How To Solve The Product-Market Fit Dilemma –‘Listen to The Silence’
By Nick Sturiale, Managing Partner
Imagine you own a new comfort-food restaurant in a trendy part of town. You begged local investors for two years to support your dream of an informal, rustic dining experience attended by a friendly wait staff.
Tonight’s your grand opening. Fast-forward. It’s 11 p.m., closing time. Besides a few friends and family, nobody showed up. You walk across a mostly empty dining area and observe stolen glances from staff. Family members gamely attempt to reassure you with compliments. Your mind spins. What…went…wrong? Was it the menu? Too little promotion? And how many months of cash do we now have left?
Few moments induce as much entrepreneurial dread as a new business launch met by the sound of crickets chirping. It’s hard not to catastrophize when the market shrugs at your idea.
Today, finding product-market fit (PMF) is a cottage industry of books, tools, and magic elixirs in Silicon Valley. Yet most startup teams (and their investors) endure a quiet panic, hoping to unravel the mystery of customer traction in time to raise new funding. After working with 100 startups over the last 25 years, I conclude these PMF books undervalue a powerful human capacity to discover hidden customer demand: listening to understand.
PMF Hack – Listen to Understand
"Excuse me? Of course, we listen to customers!” Unfortunately, our cognitive biases, particularly optimism and confirmation, predispose us to over-rotate on positive feedback and disregard signs of indifference. A sales mentor once told me, "The market is always speaking, even when it's silent. The question is, are we listening?” Or, as Peter Drucker said, “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”
Listening with undivided attention is a particular skill. It demands an unusual level of sustained mental focus, which is emotionally taxing. (‘Pay attention’ implies a levy.) Our ego loves to interfere. When we try to put it in ‘sleep mode,’ it continues to run in the background, ready to intervene with me-centric thoughts: ‘Did he pause? Yeah! Now it’s my turn to speak.’ Or, as Steve Covey said in “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”
In startups, product managers are typically responsible for collecting market feedback. They often employ sophisticated analytic tools to gauge user engagement as a proxy for PMF. However, these tools don’t capture the crucial context behind why prospects lose momentum or never show up in the first place. For that, we should re-discover the power of our analog senses.
Use these four listening hacks to enable your search for PMF:
1. Two Ears and One Mouth
Greek philosopher Epictetus once said, “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” Getting a purchase order is possible when you know what a prospect wants, which is impossible if you do the talking.
Too often, CEOs mistake their sales presentations as performative. Their extended monologues are self-defeating because they leave little time for prospects to share their situations.
“What if they don’t want to talk?” Of course, prospects can be guarded. They are often unsure of what they want. Don’t confuse their reluctance to share with being impervious to influence. Nobody enjoys that awkward silence in a conversation. Resist the impulse to retake the floor. Patient stillness will induce them to expand on their initial remarks. Like a mantra, keep reminding yourself to listen more than you talk.
2. Body Language Tells
Body language—our unconscious gestures, facial expressions, eye contact, and sitting posture—conveys more than 50% of our thoughts. Facial reactions, especially incongruent ones, are like GPS coordinates, directing us toward PMF. But it’s rare to see a CRM profile that captures and tracks this rich dimension of hidden feedback.
Of course, noticing nonverbal signals is problematic when a presenter is lost in a train of thought. And on Zoom calls, watching body language is a fool’s errand.
To spot a prospect’s ‘tells,’ conduct sales calls in person and have your product manager (PM) accompany you. Like a World Series of Poker player, the PM reads a prospect’s face, looking for subtle changes in their micro-expressions, which may portend everything from curiosity to confusion to disinterest. Building a corpus of body language feedback creates an overlay network of insights into genuine demand signals.
3. Empathic Questions
In a new business relationship, we develop trust (and the ability to persuade) when we show empathy. We demonstrate it by the type of questions we ask and reaffirm it by reflecting on their answers. Empathy is the lifeblood of finding PMF because it disarms how a buyer views you. Thoughtful, empathic questions create the psychological airspace for a prospect to divulge their honest priorities. For example:
Forget about us for a minute. If you could wave a magic wand and solve anything, what problem would you tackle first? What is your most challenging job obstacle? How do you solve it? What do you wish was different in your work day?
In contrast, presumptive questions cause buyer reactance. An impatient sales rep, attempting the presumptive close, usually gets a prospect who defaults to a social harmony answer: “Interesting! We can't do anything just now. When you have version 2.0, we’ll try it.” (One door to finding PMF truth just slammed shut.)
Asking open-ended, empathic questions can be uncomfortable because you don’t know where the conversation may lead. But a fast ‘no’ is always better than a false positive ‘maybe.’
4. “Why” Behind “What”
If you meet 20 prospects, you can get 30 different feature requests that transform your product into a Swiss army knife that solves 80% of most use cases and 100% of none. How do you parse the subset of features that gets you closer to PMF?
In “Innovators Dilemma,” Clayton Christensen argues that customers ‘hire’ products to do a ‘job’ for them. This ‘job to be done’ may bear little resemblance to how vendor views their product’s raison d'etre. Christensen’s point is that need is often misunderstood. Why we buy is driven more by emotion than logic, e.g., for comfort or convenience, to escape social/job pressure, to show prestige, to reduce boredom, or to have more autonomy.
Applying Christensen’s theory to PMF, listen for the ‘why’ often expressed in contextual clues that speak to a user’s emotional motive. Be careful, however, using ‘why’ questions, which tend to generate defensive responses. Instead, ask about the experience or outcome they want. As prospects advocate ‘necessary’ new features, you can judge which ones serve an emotional need and which, in reality, are ‘nice to have.’
Conclusion
Most new businesses hope to generate demand by expending precious cash to initiate a ‘new and improved’ sales and marketing campaign—in other words, ‘talk’ to the market. Instead, consider a customer ‘listening tour’ as a cost-effective, more efficient method of discovering the ‘aha’ that fills your restaurant with hungry customers.