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Interviews with top marketers sharing tactical tips, strategies, and lessons learned to help you grow your business. Hosted by Dave Gerhardt, founder of Exit Five, former CMO, and author of Founder Brand. Learn more at exitfive.com
E5_April Dunford - Positioning, Differentiation, and Lessons from 200+ B2B Sales Pitches (CM) - Audio Episode
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[00:00:00] All right, look, uh, everywhere you look online right now, everyone's telling you the new way to do marketing because of AI. And I think because of that, there's so much perceived change, and innovation, and speed, and technology, and AI, and agents in marketing right now. I think we've forgotten a little bit about the timeless lessons, uh, in marketing.
[00:00:17] Just like life, there's a bunch of timeless principles that kinda always work. Whether I'm reading a book from 1925 about advertising and copywriting that still applies today, or if I'm doing an interview with someone here on our podcast, I'm just reminded all the time about how it's easy to open up LinkedIn and feel like you're behind or feel like you need to chase the newest tool, tactic, or channel.
[00:00:39] And so we want to profile some of the more timeless lessons here on our Exit Five podcast, right? Everybody in B2B is chasing what's new: new channels, new tools, new playbooks. But the fundamentals haven't changed. Some marketing lessons never go out of style, and, uh, that's why we handpicked this episode for you in your ears.
[00:00:57] We're blessing this as one of the greatest hits of the [00:01:00] Exit Five podcast, one of our all-time most played episodes, and here's this one for you. I hope this is a dose of timeless marketing that you need to ground yourself today. One, two, three, four, exit. Five.
[00:01:21] X bar All right, so we're live. I just hit record. I asked April offline about how she works with companies, and it's super interesting, and she does positioning with companies in a week. And I love that because don't you feel like if left to their own devices, companies would take three months, and you're just proving that this...
[00:01:38] We can do this. Guys, we can do this in five days. Dude, most of the time, people that come to me have been wrestling with this stuff for months. Like, it's been months of effort, and usually what I get is the CEO coming to me and they're like, "April, we've been pulling our hair out on this thing for six months.
[00:01:53] Please help us." I have a theory, and the theory is that most [00:02:00] companies have the answer to their own positioning problems. It-- but it's a bit like... It's like that thing, you know, where you got the elephant, but everybody's wearing a blindfold, and the guy on the leg says, "Oh, it's a tree." And the person on the tail says, "Oh, it's a snake."
[00:02:14] It's a bit like that. Sales is looking at it one way, marketing's looking at it another way, product's looking at it another way. The CEO has locked in their head a whole bunch of good stuff, but they never get the team together cross-functionally, and then when you do get the team together, you need a process to work through to get to it.
[00:02:32] So I come in as the person who's the facilitator for the cross-functional exercise and the process to follow to get there, and that's how we get it done in a week. It's not me doing the positioning for you. I am pulling it out of your brains and giving you a framework to work together to make it happen.
[00:02:52] So what's typically the output? Like, if you get to Friday of that week, is it a Google Doc with like the... 'Cause in Obviously [00:03:00] Awesome, you have a framework that somebody basically could follow. Is it the output of that? Yeah, like so Obviously Awesome describes exactly the process I would use with a company, so to go through step by step the five component pieces of positioning.
[00:03:15] So we're doing it in a very specific order, and then doing it with me as the facilitator is just gonna help break up the ties a little bit better. The other thing is that some of the steps are harder than others. So if companies try to do it on their own, the place where they, they either use the book and go through it on their own and everything's cool and they don't need me at all, or they go through it and where they typically get stuck is the value phase.
[00:03:42] So this idea of translating your differentiated capabilities to value. Value is just a really hard concept. It's hard for marketers, let alone founders or salespeople or people that aren't even ever exposed to this concept [00:04:00] of value. And so having somebody in there from the outside to help you get at something that really is value is a cool thing.
[00:04:07] The two big deliverables we get to at the end of the workshop is, one, we're getting agreement and alignment across the team on here's who we actually compete with, here's how we're different. This is the value we can deliver that no one else can. Here's what our definition of a best fit customer looks like and where we should be focusing our marketing and sales efforts.
[00:04:29] This is the market we intend to go dominate. The last thing we do in the workshop is we take all of that and we translate it into a sales pitch. So how does the sales team actually go and talk about this positioning in a one-on-one conversation with the customer? So the first book is all about getting through those first two days.
[00:04:51] When I s- first started doing this work, I didn't think I had to teach you the last bit, which was how do we translate this into sales pitch, because I [00:05:00] felt like that was a previously solved problem. And now that I've done 200 of these, I can tell you this is not a previously solved problem. So now I have a new book that describes exactly what we do on the last day, which is let's take the positioning, map it to a sales pitch so the salespeople know how to pitch it.
[00:05:15] All right. I love that. I'm taking notes. I've already got 16 different questions I wanna ask you. And I wanna talk about the new book, Sales Pitch, and I, I love that you went and did this book. Almost similar to positioning, you may disagree with me saying this, but I feel like with positioning and the sales pitch- Yeah There are many ways you can execute.
[00:05:32] You can do it. Totally. But there is value in having a way to do it, because having a way just forces you to get it done, and I think a lot of the- Yeah ... bullshit and time that it takes to get positioning done is because inside of a company, there's 20 different ways. And so I'm excited to hear about, like, what's in your sales pitch because I think there's value.
[00:05:50] Well, yeah. And you know what the thing is, is like I don't think people have to be slaves to the method. Yeah. But starting with a method is so much better than starting without one. So if I'm [00:06:00] starting with a way to think about it and a way to break things down into pieces, then it solves the problem of...
[00:06:07] Like, for positioning, the big problem we get is you get everybody together in the room, and then it becomes a big battle, and everyone wants to jump straight to value. And so the, the CEO will be like, "Well, I think everybody buys our stuff because of XYZ. Fight me." And it's, it's hard to have that fight because we don't even know what we're stacking it up against.
[00:06:25] And people get in the weeds on like, "Well, April said that, you know, slide six of the sales deck should have this on it," and it's like, put your own... Like, add your own flavor to this. It's like- Totally. It just, man, is a starting point. Like, all this stuff is a starting point. Like, everybody's situation is different, right?
[00:06:40] Your markets are different. Your product is different. Your buyers are different. Like, everybody's different. We shouldn't be looking at these things and saying, "Oh my God, we can't break the rule of step number six." Like, I don't think that's realistic. We just don't live in a world like that. And so these things are all hard to do.
[00:06:57] But I do think, I believe that [00:07:00] cross-functional teams do positioning better than positioning done in the marketing department without input from sales and product. I believe that, and I believe that positioning sticks better when sales and product and the CEO have been involved in building it because then everybody gets to get their argument of what they don't like about it on the table, and we're all gonna have a fight about it.
[00:07:22] So if we're all in agreement and alignment with it at the end, then it's much more likely that we're gonna be able to make it stick. But we're never gonna get that if we get a cross-functional team together and we just have a free-for-all, like, let's just brainstorm some stuff. Like, that's chaos, and any time I've ever seen that, what it ends up being is a battle of opinions and marketing never wins that.
[00:07:44] Please rewind. Go rewind the last 30 seconds of that
[00:07:52] Play it over and over and over again. And it's a lesson in, like, creating change within an organization, or whether it's your children or your [00:08:00] direct reports or whoever. If you create a plan and you tell them, "Go and do this plan," maybe that's gonna work, but if you bring them in and say, "Hey, we want to do this thing together, let's get all of your opinions," it's gonna be executed better.
[00:08:13] And I love what you said, which is for me, where I've seen the positioning exercise fall down the most is how can you do this without product? How can we effectively position the company if we don't know the roadmap, if we don't know where we're going, if we don't know what's happening? And I do see so often it's marketing in a vacuum, and then product doesn't agree, or then they feel threatened because then the, the company positioning is not in line with what the company can actually deliver from a roadmap standpoint.
[00:08:38] Yeah, yeah. Same thing goes with sales, right? So when we talk about competition, if I go to product and I say, "Who do we compete with?" They got a list. I guarantee you they got a list that's 200 companies long. Like, like, "Here's who we compete..." "I Googled it," right? "I Googled it. I know everybody who could possibly compete with us for the next ten years.
[00:08:59] Here they all [00:09:00] are." But if you go to sales and say, "Who do we compete with?" Sales will say, "Oracle." And then you'll say, "Hey, do you ever see any of these, you know, like, the ones over here?" And sales will be like, "Okay, maybe that one, but, like, the rest of them, no." And so in product, I'm worried about the roadmap.
[00:09:18] So I am worried about who might pop up a year from now or two years from now 'cause I'm building a roadmap out to the future. But for positioning, I don't have to position against a ghost. Like, if they never show up on the shortlist, why do I have to position against them? Customers don't know about them.
[00:09:33] I don't have to position against them. Now, over in sales land, sales knows who ends up on the shortlist, but they never count status quo as competition. They'll say, "Oh, we lost to no decision," because sales doesn't hear no. They're like, "We'll get 'em. It's just next year," right? So the advantage, again, of having a process is we can make sure that we're thinking about both.
[00:09:56] So who ends up on the shortlist? What's the [00:10:00] status quo in the account? That's actually who we have to position against. So then, you know, once we get a stick in the ground and can everybody agree on that, okay, good. Now I got a stick in the ground. This is what I gotta beat in order to win a deal, and that's just kind of the facts.
[00:10:15] And then if we build from there, now we're building on something. Then we can say, "Well, what do we got that they don't have capabilities-wise?" Like feature function of the product, but also capabilities of the company, and we can list that, and again, that's kind of fact. And who knows that better than anyone else?
[00:10:30] Product. Product's sitting in the room. They eat, sleep, and breathe this. They understand capabilities. Then we're gonna map capabilities to value. I like what you said about positioning against a ghost. I feel like it's something I've come up with a lot where I'll give you a good example. I used to work at a company called Drift, and Drift, the biggest competitor was
[00:10:47] Well, if you ask product, it would be probably 20 different technologies. Exactly. But if you ask the- Exactly ... if you ask the sales team, it was one company. It was Intercom. Right. And we did a good job, but if from a distraction standpoint, it's like we [00:11:00] needed 15 different product marketing assets to position against all these different things.
[00:11:04] So it's like, well, the 80/20, it's like 80% of the deals, it's gonna be either Drift or Intercom. Let's nail the Intercom story and make the website the, that's the leading message, and then you can handle the more nuanced messages, like, on a one-off basis, right? Exactly. There's different competitors depending on the timeframe and what we're actually talking about, but if we have a company that should compete with us, they look like they're gonna compete with us, they've raised all kinds of money, oh my gosh, it's so scary, but they never end up on a customer short list, I don't have to worry about them.
[00:11:32] When and if they do start ending on a cust- up on a customer short list and we lose a deal or two to them, well, then, we can go back, reexamine the positioning, and we'll adjust for that later. All right. I got two things I wanna get to before we ... And I have the word sales pitch and 200 circled on my list, 'cause we're gonna get to those lessons.
[00:11:49] But- Okay ... the audience of this podcast is B2B marketers, and majority of them are in B2B SaaS. And when it comes to positioning, I don't know if you know this or not, but there's [00:12:00] kind of three terms that people use interchangeably today, and I, I wanna hear your perspective on them. Are they different? Are they the same?
[00:12:08] Are people u- using them interchangeably? There is positioning Yeah ... there is strategic narrative- Okay ... and there is category creation. Okay And all the founders that I hear or people that I see inside the community, they kind of ask about the three of those things kind of jammed as one. Right. So here's how I look at it.
[00:12:28] Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at providing some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. So in my mind, there are different ways you can do positioning, different styles of positioning, depending on the nature of your product and the market. Category creation, in my mind, is a style of positioning, but it's positioning.
[00:12:52] It's the same. Like, I, I don't see any... And so if you look at the companies that I work with, about 1 in 10 of [00:13:00] them, we are doing category creation because the last component of positioning is what is the market you intend to win? That's the category. But the category isn't the only thing. Like, you have to understand your differentiated value.
[00:13:12] You have to understand your target customers, which I assume you do when you're doing category creation, anybody's way of doing it. So the way I look at it is you can either position yourself in an existing category, or you can create a new category. In some cases, you wanna position yourself in an existing category.
[00:13:30] In some cases, the existing category just doesn't fit because your thing is so new and so innovative and so different, it would be underselling it to position it in an existing category. So you're gonna have to make a new one to contain your new idea and your new thing. So those two things, in my mind, category creation is just a form of positioning, and it's generally...
[00:13:52] So for example, I, I did this last year because people kept asking me this question. So I went and looked at every company that [00:14:00] had gone public on the NASDAQ for the previous 10 years, and I went down the list, and I looked at how many of those were positioned in an existing category versus creating a new category at the time they went public.
[00:14:14] So figure about 100 million revenue plus or minus, depending on the company. And so when I did that, about 92% were positioning in an existing category And the other 8% had created a new category and weren't positioned in there. So do both styles work? They absolutely do. I think category creation, my experience with it is it's actually really works well when you're dominating the category.
[00:14:40] You've come into a category, you've got to a spot where you're dominating that category, and now what you're doing is extending the boundaries of the category to make the addressable market bigger. So most of the companies where people talk about, like Salesforce, for example, was not doing category creation at the beginning.
[00:14:58] Most of the companies that people talk about that [00:15:00] as category creators, they weren't at the beginning, but then they lived-- they survived to dominate the category they're in, and then later they puffed out the thing. A lot of the success story companies that we know in Silicon Valley became successful by absolutely decimating people that were attempting to create category.
[00:15:18] So for example, Google and search. We're using Google and not Ask Jeeves. Ask Jeeves was out way before Go- Ask Jeeves created the search market, and then Google decimated them. Research In Motion created the smartphone market, and then Apple decimated them. MySpace created the, arguably the space that Facebook then came in and decimated them.
[00:15:37] So there's risk to category creation, but sometimes you have no choice, and there are some examples where category creation works well. I just don't think it's a thing that everyone should do, and I certainly don't think it's a thing that every company can be successful at doing. But in some cases, you got no choice.
[00:15:55] That's great. So the first principle is basically, "Hey, we're doing positioning." There are different [00:16:00] paths. There's different flavors that you can choose to go and define your position. Like, I think what people need to think about is what is the job of a market category? The job of a market category is to take a prospect that doesn't know too much about your stuff and kind of point them at your value.
[00:16:16] That's all it does. It doesn't replace the sales pitch. It doesn't replace your value propositions. It doesn't replace your messaging. It's just a starting point. So if there's an existing category and a, a subsegment of that category that you could easily dominate, then it's way easier to start with something that a customer already knows.
[00:16:38] This is why most startups position in that way. But sometimes that category just doesn't, and it... no existing category serves to actually point the prospect in the direction of your value. So if it doesn't, then you're gonna have to make something up. And again, about ten percent of the time in the companies I work with, we're in that situation, then we're into category creation.[00:17:00]
[00:17:00] And what do you make of strategic narrative? Is that just a- another name for company story and positioning? So the thing about strategic narrative, so when I first started seeing that, I thought It was a sales pitch. Like, that's what the story was. But then I started working with clients that had attempted to use it for a sales pitch, and it didn't work for a sales pitch.
[00:17:21] And so here's what I think. There's an assumption behind strategic narrative that we need one story to rule them all. And so we have a story, and that works for investors, it works as our internal story to communicate our strategy, it works as our sales pitch, it works as the story to attract employees to come and be employees for us.
[00:17:42] I've never seen a company where that works. Like, in every company that I've worked at where we've raised money, the story we were telling to the investors was very different from the story that we were telling on the front line in sales. Because, you know, the investors are worried about what are you gonna be in 10 years and what's your all-singing, all-dancing thing, [00:18:00] and it's a very visionary pitch about the future.
[00:18:03] Customers, in general, they're not paying you today's dollars for tomorrow's promises. They wanna know, why pick you over the other guys right now? So the structure I've seen on the strategic narrative is missing some kinda key stuff. Like, it doesn't have a concept of differentiated value, which I think I don't understand how I do anything without that.
[00:18:22] I certainly can't do sales without that. It feels a little more like an investor pitch to me, this idea that we have a vision, there's a big change in the world, and the only comparison we're doing is old way, new way. And that, I think, works in an investor pitch, where the investors are making a bet on big upheavals in the market, and there's old things and there's new things, and it's gonna wipe everybody out.
[00:18:45] But in a sales pitch, there are often multiple new ways, so you're not the only new way. There's other multiple new ways, and we can't necessarily sell against status quo by saying they're old and bad. Like, if I'm in the CRM [00:19:00] space, I can't just say, "Well, don't pick Salesforce. They're old and shitty." Well, what are you talking about?
[00:19:05] They're actually the market leader in this, right? Like- Yeah. No, that's an interesting distinction because I think you often sell the old way, new way, and you show them the vision to get them excited about where you're going. Right. But the thing that you've highlighted here, which is it still doesn't ... At the end of the day in, in a sales context, they're gonna say, "That, that's awesome.
[00:19:23] I'm so happy for you that you're going, that you're building this amazingly huge vision," but, like, how are you different than the three other products that are on my shopping list right now? That I'm looking at right now. So there's a bunch of data around this that I think's really important. So if you read, uh, Matthew Dixon's new book, it's called The Jolt Effect, it's amazing.
[00:19:40] Anybody who's doing sales stuff should look at it. But basically, they analyzed two and a half million sales calls and looked at what works and doesn't work in a sales pitch. So one of the key insights from that data is that- 40 to 60% of B2B purchase processes end in no [00:20:00] decision. That's a lot. And if you scratch down at that, in the majority of cases, that doesn't mean that the customer voted for the status quo.
[00:20:09] It meant they couldn't figure out how to confidently make a decision that they weren't gonna get in trouble for, and because they couldn't figure it out, they just kicked the can down the road and said, "No decision, we're gonna do something later." Now, if you look at that, getting too far out over your skis on vision is giving those customers a very good reason to delay making a purchase.
[00:20:31] Like, "I love it. That all sounds great. That's amazing, that vision. Call me next year and we'll see whether or not it's working out like you thought it was working out, 'cause right now that sounds kinda unproven, risky. I'm not so sure." So that's one thing. The second thing that's really interesting when you look at the data in Matt Dixon's work is that some of these vision-style pitches are really oriented around, "Look, you should do what everyone else is doing, like you're missing out on [00:21:00] something.
[00:21:00] The best company in the world do this, and if you're not doing this, you're gonna get left behind," and all this kind of stuff. And so there's this idea that I'm throwing around a lot of FOMO. What Matt Dixon's research shows is that introducing FOMO into an account that is already indecisive, which by the way, we're losing half our deals because of that, actually decreases the likelihood that you will close a deal by a significant percent.
[00:21:27] Why do you think that is? The idea, again, is the customer is indecisive, so they're already a bit worried, like, "I might not be making the right decision here. I don't know how to make a decision. This feels like a big decision, and if the future doesn't play out the way you're saying, then I might get in trouble for making this decision.
[00:21:48] So again, let's just kick it down for a year. We'll just delay it and see, does this play out the way you said it was gonna play out or not? 'Cause it feels risky." Especially if you're a startup or a [00:22:00] challenger brand or one of a handful of companies in this space, it's always gonna be easier to just be like, "Ah, let's just buy Salesforce."
[00:22:06] No one's gonna get fired for making that decision, right? Exactly. This is why the incumbent has so much leverage. It's no one's gonna get fired for making that. It's very safe. If something goes wrong, you can just point around and say, "Look, you know, everybody else was buying them. Like, it's not me." You don't have to stick your neck out to make that decision.
[00:22:25] What if you just said, "We're the cheaper version"? I mean, you know. It could work. We're like that, but half the cost. Yeah, we're, we're racing to the bottom. I actually worked at a company that that was exactly our positioning, so we were selling against the market leader, and we were like, "We're like them, but cheaper," and let me tell you, that is a bad place to be.
[00:22:44] It is not good. While we're on this topic, let's talk about differentiation. I just... I would love to hear how you walk a company through the ways you can differentiate, and I'll give you an anecdote. So I did a bit of consulting at one point with a company that was in a very, very [00:23:00] crowded market, and- There was 10 different platforms, and they all kind of did the same thing, and they were like, "Come on, help us find our differentiator."
[00:23:07] And I, I really struggled with them because I was like, I don't know. There, there needs to be some type of, like, product innovation. There needs to be something here. You're just kinda like the same as everyone else, but your thing is more expensive. Like, how do you tackle that? Like, a- even in the companies you work with, I'm sure people don't just hire you for you to tell them, like, "Yeah, build more features."
[00:23:27] So, like, what do you- Yeah, defini- definitely not. What do you do? Well, so here's the first thing. If the company is in market, so let's say they're in market right now. They're not some, like, idea on a napkin. They're in market, and they're selling. So they've got reasonable traction. They don't just have, like, two customers.
[00:23:44] They're doing a million revenue, two million revenue, 10 million revenue. What that means is every single day, customers look at them in the middle of this soup of all the competitors and pick them 'Cause they're picking you for a reason. So there's your breadcrumb. I've literally [00:24:00] had companies come to me that are doing 20 million a year, reasonable growth on that 20 million, and I've had, like, the head of sales say, "I don't know how it's different, man.
[00:24:09] I don't know." And what that means is customers are doing a calculation. You just don't know what it is. And so if you're in market, customers are happy, your churn's not terrible, there's some growth in there. There's something there, it's just maybe you don't know what it is. Now, often, the features driving that differentiated value look small, or sometimes it's not features at all.
[00:24:33] So sometimes it's something like everybody kind of looks the same, but you're the only one with professional services, and we're really worried about the rollout on this thing, so we picked you. Or everybody looks the same, but your pricing model was different. Not that you were cheaper, but the way you did pricing actually works for us better.
[00:24:48] Sometimes what you have are these small features, but in the right context it matters a lot. So I'll give you an example. I worked at, uh, just ages ago, I worked at IBM. So if you're listening and you're from [00:25:00] IBM... This was a long time ago, so don't call me up and tell me this is wrong. This is my situation back then.
[00:25:04] But we were selling a database, and at that point, databases are totally mature. They're all the same. They're literally all the same. There's no difference between my database and Oracle's database. Performance is the same, scalability is the same, security's the same. It's the same. Now, the big difference was we had a different point of view about how a database should live in the ecosystem of IT stuff.
[00:25:28] So we're very into open systems and open standards. So we had better APIs, and the database as a whole was much easier to integrate with other things in the ecosystem. You could swap things around a database in and out really easily. And so we supported a bunch of standards that Oracle didn't. We had a bunch of stuff in our API that Oracle didn't.
[00:25:50] So it was all about this idea of openness. Oracle, on the other hand, wanna sell you the whole stack, right? Everything. Soup to nuts, the whole stack. So they didn't have all that. You're supposed to [00:26:00] buy everything from them. So if you looked at the value of that, we were selling to these very, very, very big accounts, like literally 90 named accounts across the land for billions of revenue, and those accounts cared a lot about innovation and lock-in.
[00:26:16] So they did not want lock-in. They wanted to be able to mix and match and swap things out and bring things in and make that really easy. And so we pitched them on openness equals innovation, and that's why you wanna buy from us. Oracle was pitching a level of accounts below us That were a little bit smaller, and those folks cared more about time to value, overall cost of ownership, one throat to choke if something goes bad, and they sold on that.
[00:26:45] So they beat us in these smaller accounts that really cared about that stuff. We wiped the floor with them in these bigger accounts with this story about openness. If you just sat there and did a feature function checklist between the two of us, it, it would be a long time before you got [00:27:00] down to those three or four little features that actually made us different.
[00:27:04] Often, companies come to me and they're like, "We don't have any differentiation. We don't know what it is." But then you bring the sales team in, and you're like, "So why'd they buy?" And the sales team goes like, "This thing, this thing, this thing." And product's like, "We don't care about those things. Those are Mickey Mouse little things."
[00:27:20] You know, but customers do. So if I could tell the story around the value that those differentiators can drive, the value might actually be very big. So if I'm focused on differentiated value, that's the key thing. It doesn't actually matter that much if the features underneath are kinda small or whatever.
[00:27:39] It's the story you're telling around it, which is how, you know, when I was at IBM, it's how we were selling against Oracle. The features, just little things. I love that example, and the example of, like, the, "Hey, we do this, but we offer professional services." And To your point of, like, you only work with companies that are in market and selling right now, it's, it's not based on some future promise.
[00:27:58] You're like, "The thing that we can [00:28:00] offer right now is this." I used to have a boss that used to say this all the time. "Look, we can only make money selling what's on the truck." Yeah. Yeah. Like, that's it. How do companies balance that, though? 'Cause I could see companies being like, "All right, great. We, we're gonna do this positioning ex- we're gonna do this positioning work."
[00:28:17] We go through all this, and we find that the reason that we're winning deals and this... We're, we're a $20 million SaaS company. The reason we're winning deals is because we're the company that offers professional services, right? Right. But then isn't there, like, another level of positioning or future story that is going to be the lever that's gonna get them from 20 to 40?
[00:28:32] Like, what if they don't believe that- Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Do those things happen in parallel? Is it like- So this is my thing that I, I have when, you know, when people talk about strategic narrative, is they're trying to tell the story that we're gonna be telling in 10 years but ain't the story we're telling in sales right now.
[00:28:50] So typically what we have, when I go to a VC and I pitch a VC, that is all about the vision. In 10 years, here's the all-singing, all-dancing amazing [00:29:00] thing I'm gonna be. It's gonna be nuts. It's gonna be amazing. That's why you wanna invest 50 million bucks in me or whatever it is. But I have the product as it exists today.
[00:29:10] Now, there is a strategy that takes me from where I am today and where I'm gonna be in the future, and that strategy has levels to it. Like, first we're gonna build this big thing, and then you know what? The positioning is gonna change, and the sales story we have at step one doesn't look like the sales story we have right now.
[00:29:30] Then we're gonna go to step two 'cause we're gonna make an acquisition or we're gonna go do a thing, and that positioning is gonna be different than where we started. And eventually, the positioning is gonna match the vision. Of course, the vision is now gonna be moved out, and so it's different. But we work on this stuff sometimes with this idea that we're gonna carve it into rocks, and it's never gonna change which is bonkers.
[00:29:52] Of course it's gonna change. Our product is changing. Our competitors are changing. The market landscape is changing. [00:30:00] Everything's changing. So we gotta have the best possible story to sell the thing we have against the competitors we have and do that right now. But next year That story might be completely different, and we're gonna evolve that thing over time.
[00:30:15] Like, if you look at Salesforce, they are not pitching anything close to the same story now that they were pitching when they first started. It's a completely different story, and it would be weird if you thought, "Oh, we're gonna take this story. I'm gonna take the VC pitch, and we're just gonna use that story for 10 years."
[00:30:31] I don't know a single company that's ever done that. So it's almost like the exercise is, like, twofold. It's like, number one, we're going to, whether you bring in April or not, like, we need to nail our positioning for the next six months, and that's gonna be based off of what's on the truck today, what we can sell today.
[00:30:46] But action item for the CEO and head of product and others is we need to start thinking about the future version because in about six months to a year, we're gonna need to do another iteration on this positioning that's gonna get us beyond just [00:31:00] being the CRM company that offers professional services.
[00:31:02] Am I getting that right? Exactly. So I'll give you example. I worked at a company. We had this enterprise. This is the one where we were like, "We're the cheap CRM." It was terrible. We weren't selling anything. It was awful. So we had a feature that was neat, and not only was it neat, but it, it was unique, and the big competitor could not copy us.
[00:31:20] And so the value that that feature drove was if you were in a highly relationship-driven sales situation, this thing would help you generate three or four new opportunities from every opportunity that you had in the pipeline. And so it was fancy. And so it took us a long time to figure out that was the value.
[00:31:42] At the beginning, we just pitched the feature like, "Look, we can model a many-to-many relationship." And the people would say, "Well, what good is that?" And we'd say, "You can use it for anything you want," 'cause we didn't know the value. But we landed a deal with an investment bank, and then we figured out what the value was.
[00:31:58] So we narrowed the [00:32:00] positioning down to we're CRM for investment banks 'cause we knew we could sell there. We knew we could beat the great big incumbent there. And we drew this picture that if you've ever read, uh, Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm, and you understand bowling pin strategy, the idea was investment banking was the lead pin.
[00:32:18] So we're gonna focus on that until we dominate investment banking. Once we dominate investment banking, the product's gonna be more mature, and we're gonna build some things that allow us to go into retail banking. And so now we're gonna widen it out, and then we're gonna be CRM for banks. So we're gonna sell retail and investment banking.
[00:32:36] And then while we're selling that, we're gonna be building out some stuff that's gonna allow us to get into insurance. And so once we get there, then we're gonna be CRM for financial services If we survive that, financial services is massive. So if we actually end up doing a good job there, then we're so big we could consider becoming enterprise CRM, and we're [00:33:00] gonna go sell to everybody.
[00:33:01] And so we drew that map with the bowling pins for the investors because the investors were like, "Well, hang on. We don't want you to be CRM for investment banks. That's too small. How are we gonna make any money?" And so we drew the bowling pins out on the thing, and we're, we're gonna do it just the way Geoffrey Moore tells you to do it.
[00:33:19] We're gonna knock off the lead pin. That's gonna lead us to three more pins. That's gonna lead us to four more pins, and eventually the vision was always to be the king of enterprise CRM. But if we positioned like that, we were gonna get creamed by the big incumbent in the space. So we started in the spot we could win, and then we expanded out from there with the idea being eventually we'd get big enough to take them on directly.
[00:33:42] I love that. There's so much good that happens inside of the company when you start winning in a space also that there's a downstream effect of that. Like revenue? Yeah, right. There, it kinda does cure all of the internal politics and- Right ... BS and whatever's going on. Let's talk about your new book. You published, I'm gonna [00:34:00] guess, I think it was 20- obviously awesome, 2019?
[00:34:03] 2019. All right, I got it on the bookshelf back there, dog-eared, marked up, passed off as my own advice multiple times I'm sure. Oh, you're welcome to do that. No. Everyone is welcome to do that. It's great. I mean, once you publish a book, that's it. It's out in the world. It's not yours anymore. It's out in the world.
[00:34:18] So writing a book, I don't know about you, it, it sucks. It's not easy. It's not fun. It sucks so much. You've been wildly successful. What was the desi- why go do it again? There must have been a burning desire. Oh, man. Take us into why, why go do this? Why write the sales pitch book, and what's the difference between...
[00:34:36] Like, where did you leave with positioning and actually, "No, I need to help these people create a sales pitch"? Yeah. So at the beginning, I was like, "I don't do sales pitches. I'm not doing the sales pitch bit, so I'm just gonna do the positioning bit." And so I did a bunch of clients like that, and then the problem was client come back to me a couple months later, and they're like, "Marketing loves it.
[00:34:54] Product loves it. Sales refuses to use it." What the real problem was is sales [00:35:00] doesn't know how to use it. And so I thought, man, we must have a pitch deck structure that I can just point people at and say, "Use that." 'Cause you could see these folks were not using a structure at all. Like the vast majority of SaaS companies, if you look what's happening in a first substantive sales call, they're doing a product walkthrough.
[00:35:20] They're saying, "Hey, here's how you log in. We got seven dropdown menus across the top. Let me click on every single one and show you every single thing." So there's no positioning happening there. Like, it's up to the customer to figure out what's differentiating, like which of those features do you have that no one else has?
[00:35:36] If there's features there that the people don't understand, it's up to the customer to figure out w- how that feature translates to value. These product walkthroughs are not answering the question, why pick me versus the other people on your shortlist? So we know we can do better than a feature walkthrough pitch, and so I thought, you know, there's all this sales training that people take, like you know all this stuff, like Sandler sales training and all this stuff.
[00:35:59] It turns out, [00:36:00] if you look at all that sales training, nowhere in that sales training does it talk about how to build a pitch. It just assumes that a pitch exists. Then I've got this other weird thing, like if you go inside the organization, nobody really owns the pitch or feels ownership of the pitch. So you go to sales, and they're like, "Well, we don't like using that stuff that marketing gives us 'cause that's stupid."
[00:36:21] You go to marketing, and they're like, "Ah, sales does their own thing over there. Sometimes we give them stuff. They, sometimes they use it, most of the time they don't." So there's no structure. And so in the absence of structure, what's happening is this kinda click on all the menus product walkthrough thing.
[00:36:36] So I thought, well, I could just point people to a structure, and a structure did not seem to exist. And so that was frustrating. And I knew if I wanted positioning to survive the jump from marketing to sales, we were gonna have to give people an easy way to take the positioning and translate it into a sales pitch.
[00:36:57] So I started teaching that. Now, [00:37:00] where I learned this, so here's the background on this thing. So I was doing crappy product walkthrough pitches in my early product marketing career 'cause I just thought that's how we do it. And then I went to IBM, and when I-- the first thing I launched at IBM, my boss showed up and he says, "Look, you gotta build a pitch in the standard IBM format."
[00:37:21] And I went, "Oh God, that's gonna be bad." And it was bad. It was like there was a binder, it was that fat, and there was the 29,000 step process to building the sales pitch. I was like, "Oh my God, I hate this thing so much." But after I had built a bunch of pitches with it, I started to see there were some genius bits to it.
[00:37:41] And in particular, I really liked the idea that everything was oriented around differentiated value, like the value we could deliver that no one else could. The pitches were really tuned to that. So what they wanted was nobody leaves a first call without deeply understanding why pick us over the other [00:38:00] guys.
[00:38:00] The other thing that all these pitches did was it painted a picture of the whole market, and we always had a discussion with the customer about the whole market, like all the other approaches they could take to solving a problem. And in that, we were doing discovery, but we were also teaching the client our point of view on the market, which was unique to us.
[00:38:24] And so I started using a version of that. When I left IBM, I stole the binder. I took it with me to the next company I went to, and me and the VP of sales sat down and we re-architected the first call sales pitch deck using that, which was really good. And so we got an immediate bang from our buck in that we were closing a lot more deals, the things were going great, all that stuff.
[00:38:44] And so in my kit bag of things that I used when I was a VP marketing at every company after that, is I used this sales pitch structure, like redo the positioning, and I would say, "Okay, we're blowing up the sales pitch and we're gonna build it like this." When I [00:39:00] went as a consultant, I guess I thought, like, people would know how to do it, but then it turned out they didn't.
[00:39:04] So I thought, okay, in my own work that I was doing with clients, we were always doing both things. We'd do the positioning, and then we would build the sales pitch that maps to the positioning, and that would ensure that the thing could live and survive the jump over to sales. I've done maybe 200 or so clients where I've done this sales pitch structure, and every single time people are like, "Wow, you know, we've never done sales pitches like that.
[00:39:29] That's really cool." And so then I thought, you know what? It'd be really great if I could just write the book on it, and then in the same way people can self-serve. Like, if you don't wanna hire a consultant to help you with your positioning, you can just buy my book, and it tells you exactly what I do with clients.
[00:39:44] This is the same thing for the sales pitch piece of that workshop. Those two books- It's kind of unbelievable. We got this amazing lady here who's literally done 200 of these, and she's gonna give it to you in a book that probably costs, like, you know, 18 bucks or whatever. But people won't do it. Most people aren't gonna do [00:40:00] it.
[00:40:00] Like, this is the thing, like, you should be able to do it yourself, but some folks will get stuck, and the folks that get stuck, those are the people that are gonna call me, and we're gonna work on it. But the structure should be there to just use it, in my opinion. So I felt like, ah, a stupid book needs to get written, so fine, we'll write the, write the stupid book.
[00:40:18] Rawr, rawr, rawr. I love it. I think you should've made it... I think you should've brought the binder back. I wanna see, like, modern B2B SaaS companies with binders because of you. Do you wanna know what's funny? Is, like, I stole the binder, and I took it with me to this company that I went to, and, uh, we re-architected the sales pitch and stuff and stealing stuff out of the binder.
[00:40:38] And then, uh, fast-forward a year and a half, we got acquired by IBM, and so I had to sneak the binder back into the premises. The bi- you used their own sales pitch to get acquired by the same company. I love that. They're like, "Wow, love this pitch." I'm like, "Something about it seems familiar." They're like, "They, we really love this.
[00:40:57] It matches how we see the world." [00:41:00] What's the modern version of it? Is it a 10-slide slide deck? Is it a doc? Like, what, what's the deliverable? So I can describe it. It's basically a set of components. So the, like, I think every good pitch has a set of components, and in my structure, there's eight. You can break it down into two macro components, though.
[00:41:18] There's what I call a setup, and then there's the follow-through. The setup is about the market. It's not about you. The follow-through is all about you. So the setup is kinda composed of three pieces. So it starts with market insight, and this is kind of your distinct point of view on the world. It's something that is very particular to you and your company, and it's the reason why you built the thing the way you built it.
[00:41:48] The second step of the setup is competitive approaches and the pros and cons of those approaches. So we'll look at, here's the other ways of solving the problems, here's the [00:42:00] pluses and minuses with those different ways of solving it. And then the last step is what place where we're getting agreement between the prospect and us that, you know, if this is the real problem and this is the pluses and minuses of using different approaches, here's what perfect looks like.
[00:42:18] And then we switch over. If we get the client to say, "Yeah, yeah, I agree with that," then we go, "Good, 'cause that's how we see the world, and then here's my distinct value, and here's how we get it done." So if you want, I can give you example. Yes, please. I did some work with a company called Help Scout. They're a good example 'cause everybody gets this.
[00:42:37] So they're in the, the customer service space. So think Zendesk, like, that's a competitor of theirs, except they built the product specifically for online businesses. They don't have stores. They don't have salespeople. And so their insight was that online businesses look at customer service in a very different way than traditional businesses do.
[00:42:57] Traditional businesses see customer service as [00:43:00] a cost center. Online businesses see customer service as their one and only place where they get to interact with customers. So if they give a great customer experience, it can increase loyalty, it can drive repeat purchases. It's a growth driver. Now, if I look at their competition, most folks start by using a shared inbox, really easy for the reps to use.
[00:43:21] The problem is, is as the company grows, it doesn't have the service features that you want. It doesn't let you do prioritization or assignments or any of that good service stuff. So then you're left to upgrade to something like Zendesk with help desk software, and the problem there is, one, really hard to use, so now your rep's gotta learn it, but two, everything there is designed to reduce costs.
[00:43:42] Like, you're not Dave anymore. You're ticket number 157, right? And we're trying to push you to low-cost channels, all that kind of stuff. So if I'm Help Scout and I do the feature, feature pitch, someone would come in, and I'd say, "Hey, look, prospect, I'm gonna show you all the features. Look, we have an inbox.
[00:43:59] [00:44:00] Isn't that nice and easy to use? And like, look, we've got prioritizations, assignments," another feature, another feature, another feature, another feature, and I'm gonna keep going until I run out of time, right? I'm the prospect. I'm like, "I don't know, man, like some of that sounds like an inbox like we're doing right now, and some of that sounds exactly like Zendesk, and maybe they have more.
[00:44:18] I don't know. Why pick you over the other guys?" The answer is not clear If you do it my way, here's how we do it. We start with the insight. So prospect is there, and we're like, "Hey, I'm gonna show you the product. But, but before we get there, we work with digital companies just like yours, and we believe that customer service is actually a growth driver.
[00:44:38] It's not a cost center. So we know that if you deliver a great customer experience, that's gonna drive loyalty, it's gonna drive repeat business. Would you agree with that?" Generally, digital business says, "Yeah, yeah, we do agree with that." "Okay, so you got choices. You could do this with a shared inbox. Are you doing it with that?"
[00:44:53] "Yeah, we're doing it with that now." "Well, that's great, except when you get growing a little bit bigger and you wanna do priorities and assignments and whatever. Now what are you gonna [00:45:00] do? Well, you, all you got left now is help desk software. That does all the bells and whistles, but it doesn't give a very
[00:45:06] It, one, it's hard to use, and two, doesn't give a very good customer experience. So now you gotta assign ticket numbers, gonna drive you to low-cost channels. Can we agree that in a perfect world, what I would have is customer service software that's as easy to use as an inbox, but I never have to migrate off it 'cause it has all the bells and whistles, and it gets designed from the ground up to give customers an amazing customer experience?"
[00:45:33] We want that, right? Now, if you say right, then I go, "Great." Then I switch over, and I just show you how we do that. That is a completely different pitch than this feature, feature, feature, feature. I got a feature, you got a feature. And then the ... You're not wasting time doing demos for somebody who's not gonna be primed to have that conversation.
[00:45:52] Right. Like, if the person comes and says, "No, that's a cost center for me, I'm just trying to drive out cost," well, you've disqualified yourself. I got nothing. 'Cause if all you care [00:46:00] about is that, Zendesk a better choice for you. But for most digital businesses, if I can get you aligned to that, then I show you the demo.
[00:46:07] You need something that's as easy to use as a shared inbox. Let me show you how we do that. Here's my shared inbox. Here's how it works, da, da, da. Oh, you need advanced features. Let me show you the advanced features. Oh, you need to give customers a really great experience. Look, no ticket numbers, no this, no that.
[00:46:20] So we're now doing a demo where we're organized around our differentiated value, not just features. Do you talk about the actual design of this thing? I feel like a lot of companies get tripped up in the Execution of the sales deck Yeah, like, I think what the biggest problem is that people really get attached to existing slides because they never blow the pitch deck up.
[00:46:44] And so they're like, "Well, where are we gonna use the triangle slide? We have to use the triangle slide. Every pitch has the triangle slide." And I'm like, "Maybe let's just throw out the whole pitch and start from scratch." Companies almost never do it. And then people are irrationally attached to a particular slide or something, and I'm just like, "Throw it all out, man.
[00:46:59] We can [00:47:00] start from scratch." All right, we gotta wrap, but I'm gonna put you on the spot, and give us the sales pitch for your new book, Sales Pitch, which will be out now by the time we put this podcast out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the insight here is customers are really paralyzed with indecision, and so we are doing a very bad job today in sales pitches of translating our positioning to a sales pitch that answers the question, why buy us over the other guys?
[00:47:31] So if you look what people are doing in sales pitches today, generally it's a product walkthrough. That product walkthrough does not answer this question. This book is a structure that anybody can use to take your positioning, translate it into a sales pitch, that every time you do a first call, people are gonna walk out there and understand what makes you different and special and why they should pick you.
[00:47:51] Love it. April, I could have talked to you for hours. Good news is, for Exit Five members, which you can join if you go to exitfive.com, we're gonna do, uh, an AMA in [00:48:00] a couple weeks around the book. Can't wait. I'm excited for you. Congratulations. It'll be great. Next week is the most fun week, which is launch week, and your, your inbox will be flooded, and you'll be booked up for the next nine months.
[00:48:11] I'll be on the road, and then when I come back, I go- I'll relax, yeah. What are you doing, a little roadshow? Yeah, I'm doing four keynotes in four days next week. Awesome. Well, that's great. Congrats with all the book, and we always appreciate your thoughts. I know everybody in the Exit Five community is big fans of yours, and I'm excited to get this podcast out to them.
[00:48:28] Thanks. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you. Exit Five Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit Five podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you wanna grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over at exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates.
[00:48:46] Plus, we have a community, a community of over 4,000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and wanna connect with your peers, or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to [00:49:00] grow your career and help grow your company, go and check it out.
[00:49:02] It's exit5.com. You can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you wanna grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day.
[00:49:20] So check it out, exit5.com. And I also wanna make sure I give a shout-out to my friends at Hatch. That's hatch.fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do, and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses.
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