PULL Points vs. Pain Points
Schrodinger's date
Hi! I’m Rob Snyder, founder & author of The Power of Pull - now available worldwide! I help startups with pre-PMF sales in a variety of ways; learn more HERE.
Pain points sound meaningful: “Our current workflow is extremely tedious and frustrating.”
When you hear a potential customer say this, your founder ears perk up. They shouldn’t.
Why? Because pain points don’t cause purchases - the default outcome of a pain point is not buying!
When someone says their workflow is extremely frustrating… is it OK if they don’t change their approach to this workflow right now? You can imagine them saying: “Yes, actually… this workflow is annoying and tedious, but we have other priorities right now.”
Or can they just… fix this workflow without buying your product? “Yes, actually… we just haven’t spent the time figuring that out yet.”
So then, when you look for pain points:
You will find pain points
You will pitch your product and get an enthusiastic response
As a result, you will think they are likely to buy, when they are not likely to buy and might not even be considering buying
My analogy is Schrodinger’s Date: Imagine two people at dinner, where one thinks it’s a date and one doesn’t. They spend dinner talking past each other, each misinterpreting the conversation and the situation, right up until the moment one leans in for a kiss………… and everything goes off the rails.
So: If your sales calls often feel awkward and uncomfortable at the end, and/or you get ghosted afterwards… well, you’re on Schrodinger’s Date. Looking for pain points basically always sends you on Schrodinger’s Date. (And worse - you wind up wasting your life on serial “dates”, when you could have pivoted towards real PULL sooner!)
We need to stop looking for pain points. What should we look for instead?
PULL Points
A founder friend told me to create PULL Points.1
As a reminder, the PULL framework is my model for “someone who is weird NOT to buy your product.” It is used by fast-growing startups to generate their ICP, product, sales process, pricing and basically everything else. And in a sales call, the part called “discovery” is not about finding pain points, it’s about filling out this potential customer’s PULL framework.
There are four components to the PULL framework:
The Project on a person’s to-do list (P)
The situation the person is in that makes this project Unavoidable right now (U)
The List of options available to the person to do their project (L1)
The Limitations of the available options that prevent the person from doing their project (L2)
For a given Project “P”, there are two PULL points. If these PULL points are both true, they would be weird NOT to buy. If the PULL points are not both true, they might buy - but it wouldn’t be weird if they didn’t.
The two PULL points are:
Can’t delay / avoid P
Can’t do P by other means
The first PULL point confirms the project is truly unavoidable; the second confirms that their existing options are truly unworkable.
Looking for PULL points is a really elegant way to fill out the PULL framework in a sales call.
Phrasing and reasoning
When filling out the PULL framework in sales calls, there is a slight but important difference between two questions:
“What are the limitations of the options you’re considering?”
“Are your existing options good enough?”
With Question 1, a potential customer can answer honestly - for example saying “yeah X is expensive” - but they still could go with X, and you might be on Schrodinger’s Date. Question 2, on the other hand, is worded in such a way where it’s not possible to be on Schrodinger’s Date - which is why I recommend asking it that way.
So: Look for PULL Points in your sales calls. Ask in ways that avoid Schrodinger’s Date. And stop wasting your life chasing pain points.
Thanks Doug!