The buyer-pull and seller-push theories of sales

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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.