Hello {{First name|Predictable Revenue community}},

I was on a pipeline review with a client this week, and one number wouldn't leave me alone.

Roughly half the deals in the pipe had no next call booked.

Not "we're stuck in legal." Not "waiting on budget." Just quiet. A demo happened, everyone said nice things, and then the deal went dark.

I wasn't ringing an alarm bell. Half your pipe having no next step isn't a five alarm fire, especially for a new team that’s transitioning from founder led to sales led. But something smelled like smoke.

Here's what I've watched happen, in my own deals and in the deals of the founders I coach. You get on the first call, the buyer says "cool, show me what it does," and you show them. All of it. Every aha moment you built into the product. And by the end you've fired every bullet you had. You've got nothing interesting left to pull them forward with.

That's the trap with leading on the demo. You shoot your shot in the first ten minutes.

The goal of that first call is not to show them the product. I know that sounds backwards, especially if you built the thing yourself. The founder instinct is always "I made it, let me show everyone." But your job on call one is to figure out where it hurts. The demo is how you get them excited later, once you know what to aim it at.

I think about the shape of a sales process as a V. You come down one side, you hit the bottom, you go up the other. The bottom of the V is the only part that matters. It's the point of mutual understanding. The moment you can repeat back what the prospect is dealing with, and they say "yes, that's exactly it."

Coming down the V, there are three stops. Context, progress, impact.

Context is the easy stuff. Who's on the team, what tools they're using, how they're structured, what the goals are for the year, what they like and don't like about what they've got now.

Progress is the magic wand question. What are you actually trying to get done right now? This is where you're hunting for a gap. You want the space between where they are and where they want to be. They want to be a nine out of ten on something and they're sitting at a four. That gap is everything. It's what moves someone from even keel mode, where nothing is urgent enough to change, into buying mode, where doing nothing is finally off the table.

Impact is the money. If we closed that gap, what does it do for the business? What's it worth in dollars, this month, this quarter? A question like "can you answer your CEO on pricing" is never really about answering the question. It's about what answering it unlocks, and what not answering it is quietly costing them every month.

Here's how you know you actually nailed discovery. You could turn around and sell the problem to their boss. Not sell your product. Sell the problem. If your prospect stood up at a company all hands and someone asked where the gaps in the org are, you could fill in for them. We're blind here, here, and here. It's costing us this much a month. Here's the case for fixing it.

And this is the part that ties back to that pipeline review. Every time I've had a deal stall, and I mean every time, it's because I didn't actually understand those drivers. I thought I did. I had the list. But a list is not understanding.

There's a big difference between a survey and a conversation. Anybody can ask "what are your top three problems" and write the answers down. Check, check, check. That's not discovery. Discovery is picking up problem one and going deeper. What does this look like day to day? Who else is affected? Why is this the thing keeping you up, and not the other ten things on your plate?

Now, some buyers will fight you on this. When I was selling Carb.io, people would show up, and half of them would open with "cool, press play." Like they were settling in to watch something. And they kind of were, because most reps run the average demo. Here's the tour, same one I gave the last guy, I'll go walk my dog while you talk. Buyers get trained by that. So they arrive with a thin layer of attention, eyes on the screen, brain somewhere else.

So when someone opens with "just show me the product," you need a move.

Mine is catch and release. I answer the question, briefly, because I'm not hiding anything. Here's what we do, in a sentence. Then: "I'd love to show you, but it's a wide platform and I don't want to spend three hours walking you through every corner. Do you mind if I ask a few questions first, so I can show you the parts you actually care about?" They hand you the fish, you take the picture, you throw it back. We'll get to that guy later.

When I'm running a call, I'm asking questions 80, 90 percent of the time. Not because I'm being coy. Because I want to get to the bottom of the V, and none of that requires me to show or tell them anything except "here's what I heard you say."

The demo still happens. Especially early, when someone showed up specifically to see if the thing is real, you show them a few pieces. You don't push everything to call two. But the demo lands better when it's aimed. You've found the two or three things they actually need, and now you're showing them exactly those. It's a tailored suit instead of one off the rack.

One last thing from that pipeline review. I don't count a deal as real unless there's a next call booked and accepted in the calendar. Mutually agreed. Everything else is a maybe wearing a pipeline costume. No next step means the deal is already halfway to ghosting you. No next step doesn’t mean the deal is dead, it means you don’t know if it is or not, and it’s your job to know. 

And the softest version of that ask isn't even a hard push. It's just "would it make sense to keep the conversation going?" That's it. A lot of those stalled deals were missing that one line. Not because the reps are bad. Because it's easy to end a good call feeling good, and forget that good feelings don't show up on a forecast.

So go pull your own pipe this week. Count how many deals have a real next step sitting in the calendar. Then, for the stalled ones, ask yourself honestly. Did I ever get to the bottom of the V, or did I just run a good demo?

Collin

The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers is the playbook for founders who never planned to do sales but have to figure it out anyway. It pulls together 13+ years of building software startups, building outbound systems for hundreds of B2B startups, and more failed experiments than I'd care to admit, into a practical guide for finding your first 10, 100, and 1,000 customers.

It will help you build a repeatable way to find customers without losing your weekends (or your soul).

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