[Best of B2B] April Dunford - Positioning, Differentiation, Lessons from 200+ Sales Pitches, and How To Do It Right

0:00Hey, it's Dave. So Zoom Webinars and Events has made our recent Exit 5 Live sessions way more pro lately. But don't just take my word for it. Check this out. This is what Kelly B said. She said, I compare all other webinars now against Exit 5. I love that. And look, in a world of AI slop, we just want to make something that's actually worth going to. It's not easy to get an hour out of your day. I'm just the on-air talent, though. So I'm going to kick it over to Marissa and Maria. This is our Exit 5 Live production team, our content team here at Exit 5, since they're the ones actually making this all happen.

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2:51And 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 in marketing, just like life. There's a bunch of timeless principles that kind of 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.

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4:09All 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, 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.

4:39Please help us. I have a theory. And the theory is that most companies have the answer to their own positioning problems. 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. It's a bit like that. Sales is looking at it one way. Marketing is looking at it another way. Products 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.

5:18So 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. So what's typically the output? Like if you get to Friday of that week, is it a Google Doc with like the, because in Obviously Awesome, you have a framework that somebody basically could follow. Is it the output of that? Yeah. So obviously Awesome describes exactly the process I would use with a company.

5:56So to go through step by step the five component pieces of positioning. So we're doing it in a very specific order. And then doing it with me as the facilitator is just going to 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 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. So this idea of translating your differentiated capabilities to value, value is just a really hard concept.

6:39It's hard for marketers, let alone founders or salespeople or people that aren't even ever exposed to this concept 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. 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.

7:14This 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. When I first started doing this work, I didn't think I had to teach you the last bit, which was how do we translate this in a sales pitch? because I 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.

7:52So now I have a new book that describes exactly what we do on the last day, which is let's take the positioning map into a sales pitch so the salespeople know how to pitch it. 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 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, there are many ways you can execute, you can do it, but there is value in having a way to do it because having a way just forces you to get it done.

8:25And I think a lot of the 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 what's in your sales pitch because I think there's value. Yeah, and you know what the thing is? I don't think people have to be slaves to the method, but starting with a method is so much better than starting without one. So if I'm starting with a way to think about it and a way to break things down into pieces, then it solves the problem of, 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.

9:00And so the CEO will be like, well, I think everybody buys our stuff because of X, Y, Z, fight me. It's hard to have that fight because we don't even know what we're stacking it up against. People get in the weeds on like, well, April said that slide six of the sales deck should have this on it. And it's like, put your own, add your own flavor to this. It's like... Totally. It's just meant as a starting point. All this stuff is a starting point. Everybody's situation is different. Your markets are different. Your product is different. Your buyers are different. Everybody's different. We shouldn't be looking at these things and say, oh my God, we can't break the rule of step number six.

9:36I 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. But I do think, I believe that 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 going to have a fight about it. So if we're all in agreement and alignment with it at the end, then it's much more likely that we're going to be able to make it stick.

10:14But we're never going to 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 anytime I've ever seen that, what it ends up being is a battle of opinions and marketing never wins that. Please rewind. Go rewind the last 30 seconds of that.

10:37play 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 direct reports or whoever, if you create a plan and you tell them, go and do this plan, maybe that's going to 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 going to be executed better. 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.

11:11And 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 company positioning is not in line with what the company can actually deliver from a roadmap standpoint. 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. It's 200 companies long. Like here's a week. I Googled it, right? I Googled it. I know everybody who could possibly compete with us for the next 10 years. Here they all are. But if you go to sales and say, who do we compete with?

11:49Sales will say Oracle. And then you'll say, hey, do you ever see any of these, you know, 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. So I am worried about who might pop up a year from now or two years from now, because 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 short list, why do I have to position against them? Customers don't know about them. I don't have to position against them. Now, over in sales land, sales knows who ends up on the short list, but they never count status quo as competition.

12:29They'll say, oh, we lost no decision because sales doesn't hear no. They're like, we'll get them. It's just next year. So the advantage, again, of having a process is we can make sure that we're thinking about both. So who ends up on the short list? What's the 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, can everybody agree on that? OK, good. Now I got to stick in the ground. This is what I got to beat in order to win a deal. And that's just kind of the facts. And then if we build from there, now we're building on something.

13:04Then 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? Product. Product sitting in the room. They eat, sleep, and breathe this. They understand capabilities. Then we're going to map capabilities to value. I like what you said about positioning against the 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, well, if you ask product, it would be probably 20 different technologies.

13:36But if you ask the sales team, it was one company, it was Intercom. And we did a good job. But if from a distraction standpoint, it's like we needed 15 different product marketing assets to position against all these different things. So it's like, well, the 80-20, it's like 80 % of the deals, it's going to be either Drift or Intercom. Let's nail the Intercom story and make the website, 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.

14:07But 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 shortlist. I don't have to worry about them. When and if they do start ending up on a customer shortlist and we lose a deal or two to them, well, then we can go back, re-examine the positioning and we'll adjust for that later. All right. I got two things I want to get to before we, and I have the word sales pitch and 200 circled on my list because we're going to get to those lessons. Okay. The audience of this podcast is B2B marketers and majority of them are in B2B SaaS.

14:40And when it comes to positioning, I don't know if you know this or not, but there's kind of three terms that people use interchangeably today. And I want to hear your perspective on them. Are they different? Are they the same? Are people using them interchangeably? there is positioning, there is strategic narrative, and there is category creation. 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. 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.

15:22So 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. It's the same. I don't see any. And so if you look at the companies that I work with, about one in 10 of 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. You have to understand your differentiated value. You have to understand your target customers, which I assume you do when you're doing category creation, anybody's way of doing it.

16:04So 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 want to position yourself in an existing category. 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 going to 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, so for example, I did this last year because people kept asking me this question.

16:42So I went and looked at every company that 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. So figure about a hundred 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 were 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.

17:26You've come into a category, you've got to a spot where you're dominating that category. 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. Most of the companies that people talk about that 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.

18:03So for example, Google and search, we're using Google and not Ask Jeeves. Ask Jeeves was that way before 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 arguably the space that Facebook then came in and decimated them. 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.

18:38But in some cases, you got no choice. That's great. So the first principle is basically, hey, we're doing positioning. There's different 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. 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.

19:11So if there's an existing category and a sub-segment of that category that you could easily dominate, then it's way easier to start with something that a customer already knows. This is why most startups position in that way. But sometimes that category just doesn't, and no existing category serves to actually point the prospect in the direction of your value. So if it doesn't, then you're going to have to make something up. And again, about 10 % of the time in the companies I work with, we're in that situation that we're into category creation. And what do you make of strategic narrative? Is that just another name for company story and positioning?

19:52So 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. 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.

20:28I've never seen a company where that works. Like in every company 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 going to be in 10 years and what's your all singing, all dancing thing. It's a very visionary pitch about the future. Customers in general, they're not paying you today's dollars for tomorrow's promises. They want to know why pick you over the other guys right now. So the structure I've seen on the strategic narrative is missing some kind of key stuff.

21:01Like it doesn't have a concept of differentiated value, which I think I don't understand how I do anything without that. 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. 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.

21:39And we can't necessarily sell against status quo by saying they're old and bad. Like if I'm in the CRM space, I can't just say, well, don't pick Salesforce, they're old and shitty. Well, what are you talking about? They're actually the market leader in this, right? 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. But the thing that you've highlighted here, which is it still doesn't, at the end of the day, in a sales context, they're going to say, that's awesome. I'm so happy for you that you're going, that you're building this amazingly huge vision.

22:13But like, how are you different than the three other products that are on my shopping list right now? That I'm looking right now. So there's a bunch of data around this that I think is really important. So if you read Matthew Dixon's new book, it's called The Jolt Effect. It's amazing. 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 percent of B2B purchase processes end in no 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.

22:55It meant they couldn't figure out how to confidently make a decision that they weren't going to 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 going to 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. 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. Because right now that sounds kind of unproven, risky.

23:27I'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 something. the best company in the world do this. And if you're not doing this, you're going to 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.

24:13Why do you think that is? The idea, again, is the customer's 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. 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 going to play out or not because it feels risky. Especially if you're a startup or a challenger brand or one of a handful of companies in the space, it's always going to be easier to just be like, ah, let's just buy Salesforce.

24:52No one's going to get fired for making that decision, right? Exactly. This is why the incumbent has so much leverage. No one's going to 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. What if you just said, we're the cheaper version? I mean, you know, we're like that, but half the cost. Yeah, we're going to race into 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.

25:27And let me tell you, that is a bad place to be. And it's 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 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. And I really struggled with them because I was like, I don't know, there needs to be some type of product innovation.

25:59There needs to be something here. You're just kind of like the same as everyone else, but your thing is more expensive. Like how do you tackle that? Like 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. So like, what do you - Yeah, 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.

26:29They're doing a million revenue, 2 million revenue, 10 million revenue. What that means is every single day, customers look at them in the middle of the soup of all the competitors and pick them. So they're picking you for a reason. So there's your breadcrumb. I've literally 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. 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.

27:05Your 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. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. If you want to know what AI agents can actually do for a marketing team, Optimizely is where I'd point you to right now for a real example. Last month, we ran an Exit 5 live session where a bunch of our members showed off their best AI agent use cases. And McKeel, director of AI innovation at Optimizely, actually won the whole session. He showed us how he used Optimizely's AI agent platform to run an ABM campaign that gave 2 ,000 accounts their own landing pages built from signals like job postings, press releases, and leadership changes.

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28:22Check them out at optimizely.com slash exit five. That's optimizely.com slash exit five. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Compound Growth Marketing. They're a full funnel demand gen agency that I've personally hired twice. Yep. Before I was just a thought leader. I was a real marketer and CGM was one of the best agencies that I worked with. They help high growth software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They've helped an enterprise cybersecurity company grow pipeline 168 % year over year with full funnel media and an HR tech company grow 48 % through paid search.

29:00And they can do the same for you. They offer a combination of full funnel paid advertising strategy and execution, AEO, and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured, and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you. And this works because they were started by an actual former VP of marketing who really gets this space that you work in in B2B. So visit compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five to see how they can help you meet your 2027 revenue goals. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five. Or sometimes it's not features at all.

29:32So 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. 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, just ages ago, I worked at IBM. So if you're listening and you're from IBM, this was a long time ago, so don't call me up and tell me this is wrong.

30:02This is my situation back then, but we're 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 is 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. 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.

30:41You could swap things around the 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. So it was all about this idea of openness. Oracle, on the other hand, want to sell you the whole stack, right? Everything soup to nuts, the whole stack. So they didn't have all that. You're supposed to 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.

31:15So 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 want to 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. 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.

31:54If you just sat there and did a feature function checklist between the two of us, it would be a long time before you got down to those three or four little features that actually made us different. 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 was like, this thing, this thing, this thing. And product's like, we don't care about those things. Those are Mickey Mouse little things, 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.

32:31So if I'm focused on differentiated value, that's the key thing. It doesn't actually matter that much if the features underneath are kind of small or whatever. It's the story you're telling around it, which is how, you know, when I was at IBM, that's how we were selling against Oracle. Features, 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 not based on some future promise. You're like, the thing that we can offer right now is this.

33:01I 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. Like, that's it. How do companies balance that, though? Because I could see companies being like, all right, great. We're going to do this positioning work. We go through all this and we find that the reason that we're winning deals and 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. Right. But then isn't there like another level of positioning or future story that is going to be the lever that's going to get them from 20 to 40?

33:32Like 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 have when, you know, when people talk about strategic narrative is they're trying to tell the story that we're going to be telling in 10 years, but ain't the story we're telling in sales right now. So typically what we have, When I go to VC and I pitch a VC, that is all about division. In 10 years, here's the all singing, all dancing, amazing thing I'm going to be. It's going to be nuts. It's going to be amazing. That's why you want to invest 50 million bucks in me or whatever it is.

34:07But I have the product as it exists today. Now, there is a strategy that takes me from where I am today and where I'm going to be in the future. And that strategy has levels to it. Like first, we're going to build this big thing. And then you know what? The positioning is going to change. And the sales story we have at step one doesn't look like the sales story we have right now. Then we're going to go to step two because we're going to make an acquisition or we're going to go do a thing. And that positioning is going to be different than where we started. And eventually, the positioning is going to match the vision.

34:40Of course, the vision is now going to be moved out. And so it's different. But we work on this stuff sometimes with this idea that we're going to carve it into rocks and it's never going to change, which is bonkers. Of course it's going to change. Our product is changing. Our competitors are changing. The market landscape is changing. Everything's changing. So we got to 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 going to evolve that thing over time. Like if you look at Salesforce, They are not pitching anything close to this team story now that they were pitching when they first started.

35:22It's a completely different story. And it would be weird if you thought, oh, we're going to take this story. I'm going to take the VC pitch. We're just going to use that story for 10 years. 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, we need to nail our positioning for the next six months. And that's going to be based off of what's on the truck today, what we can sell today. 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 going to need to do another iteration on this positioning that's going to get us beyond just being the CRM company that offers professional services.

36:02Am I getting that right? Exactly. So I'll give you an 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 was unique and the big competitor could not copy us. 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.

36:42At 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, because we didn't know the value. But we landed a deal with an investment bank. And then we figured out what the value was. So we narrowed the positioning down to we're CRM for investment banks because 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 Jeffrey Moore Crossing the Chasm and you understand bowling pin strategy, the idea was investment banking was the lead pin.

37:17So we're going to focus on that until we dominate investment banking. Once we dominate investment banking, the product's going to be more mature and we're going to build some things that allow us to go into retail banking. And so now we're going to widen it out and then we're going to be CRM for banks. So we're going to sell retail and investment banking. And then while we're selling that, we're going to be building out some stuff that's going to allow us to get into insurance. And so once we get there, then we're going to be CRM for financial services, if we survive that, financial services is massive.

37:50So if we actually end up doing a good job there, then we're so big, we could consider becoming enterprise CRM and we're going to go sell to everybody. 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 going to make any money? And so we drew the bowling pins out on the thing and we're going to do it just the way Jeffrey Moore tells you to do it. We're going to knock off the lead pin. That's going to lead us to three more pins. That's going to lead us to four more pins.

38:24And eventually the vision was always to be the king of enterprise CRM. But if we positioned like that, we were going to 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. 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. Like revenue? Yeah, right. It kind of does cure all of the internal politics and BS and whatever's going on. Let's talk about your new book.

38:58You published, I'm going to guess, I think it was 20, obviously awesome, 2019? 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. You're welcome to do that. Everyone is welcome to do that. 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. So writing a book, I don't know about you, it sucks. It's not easy. It's not fun. It sucks so much. You've been wildly successful. What was the desire? Why go do it again? There must have been a burning desire. Take us into why go do this?

39:33Why write the sales pitch book and what's the difference between, 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, product loves it, sales refuses to use it. What the real problem was is, sales 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.

40:09Because you can 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. 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? If there's features there that the people don't understand, it's up to the customer to figure out how that feature translates to value.

40:43These 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. It turns out 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.

41:16So you go to sales and they're like, we don't like using that stuff that marketing gives us because that's stupid. You go to marketing and they're like, ah, sales does their own thing over there. Sometimes we give them stuff. 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 kind of click on all the menus product walkthrough thing 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 going to have to give people and easy way to take the positioning and translate it into a sales pitch.

41:56So I started teaching that. Now, 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, because 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 got to build a pitch in the standard IBM format. 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.

42:32But after I had built a bunch of pitches with it, I started to see there were some genius bits to it. 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 guys. 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.

43:13And 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. 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 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, that things were going great, all that stuff. 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.

43:55And I would say, okay, we're blowing up the sales pitch and we're going to build it like this. When I went as a consultant, I guess I thought like people would know how to do it, but then it turned out they didn't. So I thought, okay, in my own work that I was doing with clients, we were always doing both things. We 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.

44:29That'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 want to 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. 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 going to give it to you in a book that probably costs like, you know, 18 bucks or whatever. But people won't do it.

44:59Most people aren't going to do it. Like this is the thing. 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 going to call me and we're going to work on it. But the structure should be there to just use it, in my opinion. So I felt like, ah, stupid book. needs to get written. So fine, I'm going to write this stupid book. I love it. I think you should have made it. I think you should have brought the binder back. I want to see like modern B2B SaaS companies with binders because of you. Do you want to know what's funny?

45:29I stole the binder and I took it with me to this company that I went to and we re-architected the sales pitch and stuff and stealing stuff out of the binder. And then fast forward a year and a half, we got acquired by IBM. And so I had to sneak the binder back into the premises. Use their own sales pitch to get acquired by the same company. I love that. They're like, wow, I love this pitch. I'm like, something about it seems familiar. They're like, we really love this. It matches how we see the world. What's the modern version of it? Is it a 10 slide slide deck? Is it a dock? What's the deliverable?

46:06So I can describe it. It's basically a set of components. So 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. 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 kind of 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.

46:48The 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 pluses and minuses with those different ways of solving it. And then the last step is a 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. And then we switch over. If we get the client to say, yeah, yeah, I agree with that, then we go, good, because that's how we see the world.

47:25And then here's my distinct value and here's how we get it done. So if you want, I can give you an example. Yes, please. I did some work with a company called Help Scout. They're a good example because everybody gets this. So they're in 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. Traditional businesses see customer service as a cost center.

48:01Online 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. The problem 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.

48:34And the problem there is one, really hard to use. So now your reps got to learn it. But two, everything there is designed to reduce costs. 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 going to show you all the features. Look, we have an inbox. Isn't that nice and easy to use? And like, look, we've got prioritizations, assignments, another feature, another feature, another feature, another feature.

49:07And I'm going to 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. 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. We're like, hey, I'm going to show you the product. But before we get there, we work digital companies just like yours. And we believe that customer service is actually a growth driver. It's not a cost center.

49:39So we know that if you deliver a great customer experience, that's going to drive loyalty. It's going to drive repeat business. Would you agree with that? Generally, digital businesses, yeah, yeah, we do agree with that. Okay, so you got choices. You could do this with a shared inbox. Are you doing with that? Yeah, we're doing with that now. Well, that's great. Except when you get growing a little bit bigger and you want to do priorities and assignments and whatever. Now, what are you going to do? Well, all you got left now is help desk software. That does all the bells and whistles, but it doesn't give a very, one, it's hard to use.

50:08And two, it doesn't give a very good customer experience. So now you've got to assign ticket numbers, it's going to 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 because it has all the bells and whistles and it gets designed from the ground up to give customers an amazing customer experience. 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.

50:43I got a feature, you got a feature. And then you're not wasting time doing demos for somebody who's not going to be primed to have that conversation. Right, like if the person comes and says, no, that's a cost center for me, I'm just trying to drive out costs, well, you've disqualified yourself, I got nothing. Because if all you care about is that, Zendesk is a better choice for you. But for most digital businesses, if I can get you aligned to that, then I show you the demo, 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.

51:12Oh, you need advanced features, let me show you the advanced features. Oh, you need customers a really great experience. Look, no ticket numbers, no this, no that. 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. And so they're like, well, where are we going to use the triangle slide?

51:46We 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. I'm going to start from scratch. All right, we got to wrap, but I'm going to 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. Yeah, so the insight here is customers are really paralyzed with indecision.

52:20And 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? 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 going to walk out there and understand what makes you different and special and why they should pick you. Love it. April, I could have talked to you for hours.

52:54Good news is for Exit 5 members, which you can join if you go to exit5.com, we're going to do an AMA in 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 inbox will be flooded and you'll be booked up for the next nine months. I'll be on the road. And then when I come back, I'll relax. Yeah. What are you doing? A little road show? 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 5 community is big fans of yours and I'm excited to get this podcast out to them.

53:28Thanks. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to 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. Plus, we have a community, a community of over 4 ,000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to 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 grow your career and help grow your company, go and check it out.

54:02It'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 want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out, exit5.com. And I also want to 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.

54:34They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you gotta do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's hatch.fm. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Customer.io. They're one of our longest running sponsors. Customer.io helps marketing teams get more impact from every message they send so you can reach the right people with the right message at the right moment. What we love about Customer.io is that they have a great team of marketers who really care about the craft.

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