries everyone already knows one another for decades. People looking to fragment that market are seen as a problem even if they don't know they are a problem.
It is rude to "ghost" people, but it is unfortunately a modern pop-culture trend. Most competent firms should at minimum refer your team to a competitor if their schedule is full for the year. =3
this has nothing to do with not answering emails.
> People looking to fragment that market are seen as a problem even if they don't know they are a problem.
you mean customers?
> It is rude to "ghost" people, but it is unfortunately a modern pop-culture trend
no its not. ignoring people is as old as time.
For you maybe, sometimes the entitled do not recognize the liability their antics bring to other business dynamics.
>you mean customers?
You mean your potential 1 sale is worth more than years long account activity your competitors have shown? Some customers are just not worth the grief, and you make more profit not selling to them... Too-big or too-small some people are just are not worth the risk... You'll be out of business if you ignore this...
>> It is rude to "ghost" people,
>no its not. ignoring people is as old as time.
Hence the mystery is solved, some companies won't want that kind of contradictory business relationship liability. People often can't get away with that behavior unless they are running a fast food outlet with low value stakes. lol =3
Another cause is that, a lot of B2B startups are building the plane while flying it - they don't actually have all of the enterprise features they claim to have (or at least, the features aren't yet generalized enough - think "if customer.name == 'BigCo' then DoBigCoThing()" type of code). So they need to figure out what your needs are, and thus what things will need to be cobbled together by the time the deal closes.
@netlify I hope you see this. You are terrible at the buyer-pull. We want log shipping, but to get that, we have to go into the "enterprise" tier... We are a startup with very little money, and what is log shipping worth to us? Not hundreds a month. Honestly it's worth a little less than whatever the cost of us moving to Vercel is (where log shipping is not part of enterprise).
So now I've now been through multiple sales emails from them trying to get me on a call to "discuss how we can help you" which I know is just going to be Netlify trying to upsell me into a bunch of "enterprise" features we don't need. Just tell me the price and let me click a button to enable it!
This is how I learnt why marketing and promotion (and I guess luck) are everything and without being an influencer or spending money to get it noticed the algorithm will forever ignore you. Great to see these amazing marketing theories but you need to get noticed first.
People or businesses that break this rule and prosper are either being incredibly persistent at playing a numbers game or are doing something sketchy.
Funny example: Futurama's Fry goes to the eye-phone store and pulls out wads of cash and yells at the cashier. First two sentences: "take my money! I hope you have a phone left!"
I've not worked in sales and marketing but I have a soft place for those who do it well. I distinctly remember being asked by a Chem Eng at a young age: what's the difference between sales and marketing. And i distinctly remembered being confused. At that time both ideas where so fuzzy in my mind I had no idea how to start an answer.
Many years later I might add strong cross functional coordination and a great COO can help a company market itself. Its a base to build off. Its such a breath of fresh air when customers think a company isn't a bunch of silos.
croemer•5mo ago
It's about Buyer-Pull vs Seller-Push theories of sales.
Edit: The original title was "The Physics of Sales", now the HN title has been updated.
dang•5mo ago
lurk2•5mo ago
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
Has this policy been relaxed recently? I never liked it as I find a lot of submissions can be unintentionally misleading when the original title is used.
croemer•5mo ago
lurk2•5mo ago
taneq•5mo ago
dang•5mo ago
It sounds like the subthread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45098046 cleared up any misunderstandings but if you still have questions let us know!