Hi {{ first name | there }},
“If someone buys X, they’ll naturally need Y too.”
Sounds logical...
It’s also one of the easiest ways to misread demand and waste time on people who were never going to move.
Because correlation isn’t causation.
Most sales and marketing teams don’t think in terms of causation.
They think in terms of products, segments, and activity. If someone looks like a good customer, they assume they must be “in-market”.
But that’s not how great sales teams operate.
Demand starts with a struggling moment
As Bob Moesta (co-creator of Jobs to Be Done) says:
“Most seasoned salespeople know the causation of their product or service. That’s what makes them great [at sales].”
Great salespeople don’t start with features. They start with the struggle; that moment when something in the customer’s world stops working well enough, when frustration builds, and when ignoring the problem is no longer an option.
Why people really buy
Take Apple AirPods Pro as a simple example.
People don’t upgrade their AirPods because they bought an iPhone — that’s correlation.
They buy AirPods Pro because their current headphones are terrible on calls, or the commute is noisy, or they’re tired of fiddling with cables.
The causation is the struggle - and the desire to make progress.
The iPhone just happens to be there in the background.
Supply-side stories vs demand-side reality
This is where so much sales and marketing goes wrong. Most teams operate on the supply side: what we’ve built, what we can deliver, our features and benefits.
But customers live on the demand side.
They don’t talk in terms of solutions; they talk in terms of problems, frustrations, and workarounds:
“This is taking too long.”
“I’m doing this manually and it’s painful.”
“I can’t keep operating like this.”
That language is a clear signal. It’s the sound of demand forming.
Circumstance explains “why now”
Another critical piece here is circumstance. Circumstance is the reference point for the progress someone is trying to make.
To understand causation, you have to understand context:
What exact situation were they in?
What outcome were they trying to achieve?
What trade-offs were they willing to make to get there?
If you want causation, talk to recent buyers
And the best way to uncover it isn’t through personas or surveys. It’s by talking to the people who’ve already bought, not to ask what features they liked, but to understand what triggered their search and made the problem unavoidable.
Was the motivation functional, emotional, or social?
The “why” that matters has everything to do with the progress they needed to make.
If you can shift from correlation to causation, from supply-side stories to demand-side reality, your marketing and sales start to feel obvious.
You stop pushing and start helping them make progress. And that’s where real demand lives.
Speak soon,
Peter
P.S. If this is resonating with you and you want to dive deeper into demand-side thinking, I’d definitely recommend Bob Moesta’s book "Demand-Side Sales." Stick it on your Christmas list!
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