A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch)

23:23I think this is one of the most interesting insights that you share in your book. And you also share this in the newsletter, post about how buying software is, you could argue is harder than selling it because people will have learned their skills and training for selling, but buying is this, as he described, extremely stressful, like basically your job is online if you make a mistake. Is there anything more you can share along those lines? Just like to help reinforce that buying software is extremely hard and stressful and people don't understand that. Once you sort of get into that mindset, I think then you look at the situation a lot different.

23:55Like I think we've seen the statistics on this that says, you know, the buyer is 80 % of the way through their buying journey by the time they talk to your sales rep. Yeah, maybe, but they might be 80 % of the way to say, and nope, I'm not buying nothing. And in fact, that's true 60 % of the time. And so how do we combat that? Like the way we combat that is not just talking about ourselves. It's actually about trying to be helpful to that person in this very stressful situation that is trying to figure out how I make a really good decision. So what we should be doing is given them a way to think about the whole market and say, look, like, you know, in the case of HelpScape, look, there's shared inbox and then there's helped us software and then there's us.

24:40And I don't care who the vendor is, I'm gonna put them in one of those buckets. And so you can just think of it that way. You don't need to know every single feature, every single thing. I'm giving you a bigger picture of the whole market and helping you feel good. Well, if you choose this or you choose that, now you know why. I think what's interesting about this is a lot of startups fail because they can't convince anyone to switch from the status quo. And I think people always think of that as the current product is good enough and that's why they're losing. But I think this adds an additional wrinkle of it's also the person buying it is just like, I don't want to add the stress to even decide and make the choice and put my butt on the line to switch.

25:20And I never thought of it that way. Yeah, like I think that hurdle is a lot more than you think, right? So we obviously have to compete with status quo. Like we can ignore status quo because sometimes status quo just is good enough. You know, and so we can't ignore that. We still lose deals to status quo. But we lose an awful lot of deals to just plain customer indecision, customers being more afraid of screwing up than missing out. So to try to overcome that, to drill into the things you find most powerful, one is help the customer understand the bigger picture and why it's essentially they're falling behind, why maybe competition is gonna have an advantage because they're using thinking in a different way.

26:04Well, I'll throw something out about that. Please. So, so I've heard people talk about this a lot that one of the things we could do in this situation when a customer is feeling this indecision is to kind of lean into this FOMO and say, look you're missing out, like the competitors are all doing it and you're not doing it. And so this is an interesting question. And so I was super excited, Matt Dixon wrote this book called the Jolt Effect. And in that they studied two and a half million sales calls that recorded on Gong and they studied it with AI and then they looked at what happened after the sales call.

26:43So were these successful or not successful, did a deal happen or whatever? It's pretty rare that we get a chance to like dig into some data like this. And so what his data showed is if a customer is indecisive, throwing FOMO into the mix makes it worse. So they are less likely to close the deal if you throw that in. And the idea is that they're already stressed out. And you're just putting more stress on them by pressuring them by saying, oh, this is having a bad thing. You know, you're like, ah, bad things will happen. If I do some bad things, if I don't something, ah, what am I doing? They just put their head in the sand, right?

27:23They're just like, I forget it. So they're just like, forget it. I'm doing nothing. Now I'm totally paralyzed. And so there's an assumption that companies are very motivated by this FOMO thing, but I think that that is not always true. And if the customer is actually indecisive, throwing in this FOMO thing isn't going to do it. So what does work in that situation is one, giving them the tools to make the decision. So that includes paying the picture of the market, teaching them how to buy essentially. So teaching them, look for customers like you, you just have to worry about these three or four things.

27:57And all this other stuff, it doesn't apply to you. That applies to bigger companies, that applies to whatever. So this idea of teaching a customer how to buy is one way to take that stress down. And then there's a whole bunch of other techniques you can use. So one is, you know, if it's a really big deal, we can split it into smaller pieces. We can do things like offer you money back guarantee, we can do things like sometimes we have services and support that are going to help you if things go bad. And this is how we're going to make sure. So this idea of being able to take risk off the table is a really serious one if we've got a customer that is actually paralyzed because of this indecision thing.

28:35That makes a lot of sense. Basically, it's like, how do we help the buyer cover their ass if they made a mistake? Because what you're saying is that's the main reason they're not buying your product. And this FOMO thing is just not going to do it. So interesting. So I really like this framework over the stand, teaching them how to buy. That is a really simple way of just thinking about this whole process. Well, you know, it's funny. I was having this conversation with Bob Mesta. You know, he said jobs to be done. Yeah, I watched that episode. Yeah, so he's just the best. And so one of the things I think of is like normally when we come at this, we're like, well, how can we convince the customer that we do the job that they need to have done?

29:11And obviously we need to do that. But there is this kind of secondary job that the champion of the deal is, and that's how do I make a decision without getting fired? And so we got to help them accomplish that job. Otherwise, we don't get what we want, which is the money. So interesting. And it's not even like necessarily get fired. It's like even the performance offers or they don't get the promotion. It's like, yeah, like they do a good job. And this makes me think of a process that are being be we went through to buy a community for him software. And I just remember these like massive teams of sales people come to the office and pitching everyone on the software and they just keep like pushing you to make like what's the next step here?

29:52How do we need to roll in? Who needs to buy into it? And I'm just like, oh my God, so stressful. I have to like keep this thing moving. And then there's IT coming in like, oh, we got to make sure it integrates with Salesforce. And like you start with, I just wanted the best community for him software because we're trying to build something really different and unique and you end up with like, okay, it's fine. Let's just go with the thing that works with Salesforce. It's all good. I'm just gonna move on to another process. Well, this is the thing. It's so easy to default to the market leader in that situation.

30:20Like the market leader has this big advantage that you can say, you know what? Who's gonna get me in trouble for picking Salesforce? Nobody, right? Like it's so easy to just flip back on that. And so if you're the challenger in this situation at the brand that's number two or number three, like you've got to get over all of this inertia and tilting towards this status quo because it's just so easy. It's the lowest risk decision. Besides do nothing is to just pick the leader in the market. We'll just run with that. Yeah, I think the classic phrase was, no one gets fired for buying Microsoft. I wonder if it's like, is it Salesforce now?

30:53What's the default? I don't know. Yeah, the original one was IBM. No one's fired for IBM. Oh, I think you're right. Now you totally get fired for buying IBM. I don't know what happens. The other thing you bring up is I think an interesting thing to think about too, that really messes people up in these situations is that in B2B, typical purchase process, we have five to seven people involved in making the deal happen. And so there's this complexity. We don't have a consumer, right? But a lot of people I think overcomplicate that. Like in a typical B2B purchase process, we've got someone in that buying team is what we would call the champion.

31:32So that person is the person who's been tasked with, hey, pick us the accounting software or pick us to the CRM, you figured out. And so that person is the person that does the initial research, makes the short list, probably sits on the first calls, and then there's all these other people. Now the other people can't make a deal happen, but they can kill it. A thousand ways. So the way this works is you have to, you're positioning and your pitch needs to really work for the champion because if it doesn't, you don't even get to talk to anybody else. Like you don't even get to go near anybody else.

32:10We don't make it all the short list that you don't get to deal with cooking. But once the deal is cooking, it is on you to arm that champion to handle all the objections, potentially, of all the other groups. So if you're the line of business buyer, let's say you're in the sales department, you're buying a CRM, IT's gonna have to get involved at some point. And IT doesn't really care about the value of your CRM, but they do care, doesn't meet the security requirements, it doesn't integrate with the stuff we already have and how much of a pain is this thing gonna be to manage and so we're not actually pitching value to those people.

32:44We're just handling objections. And so once we realize that, then we can get really tight on our positioning and our sales pitch. Like what we're really trying to do is just cook the champion, get the champion, and then once the deal's going, we gotta arm the champion for how to handle all these objections of all these other groups so that you can get a consensus to get a deal moved forward. How do you actually do that? Is it ask them what are all the concerns you're hearing? Is it ask the individual stakeholders what are your biggest concerns? If we're really smart, we already know, because we've done lots of deals.

33:15So if we're being a good partner in this, we're sometimes even in the very first meeting, we're saying, hey look, in that spot where we're talking about objections, we're gonna say, hey look, IT's gonna come in and they're gonna be worried about this, this and this, and don't worry we got you. So we're sock too compliant, we do this, we do that, we know, because we've done 15 deals and we know what these deals are like and we know what the stuff is gonna be. You might have the champion come in and say, well I don't know, and users might not like it. And it's like, okay, well here's how we're gonna get your end users on board, this is the training we have, this is the stuff we're gonna do, the neat thing, if you have a product like growth ring on the front end of that, it takes that objection off the table.

33:58But, and you might have other things like, you're gonna take this to your boss and they're gonna wanna know ROI numbers and blah, blah, blah, and we've already done that. Look, here's our calculator, if you give us this information, we can put this in, here's how you sell your boss. So that's what we're doing, we're trying to arm them because we've done a million deals, they've never bought software like this before. So have the time, you'll be doing deals and they don't even know what the process is. And so if we're being good partners, we're like, okay, does this need to go to purchasing and they'll say, yeah, it probably does.

34:29Oh well, here's what typically happens in purchasing. They're gonna do this, this, this, and we're gonna give you this stuff and that's gonna help you get it through purchasing. The way you're describing it now, it makes it feel like you need to be a big company for this to be useful because smaller companies don't have all these reps and they may not have the resources to do all these things you're describing. Who is this framework useful for? Can you use this approach if you're just, say, like an early stage of B2B? That one. Well, so it's B2B products, if you don't have a sales team, like if you don't have a sales team, I still think you can use this structure to build a story that marketing can use and you can use in different ways.

35:03We can talk about that. But in the companies that I work with, there B2B, they've got a sales team. And so the immediate thing we're doing is, we're making a shift in positioning, we're building a sales pitch that reflects that positioning. We can immediately implement that in sales, even though it's gonna take a while for us to forklift the messaging and do other stuff and change our campaigns and everything else to match this new positioning. But we can tighten up the sales pitch and have an immediate impact over in sales on that. Second thing is that I've worked with tons of companies where it's, you know, the founder is the only sales rep.

35:35But this works pretty good for that. I don't think we need a ton of resources to do it. But I do think we need to have enough traction in the market that we understand how a deal typically goes. So if we haven't sold anything yet, and we don't know yet, it's hard for us to help you buy something and we don't even know how to sell it. But if I've done 10 deals, I know what happens. I know it. I got a pretty good guess of what IT's gonna say when you try to implement this stuff. I have a good guess of what's gonna happen when we go to roll it out. I have a pretty good guess of what your boss might object to or might get excited by.

36:12And so I don't necessarily need a research team to go figure this out. This is just me trying to be helpful and help the champion do their job of getting this deal to the finish line. So maybe the MVP of this approach is a deck that you continue iterating and adjust and restructure. And also bullet points of things you wanna bring up. Like, okay, cool, IT's gonna ask for these things. Few bullet points that you kinda keep track of. Exactly. I'm also thinking from the perspective of a product team building a product. They don't really sell it themselves. They work with sales. They work with marketing.

36:47Is there anything that you would recommend or yet you think product teams could learn from this approach of selling that would help them build products in a different way or work with sales in a different way? Yeah. So here's what I think. Like, the core of a good sales pitch is really deeply understanding your differentiated value, which is what is the value I can deliver that no other solution can. Often what I see at companies is you got a smart product team and they know a lot about the stuff they're building and why it's important and what the value is to the customer and they did all this work on that when they were building it.

37:24But that information never made the jump to sales. Because sales isn't even trying to pitch value. They're just pitching features. Like, here's the drop down venues. Here's what they do. And so the first step in fixing this, I think, is to have a cross -functional team work on positioning. So if I've got product marketing and sales together in the room, working on defining what our differentiated value is, then I'm going to get all the good juice out of the product team that deeply understands the product, deeply understands what's differentiated about it, deeply understands value. And then I'm also going to have the all the juice from the sales team that understands what the common objections are, what the champion really wants to get done and doesn't want to get done, what the situation is in a typical account.

38:13And then all this cool information sharing happens, which actually you end up with way better definition of your differentiated value in the first place. And so once we've done that work, it is very natural then for us to work together on the sales pitch that reflects that. What typically happens is not that at all. What typically happens is, product's working on some stuff, sales working on some stuff, marketing's working on some stuff, marketing in their own little bubble comes up with positioning. They might build some stuff for the sales team, keep it over to the sales team. Sales team looks at it and says, I don't get what any of this stuff is.

38:48I disagree with this. This doesn't match what I see and they just throw it out and they go back to doing the same pitch they've been doing since the year of the flood. It's a long time. So our first podcast episode was all around positioning and so folks want to get deep into that. They should listen to that. So we're not going to spend tons of time there, but differentiated value is a big part of this process also. So I think it's worth spending a bit of time here. Could you maybe share a couple of examples of like, what this is to give people sense of like, what does it mean to be to share a differentiated value?

39:20Yeah. So differentiated value is kind of the answer of the question, why pick us over the other alternatives? And so the way we get at that in positioning is we start with, you know, putting a stake in the ground of who do we actually compete with? And so, you know, if we didn't exist in the market, what would a customer do? And so typically there's some status quo thing. It might not even look like you. It might just be a spreadsheet or do it with the intern or manual labor. And then there's whatever else ends up on a short list against us. And it's basically the definition of, you know, I got to beat all this plus and decision in order to win a deal.

39:57So I can stick my stake in the ground. Sales knows the answer to this question. If you have a sales team, they know the answer to this question. Like, you know, what would a customer do if we didn't exist? They know. And then we get to the next step is, well, so what do we have that's different? And that's capability wise, feature function of the product or capability of the company. So it could be features, it could be your pricing model, it could be we have support in a way that the other folks don't. So there's all kinds of things that could be, it could be the breadth of the portfolio that you have beyond that one product.

40:25We can fill whiteboards with this stuff. And then what we do is we go down that list of features and we say, so what? So, you know, you got advanced AI, whatever the heck the thing is, so what? Why does anybody care? And the answer to that, so what is your value? And because it came from this differentiated feature, it's generally value that the other guys can't deliver because they don't have the capabilities that underpin it. So if I give you an example, so at a company I work with a few years back, they recently been acquired by Salesforce called Level Jump. And so they're in the sales enablement space, which is terrible.

41:06There's a million companies in the sales enablement space that they all kind of look the same. And so level jump, you know, so if you look at, well, you know, what's the competitive alternatives? If I look at all the companies in the sales enablement space, you can kind of put them into two buckets in terms of approaches. They're either a CMS, like a jazzy content repository, where you can make sure that people are using the right content and whatever, or they're an LMS, a learning management system, which, you know, I can build the course and certify you on the course, and that's how we're gonna train the sales reps.

41:38If you look at Level Jump, they're differentiated capability, is there the only one that's built on top of Salesforce? That's the feature, you know, we're built on Salesforce, the other folks aren't. And then, who cares? Like, so what? And so when we first had a conversation about it, that you know, there was five or six different answers to that, so what question? But the big answer was, well, because we're built on top of Salesforce, my sales enablement data is integrated with my sales data. And then you say, well, so what about that? Well, because that means if I can actually tell, did the sales enablement improve time to first deal or improve time to make quota?

42:19Well, so what about that? Well, if I improve that ramp time, then we get way more revenue faster. So that's the differentiated value. When I go to do that in a sales pitch, I can translate that into my insight. My insight is, every day your reps not making quota cost you money. So if we really want to solve sales enablement, don't we really want to have something where we can measure whether or not the sales enablement is working with sales metrics? Yeah, we do. Interesting. So the differentiated value often informs the insight that it does start with. It absolutely is. Like the insight is basically the context that makes your differentiated value important.

42:59Like, what is the thing you need to know to understand the importance of my differentiated value? In the case of Help Scout, the insight is, look, digital businesses like customer services, growth driver, where does that come from? Like, if you look at their differentiated value, it's there. And so we can just reverse it, flip it around. Even if the product wasn't necessarily constructed with that insight, maybe we got their sideways or the roundabout way or whatever, we iterated our way into that. We can look at the differentiated value and then basically reverse it out to the insight. What's the sign that the differentiated value or insight that you've come up with just isn't clicking?

43:37If the differentiated value doesn't work in a sales pitch, which'll get us the company going, why would I pay for that? Mm -hmm. Yeah. Like, this is not value for me, buddy. Yeah. Like, the way I look at it is, the company's I work with. The way I look at it is, if you're in market and you're selling and you have happy engaged customers, there's differentiated value there. That's why they picked you. That's why they love you. That's why they don't turn out on you. It's there. You might not know what it is. We might have to, you know, we might have to do a little process to get at it, but it's there and it exists.

44:16Awesome. Another question that's been the background, in my instance, we started talking about differentiated value is just how honest should you be about the competition? Obviously, there's a spectrum of extremely honest to like, super biased. What's your guidance on just like how honest to be there? I mean, the posture, I think you should assume in a sale situation is, I had old boss used to talk about this, is the posture we should have is calm confidence. So where that calm confidence comes from is we really understand why people should pick us, so this differentiated value. We really understand it and we really understand who that's a really good fit for and we don't even bother trying to chase anybody else.

45:03So we should be able to come in and say, look, we're sales and everyone that delivers results. If you don't care about those results, you shouldn't pick us. You shouldn't pick someone else. And so generally what we're trying to be is extremely honest. So we're trying to come in and actually give credit where credit is due with the other approaches because typically the other approaches work just fine for other kinds of companies. Like if you're really small and you're not growing e -commerce business, use a shared inbox. It's free, it's easy to use. There's no problems there, just use it. If you're really worried about bringing the cost down in a customer service center, maybe you should use Zendesk.

45:44Like and so I think the more we can be, we can act as a guide in this situation and come in and say, look, like these guys are good for this, these folks are good for this and we're good for this. And you might not care about that. And if you don't care about that, we're not the one for you. You shouldn't pick us. But I think that what, you know, this calm confidence idea is that where we know the client should pick us, we should be unafraid to fight for that business. But we should totally walk away from business where we're not the best fit. We shouldn't be chasing that business at all. And this comes back to teaching them how to buy it again and again for these cases where you're like, this is not a fit.

46:25Ideally, you know that before you fly to their office and pitch them. Yeah, like generally you've had some kind of qualification happen upstream. And so that qualification can be done in lots of different ways. Like if it's, if you've got some kind of product like growth motion in the beginning, you're looking for signals in that. And if the signals aren't there, then you're not talking to them. And so, you know, if you, if you've designed your signals right, then you already know there's intent there. You already know you're a fit. You already know stuff. The way a lot of companies do this is they'll have inside sales do a qualification call before they set up a first call with a sales rep.

46:59In that qualification call, you're trying to make sure, you know, is this the right person? Do they have a need that we can actually meet? Is this actually a good fit for what we do? And if they're not, they don't even make it to the call. Mm -hmm. Imagine a place where you can find all your potential customers and get your message in front of them in a cost -efficient way. If you're a B2B business, that place exists. And it's called LinkedIn. LinkedIn ads allows you to build the right relationships, drive results, and reach your customers in a respectful environment. Two of my portfolio companies, Webflow and Census, are LinkedIn success stories.

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48:17Make B2B marketing everything it can be and get $100 credit on your next campaign. Just go to LinkedIn .com slash podlennie to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn .com slash podlennie. Terms and conditions apply. Another question around this idea of different range of value and just alternative approaches is there's a certain previous guest who is very big on creating category being extremely important and that potentially being the only way to build a legendary business. I know you have a different perspective on that because in theory, if you go that direction, there's no alternative. It's like we're the one what's your take on that.

48:55Well, so here's a few things. So one, obviously creating a category is not the only way to create a legendary business because the vast majority of legendary businesses did not create the categories that they're in. So Google did not create search. Facebook did not create. So it's not work. I mean, there's so many of them. It's actually more of an exception to the rule that the company is creating a category than the other way around. So I think it's a bit disingenuous to say the only way, it is a way to build a big business. No question about that. But it is absolutely not the only way. In fact, it is, it's not the most common way, but it is a way and it does work.

49:37So that's one thing. The second thing is that it category creation is interesting. Like most companies, if you look at their arc, they did not, even the category creators that are successful, they did not start out as category creators. So they started out as a niche play in an existing category. And that's because that's generally the easiest way to get traction for a company early because what is the job of the market category? The job of a market category is to help answer the question, like, what is this thing all about? If I'm positioning an existing category, I can say, well, I'm CRM for very small businesses.

50:14That was Salesforce's initial positioning. I didn't have to explain to you what a CRM was that already existed. There was already billion dollar company in that space. We know what a CRM is. And I could say we're CRM for very small businesses. The reason you can use it this very small businesses, we don't have any software, so you don't have to have an IT department to babysit it. It's fantastic. So most companies start there. Now, what happens is is that if you become the dominant player in that space, which, again, category creation folks talk about this, like no category creator has ever lost the market.

50:48In fact, most category creators list the market, like what happened to my space? What happened to ask Gives? It didn't work out so good for them. Most category creators actually get overtaken by fast followers. So if we look at the CRM market, Sebel was the big dominant player there, and now they're not. So now we've got Salesforce. Once you're the dominant player in that market, a cool move to do is to actually extend the boundaries of the category so that you can continue to grow. And most of the category creation examples we see are companies that when they were 203, 400 million revenue dominating their space, then decided to move the goalpost and say, well, actually now we're expanding into all these other areas and we're gonna call this category something and that's what it is.

51:38And there's loads of examples of that. Like, you know, Qualtrics, for example, is a company that a lot of people talk about very successful category creation. Well, they were survey software up until they were 300 million revenue, just like everybody else in an existing category. So that got them there and that worked just fine. Well, once we're dominating it, now we can say it's whatever it is, customer experience software, whatever it is, snowflake, another good example. Like data warehousing in the cloud, they were that like data warehousing, an existing market, were data warehousing for the cloud.

52:07That is not category creation. And that took them all the way up to the point where they were about to go public. And now their cloud data, which is their attempt to expand and say, well, it's not just data warehousing, it's actually data lakes and a lot of other data stuff. And so that's a smart move for them because they're now very well known and that's base. You know, I'm not saying category creation is a bad thing. There are examples of a company that came right out of the gate and successfully created a category and then survived to own the category longer term. But a more common thing that happens is that the company does the hard work of creating the category and then exactly the moment where the category starts to take hold, fast fall work can come in with fresh funding and a lot of it and learn from all your mistakes and come in and knock you off the peak right when you're think you made it.

53:01So I think category creation is, you know, again, it's good, like it works. But I think we have to be very careful when we're thinking about doing that at an early stage business or a business that isn't already dominating the category that they're in, it's much more common to see companies come in, shave off a piece of the market, dominate that and then successfully branch out. It's what Jeffrey Moore called Bowling Pins Strategy, almost all successful companies follow Bowling Pins Strategy. Wait, what is that? Let's touch that, touch on that. Oh, yeah, you're there. They guess funny how many times I've talked about Bowling Pins Strategy in the last two months.

53:35So this comes from a bunch of work that was done around the way innovation gets adopted, blah, blah. So there's a bunch of research done on this stuff, but you know, and I'm gonna misquote it because Jeffrey Moore's stuff I've been reading it for decades. But Bowling Pins Strategy goes like this, the easiest way to take over a great big market is to define a segment of the market that is underserved by the market leader. And so if you think about a bunch of Bowling Pins, we're gonna circle around the lead pin, which is this little piece of the market that's easy for us to go get and the market leader probably doesn't care about it.

54:11And so we knock over that pin and knock over that pin enables us to get to the three pins right beside it and so now I'm established here as a beach head and I can go get the next three pins. I'm gonna knock those over and eventually I get big enough to challenge the market leader and then I overtake them. So the example for my early career was I worked at this company, we thought we were enterprise software, we narrowed it down to CRM for investment banks. And so we literally drew Bowling Pins for our investors and said lead pin is CRM for investment banks. Once we knocked that over, then we're gonna go to retail banking, then we're gonna be CRM for banking.

54:49And then once we knocked that over, we're gonna go to insurance, then we're gonna be CRM for financial services. Once we knocked that over, then we're gonna be a great big company and we're gonna challenge C -Bull to be CRM for enterprise software. Instead we got acquired by C -Bull for like a billion bucks, but whatever. So most companies, if you look at the history of them, they actually start that way. And so yeah, if we just fast forwarded to when they were 300 million, we could say, how do we create C -Bull? It's the only thing to do. But it's like, well, what happened before then? That was some different.

55:21Awesome. Let's come back to your framework. I'm looking at the list of bullet points. So we've covered a lot of this already actually. So there's the insight where you help them understand what's happening in the world and what's changing and why this is important. Then you talk about what the alternative approaches might be, pros and cons. Then there's this third step, which we haven't talked about yet, which is sharing the perfect world, characteristics of a perfect solution. Can you talk a bit about that and why that's important? So this is the conclusion of the setup phase. So if I'm, help scout, for example, the conclusion is, we say, look, you really want customer success software that's as easy to use as an inbox.

56:03You're never gonna outgrow it, but it was built from the ground up to deliver an amazing service. And so it's this part of the pitch where we actually get agreement with the customer that we are aligned in terms of our point of view on the universe. So it's where I say, okay, we've had our little discussion about the pros and cons of the other alternatives and we say, so look, so are you with me, man? Like, can we all agree? That a really good solution for you would have A, B and C. And the customers either like, yeah, right, or they're not. And so if they're right with you on this definition of the perfect world, then I've got you.

56:42Like, I've already won the deal and I haven't even talked about us yet because the way I've set it up, I'm the only one that can deliver that. So if you say, right, all I gotta do is prove that I can do that and get you over the hurdle that it's possible for you to adopt it. Sounds too easy, but yeah, I mean, I say, lower than man. Well, this was easy, Lenny. We would be on a beach drinking out of a coconut. Oh, man, let's make it happen. Okay, so that's the setup. What do you call the second part again? It's the follow through, which is really focused on differentiated value. So in the second part, the first step is usually we introduce our stuff, which is where the market category is important.

57:25So we come in and we say, okay, can we agree that a really good solution should take these boxes? Yes, okay, good. Now let's talk about us. Okay, so we believe that. That's why we build when we build. So here I am, I'm helps out, we're customer service software for digital businesses or whatever our market category is. So we introduce it just to get people straight in their mind about what it is. And then we move to, here's the value, here's how we do it. If we think about a typical sales call, like let's say a sales call is half an hour, 45 minutes, I would expect it's been more than half of the time in the sales call in this differentiated value phase.

58:03So if we're doing a demo, that's the demo. And we're saying, okay, step one, let me show you how we do this, right? So easy to use as an inbox, here's the features. You know, never have to outgrow it, here's the features. Delivers amazing customer experience, here's the features. And so that's where we're doing, you know, we're getting to the meat of what you thought you were getting when you clicked on the button that said, give me a demo. That's all, that's where we do it there. And then we end with these three little pieces. One is, generally I gotta show you some proof that I can do what I say I can do.

58:36So if I'm claiming this thing delivers an amazing customer experience, how do I prove that? Well, I can prove it by other customers saying it was amazing, that's one way to prove it. If I had some independent third party, you know, data that proved whatever I was claiming, I could show that there too. But a lot of times what we're doing is we're like, let me show you how this worked in a company that used our stuff. This is what the before looked like. They did this thing, here's the after. And so customer case study is usually good way to do that. But there's usually a step called proof, which is I showed you the value.

59:10Now here's the proof that I can actually deliver on that value and it's not just meat, blown smoke. And then the step after that, then it's this optional objection step where they say, oh yeah, sounds good, but I tease never gonna go for it. Or sounds good, but maybe it's gonna be too expensive or something. And so you're gonna handle that objection as best as you can. And then you finish with the ask, which is, you know, whatever the next step in your sales process is. So if it's, you know, hey, well, this is, you know, so what we have to do to get a deal cooking here? Like do we have to get IT involved?

59:46Is IT need to see it? Would you like us to come in and present with you with IT or do you want me to just help you, you know, work on some stuff for IT? Like it's whatever your next step in the sales process. Awesome. So let me read through this just to have it also sinkily here in case people are taking notes or trying to remember the stuff. So there's the setup, there's the follow through within the setup, yep, the insight, the alternative approach is pros and cons and the perfect world. And then you introduce your product, talk about the differentiated value, share the proof of why it works, potentially handle objections, silent objections, and then the ask of what comes next.

1:00:20That's right, that's it. In terms of knowing if this is working and if your differentiated value works, so if your insight works, do you have kind of a heuristic of a success rate that feels right, like how often should this work for you to feel like I think we have it? Well, so generally, if the sales pitch isn't working, it's because the positioning was weak. And so companies that jump straight to building the new sales pitch, without going back and really making sure that they really nailed the differentiated value, who knows, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. And a lot of times it doesn't, I think.

1:00:53And so in the work I do with my clients, we go all the way back to the beginning. So we go right back to, let's work on the positioning first. Now, if I've got the smartest people from the company in the room, and we've done enough deals that we're pretty knowledgeable about how customers buy and what they like and what they don't know, if I've got the senior executive team in the room and they've got a reasonable amount of customer experience, we can pretty much feel good that the positioning we come up with, if we're following a process, will be good. Then it's just a matter of taking that positioning, mapping it to the sales pitch, and then going to test it.

1:01:30So I think there's a bunch of things in testing that are really important. So one is, we absolutely need sales involved in building the pitch. If we don't have sales involved in building the pitch, the pitch is never gonna stick. Like the rule with sales reps is, even if they don't like their current pitch, they're comfortable with the current pitch, and they know it and they memorized it, and they have a little joke they tell on slide three. So they're not gonna give up the current pitch without a fight. So you gotta get sales management involved in building a new pitch, and then I would never just build a new pitch and then heave it over the wall and say, good luck Chuck.

1:02:03Because what'll happen is they'll come up with all kinds of excuses why they can't use this pitch. Instead, what you do is you take your best sales rep, your best one, and you bring your best sales rep over, and you train them on the new pitch. They gotta learn it, they gotta pitch it to you, pitch it to the head of sales, we do a bunch of repetition on that. And then we have that rep test the pitch with qualified prospects. So we don't go to existing customers, they've already been polluted with the old positioning and the old pitch, and this needs to work with a qualified prospect. So let's do it in the way it was intended.

1:02:35We're gonna take qualified prospects and work that new pitch with them. Usually what we'll do is a test period where after every pitch will huddle and say, what worked, what didn't work, maybe that word is tripping people up, maybe we need to move this slide from here to here, and so you will tune it. And then after we've done a bunch of pitches, one of two things happens. And so in this test structure, I am very much relying on the expertise of my best rep to know what's good. So after the best rep is comfortable with the pitch, done a bunch of pitches, we've twizzled it. At some point the rep will say, okay, I think we're done optimizing this pitch and I'm not going back to the old pitch, I'm sticking with this pitch.

1:03:23Because I think this one works better. And experienced sales rep will know that whether the pitch is better than the old pitch. If you give them the opportunity to feel comfortable with it, work with it a bit, and pitch a bunch of new prospects with it. So if your best sales rep says, oh, this is way better than the old pitch, I can just feel it from the way people react to it. And the number of times we've been able to convert people over into actual opportunities from a first call, then what you do is at that point I call that pass. So then we take that rep, we can film them doing the pitch for training and then we can take that rep, go back to the rest of the sales team and have that rep sell everybody else on it.

1:04:06So that rep goes back and says, listen up, people, you're stupid if you're using that old pitch, which sucks, this new pitch is way better. Trust me, I'm the best rep on this whole team. By the way, here's the list of deals. I have cooking in the pipeline that I got used in this deck. You should go do it and I'm gonna teach you how to do it. Now I got sales teaching sales instead of marketing, sort of throwing something over the wall and cross their fingers and saying, hey, I hope this works. What we should see is an immediate uplift in what happens after first call. So most of the time what that is is we get a higher percentage of deals converting into opportunities after that first substantive calls.

1:04:47Sometimes depending on the quality of the pipeline we had coming in, we're actually disqualifying more but sometimes that's a good thing. But what we should see is an immediate uptick, it's stuff coming into the pipeline. It's a neat trick to pull when, like, like especially right now, when everybody's budgets are really tight and you're just trying to squeeze more juice out of the lemon, it's a really easy way to get some more juice out of the pipeline, just go in, tighten up your positioning, tighten up that sales pitch, and we'd have instant impact with that because we can roll that out in a couple of weeks and start getting better deals flowing through the pipeline because these customers are understanding your value better, understanding why to pick you better, it's just easy low -hanging fruit to do when the economy's bad.

1:05:32To give people a sense of maybe how easy that might be, how long would you suggest people spend on maybe tweaking their positioning and then also on this pilot, like how much total time could it take to potentially significantly increase sales? Yeah, so in the customers that I work with, when we do the positioning stuff, the positioning stuff takes a week. Like, we're beginning and we're done in a week, like we're all about speed on this thing, we're trying to get the thing happening fast. So we're in and out on the positioning in a week. It might take you, like, it depends on the company, like the bigger the company, the slower this is, but some big companies are actually quite fast, and if you're motivated, it doesn't, it shouldn't take long for us to take that pitch and make it real.

1:06:10Then we gotta find a rep, train the rep, and then how long it takes us to test it really depends on how much deal flow you've got. So if you're working on monster deals, and you don't actually get that many qualified prospects to pitch, that might take a few weeks, but if you've got a lot of prospects coming through the door and you can get through this fairly quickly. So I've had companies do it, start to finish, we got new pitch out the door and people using it in two weeks. That's about as fast as you can get it done. Most folks, I would say, take about a month. Cool, that is very important.

1:06:40Sometimes you're like IBM and who knows when you get to it, right? But most folks could get through it. If everybody's motivated, we can get it out and have it run in a month. You mentioned marketing and earlier you said that marketing is involved in this process in some way. What's your advice and just how to involve marketing where they fit in? Yeah, so usually marketing is gonna end up being the stewards of the positioning, once the positioning is done. So they're gonna end up being like positioning police after this, because a lot of the positioning stuff is gonna take the form of marketing things.

1:07:11So they're invested in this. So when I was the VP marketing, I was the person that would instigate the positioning thing. Let's get everybody together, work on the positioning. And then I would usually be the person that is driving, getting the sales pitch figured out, but it's me and sales and product working together. And then once the sales pitch is done, depending on whether the size of the organization, whether or not you have sales enablement or somebody inside sales that can babysit the pitch, usually me and the head of sales would work on, okay, this is the pitch and this is locked down.

1:07:48And we're not actually gonna change this pitch until something happens that requires us to change the positioning and then that's when we'll relook at the pitch. So we would look at recertifying the reps at recorder on the pitch and all that kind of stuff. And that would be me and partnership, generally me and partnership with the head of sales. But it depends on how you do it. Like I don't think it really matters who owns it. If you have a good product marketing organization, good product marketing organization, generally is very concerned with the positioning in the pitch and those two things sit in their purview, but it depends on how you define it.

1:08:19I can't wait till you get Airbnb tell us how this stuff works. I mean they're different because they're consumer, but companies are arranged in all different ways. So if you have product marketing, it looks one way, if don't, it looks another way. Somebody's got to kind of be the owner of this thing, and so we have to decide who that's going to be. Just a couple more questions. One is to motivate people to do this. What kind of impact have you seen at companies that invest this time and rethink the way they pitch? Well, so you know, people don't like me talking about revenue. Stop. Usually what we've seen though is again, the immediate impact is felt it's sales and everybody's very jazzed about that because sometimes what the worry is is like, we've got this old positioning and they came in through the pipeline that way.

1:09:11So they were exposed to our marketing somewhere with this old positioning, and then we hit them with the new positioning, with the sales pitch and aren't they going to be all like, oh, you move my cheese? And usually it ends up not being a problem at all. So usually what we see immediately is an uptick in what's happening in sales. And so I've had a couple of companies tell me they've doubled the number of deals that they're bringing from first sales call to opportunity just by tightening up the pitch and getting that going. I think that's not unusual. I worked at a company where we did it in -house, we were I was the VP marketing, and we within two quarters I doubled the revenue, just by tightening up the pitch, just tightening up.

1:09:53All right, yeah, yeah. No big deal. Yeah, okay, so. It was a big shift in positioning though, I'll tell you that. Mm -hmm. Not small. Most of the time we're not doing that. Most of the time it's a tightening, right? Like we're not saying, oh, we used to be this and now we're this. Most of the time it's a tightening, but usually like the pitches are so bad. I'm telling you, they're so bad that there's this low hanging fruit there that if we could improve it even a little bit, it actually has this big impact on how much stuff survives down the pipe. And again, if folks want to go deep into the positioning, step your first book, obviously awesome, as a great guide and our first podcast episode goes through this.

1:10:33Plus you have a guest post on my newsletter where you give them a quick start guide. So there's so many tools to help you through this process. So my tools. The other thought I've had in the back of my mind as we've been chatting is a previous guest, Andy Raskin, has a different framework, feels similar, but I know they're different. His framework starts with a shift that's happened in the world and then here's who's gonna win in the shift, here's who's gonna lose and then he kind of goes into why this product is the best. What's your perspective on that approach? Which is this approach and the big differences?

1:11:00Yeah, so the thing that the thing we're doing at Framework is I do think it works in certain conditions, but again, I think the conditions might be kind of edgy. So there's a couple of things that I think are lacking in that structure for a sales pitch. So the first one is there's actually no concept of differentiated value in that pitch, which for me is a giant miss. So in that pitch, it assumes that new is inherently valuable and old is inherently bad. And sometimes that's true. So sometimes there's just you versus the status quo and the status quo is some terrible old thing, some legacy thing or its manual processes or something, and you're the only thing out there, then you can get away with that.

1:11:46But most of the time we don't have that. Like most of the time, there's multiple new ways of doing something and you just can't say, well, I'm the only new and the rest of your old bad. So usually I've got it's read the needle. And so that's the first thing. The second thing is that for most companies, like if we really understood customer and decision, old is good, it's safe. It's not risky. And like does anybody ever say, no, I'm not gonna buy, I'm not gonna buy sales force, that's the old stuff. Like I just don't think that happens. So in a lot of cases, I don't think you can rely, like it's lazy to say, why is this because it's new and new is better?

1:12:26Most of the time the customers are gonna wanna know, well, what's better about it? Like tell me what the value is that I can't get anywhere else and you're gonna have to get more specific than just saying, trust me, it's new and new is good. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, you know, this idea of starting with a trend, on the surface, it looks kinda good, but the problem is, often the trend is not unique to you. So everybody else sees the trend too. And so you're starting in a way that any of your competitors could start the same way. So I did this for years where I was taught to do problem solution, right?

1:13:03And so we would define the problem like a trend. So we'd say, well, the change in the world, like I was selling databases and I'd say, change in the world like, data is exponentially growing. You know, and it's like, no shit. Like, we all know that, all of my competitors could say that. And all of my competitors deal with the trend in the same way. So unless you have a particularly unique take on the trend, well, then it's not the trend at all, really is it? It's kind of your insight into the trend. So I don't think trend is that great because it's not always unique to you. And ideally, what we want is something that we can say that none of our competitors can, and typically, you know, a trend is something outside of our control.

1:13:44It's out in the world and everybody else can see it too. So I don't think it's great. I think if that structure, it looks a lot like the structure we use in a VC pitch or an investor pitch because we're talking about much longer timelines and we can say, look, the world is really changing and 10 years from now, there's going to be chaos and destruction. And the only one standing is us. And, you know, therefore, there is no competition and blah, blah, blah. And because the time frames are longer and we're talking about disruption of an entire market, which is pretty theoretical, we can get away with a lot of that stuff and investor pitch.

1:14:17In fact, we want to go there and invest a pitch. Sales pitch, you know, sales pitch is all about right now. Sales pitch is like, okay, I'm going to exchange my money for right now. Like you can't get too far into the future. Otherwise, all I'm doing is giving everybody a reason to delay, which they're kind of likely to do anyway because they're indecisive about what they should do. I feel like I need a debate version of this podcast where people come on and... I know. Here's the thing. Like that I think people should think about when they're looking at all this stuff because, you know, it's terribly confusing if you're trying to figure this out.

1:14:51You know, the one thing I really dislike about the category creation folks is they say that's the only way that you can be successful. And in general, that's just not true about anything. Like there's lots of ways to do everything. And so I think people should mess around with stuff. And for any of these frameworks, I think they should look at it and see if it works for them in their situation. And maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. And I think they should steal things from wherever they can steal it and figure out what works in their own situation. Like my stuff, like I like to think it's a starting point.

1:15:24Like folks should use it as a starting point. But people shouldn't be sleeves to it. Like, you know, learn lots of things that work at a market. And I think the only thing that we know for certain is that we can't say, well, this is the rule and it always works like this. If it was that easy, again, like this wouldn't be so hard. We wouldn't have podcasts and newsletters and all kinds of things trying to figure this stuff out. Extremely true. Well, with that, we've reached our very exciting Lightning Round. Are you ready? Yeah, Lightning Round. Oh gosh, it gives me stress. Okay. Okay, question number one.

1:15:59What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? Well, that's an easy question. So that right now, I'm really into Maddixons work right now, which we mentioned him a couple times on the podcast. But Maddixons new book called The Jolt Effect is really great just because there's all this data. And the things that he discovered with that data, a lot of it sort of go against the, you know, what would we consider like accepted sales wisdom? And so I think that book is full of juicy nuggets and everybody should look at it. His previous book, The Challenger Sale, and there was a companion book to that called The Challenger Customer.

1:16:38Those were also excellent. And based on a deep set of research and those books are older now, but what we see in The Jolt Effect is all the stuff holds true. Like all the stuff from The Challenger Sale has not changed in 10 years. So I think those books together are really cool. The other one that I always recommend is like the original book on positioning, which is the book by recent trial positioning the battle for your mind. Like, you know, I have my copy of it is like, is like dog year. I probably read that book a hundred times. And I still see stuff in that book that I didn't see before. So I think if you really want to go deep on this positioning stuff, my book is like the how to book.

1:17:13Their book is like that. What is it in the first place book? And I think everybody that's interested in positioning should go read that. Amazing. By the way, I have your first book somewhere behind me there. I don't know where it is, but it's there. I got mine right here so I can do this. Okay. There it is. There's the new one. There's the old one. Yeah. YouTube audience can see that trick that you've learned. Second question. What is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed? Oh, man. I'm going to get in trouble for this. But so, so, you know, you know, Bong Junho, this is the guy that did the movie Parasite.

1:17:47Yeah. So before Parasite, there was this book called this movie called Snowpiercer. It's really old. I think it came out. I've seen that. That was a train. Have you seen it? So I love this movie so much. So recently I went on a train trip with my dad. And before I went to the train trip, you know, we got talking about trains. And then, and then, you know, we all had to go watch Snowpiercer again. It'd like me and my daughter watching Snowpiercer. We're really into this movie. And it's funny when it came out, I was working on a startup and the CEO came and said, see any good movies lately? And I was like, oh, man, you got to see these movies.

1:18:20Snowpiercer. And he went on a first date with a woman. And he came back the next day and he was so mad. He was like, not just kind of mad. He was really mad at me. He was like, that was the worst movie I ever seen. And I was like, dude, you should told me you were going on a date. I didn't know. Yeah, that is my experience with that movie. It's, I did not enjoy it. But I think if they go into it, it's polarizing. Like, it's polarizing. You either, you either think it's amazing or you're like, that was terrible. What did I just watch? It's explains your taste in movies. We learned a lot about musical movies, something else.

1:18:59Did you see Paris? I think that was amazing. That was amazing, very different. And not what I imagined. I didn't realize it was the same person. Oh, yeah. Oh, all right. Okay, cool. That's two movies for people to watch. I'm curious how people be warm. Don't go on a date with this. Oh, man, we still think about that movie sometimes. Next question. What is a favorite interview question you like to ask people that you're interviewing usually this is for like when you're hiring. So whatever this thing, this comes up. Yeah. So you know, back when I was running teams internally, like back in my VP marketing days, I felt like a lot of marketing folks came with with a certain amount of bad habits, particularly startup marketing folks would be, you know, they, it's a bit of the wild west in marketing.

1:19:44And so sometimes they come in and you get into somebody new and they be really smart. But they learn something at the previous company that you're like, please never do that here. It's not not going to work here. And so I, I kind of developed a thing where I was just looking for attitude. Like, you know, were you enthusiastic? Did you look, you know, are you super into what we're doing here? And I can teach you pretty much anything. The only thing I can't teach you is persuasive writing. And I think that's a learnable skill. Like I think people can learn how to do persuasive writing. I just don't have time to teach it to you myself.

1:20:15And so I used to give people a writing test. So I'd say, look, like think, think of something you bought recently and write me two paragraphs and just sell me on it. And I used to love that test because people could either do it or they can't. And there's just so much stuff we end up doing in product marketing and marketing that involves a little bit of writing that it's just, it's kind of a foundational skill. And if you don't have that, it's like, that was the one thing I couldn't teach you. Well, that is fascinating. I've never heard of that as an interview question. And I love it. I feel like product manager.

1:20:46I stole it from a company that made me do it before I got hired. And I was like, this is a really smart thing. I'm stealing this. My thing was I got anxiety and I couldn't, I couldn't decide what product to write about. And I had literally just bought a new pair of running shoes. So I wrote two paragraphs about my, my new Brooks distance running shoes. But it was good. I got the job. It is an excellent segue to our next question, which is, is there a favorite product you've recently discovered? May you really like? Right now, I'm kind of into like, I don't even know how to describe this category of things, but things that are kind of low tech, but, but are awesome.

1:21:27And so one of the category of things that I really love right now is I'm really into fountain pens. I don't know if you've ever written with a fountain pen. I haven't, but I know what they are. And so there's this company, Lamy, they're based in Germany, and they make the world's greatest fountain pens. They're beautiful. They're amazing. Some of them are really expensive. If you want to spend a lot of money on a pen, you can. But they have this one called the All Star, which is not an expensive pen. It's 20, 30 bucks. I mean, maybe expensive for a pen, but it's not so much money that you wouldn't feel bad if you lost it.

1:21:56So, Lamy All Star, that's my, that's my, that's my great product lately. I don't have one right here. I should have been a great, it'd be a great prop to pick it up, but I actually don't have my bag here and it's in my bag, but Lamy All Star, you Google it. These are beautiful pens. And then if you haven't written with a fountain pen, it takes a minute to get used to it, but then it's like, gosh, it just feels great. Like, you'll never write with a ballpoint pen again. I was going to ask, is it the feel of the writing that you really draw about it? Feel. Totally different. Yeah, amazing. I use Mujipens.

1:22:30I don't know if you know these pens. Oh, yeah, these are actually really good. They're like rollerball pens, rollerball pen, very good. But, but not as good as the fountain. The Mujipen is pretty good. Yeah. And then you have to dip it in ink and stuff. How does that work? No, you're actually, they either come with a little cartridge that you stick in, or if you do, you know, if you feel bad about the environment, you don't want to be throwing out cartridges all the time. There's a refillable cartridge. So you basically just stick it in the thing and it sucks it up. And yeah, you don't dip it in ink.

1:22:54That would be crazy. I can't take that on the airplane, man. Confiscaturing. All right. Questions get a little more challenging, potentially or really easy. Do you have a favorite life motto that you like to repeat yourself? If you like to share with people, they find it useful to come back to. My thing lately is like, and maybe this is just like an old, old person thing. But my thing lately is like, nothing's a big deal. Nothing's a big deal. Nothing's a big deal. And so you'll have stuff that you think is a really big deal, positive or negative. And you'll be like, wow, if this thing happened to be so great, and then it happens, you're like, yeah, it's pretty great.

1:23:36But, you know, things are good otherwise. Or it'll be the opposite. Like, oh, if this thing happened to be so bad, then it happens and you're like, that was not bad. And so I don't know if this is good or bad. But lately, I'm in this zone of like, I'm in this kind of chill zone where I'm like, nothing's everything's cool. That super resonates. And as much as you say that to yourself, it's still hard to convince yourself of that sometimes, right? But that is a really good motto. I'm going to steal that myself. I kind of say that to myself often in a different way. Yeah. What is the most valuable lesson your mom or your dad taught you?

1:24:15Yeah, you know, it's funny because it's a little bit related to that. So my dad ran a business. So I grew up in a really small town. And my dad, and it's cottage country in Canada. And so my dad ran the local toys for tourists, like boats and motorcycles and ATVs. And that sort of thing. And he ran that business for years and years. He sold it a few years back when he retired. But it's a neat thing to grow up in entrepreneurial family because you kind of see this highs and lows. You know, like the business is really good. And then the business was really bad. And you know, we were all broke. And then the business was good.

1:24:53And we were not broke. So there was this thing. And my dad, you always kind of have this attitude of like, you just got to grind it out. Like, you're just going to grind it out. There's going to be good stuff. There's going to be bad stuff. But the key is to just keep going. Just keep going. And so he ran that business for whatever said 30, 40 years. I don't know. His motto is to home of funds at 71. So he started at 71. I think he sold it three, four years ago. So a long time. And you know, and it all worked out good in the end. And so I don't know. I think there's something cool about growing up in a family where you can see the sort of highs and lows.

1:25:29And then again, be sort of like everything's like, you know, we're just grinding it out over here. Like nothing's a big deal. It's clear where all that comes from now. Yeah. Final question. You do a lot of traveling. You do a lot of speaking. You go to a bunch of cities. I'm curious just what is your favorite either city that you go to that maybe people may not know about or venue that you speak at? You know, it's such a cliche, but but I love Paris. Like I just love it. And but for me, for me, Paris is like, it is like a, is like a particular vibe. So when I was in university, I did an exchange when I was in engineering.

1:26:02And I did third year engineering at a school just outside of Paris. And so I spent the whole year there learning a bit of French. My French was pretty good at the end. My French is really bad now. But what I, so I kind of get Paris. I like Paris. And so when I go to Paris, I just have the best time. Like, you know, I have my set of restaurants. I want to go to I have my handful of places. I want to go shopping. I like, you know, put my butt down in a cafe, look at the beautiful people, drink my nice coffee. Like I just, I just really dig the whole vibe of Paris. So, you know, and people are starting to know that now.

1:26:36So like French companies will call me and they'll say, do we get to Paris discount? Because we hear you like that coming here. And I want, and I go, okay. Now they're going to snout this. There's a great product, there's a great product management conference there called Le Prouddeq Conference. Run by these folks at Tiga, shout out to Tiga. So I've been there a number of times for their conferences. And they do an amazing job and the venue is really great. They've changed it around. But last year, the last time I went there, which was two years ago, it was at an old theater in Pagall, absolutely beautiful.

1:27:14And, you know, that was, that was a pretty great venue in a great city with a great conference. So yeah, shout out to French people. Oh man, that sounds dreamy. Paris, I see how that could be a favorite. April, we, I think we accomplished everything we were hoping to accomplish. I think everyone that has listened to this podcast is going to be better at pitching and selling. It feels like even if they take one element of this framework, say, starting with an insight or focusing on different shade value will make them better. And so I am proud of us. Thank you so much for doing this. Two final questions.

1:27:46Working folks, fine in line if they want to reach out. And how can listeners be useful to you? Yeah, so where can people find me? I'm AprilDunfer .com. You know, the only social media I'm doing these days is LinkedIn. I'm a bit social mediaed out. You know, I'm experimenting a little on threads and Instagram, but LinkedIn is a good place to find me if you just want low lift way to follow my stuff. But I'm doing all the things now. Lenny, I got a podcast. It's called Positioning with AprilDunfer. I got a newsletter. That's also called Positioning. You can find that if you go to, it's on substacks.

1:28:20You can find it there. Otherwise, apraduffer .com. So I've books and you can sign up there. But those are kind of the big things. And then there's the books, obviously. If you want to learn more about this stuff, everything I know is in the book. There isn't stuff that I know that isn't in the book, to be honest. Amazing. And then how can listeners be useful to you? Just check out those things. I mean, I guess so. Like, you know what? I'm in this phase. I think I'm feeling, again, I think it's an old age thing. Like, I'm in this kind of philosophical phase where I'm not going to be doing this forever.

1:28:48And what I'm trying to do right now is get everything that's useful out of my head and out in the world before I'm done. And so right now, I'm very focused on delivering useful things for other people. Like, I didn't think I needed to write a book about sales pitches. But then I got the idea in my head, like, everybody sales pitches so bad. And there isn't a book on how to build a sales pitch. And I'm not saying mine's the world's greatest thing, but it's better than nothing. So this is what I'm trying to do right now. I'm trying to be useful to other people because, you know, pretty soon, I'm not going to be doing anything, I think is the idea.

1:29:27So yeah. Our unsports and anger's new book is called Be Useful. And I feel like that's the perfect description of how to be successful. And especially in the work that we do, I'm just hoping people. But I always keep coming back to that. It was just be useful. I mean, I think there's a really important thing. Like, when I wrote the first book, people started writing back to me and saying, oh, your book was so great. And my reflex action was to say, well, I'm glad you enjoyed it. But then I kind of stopped myself and I was like, you know what? I don't actually care if you enjoyed it. Like, this isn't entertainment.

1:29:58I'm actually trying to create something that's useful. So what I really want is for people to read this stuff and come back and say, you know, that was useful. We were struggling with this thing and that kind of unlocked something for me. And that was useful. And that's what I'm trying to do right now. April, thank you so much for being here. This was amazing. Thanks so much. It's always good to be here. Always good to have you here. And we might do a V3 when you do a third book, if you ever achieve. Not happening.

1:30:25All right, well, bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com. See you in the next episode.