Demand-Side Sales 101

Discovery calls last week

You've been doing a lot of customer interviews. What's coming out of them?

People love the product but conversion is slow. They say all the right things in interviews — but then don't sign up. I don't understand the gap.

Why your interviews might be producing bad data

"Love the product" in a discovery call is almost never actionable. What you're hearing is the social answer — what people say to be polite. Teresa Torres explains how to get past it.

What job are they hiring the product for?

When a user converts — what triggered it? What were they trying to solve the day they signed up?

I honestly don't know. I assumed they wanted the core feature. But some of our best users use it totally differently than we expected.

The moment of hire

The users using it "differently" aren't outliers — they might be telling you what the real job is. Alströmer's fix is one question: walk me through the day you decided to look for something like this. That's where the trigger lives.

The underlying question

Three days of this. What do you think is actually happening?

I think we're solving a problem people have, but not the moment they have it. Like the timing is off — they need it eventually but don't realize they need it now.

You just described the demand-side problem

"Solving a problem but not the moment they have it" — that's demand-side sales. You're thinking supply-side. Moesta spent 20 years studying why people switch products. His framing reorients your entire discovery approach.

Demand-Side Sales 101

— Bob Moesta