he pitched my own offer back to me

i pitched a guy this month and instead of saying yes or no he repeated the whole thing back to me in his own words, cleaner than i had said it.

let me play that back and tell you what i think i heard. then he laid it out. the sequence, the mechanism, why it works, what he would get, what he would have to do himself. he got one part wrong, and the part he got wrong was the exact part i had been fumbling for two months.

that is the most valuable thing a prospect can do for you and almost none of them will.

most people are polite. they say interesting, let me think about it, send me something. and you walk away with no information at all, because a soft no tells you nothing about which sentence lost them. the playback tells you everything. whatever survived into his version is what actually landed. whatever he added is a gap he filled in himself, which means i left it out. and whatever he got wrong is where my words are doing the opposite of their job.

i have started asking for it on purpose now. not what do you think. instead, how would you explain this to your business partner. it is a small question and people answer it honestly, because it does not ask them to commit to anything.

the other thing he said has stayed with me too. i asked where they were on raising and expected the usual answer about a round coming together. he said we are not looking for money right now. we want clients. the more clients we get the more we are worth, and then we can go look for money. and the product improves with every one of them, because his engineer builds new rules against real accounts rather than imagined ones.

he has the order reversed from most founders i talk to. they raise in order to build the thing that will attract customers. he is letting customers build the thing, and he will price the company later with the evidence sitting on the table in front of him.

both of those are the same discipline. do not ask people to imagine. get them to show you.

the next time you pitch, ask them to say it back. it will be the least comfortable ninety seconds of your week and the only ninety seconds that teach you anything.

when did you last hear your own offer come out of somebody else's mouth?