Most founders instinctively try to "push" sales forward: creating urgency, sending non-stop follow-ups, and trying to convince prospects. The actual physics of sales is "pull." When a customer has genuine demand and lacks good options, they will do the work—scheduling meetings, bringing in stakeholders, and asking for information—to acquire your solution.
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The discovery phase of a sales call isn't a generic interrogation or a prelude to a demo. Its only goal is to understand the customer's PULL: their specific Project, its Urgency, the other Options they've considered, and the Limitations of those options. Only then can you effectively position your product.
The most significant mindset shift for founders is realizing they can't force a customer to have demand. Demand is an objective state in the customer's world—a project they are already trying to accomplish. This transforms sales calls from high-pressure convincing into low-pressure discovery, liberating the founder from feeling responsible for the outcome.
Use a ruthlessly simple, repeatable process for zero-to-one sales: 1) Craft a 'pull hypothesis,' 2) Schedule five conversations, 3) Execute the conversations to discover demand, not to sell, and 4) Analyze the results to refine your hypothesis for the next sprint. This forces focus and rapid iteration.
When you feel like you're trying to convince or 'push' a prospect during a sales call, treat it as a critical signal. This feeling indicates a flaw in your process—either you're targeting the wrong people or misinterpreting their demand. Use this to diagnose and fix the root cause.
Believing you must *convince* the market leads to a dangerous product strategy: building a feature-rich platform to persuade buyers. This delays sales, burns capital, and prevents learning. A "buyer pull" approach focuses on building the minimum product needed to solve one pre-existing problem.
Buyers often volunteer the exact details of their problem—their project, its urgency, and their frustration with current options. However, traditional sales training teaches founders to ignore these cues, interrupt the customer, and pivot to pitching their solution, thereby missing critical information.
If prospects seem engaged and agree to follow-ups but then disappear, it's a strong indicator you're "pushing" a solution they don't truly need. In their mind, they don't understand how your product solves their prioritized problem, even if they were polite during the call.
When sales stall, founders assume the market isn't interested. More often, it's an execution problem: they fail to listen to clear demand signals or pitch irrelevant features, creating a self-inflicted "demand problem."
The fundamental force in a sale isn't a seller's persuasion. It's the buyer's pre-existing need to accomplish a task on their mental "to-do list." When your product (supply) fits that task better than alternatives, the buyer pulls it from you, requiring minimal convincing.
Founders often dread sales because they mistakenly believe their role is to aggressively convince customers. This "seller push" feels inauthentic. Adopting a "buyer pull" perspective, where you help customers solve existing problems, transforms sales from a chore into a collaborative process.