Do You Sell, or Do You Help Your Customers Buy? - April Dunford
April Dunford argues that B2B tech vendors should guide customers through complex decisions instead of pushing sales. She uses a toilet-buying story to show why buyers often choose to do nothing, then explains how to reframe your pitch around market alternatives, trade-offs, and real insight rather than features.
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We're talking about selling. Really? Do you sell or do people buy from you? And how's that go? And what could you do differently? I'm Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. Our show comes to you every week with something to do with the world of growing your company, getting your business up, people, strategy, execution, cash, and the leadership required to take it. There's sales is certainly part of that topic. So, you know, we have our show on every week, and then we have all the 500F plus episodes, a back catalog of everything to do in all these different areas. And then we've got our coaching programs, workshops, webinars, that kind of crap. You'll find all that@scalingcoach.com scalingcoach.com is our website, and that's also where you'll find out about the various coaching programs. In particular, our Growth Navigator coaching program that helps people go from a million to past 20. If you're anywhere in there, a million to 20 million. We've got a program that has weekly touch points, learning support, speakers, accountability, coaching, all that every week to get your company growing. And it's super, super affordable. So if you have at least 10 employees, you're at least a million dollars in sales. We got a program for you atscale and coach.com. So I'm joined by April Dunford. April is an author, speaker, podcast host, and consultant all around the area of positioning and selling. And she's going to share some of her thoughts today, in particular from this book. Where's the book titled I'm Spaced?
It's called Sales Pitch.
Sales Pitch. There it is. I'm looking at my notes and they're a different format today. Should be right there. Sales pitch. Anyway, that fluff helped people to actually remember the book title better, I'm sure. April, where are you today?
I'm in Toronto, Canada.
Oh, it's probably getting a lot colder there than it is here where I am.
Where are you?
I'm outside of San Francisco.
Ah, yes. No, it's definitely colder than San Francisco today.
Yeah. So you've got all kinds of great stuff to do, and I think we'll let the story and the ideas behind the book come out as you go in preparing for the show. It sounds like the toilet story is the place to start.
Yeah, the toilet story. Would you like me to tell the toilet story?
Yeah, it tells the toilet story.
So. So here's the idea. So we have a terrible echo, by the way. I don't know if you hear. Yeah, so But I'm just gonna run anyway so you guys can do what you do about that. So the toilet story. So one of the big concepts in the book, or at least the big ideas, is that. That we as. We as. It's really bad. I'm sorry. The echo is really, really bad.
It's killing you now. Yeah, yeah, hang on. Echo cancel.
Huh?
I don't know. Is it on your end? How's your echo? Look at your settings there on your. There's a little settings thing at the bottom of the screen, below the pictures, the thumbnails of us. There's mute, stop cam mic settings, and there should be in there audio and echo cancel.
Yeah, I don't have that. I have edit things and stop cam, but I don't have that. Maybe it's gone. All right, I'm going to run with it.
We have. I. I have echo cancellation on for both of you.
Oh, okay.
So we should be.
Seems to be gone now, so maybe we'll just run.
Okay. Yeah, let's run with it.
Okay. Sorry about that. So one of the big concepts of the book is that as folks that run companies, as vendors, we think a lot about selling. And in particular, I think most CEOs would agree that selling is hard. But a thing that I don't think we think enough about is how hard it is to actually buy things. So me in particular, I work with B2B technology companies. B2B technology is something that is actually very difficult to buy. So a lot of times when I say buying is hard, people are like, what? That's shopping. What are you talking about? Buying's not hard. I wish that was my job, to just buy things. Things. But some things are easy to buy. Some things are hard. Like it's. I like buying a T shirt or a pair of shoes, drink at the bar, that's fine. But other things are really terrible to buy. Like, who likes buying insurance? Nobody likes buying insurance. B2B software is very much like this. So one of the examples I use of something that seemed like it was going to be easy to buy, and it turned out it wasn't that easy to buy was my experience of buying a toilet. So I bought a. I live in Toronto. I bought a house. It's kind of an old house. Inside that old house, there's an old bathroom. So I hired a contractor to come in and fix the bathroom. And he came in and he's fixing it, and he says, look, you're gonna have to go to the store, buy a toilet. And I said, okay. Never bought a toilet before, but how hard can that be? I'll go to the toilet store and pick out a toilet. So I go to the toilet store. I walk in, salesperson walks up to me, and he says, can I help you? And I said, yeah, you can. I'm here to buy a toilet. And the salesperson says, well, what kind of toilet do you want? And I'm like, one that flushes. Like, I don't know what kind of toilet I want. And he says, well, the toilets are back there at the back, going back to the back and, you know, pick one out. There's all kinds of them back there. They all got stickers, and they'll tell you what they're all about, what the price is, figure out which one you want, then come and call me and say, okay. So I go to the back, and what do I see? There's a thousand toilets, and they all look exactly the same. Like, exactly the same, but they are not the same. Like, some of them cost a hundred bucks, and some of them cost a thousand bucks. And each one has a tag on it. And there's all these features. And the features are like, trapways and flappers and gravity assistant. Like, all this stuff I've never heard of. And so I spend an hour in there looking at these toilet features, and I'm like, I don't actually know enough to buy a toilet. So I do what anyone would do. I run out of the showroom, I go home, I Google it, and what I find is 9,000 sites talking about toilets. And there are so many toilet features. And toilet technology is outrageous. There's, like, different seat heights and trap ways and flappers, and some of them have flappers, and some of them don't have flappers. I don't know what's what. There's like, can I teach you a disgusting thing? There's a disgusting thing about toilets. There's a score. It's called the MAP score. That stands for maximum performance, and that is the amount of solid waste that a toilet can handle in a single flush. 300 to 600 grams is good, but some toilets can handle up to a thousand grams in a flush. It's like a little dog. Anyways, so at this point, I'm like, I don't have time for this. I'm a busy person. I run a business. I got kids, I got a dog that doesn't need to get flushed. I'm like, I don't have time to be a toilet expert. And I get this genius idea. Maybe I don't have to buy a toilet. Yeah, maybe I don't have to buy that one. The old one was working just fine. And like, I could just stick with the old one, renovate the bathroom. And then when and if the thing out on me, I'll worry about buying it then. So what happened? Right? I went to showroom twice. I spent what felt like infinity on the Internet looking at things. And how many toilets did I buy? Zero. I bought zero. Now, if you think about it, B2B software is actually almost the same. In fact, I would argue that maybe it's worse than buying a toilet. So if you look at it has a typical B2B software purchase gets made. Let's take something easy. Accounting software. The vice president of finance wakes up in the morning and she's like, what's that?
I think of accounting software buy is very hard. There are so many different.
Very hard. But this is how it works. Vice president of vice president of finance walks up and she says, you know what? We're in the middle of an audit. Our accounting software sucks. We need new accounting software. Does she go and figure out what new accounting software to buy? No, she's a vp. She's busy. She's not going to do that.
Right.
She goes into her office and she says, you, Joey Controller, or whatever you are, go figure out what accounting software to buy me. How's Joey feeling? He's pissed. He's like, I don't know. Like, I'm an accounting software user. I don't know what the state of the art of accounting software is. I don't know who the vendors are. I don't know what I should pay attention to. I don't know what I shouldn't pay attention to. So what does he do? Just like me in the toilet? He goes and he Googles it. What does he find? 900 million packages of accounting software. They all look exactly the same, the same. And like there's all kinds of features. And he don't know what. He doesn't know what those are. He doesn't know what they're good. Nothing. He's just like, oh, my God, how do I make this decision? And maybe he clicks on a button on your website that says, give me a demo. And then what happens? But then he gets passed over to sales. And so then what happens in sales? Sales is like all fantastic. Joey, welcome. You sit over there. I'll sit over there. You just step right in here. Welcome to my wind tunnel of features. So the sales rep is like, all right, here we go. We got 59 drop down menus. I'm going to click on every single one and show you every single feature in this thing. And so we got this feature, this feature, this feature, this feature. Joey sitting there with his hair blowing back like, and he doesn't know what half these features are. He doesn't know, do all the packages have these features or does just your package have this feature? Is that important for a company like mine or is that not important for a company like mine? What's the value of any of these features? Who knows? And so Joey's freaking out. Part of the reason why he's freaking out is because there are stakes involved in this decision, right? If Joey makes a bad choice, bad things happen. So first of all, maybe he picks the wrong accounting software, recommends it to his boss, and his boss the thinks that's bad idea. And now he looks stupid in front of his boss. Maybe he buys accounting software and the end users in the accounting department hate it. And then he's like, everybody in the accounting department hates his guts. Maybe he picks the wrong accounting software, they fail the audit. That's very bad for the business. Maybe he gets passed up for a promotion. Heck, maybe he even gets fired. So what is the lowest risk? Easiest decision for Joey to make in this moment is to do the same thing I did with the toilet is to come in and say, go to his boss and say, you know what, now's not a good time. Now's not a good time. We're in the middle of the audit. This is bad. You know, just let's, let's do it next year. Like, you know, there's lots of things out there. The thing we're using now, we don't love it, but it's okay. And so we'll just kick the can down the road for another year. And like, you might not think this happens very often, but the research tells us that in B2B, 40 to 60% of B2B tech purchase processes end in no decision. And the majority of those no decision cases, it's not that they're taking a vote for the status quo. Like, oh, we looked at everything and we decided the thing we're doing now is the best. The problem is actually that the buyer goes in, looks at all their options. They all kind of look the same. They can't figure out how to confidently make a decision to that they're not going to regret later. And so the easiest thing to do is to simply say, we're not buying anything. That's it. That's my Rant. That's the toilet story.
You didn't buy a toilet.
Well, here's the, here's the crazy ending of this story. So I, I, I go back and I say to my toilet guy or my contractor, I said, hey buddy, we're going to just keep the existing toilet. I'm busy, you know, I don't have time. And the guy says, what? No, lady, we already sent it out for the recycling. You know, it's gone to the big bathroom in the size guy, you know, it's gone. You gotta buy a toilet. And I'm like, oh, damn it. So I go back to the toilet store. So I walked in, the toilet store guy comes out and he's like, can I help you? And I'm like, yeah, buddy, it's a toilet emergency. Yeah, you can help me. I gotta leave with the toilet today. And then, you know, and I tell you I've been shopping for toilets for a few weeks now and it's not going so good. I really hate shopping for toilets. He says, buying a toilet's hard, isn't it? And I said, yeah man, it's been. And he says, you don't use that word here, ma'. Am. It's solid waste. And I said, dude, it's been solid waste. I need to get a toilet. And he says, okay, look, I'm going to teach you how to buy a toilet. I was like, okay, teach me toilet, Obi Wan. He says, yeah, we got. He says, there's only three things you need to worry about in a toilet. Quality, aesthetics, space. Like no kidding. He says, look, see all these cheap ones over here, all these expensive ones over here, all those features you've been looking at trapways and all that stuff. Really, it's just a measure of the quality. These ones last way. Way more flushes than these ones over here. Way less flushes. So they're cheaper, lower quality toilets. I'm like, who buys a low quality toilet? He says, well, actually if it's a spare bedroom toilet or maybe it's a vacation property, they hardly ever get flushed. So you'd be stupid to buy one of those expensive ones. Buy one of the things. But I said, look, it's my primary toilet, so you know, I need one of these high quality toilets. He says, okay, so we just eliminated half of them. Okay, fine. Then he says, second thing's aesthetic. Some people are going for a certain look in the bathroom, you know, they want a gold toilet or something. And you're going to pay more for those. They're good quality. Toilets, but you're going to pay more for the aesthetic. And I said, look, I don't have any toilet fashion requirements, so we can take those off the list. Okay, fine. So we take those off. Now we're getting somewhere. And then he says, the last thing is space. So some people have little wee spot for a bathroom, and so they have these toilets. We can put the tank and the wall, and that saves a lot of space. The downside of that is if the toilet breaks, you got to break out the wall to get in and fix it. And I said, well, look, I got lots of space, so, you know, let's get rid of the low space toilets because I don't want to be breaking in the wall. So, okay, we eliminate those. And it's amazing. Now we're down to three toilets. I'm like, oh, my God, this is so good. And he says. I said, which one should I pick? And the guy says, look, I got to come clean with you. I work for Toto, so I'm going to tell you to pick the total toilet. But there's all three of these. Toilets are fine. You can pick whatever you want you want. He says, I picked a total one. I love the product. You know, you could Google it online. Great quality toilet. If you just want to pick a toilet, never think about toilets again. That's the toilet you should pick. So I, you know, so I pick it. I buy the thing. 10 minutes, I'm in and out. I get a toilet. 10 minutes. So what happened? There was that guy being a pushy, pushy salesperson.
No, no, he's being helpful.
Yeah, he's being helpful. Was he trying to explain every single feature? Did he give me a toilet feature walkthrough pitch? No, he did not. Right. What he was. What he was actually doing was being a guide. He was giving me a rubric to understand how to categorize all the toilets so I could narrow down my choices and pick the one that was best for me. And so this got me thinking, like, why don't we do this in software? Like, we have the ability to do this in software. We know more about our landscape and the competitors and everything else. Like, why are we not actually attempting to help customers buy in a purchase process?
So that's why you're here. That's why the book I'm here.
So then I was like, you know what? I think we can do better than an aimless product walkthrough to help customers do the job they're actually trying to do, which is figuring out why should I pick you over the other guys? And so, in my opinion, if we really want to be a guide in the purchase process for prospects, what we need to do is paint a picture of the entire market and help people understand what are the different approaches to getting this job done. How do I segment the market and where does, you know, as vendors, where does our product fit in the midst of all these other products and basically teach customers how to buy and make a decision that they don't regret.
Yeah, see that seems to me to be coming from a place of confidence and abundance. Like, and a lot of times it's like, I don't want to lose this one. I want to make sure I sell everyone. I want to manipulate the hell out of you.
I want to do all that.
I. I also recently bought a toilet. I did too, about last year.
Did you get the toto toilet?
I have a toto toilet. Yeah.
Now I know, Now I know. You just, you don't do any of this research. You just buy the toilet.
Mine is different though. I so. And probably two thousand dollar toilet. So I us Right? That's like five thousand Canadian or something. Um, it's a bad monetary joke.
Yeah. Was it gold? Like, why is it so expensive?
Yeah, fully gold. No, I so I travel, right. I'm on planes almost every week somewhere and I stay in a lot of different hotels and I'm in different parts of the world and I'm like, of all the places I stay, of all the things I like, what do I like the best? I like that Japanese super robotic toilet that washes your hiney and dries it off and does all that work.
Specialized toilet requirements.
Yes. And I'm like, and it's not only the bathroom that I use the most, but it's also the one used by most of our guests. So when we remodeled that bathroom, I'm like, I want a cool, highly functional toilet to fit in. And it's a small space. So like, okay, it's got to fit in, but it isn't in the wall type. It's the, it's small of the other kind. But. Right. I knew what I needed in that and I used somebody else. I'm like, here's what I want from a toilet. Tell me what I got. She's like, okay, well you got this one. This one.
So you hired a toilet guide.
I hired a whole designer to design the bathroom.
Yeah.
Right. So respect it out for me. Now, did I get the best deal? I'm sure not. Like, I probably could have bought that For a thousand bucks.
No, but you didn't have to make the decision yourself, right?
No, I relied on her. And you know, and like the fixtures, everything in the bathroom, the cabinetry, like all the stuff got redone, man. So.
That'S kind of not the point of my story. But yeah, congratulations on that. Very expensive bathroom guide.
Things that I needed.
Yeah. Get it. Yeah, yeah.
So you talk about working with an enterprise client and they, and you're working on their sales thing and they throw a 4 inch binder at you. Tell us that story.
Well, so, so this is actually not me working with a client. So if you think about sales pitches, like in tech, when I started in tech, what I noticed was that the sales pitch was always kind of an afterthought. And so the first sales pitch I ever worked on, you know, there was a sales pitch that already existed and it had been around since the dawn of time. And, and it was basically a product walkthrough with a little setup and a little finisher. And so the setup was always, we'd start with a problem statement like, what is the problem? And so we would have this discussion with the client. But the problem was usually really vaguely worded. So like in my first company, we were selling a database and the problem statement was like, the amount of data that we are producing in a company is growing exponentially. It's like, no kidding. Any one of my competitors could have said the same thing. Like, we all know this is true. All customers know it's true. A dumb thing to say. So we, we define this problem and then we would switch into, well, here's our product and here's how it solves that problem. And so I didn't think too much about sales pitches until later in my career. I got a job at IBM. And so at IBM we were launching a new product. And so I was working through the IBM product to launch a new product. And part of that process was we had to build sales pitch. And so my boss came into my office and he said, have you built a sales pitch for that thing yet? And I said no. And he says, well, here's how we do it around here. And he came in and he had this binder and it was like this fat 4 or 5 inches plonks it on my desk. And it was the 59,000 step process at IBM to build a sales pitch. And at first I thought, well, that's stupid. Like that's just overkill. Like, why do we have such a big gnarly process to build a sales pitch? I mean any other company ever worked at. We didn't even think about it at all. But then I built a dozen or so sales pitches with the process and I started to see the genius in it. Now some of that process, in fact a good percentage of it, maybe 80% of it, was very specific to IBM. And at IBM we did these very, very large deals, like multi million, 10 million plus deals, very, very long sales cycle, quite complicated, quite deep, technical deals. But there was 10, 15% of that sales pitch that I thought was anybody could use. It was really genius. So one thing was we never started with the problem. We certainly never jumped straight to features. We always started with what we called insight. So we started with IBM's perspective on the market. So we would start with, here's how we look at the market. And we look at the market in a kind of a different way than everybody else. And then we would have a discussion with the client about, much like my toilet guy, the whole market. So we'd say, look like you're trying to solve this problem. There's lots of different approaches to solving that problem. And we've dealt with a lot of customers and we've seen them, sometimes they approach it like this, and here's the pluses and minuses. Sometimes they approach it like this, here's the pluses, sometimes they do it like this, here's the pluses, minuses. And so we would have that big discussion. And so the neat thing about that is it allowed us to frame the sales pitch from the very opening to something that was very specific to us. Like instead of defining the problem the same way our, our competitors define the problem, we'd be starting with our insight that was very specific to us. And then we'd have this neat conversation about the whole market. And it gave us a really convenient place to do discovery. So we'd say, look, this is what we see in the market. How are you doing it today? What else are you looking at? Are there other things on your short list? So we could simultaneously be educating the prospect about what we think the pluses and minuses are of different approaches to the problem. At the same time, we're gathering information about what are they doing today, what is their current situation, all that stuff. So I thought that was genius. The other thing I really liked about the IBM pitch structure was whenever they talked about features, they only ever talked about features within the context of the value that the features deliver. So if we had some whiz bang AI advanced thing, we would never say, oh hey, we get the whiz Bang AI. This is what it is. We'd say, look, we're going to save you $10 million a year. Here's how we're going to do it. And then we would talk about the features within that context. So I thought that was also good because customers ultimate don't care that much about features. They care about what the features are going to do for their business. So I left IBM, I went to a startup and I joined at the same time a new vice president of sales joins. And we had worked together previously, so we're like, yay. And so we ended up doing a repositioning of this company. But when we got the new positioning done, we needed to redo the sales pitch deck. So Key and I sat down together and I said, you know what, I think we should steal some stuff from this, this IBM sales pitch structure. So I like hauled out the binder, which I had stolen from IBM and said, I think we could steal some of this stuff in here. So we reworked the sales pitch using this insight as the starting point and then re architecting the demo to be all oriented around value. And that worked really good. And so the new sales pitch was super successful. We ended up restarting the growth engine of this company. We grew really fast for eight months and then hilariously, we got acquired by IBM. So give them their binder back. But yeah, so, so ever since then, every company I worked at after that, we re architected the sales pitch with an evolving version of this sales pitch structure. And so in the work I do as a consultant today, now we do two things. So first we'll work on this positioning, get a really tight definition of the positioning, and then we'll take that positioning, translate it into a sales pitch using this structure. So the new book is basically a how to book. Here's the piece, parts of the structure. Here's how you map your positioning into the structure. So that's what I'm attempting to teach people.
We'll talk then about competition. So before we get into, I mean, because that's additional to positioning. Right. How do you think about your competition? Why do people suck in talking about their competition? This is one I think about all the time with our clients.
Yeah. So most of the time I would say in tech companies it's very common for the company to not talk about competition, competition at all in their marketing and sales. So they were, you know, anything they're communicating to customers, they would essentially pretend that no competition exists, which of course is almost never the case. And in Fact, we're always competing against status quo even if we don't have short list of competitors.
Yeah, we're in a class by ourselves.
Like, good luck with that. So the customer always has alternative ways of solving the problem. And so if you think about, again, coming back to this idea about how hard it is to buy the champion in a deal is trying to figure out who should be on my short list, why should they be on my short list? Which alternative should I buy? How am I going to justify it to my boss? How am I going to handle the objections of everyone else on the buying committee? All these things, how on earth are we going to help that customer answer those questions if we never talk about the competitors? And, but most of the time we don't, we'll just ignore it and we'll put that burden completely back on the customer to figure out, you know, is this different than the other alternatives? If so, how? Like most sales pitches and most marketing material I see from tech companies are architected with this idea that the question we need to answer is why pick us? But that's not the question. The question is why pick us over the other guys?
So yeah, yeah, yeah, if we really.
Want to answer this question, we're going to have to address the alternatives. Now a lot of companies will say, well look, you know, we should, we can't talk about competition because you know, that's, that looks bad. We're going to be seen as bashing the competition. And then the second thing people will say is, well, nobody wants to hear my opinion about competition anyway because we're biased. And so they don't want to hear my biased thing about, you know, the, what the competition has to do. But again, if you look at the data on this, the data says that's not true. So there's been a bunch of studies done on B2B software purchasers and they've asked them, what do you actually want in a interaction with a salesperson at a vendor? And the top two things were one, I want perspectives on the market. So not perspectives on you and your thing, perspectives on the whole market. Teach me how to think about the market. What do you know about the market that I don't know? The second thing is they want to understand trade offs to different approaches to the problem. So who better than us to give that information to customers? Most of the customers you're selling to have never purchased a solution like yours before. We on the other hand, eat, sleep and breathe this market space. We know all about the competitors, we know all about their strengths and weaknesses and why a company should pick us. So why not just give them that information so we can do that? In my, in my opinion, the best way to do that is to not pick on products because we don't actually compete with products. We compete with approaches to the problem. And so we can take all of our competitors and bucket them into approaches of the problem and then have a discussion with the customer about, look, some companies do it this way and that's good for these reasons and it's bad for these reasons. Other companies do it this way and here's the pluses and minuses of that. And then contrast that with what we can do. And that's actually what the customer wants. The customer wants to, wants help making sense of the whole market. And we can help them do that. So why wouldn't we? And I think we should in our marketing and sales materials.
What do you think about that? I now speak frequently about competitors when I'm selling.
Yeah.
And I, I'm usually like, look, I really don't like that company because of X, Y and Z. But a lot of people do like them for abc. That's right. And you know, if that's you, then you should think about working for them. And if it's not, then. And the reason that I don't like them is probably not at all important to you. Like, I don't like them because of this ethical thing. And, but you know, that doesn't mean they can't do a good job for you. Like, it's fine. A lot of people love them and that isn't an issue for them. You know, so I usually am very candid like that. And like that's a great coach or that's a great program over there for this. And they really emphasize that. And I really emphasize something else. Like, here's how we deal with that and focus on the differentiation so they can see what do I care more about. Right. Like, look, if you want a drill sergeant coach, you should go to them. It's not me. I'm not going to be like your bark at you or whatever or just say, come on, you know, I'm also not, you know, so. And then. But I think that's kind of. Because when you think about it, they are different. This company's approach to service, the way they implement their ui for sure. All of those things are their workflows. They're like their feature set, their fundamental thing, the way they handle new development, like the way they take care of their, their user base. Right. All Those things are really different and they have unique things, but you never see that in a feature benefit recap. Never.
Well, or you, or you. It's hard to tease it out, right? That's the thing for customers, it's hard to tease it out. And I think customers want our opinion on that stuff. Like in tech, it's interesting because a lot of companies will come to me and they'll say, you know, we don't really have anything that's all that differentiating. It's all the same. We all have the same thing. It's a mature market. And that is almost never the case. Like every day a customer is making choices and they're picking you over the other guys. Maybe you don't know why and that's a problem, but most of the time they're doing it for a reason. So I'll give you an example. You know, when I worked at IBM, I, I was in charge of selling this database thing. It's a very mature market. Database is totally boring. They've been around since the dawn of time. And so we got a database and Oracle's got a database and they look the same. Like 99% of the features are the same. We do the same thing. The performance is the same, the scalability is the same. Like, it's just the same. And so when I first got there, if you looked at the way the reps were pitching it, they were trying to differentiate on stuff that wasn't differentiating. They say we're more scalable or more reliable or more this. And the fact is we were actually all the same. And so we went through a positioning exercise. We started with, well, what have we got that they don't have? And so one of the interesting things that IBM had that Oracle didn't have was a real commitment to openness. So we supported open standards better, we had better APIs, and so we just played nicer in an heterogeneous ecosystem of other vendors. Whereas Oracle was very much selling their database as part of a big stack, and so you had to buy the whole stack. The advantage of that is that really easy to deploy, fast to deploy, something goes wrong, you got one vendor to call. The advantage of our way of doing it was that it actually was more of a platform for innovation if you wanted to swap something out and put something new in. We played really nice with everything. Our customers, which were big, big, big Fortune one hundreds, cared a lot about that innovation message. Oracle's customers, which were Fortune 5000 customers, cared a bit more about total cost of Ownership, roi, all that sort of stuff. So if you heard us pitch databases, our pitches were totally different pitches with totally different differentiated value aimed at totally different segments of the market. Even though our products were like say 90, 95% feature parity.
It's funny, in our world we often talk about IBM and Oracle's Oracle selling against them with a exadata promise of 5 times faster than IBM and their 10 million dollar guarantee. I don't know if that was at play when you were doing that, but it, it comes up.
No, not when I was there. We were all the same. We were all the same. All the stuff was the same. There was no different. Like performance wise, total wash. Occasionally get a rogue salesperson, try to, try to convince people that we were different. But we were, if you wanted the honest to truth, the same. Totally the same.
So you imply and talk about a guide and being guided and, and, and our folks are probably pretty familiar with Hero's Journey and story brand kinds of word selling talk about what missing there for you.
Yeah, so on the marketing side of the house, most of the folks have learned Hero's Journey as a storytelling structure. And you know, if you're not familiar with Hero's Journey, like for the audience, it's, it's, it's like the plot of Star wars. That's the one that everybody always uses as an example, you know. So the idea is we have this Hero, in our case, if it's business storytelling, the hero is the customer. So there's the customer. And the customer, you know, embarks on a quest, you know, runs into some obstacles, has some challenge, and then they encounter a guide. And that's us, we're the vendor, we're the guide, and the guide gives them a plan and then they go and, and execute on the plan and that leads them to success and helps them avoid failure. And so it's a neat structure if you want to do things. Like it works really well for a customer case study, for example. So I've used that structure in a case study. Here's the customer, here's what they wanted to do, here's, you know, here's what they ended up doing. And the problem is it doesn't work very well in a sales situation for a lot of reasons. So if you think about it, in the Hero's Journey structure, there's that part where they meet a guide and the guide gives them a plan. The sales pitch is the plan. So we need a structure for that. What does the plan look like? Because we need to give them A plan. And so I don't, I've never seen anybody use Hero's Journey story structure in a sales pitch. And I think that's because it's not, it's just not suited to that very well. So instead I think what we need to think about is a structure that allows us to do all the things we need to do in a sales pitch. So one, we need to communicate our point of view on the market. Like, what do we believe about the market that is true, that none of our competitors believe, therefore they built different things than we built. Like in my IBM Oracle case, it was, you know, we believe in openness. The Oracle guys do not. They believe it's better if it's close. And then what are the differences? You know, I need a step in the story to talk about different approaches to the problem and pluses and minuses to difference approaches in the problem. And then I need a step where I, you know, after I have this discussion with the client, we, I lean across them and say, look, so if we really understand the problem and we really understand what works and doesn't work in the market, can we agree that a perfect solution would tick these boxes and the customer is either with me or they're not. You know, and if they're with me now, now I'm going to sell them something. If they're not, then I kind of disqualified them at this point. Like there's, you know, if they don't, if they don't believe in my, the basic premise of my differentiated value, then I got nothing to sell them. And then I want to have a way to expose the features, but within the context of the differentiated value. And then I need a couple of extra things, like I need a way to handle unspoken objections and I need a way to wrap the thing up at the end with an ask. And so I think a good sales pitch needs to have all those pieces. Hero's Journey does, fundamentally does not have any of those pieces. Hardly. Again, it's the plan that the guide uses, which we don't have that structure.
For your talk about objections and urgency, what's your approach to that? So you said unspoken objections. I think there's always, yeah, but how about what if going on? And people don't always speak them out. They don't say, listen, I'd like to buy from you, but here's what I'm grappling with. No, they keep that in their head. Right?
That's right. So again, if a, if a marketer is building a sales pitch, they don't usually think about that. So they'll build a sales pitch structure and there'll be nowhere in there, no place in there to handle those unspoken objections. Sales people know they're going to have to deal with objections as the pitch goes through. But there's usually, like in software, there's usually a handful of things that we know are objections, and if it doesn't come up, we actually need to bring it up ourselves and put it to bed, because otherwise we might not make it to the second call because the customer leaves the call and says, yeah, that all sounds pretty good, but it sounds way too hard for us to execute on. Or, oh, that sounds really good, but for sure it's too expensive for our budget, or, you know, that sounds great, but we would need an army of professional services people to come and do change management for that thing. So, you know, therefore we can't do it. So rather than let the customer leave, we actually want to drive right at that stuff and handle it in the sales pitch itself. So in my structure, there's a step right before the ask, so right at the end where we handle stuff like that. So we specifically put it in the deck. If we've talked about it already, fine, we'll just skip that step. But if we haven't, then there's a spot for us to say, hey, like, a lot of our customers are worried that maybe this is really difficult to do change management for. And this is why we have professional services and onboarding service and training. And this is what it looks like, and this is how long it is. And here's a quote from a customer that says how great it was. Or it might be something to do with the pricing model. Like, you might not want to get into pricing in a first conversation with a prospect, but sometimes you can expose the model and say, look like the pricing is actually per user or it's per transaction. And this is how it would work. So pricing for you might fall into this range, just so you know approximately how much it is. And again, you can give them an idea so that they're not leaving and saying, oh, you know, there's no way we could do this. I worked with a handful of companies that had really specific things, like sometimes it's around certification or something like that. And they would just assume because we're a small company, we're not stock two certified, so we have to put it in the deck and say, oh, by the way, if you take this to your IT company, they'll say they can't work with A small company because of these things. But don't worry, we have it covered. Here's the certifications we have. You know, the same thing with integration into other stuff. Your IT department's going to worry about how we integrate with the CRM. Here's how we do it.
So I've heard a lot of people saying, God, I really don't want to bring up any potential objections for fear I'm going to put them out there and they don't need to be addressed out there. What I need to do is like clear things away that exist, but then you have to actually surface them. What's your thought on throwing things out there? Introducing objections they hadn't even considered?
Well, so here's the thing. If you've got a slam dunk response to it, then there's no risk in putting it out there, right? There's no risk. And in fact it builds credibility with you and the buyer. If you don't have a slam dunk response to it, well then, then we're getting in a situation about, well, maybe we, we gotta decide whether we're gonna bring it up or not. So sometimes we might have something that is a known weakness of the product, but not everybody cares. And so if not everybody cares, then we wait until it comes up. If the, if the customer brings it up, then we address it there as best we can. But if it doesn't come up, we're not going to be the people to mention it. But if we have a potential objection and we have a very good slam dunk response to it, we might as well just run at it head on.
See, I always feel like, especially in a certain software and sir, like we're not talking about software that is a sell once kind of thing. Like you, it's an ongoing relationship. These are large, complex things. And many of our folks and, and, or if you're like me, professional services firm like you, you know, it's a thing you have to live with. So if you don't address people that you shouldn't work with, then you're going to end up taking on people. I try to like scare people away in the beginning. Listen, working with us is like this and it like it might not be for you, you know, and these, there are certain kinds of people that don't turn out and here's who they are so far. And like I try to push back and bring that stuff up because I don't want to deal with it in six months or three months or whatever.
Yeah, well, if there's things like that, I would call that a disqualifier. So if there's things like that are, that are just a straight disqualifier, then you want to get that stuff out on the table and disqualify before you even get to the pitch. In my opinion, like, I wouldn't even pitch people if there was a disqualifier. And I also think that the beginning part of the pitch where you're trying to get the person aligned to your point of view in the world, like, that's where we're saying, look, you could do it this way, this way or this way. And you might say, you know what? Like, for companies that, you know, their problem isn't as complex and they only do this once in a while, this is good enough. It's kind of like the equivalent of my toilet guy saying, look, if it's a vacation property, why would you buy the super fancy toilet for a toilet that's hardly ever going to get flushed? And we'd be like, all right, yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe that is what I need. So we want to have the equivalent of that conversation before we even get to the, here's our value prop and here's all this stuff, like, way before we get to objections, like, if we fundamentally aren't in alignment on what's important and it isn't important in solving this problem, then let's not, let's just save us all some time. I don't have to finish the rest of this. I could just disqualify you now. And so again, if I can't get you aligned to my point of view of the world, like, like say I'm IBM and you're like, you don't care about openness at all. Well, then you're not the, you're not the deal for us. We'll go find another one where, where we are that we are the thing, right?
Find the one that fits. Before we talk about the structure of the pitch and that kind of thing, let me just remind our listeners that we've got coaching programs to help you grow and scale. Like, we are not going deep into the pitch. We're talking about the overall strategy. Getting the team right, the culture right, executing better overall, improving your financial model and then managing the sort of path as the leader of the business so that you aren't the lid on the growth of the company. And then within that, we've got all kinds of experts, guests and that kind of thing, like April here to talk about that. And that our best program for most companies is the Growth Navigator program, and we give you weekly touches in growing and scaling your company in that program. It's 1500amonth and you spend a little time with us every week, you and your leadership team, quarterly planning, accountability, coaching, problem solving coaching, lessons on from the world of scaling up and our guests and that kind of thing. So all that and more, both in person and hybrid, mixed in that program. It's super cool. ScalingCoach.com is where you'll find that. Go to ScalingCoach.com to find out more. So, April, let's talk about next steps and the kind of the core process. What do you want to leave people with besides Go, go read the sales pitch book.
There's a couple of things. So most folks will try to build a sales pitch. If they try to build a sales pitch from scratch, they'll do it without any input inputs. So this, and this is part of the reason why these pitches end up looking like feature walkthroughs. Because they'll be like, all right, well, we're going to do this pitch. Well, what do we want to do? Well, we want to show them the product. So, okay, what do we want to show them in the product? Well, everything. So let's show them the everything. And then people will have opinions. They'll say, well, maybe we should have a logo slide that shows all the logos of the customers we work with. Yeah, that'd be good. We should have a slide about how long we've been in business and stuff. Yeah, yeah, okay, let's add that. And then the next thing you know, there's just random slides all stuck together. A better way, I think, to approach this is what you're really trying to do in a sales pitch is answer the question, why pick us over the other guys? The answer to that question comes from your positioning. So your positioning defines who do we compete with? How are we different? What is the value we can deliver that no one else can? What is the profile of a best fit customer? So who cares a lot about the value that only we can deliver? And what is the market that we intend to win? So I think a good way to start a sales pitch exercise is to go back and review your positioning and tighten up your positioning as much as you can. And then once you have that, then it's actually pretty straightforward if you have a structure for the sales pitch, to just map stuff into that structure. So that's how I would recommend people do it.
Yeah, it's so useful, even if you've been at it for a while, to update and upgrade your pitches and that kind of thing. The book is Sales Pitch, how to Craft a Story and Stand out and Win that. Do we have a. There you go. It's in the thing. Sales pitch and obviously awesome. The prior book. April Dunford, thanks for joining us on the show today. Thanks to my friend and mentor, Vern Harnish, who created the Rockefeller Habits and the scaling up work and books that that made all this necessary. And to Seth Silvers, who produced this show, the folks at StoryOn and our show is edited Potfly Productions. Thanks again everyone for watching, for listening. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep scaling up.
