When > What - by Rob Snyder

I’ve noticed a pattern where it’s very hard for B2B founders to describe our products in sales conversations. Customers don’t “get it.” At best, they understand IN THEORY what the product does, and how the features work, but they don’t connect it to their world. Ultimately, they don’t buy. They ghost us after saying something confusing like: “This is awesome, I can see how it can be helpful, let me circle back with the team and let you know when this fits into our priorities!” And we don’t know whether: They’re not a good-fit customer They lied to us We’re bad at sales We have a shitty product nobody wants We just can’t describe the product well Etc. Welcome to hell. I have found that the simplest “way out” is: Stop describing our product based on WHAT it is Start describing our product based on WHEN it’s relevant A firsthand example: My new startup is a dev tool - it’s a platform-as-a-service to build secure web applications in your AWS account. And when I describe it like this, based

I’ve noticed a pattern where it’s very hard for B2B founders to describe our products in sales conversations. Customers don’t “get it.” At best, they understand IN THEORY what the product does, and how the features work, but they don’t connect it to their world. Ultimately, they don’t buy. They ghost us after saying something confusing like: “This is awesome, I can see how it can be helpful, let me circle back with the team and let you know when this fits into our priorities!” And we don’t know whether: They’re not a good-fit customer They lied to us We’re bad at sales We have a shitty product