Demand-Side Sales 101 is Bob Moesta’s book about selling by understanding how people buy, which in practice means it is a book about Jobs to be Done applied to the sales conversation rather than to product design. Moesta was one of the people around Clayton Christensen when the JTBD framing was being worked out, and the book reads like a practitioner’s manual: fewer theories, more transcripts of people explaining why they bought a laptop, changed their banks or tried out a remote doctor’s consultation.

The book is uneven. The first chapter is spent making a single point: that you should put yourself in the situation of the customer and work out what problem he has and what progress he is trying to make on it. The chapters then alternate between the perfunctory and the genuinely useful, and the useful ones are mostly the ones about interviewing. The material on the JTBD timeline, the case studies and the interviewing tips are worth the price of the whole thing; the rest can be skimmed without much loss.

The best insight in my opinion is that most real growth comes from a struggling moment, not from the specifications of the product. This is as true of software as it is of anything else that gets sold.

The biggest problem is that there is absolutely no insight into how to acquire the first customer, which is the biggest problem for greenfield software. This book focuses a lot on how to conduct customer interviews to gain new insights into getting further sales and understanding your existing customers to nail down market fit, but has no comment on how to even convince them to sit down with you in the first place, or what to do before you even have any customers to speak of.

That said, while the sales framework might not be particularly useful to indiehackers or solo founders, it’s pretty good material for technical consultants and developers that deal directly with customers, because it can give you tools to understand their point of view, their needs and wants, and get information out of them about what they actually want their software to do.

Notes

Three sources of energy

• Functional motivation—how cumbersome is the purchasing process for the buyer? The decision to buy something and make progress on the problem is impeded by some functional barrier.
• Emotional motivation—what positive or negative internal thoughts are driving the purchase: fears, frustrations, desires?
• Social motivation—how do other people perceive, respect, trust, or acknowledge me?
• The goal is to reduce the negative motivations while amplifying the positive ones.

Four forces of progress

• Push of the situation—the struggling moment is unbearable and it’s affecting your life beyond just the moment when you are inconvenienced.
• Pull of the new solution—the moment you realise that something might bring you a better night’s sleep: the pull towards progress.
• Anxiety of the new solution—will the new solution deliver on its promise? Can I even figure out which one is best? What happens if I get it and I hate it?
• Habit of the present—you are used to your situation, even though it’s unpleasant, you have learned to live with it.
• People only make progress if push and pull together are greater than anxiety and habit.
  • Which means that adding more features might increase anxiety, and so work against the sale.
• Wording that helps when diagramming the forces, similar to the tried and true user story template:
  • Push of the situation: when… (“When I can’t count on my laptop…”)
  • Pull of the new way: so… (“So I can work in places besides my office”)
  • Anxiety over the new way: a question (“How much RAM do I need?”)
  • Habits of the old way: even though… (“Even though I already have workarounds…”)

The JTBD timeline

The process of making progress. I tried to apply it to the process of buying a new watch, which is something that has been on my mind recently.

• First thought—admitting there is a problem. This is the critical step, because before it there is no place in your mind to file the information that you have a need which can be fulfilled. Without the first thought there is no demand; once you have it, you start noticing things you hadn’t noticed before.
  • Four ways to create a first thought: ask a good question and don’t give the answer, tell a story, give a new metric, state the obvious.
  • The watch: I watched a Gbay99 video essay on wearing a watch, and rediscovered an old Adriatica that I had won on a TV quiz show, started wearing it, but immediately noticed that it has some problems and I would like to get something more serious.
• Passive looking—realising you need to do something about the problem. You start noticing candidates for a solution, filling in the space created by the first thought. You don’t yet know enough to move forward. Passive looking is about learning: the problem, the language.
  • The watch: consuming (a lot of) watch content on YouTube, doing research about various aspects of watchmaking.
• Active looking—asking yourself about alternatives for progress. People plan, or spend time and even money figuring out what the solution to their struggling moment might be. In order to move forward they need options as a reference point, and they need a time wall—the idea that the purchase must be made by a certain date. This is the stage where people start to make more serious investments to see the possibilities.
  • The watch: planning to visit a specific store in person to see a specific model, rather than window shopping when at the mall.
• Deciding—making the trade-off and settling on what you want. People will say they want the top-of-the-line thing, but nobody gets everything he wants. You need to know which trade-offs people are willing to make. The customer’s understanding of quality, performance, and satisfaction starts here, and everything afterwards is measured against the expectations locked in while deciding.
  • A trade-off is not a compromise. When choosing between a thick crust and a thin crust pizza, a medium crust is not a good choice at all. By forcing people to choose, you make it easier to decide. The tradeoff is about helping people make better decisions.
  • The watch: not every watch has every complication, so you have to choose which ones you actually want, especially since additional ones come with a steep increase in price.
• Onboarding—the customer has made the “big hire”: locked in and bought the product or service, and has his first use of it, measuring it against his expectations.
  • The watch: you buy it, unbox it, set it, fit the bracelet, figure out how it works.
• Ongoing use—the customer decides whether the product is doing the job through a series of repeated “little hires,” each time he uses it. Satisfaction is determined by whether the expectations set earlier were fulfilled. Progress is achieved in ongoing use.
  • The watch: deciding whether to wear it on any given day.

The Kano model

A theory of product development classifying different kinds of product attributes or features:

• Basic threshold attributes—we assume they’re included, so we don’t ask for them.
• Performance attributes—standard expectations: if you do them, great; if you don’t, horrible.
• Excitement attributes—unexpected things that delight the user.

Five principles of client interviews

• Humility—you are not smart enough to instinctively know why people really buy.
• Causality—everything is caused and nothing is random, if your model assumes a customer behaviour is random, that means you haven’t uncovered the true cause.
• Tradeoffs—everyone makes trade-offs in order to make progress, choosing one path means not choosing another.
• Disconnected—most people don’t know why they do what they do, the job of a salesman or a consultant is partly to help them uncover it as well.
• Lies—you must not fall for the lies people tell themselves. They don’t lie with malice or intent; they build a story to fit their world.

Ten interviewing tips

• Setup—keep a casual, conversational tone. It matters that they don’t feel there is a right or wrong answer. If you have a list of questions, make an effort not to use it unless the conversation has otherwise irreparably stalled.
• Details—asking detailed, specific questions about innocuous details is a trick to jog the interviewee’s memory.
• Context—people tend to miss narrow context around their decisions if there’s a simpler, broader explanation. “I bought a pizza.” Why? “Because I like pizza.” (Broad context.) But I also like steak, so why didn’t I buy steak at that moment? “Because the team won the big game and we wanted to celebrate.” That is the narrow context.
• Contrast—have them tell you why they decided against an alternative path. Without contrast they often can’t work out why they did what they did; people find it easier to say what something is not than what it is.
• Vagueness—everything is bound, and you are trying to find the reference point. It’s fast—faster than what? It’s healthy—healthier than what?¹Marginnote nstd1This is the same idea as calibrated questions from Chris Voss’s book Never Split the Difference, which is namedropped before these tips. ↩
• Energy—a downward intonation implies there is something wrong. When you start hearing emotional energy, stop and ask further.
• Play dumb—the moment someone feels stupid, he shuts down, so your job is to never make your customer/interviewee feel stupid. Be candid, if the customer feels something he does is wrong, you can say: “oh, I do that all the time.”
• Set up bad questions—instead of asking outright about something suspect, preface it: “this is a bad question, don’t feel like you have to answer it.”
• Good cop, bad cop—if you interview in pairs, argue with each other over details to fuel the conversation. Never argue with the interviewee. “Let me try to rephrase what you said, I think I understand this better than my colleague…”.
• Analogies—use analogies to help build language. Asking someone to compare two things that are not at all similar works surprisingly well; it forces them to think and to reach for better words.

Progress tools

• Framing the problem—framing the struggling moment, understanding the context, and figuring out the outcomes the customer is seeking. These aren’t questions to ask directly, but you want to have the answers to them by the end of the interview.
  • Push questions:
    • What are you struggling with?
    • What’s not happening that you want to happen?
    • Why are you doing this now?
    • What don’t you like about your current product or service?
  • Pull questions:
    • What are you hoping for?
    • What’s going to be different once you’ve got something new in your life?
  • Anxiety questions:
    • What are you worried about?
    • What’s your greatest concern about getting rid of the old service?
    • What’s your greatest concern about putting something new into your life?
    • How’s that going to impact everyone else around you?
    • What are they going to say?
  • Habit questions:
    • What do you love the most about your current product or service?
    • What are you willing to give up in order to get something better?
    • What are you not willing to give up?
  • Time wall questions:
    • When do you need to make this decision by?
    • Why then?
• Unpacking language—calibrated questions used to find out what stands behind vague words and concepts (“easy,” “convenient,” “fast,” “healthy,” &c.). You ask questions down to actions: the goal is to work out what the customer actually does, and what his reference point is.
  • What does that mean?
  • Tell me what that is.
  • Tell me what that is not.
  • Give me an example of that.
• Prototyping to learn—once you have the context and the outcomes framed, you pull in contrasting solutions to the problem.
  • Even if they have already told you what they don’t like—by rejecting a standard solution, say—you may want to ask them to try it anyway, so that they can tell you specifically what they like and dislike about the thing they rejected.
  • The point is to understand what they value, not to change their mind.
  • Contrast provides valuable feedback for helping people make progress.
  • Prototyping lets you pick apart the pieces and understand which parts are the most desirable, so you can build the ideal solution.
  • Framing the problem and unpacking are both about context; prototyping is about building contrast to create meaning.
• Designing to decide—figuring out the best way to make progress with three possible solutions. People need to be able to eliminate options in order to decide, but too many options only confuse.
• Playing it out—helping the buyer see around corners and look to the future by asking him questions in advance.
  • How do you know you will be satisfied? What are your measures of satisfaction? What are the outcomes that will make you realise you made the right purchase?
  • Help the customer find metrics that will frame his purchase, otherwise he will end up with buyer’s remorse.