The buyer-pull and seller-push theories of sales | Hacker News Reader

The buyer-pull and seller-push theories of sales

howtogrow.substack.com

116 pointsjmvldz59 comments

I remember working at a company where we used a vendor extensively in their mid-tier plan. We wanted an enterprise plan with more features, so we reached out to buy it.

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.

This made me recall a sales interaction with a company myself. Somehow a sales person from a company noticed we were in the market for an somewhat expensive product their company was selling.

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.

I've had even worse. We wanted to buy a product and couldn't do so on our own, so I left my contact information on their "speak to a sales person" form.

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.

For B2B, there are often close relationships with client interests. If a small firm signs a non-compete and NDA with a competitor, it can cost a lot more than a single sale to chat.

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

> If a small firm signs a non-compete and NDA with a competitor, it can cost a lot more than a single sale to chat.

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.

> this has nothing to do with not answering emails.

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

The datadog sales team would do that kind of things to us, which basically led to us banning them from even consideration.

The main cause of this phenomenon is the simple fact that, many B2B startups are going to try their hardest to charge you the maximum you can afford, rather than a standard price. So their first job is to figure out how deep your pockets are.

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.

It doesn’t even have to be as nefarious as trying to maximally charge. Very often what seems like a simple product offering can actually be quite nuanced with services or goods bundled or unbundled. I’ve listened to many sales calls where the buyer was asking for the wrong thing, and giving a quote for that thing doesn’t really do anyone any good. In my experience the best sales people are really trying their best to tailor their offerings to the needs of the customer even going so far as pointing them at cheaper products or even another company if it fits their needs better.

Love that goalkeeper line. 100% my experience with so many SaaS companys.

@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!

One of the ways you know if you're really practicing this is if you actively disqualify potential customers after the first call.

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.

That’s antithetical to “this period’s bonus.” Who cares if it dies in three months when the bonus for that three months end up in the salesman’s pocket?

Why would you be paying a bonus for deals that die? Sales incentives need to match business incentives or you’re completely screwed.

Also: “Coffee is for closers”

You can’t make sales people responsible for the entire company, that’s CEO- and board-level responsibility.

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?

As a counterpoint, my company pays engineers a bonus only if sales brings in enough revenue…

I’ve always hated “team objectives” as such tend to be far outside an individuals control.

It is only a counterpoint if you claim that this compensation scheme works well. If you don't think it makes sense, then it actually proves my point that bonuses should only involve things that directly depend on employee's own performance.

Definitely agree with you there, perhaps choose the wrong word.

That’s not how it works, you structure the comp such that the sales person doesn’t get paid out in this case.

Is it fair for the company to have received three months of payments from a customer but the salesperson doesn’t get commission at all? How will you retain sales staff when word gets out? What’s the period length over which if the deal dies the salesperson doesn’t get their commission? Do you roll back commission payments later when the customer stops paying?

Yes you clawback commissions. It’s a very common practice.

These are all great questions which people have answered and it’s the standard solution to the problem of misaligned incentives between the company receiving recurring revenue and the sales person receiving an upfront commission.

It's optimized for the seller. The sales person that can actually determine good fit/bad fit can't also be making 100 calls a day. The BDR making 100 calls a day cannot determine good fit/bad fit on their own on the first call.

The article details the seller-push (i.e. bad) theory, but doesn't go very far with the buyer-pull - presumably this is where one would get value out of the coaching sessions offered at the bottom of the piece?

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?

> 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.

This is not a very helpful post, because it doesn’t provide many clues on how to do buyer-pull sales.

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.

Much of my team would probably qualify me as about as buyer-pull as sales people get — I told my VP my strategy for pipe generation in a QBR was exercising more product influence — and I disagree with many of the author’s points.

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.

> Attaching to buyers pain is the only way you’ll ever get anything meaningful done.

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.

They followed up with another post to answer that question: https://howtogrow.substack.com/p/the-physics-of-sales-part-2

So "push" and "pull" as English verbs are basically opposite; and he's describing them as opposites in the previous post. But in this post he describes "push" this way:

> 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.

It is a "see.... i know my shit" and "here is my number" post.

I believe (I have done very little sales, so mostly as a buyer) that while all three (buyer-pull, seller-push, Cialdini-style mentioned in a comment below) can work, the best result comes from buyer-pull when you have empathy for the customer.

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.

For a startup it is important to not be pulled to too many directions. If you find one great customer you can co-develop the product with them, whereas having very many customers might take up all your time listening to them.

Good marketing is selling stuff that people want to buy.

People or businesses that break this rule and prosper are either being incredibly persistent at playing a numbers game or are doing something sketchy.

I agree completely with your idea of marketing totally: its getting customers to yes before you know their name:

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.

I remember my first book. I spent freakishly little time working on the cover, blurb, keywords and promotion before publishing it, because, well, who needs that shit, it will obviously sell itself! So I published it and opened my newly minted Amazon author metrics page daily as I waited for it to take off. I waited, and I waited, two months I waited and not one sale! three years later I have sold a few dozen, though it does seem popular at the local library.

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.

Is there any data that you can share beyond anecdotal claims? For starters would love to see following

- Close-rate differences between push vs. pull strategies.

- Win rates for deals where urgency was “created” vs. “aligned with existing urgency.”

I don't mean to be rude but this idea that there's some decisive, authoritative data vs. sketchy anecdotal claims kind of drives me up the wall.

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.

Your comment hits on a broader tension I see a lot, not just here but in business strategy in general. It's the divide between compelling, experience-based narratives and empirical evidence. I think both are essential.

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.

Please don’t pollute HN with AI slop.

Two background resources useful to know: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcome-Driven_Innovation and Christensen's "Jobs to be Done" theory. 2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/245472.Integrity_Selling... specifically, the taxonomy of customer types

my favourite theory of sales is that of the school of cialdini, which is basically treating the customer as something which can lead to money coming out of it if you supply the right verbal and visual stimulus.

Unironically demonic.

The prospect is a p-zombie?

This sounds like a viable first-order black-box approximation for beginners. More experienced and skillful sales people surely go beyond that understanding

I hate sales people.

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.

I see what you’re doing. Going after that anti-sales dollar. That’s a good market. Very smart.

Haha it's just all the sales people I met were exactly kind of people I hate, which made me hate sales entirely. There is something special about them: fake smile, gestures etc even in simple face2face conversations

Whether you like it or not, somebody selling keeps most of us in a job. Mostly I’m a software developer but I’m in a role now that requires selling. The simple truth is that most people need some kind of push to get them to make a decision. Whether that’s a needs based thing as described in “buyer-pull” or a couple of little harmless manipulations doesn’t really matter in the end. As long as the customer got what they wanted it’s mutually beneficial.

And bonus: you get to keep a job sheltered away from the grotty truth of how the money is made that funds your salary.

Unfortunately my company needs sales, because other companies have sales. That's a nuclear weapon situation. Sales gives a leverage, pushes company ahead of competition. So the competition have to have sales as well.

I find this situation toxic, but that's just sad truth of the world.

Whoever it was at Substack that decided to remove the ability to pinch-to-zoom on mobile should be forcibly removed and left stranded on an island.

this article feels out of touch. The actual driver of sales esp in AI and enterprise tech in general has nothing to do with these academic theories

How does that work, then?

There's no reason to put Physics in the title. There's zero Physics in the article.

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.

That's a more representative title, so let's use it instead. Thanks!

I’ve seen a few submissions have their titles changed in the last few months. I was led to believe that submissions should not deviate from the original title under any circumstance other than those described on the guidelines.

> 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.

In this case the title is misleading so the policy still applies

I had always read misleading to mean deceptive. That’s embarrassing.

It's often used that way. I'd define 'misleading' as 'easier to interpret incorrectly than correctly', and 'deceptive' as 'intentionally misleading'.

The policy is as stable as fossils in granite. It definitely hasn't changed.

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!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com