نتیجه گیری

Conclusion and a cheatsheet

So I want to wrap with a story from ancient times, which may or may not be true. But in any case it’d been prophesies that whoever undid the convoluted Gordian not who’s this impossibly knotted together gigantic, thick, heavy rope that was pulled across the crucial piece of the desert and whoever untied it, it was foreseen would rule the land. And a lot of people are tried and no one got anywhere. If anything, their efforts only made the not more knotted and more difficult. And when he reached it with his armies Alexander the great, who wasn’t the great at the time, he was just Alexander; he drew his sword and with a single stroke, he cut it in half. The knot was undone and he went on to rule everything.

Struggling to untie the knot was the proper process that was as the textbooks would say, the textbook about Gordian knot untying would tell you to study it and be patient and start at one end. But cutting through was a hack which got Alexander straight to the end result without any of the work. When we find a new and exciting process like talking to customers, it’s easy to do the opposite of what Alexander did. And to spend hours and weeks and months obsessively geeking out about exactly the right way to untie this big gnarly not.

I remember being in a startup workshop and one of the guys there, he was a personal trainer. So really not a startup but certainly an entrepreneur and he was try to make his personal training business bigger. He said he was spending most of his time on nonbillable commuting time. He had to travel between his clients. So for one hour of paid work, he would have to do an hour, an hour and a half of traveling. At some point it was suggested to him that the police might be a better customer segment. Instead of commuting between a bunch of individuals houses, he could go to one police station and work with all of their officers doing the custom training that he was so great at, no commute, more billable hours, and presumably they would pay him better. It sounded really good in theory. Everyone in the class, we started geeking out on all of this possibilities, about how he’s gonna validate it? Who could he talk to? Did anyone have family in the police? What should his interview questions be? What was the market size? How many police precincts were in the city? Etc, etc. We were theorizing business models and websites and all this stuff.

And he looked at us like we are all idiots and he held up his phone and he goes guys slow down, I think I just call them. It’s not like he didn’t know the phone number for the police. We all stood around a bit dumbfounded and he went outside and called the police. 20 minutes later he came back in with a trial session scheduled.

Having a process and having the tools is valuable, but don’t get trapped by it. Sometimes you can just pick up the phone and hack through the not.

Cheatsheet

Just in case you like lists, I will rattle through some lists where stuff is.

So the key skills that you need to get good at in order for this to work: Asking good questions which we covered in chapters 1 and 3.

Avoiding bad data which is chapter 2.

Keeping it casual, chapter 4

Pushing for commitments and advancements, chapter 5

Framing the meeting, very few wizards properly ask, chapter 6

Customer segmentation, chapter 7

Prepping and reviewing before and after your meetings, taking good notes, chapter 8 The mom test itself has 3 rules:

Talk about their life instead of your idea. Don’t pitch your idea if you can. Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or hypotheticals or opinions about the future. Dig beneath signals. When some one gives you an emotional signal or a frustration or a joy, dig beneath it. And kind of the extra bonus rule is as much as possible shut up. Talk less, listen more.

To avoid bad data, deflect complements, anchor fluff and dig, dig beneath signals.

Some of the mistakes that you might make. These are symptoms and if you see yourself making them or saying these things, you know that you’re in trouble, but that’s good news because then you can fix it.

So the first’s fishing for compliments. You get this by saying stuff like, “hey, I’m thinking of starting a business. So what do you think?” Or, “I have an awesome idea. Do you like it?” Another mistake is exposing your ego or the pathos problem. “So here’s that top-secret project, I quit my job for. What do you think? I can take it. Be honest. Tell me whether it’s good or not.” Another mistake is anytime you being pitchy. “No, no, I don’t think you get it.” “Yeah, fine. So you don’t like it but it also does this!” Fourth mistake is being too formal. Making it a formal interview, a formal whatever. “So first off, thank you for agreeing to this interview. I just have a few questions. On a scale of 1 to 5, how much would you…” Or often a lot of the times when you’re just trying to set up a meeting that’s a sign that you’re being a bit too formal when you could’ve just chatted to them right then.

Fifth mistake is being a learning bottleneck. You don’t have to worry about the product. All talk to all the customers, you just focus on the tech. We have to do this because the customers told me or whenever you’re not sharing your notes. Another mistake is collecting compliments instead of facts and commitments. “Hey, we’re getting a lot of positive feedback or everyone I’ve talked to loves it.” Also, you should remember that meetings are either good or bad. A bad meeting ends with a complement plus a stalling tactic. And you’re a bit unclear on what the next steps are. And they haven’t given you anything of value. Whereas a good meeting gives you facts, commitments and advancement. Facts are concrete, specific details about what the customer does and why they do it that way. This is in comparison to the bad data, compliments, opinions, fluff. Commitments are a sign that the customer is showing they’re serious. And they do this by giving you something they value such as meaningful amounts of time, reputation or money.

Advancement means that moving to the next step of your real-world funnel, they’re getting closer to a trial, a sale, a proof of concepts. They’re moving forward in a meaningful way.

There’s also a forth thing you can get, specifically with enterprises where they’re basically giving you insight into their buying process. They’re showing you behind-the-scenes about how their organization works. What their budgets are, who the stakeholders are, any of that kind of information is also a sign of a good meeting.

On the other hand, signs you just going through the motions are things like if you’re talking more than they are, you’re accepting complements, you’re not taking notes and you’re not sure why you’re even in the meeting in the first place. You want to take good notes by writing down symbols, excited, angry, embarrassed, pain, goal, obstacle, workaround, background information, feature request or purchasing criteria, money or purchasing info, people and tasks to follow up with. Write down the symbol and also write down a few words, an exact quote if possible, which lets you reconstruct the conversation and share its raw data with your team.

There some signs that you’re failing to push for scary commitments by asking that important question. Do you want it? Will you reject me or will you give me this thing? The big signs are a pipeline of zombie leads or a pipeline where you have no idea when anyone is going to close. Or if you finish a product meeting with a complement, meetings which is vaguely went well. All of these things are big danger signs. I find it personally like this scares me, I’m not a natural salesperson. I had to learn all this stuff. I’m a techie.

So what I did is I would write down all my notepaper, kind of in a shorthand, so my customer wouldn’t think it was weird if they saw it. But I would write down what I was meant to be asking for at the end. And then, I put a big checkmark by it. And if I hadn’t asked that, then that checkmark’s open and I would know I had really screwed up. So that was how I got over this fear.

Your ultimate prep question which you do ahead of times is, “What do I want to learn from these people? What’s important to my business? What are the risks? What are the questions? What am I trying to learn? Why does this conversation matter?”