Treat your startup not as separate departments (sales, product), but as one cohesive organism. The unifying force is customer "Pull," which acts as an evolutionary selection pressure, shaping every aspect of the business to fit what customers urgently need.
The default state for any new product is zero demand. Instead of trying to create desire, your job is to find the rare, pre-existing conditions where a customer is so urgently blocked on a project that they would be irrational not to buy your solution.
Top business schools teach methodologies like customer interviews that make founders feel productive but are ultimately "fake research projects." This delays the essential, painful feedback from actual sales attempts, which is the true driver of progress and learning.
Defining an ICP based on who you *want* to sell to is flawed. A "Pull"-based ICP is defined reactively: it's the specific group of people currently experiencing such an urgent, blocked project that it would be illogical for them *not* to buy your solution right now.
The traditional sales mindset ("How do I make them want this?") is flawed. A "Pull" mindset inverts this entirely by asking, "What urgent project are they already trying to accomplish, and are they blocked?" The focus shifts from product persuasion to identifying and resolving an existing blockage.
In a discovery call, the phrase "that's a lot of very useful context" is a sign you're failing. It means you're gathering irrelevant business factoids instead of identifying "Pull." The sole purpose of discovery is to determine if a prospect is trying to achieve something urgent now and is blocked.
Don't view sales friction like pushing or persuading as an obstacle to overcome. Instead, treat it as "selection pressure"—direct feedback from reality on how your business is misaligned with customer "Pull." Your job is to diagnose this pressure to find and fix the flaws in your business model.
A startup's evolution is not a linear execution of a plan. It's an "unfolding" process where the pain from misaligned sales (selection pressure) forces you to change one core assumption. This change then ripples through your entire business, forcing it to evolve into a more coherent form that fits the market's "Pull."
While there are infinite logical ways to describe your product, only one will resonate. It must directly mirror the customer's "Pull." If they need "visibility into AI failures," your pitch must be "we give you visibility into AI failures." Any other framing is a distraction that will cause confusion.
When selling to what you believe is a single ICP, but some buyers have intense 5/5 "Pull" and others have a mild 2/5, your ICP definition is flawed. The difference in their behavior is the key signal. You must diagnose the non-obvious differences between these groups to define your true, high-intensity ICP.