On the hunt for critical events 🔍

Life update: I think I'm *slowly* getting smarter about founder-led sales

A few weeks ago, I learned about Steve Blank’s breakdown of customer pain point types: latent, passive, and urgent. This week, Hiten Shah graciously helped me build on this by introducing the concept of critical events from the Winning by Design team. A critical event is a moment in your customer’s journey that suddenly increases their readiness to buy your product.

Customer pain tends to evolve with time. It usually starts as a latent pain: the customer is blissfully unaware of their problem. However, with time, the problem eventually starts to nag at them and they realize that it is, in fact, an issue that they could deal with but, as usual, (1) who's got the time, and (2) is it really worth prioritizing right now? It’s now a passive pain point. But, then, a critical event occurs and the pain point becomes urgent. It could be a big enterprise sale opportunity blocked by a SOC-2 compliance need, a product outage, or as simple as your customer walking out of a meeting in which their CEO demanded new quarterly targets (e.g., we need a financial planning software as-soon-as-freaking-possible).

The key trait of a critical event is that it has a due date and there is a consequence if the customer misses that date. The prospect may say something along the lines of “I need to be SOC-2 compliant by the end of the month” or “I need this planning software by the end of the week.” The WBD team offers the following advice to identify (a) if there is a critical event and if so (b) what the critical event is:

The first question to ask is “When do you need this solution in place?”. Follow it up with “...and what happens if you miss that date?”

This simple question will let you know if the event is “compelling” or “critical.” After the prospect shares the critical event and the consequences of missing it, you can ask, “If you need to have this live by {date} to get {impact} or otherwise face {consequence}… how can we help you avoid that?”

As you can imagine, if you build a product that solves a common critical event (think Vanta, who casually onboards 600+ companies per quarter), you’re going to do pretty well. Here’s the thing, though. You’re probably building a B2B product that has plenty of prospects with “compelling” events, but very few/rare “critical” events. Collecting only “compelling” events doesn’t mean that you’re doomed for failure. I’m sure you can think of plenty of successful companies that don’t fit the “urgent user pain-point” mold. Realistically, not having a critical event simply means you’ll just need to gear up for a longer, more complex, sales cycle or lean into PLG / freemium motions that allow “curious” users to trial your product and find a magical moment.

What critical events have you seen recently? I’d love to compile a list of realistic examples to share more broadly.

Happy weekend,

Raman at Rhetoric

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📚 What’s made me a better storyteller this week

How are you learning about LLMs? I’ve been loving these essays on The Gradient.

Goals and Expectations by Seth Godin. For any founder that is pushing a granite sled up a mountain right now, Seth offers three reasons why your goal may not be achieved.

A friend and I were recently chatting about how sleek demos can look these days and how they can be potentially misleading (the technology is overstated, the features don’t actually exist yet, etc.). But, I’ve got to say, Lazy’s demo from this week is REALLY sleek.