YouSaid · the spoken record

April Dunford

lines on the record: 110
first: 2023-10-22
most recent: 2023-10-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Oh, yeah, you remember that? I think it's funny how many times I've talked about bowling pin strategy in the last two months. So this comes from a bunch of work that was done around the way innovation gets adopted, blah, blah. So there's a bunch of research done on this stuff, but I'm going to misquote it because Jeffrey Moore's stuff, I've been reading it for decades. But Bowling Pin strategy goes like this. The easiest way to take over a great big market is to define a segment of the market that is underserved by the market leader. And so if you think about a bunch of bowling pins, we're going to circle around the lead pin, which is this little piece of the market that's easy for us to go get. And the market leader probably doesn't care about it. And so we knock over that pin and knock on over that pin enables us to get to the three pins right beside it. And so now I'm established here as a beachhead and I can go get the next three pins. I'm going to knock those over. And eventually I get big enough to challenge.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not saying category creatures are a bad thing. There are examples of companies that came right out of the gate and successfully created a category and then survived to own the category longer term. But a more common thing that happens is that the company does the hard work of creating the category. And then exactly the moment where the category starts to take hold, fast follower can come in with fresh funding and a lot of it and learn from all your mistakes and come in and knock you off the peak right when you're”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, qualtrics, for example, is a company that a lot of people talk about very successful category creation. Well, they were survey software up until they were 300 million revenue, just like everybody else in an existing category. So that got them there and that worked just fine. Oh, well, once we're dominating it, now we can say it's whatever it is, customer experience software or whatever it is. Snowflake, another good example. data warehousing in the cloud they were that like data warehousing an existing market were data warehousing for the cloud that is not category creation and that took them all the way up to the point where they were about to go public and now their cloud data which is their attempt to expand and say well it's not just data warehousing it's actually data lakes and a lot of you know all other data stuff and so that's a smart move for them because they're now very well known in that space”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This, like no category creator has ever lost the market. In fact, most category creators lose the market. Like, what happened to MySpace? What happened to Ask Jeeves? It didn't work out so good for them. Most category creators actually get overtaken by fast followers. So if we look at the CRM market, Siebel was the big dominant player there. And now they're not. So now we've got Salesforce. Once you're the dominant player in that market, a cool move to do is to actually extend the boundaries of the category so that you can continue to grow. And most of the category creation examples we see are companies that when they were 200, 300, 400 million revenue dominating their space then decided to move the goal posts and say, well, actually now we're expanding into all these other areas and we're going to call this category something and that's what it is. And there's loads of examples of that.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did not start out as category creators. So they started out as a niche play in an existing category. And that's because that's generally the easiest way to get traction for a company early. Because what is the job of the market category? The job of a market category is to help answer the question, like, what is this thing all about? If I'm positioning an existing category, I can say, well, I'm CRM for very small businesses. That was Salesforce's initial positioning. I didn't have to explain to you what a CRM was. That already existed. There was already billion dollar company in that space. We know what a CRM is. And I could say where CRM for very small businesses. The reason you can use this very small business is we don't have any software. So you don't have to have an IT department to babysit it. It's fantastic. So most companies start there. Now what happens is that if you become the dominant player in that space, which again, category creation folks talk about.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so here's a few things. So, one, obviously creating a category is not the only way to create a legendary business because the vast majority of legendary businesses did not create the categories that they're in. So Google did not create search, Facebook did not create social network. Like, I mean, there's so many of them. It's actually more of an exception to the rule that the company is creating a category than the other way around. So I think it's a bit disingenuous to say the only way, you know, it is a way to build a big business. No question about that. But it is absolutely not the only way, in fact, it is, you know, it's not the most common way, but it is a way and it does work. So that's one thing. The second thing is that category creation is interesting. Like most companies, if you look at their arc, they did not, even the category creators that are successful,”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, you know, if you've designed your signals right, then you already know there's intent there. You already know you're a fitch. You already know stuff. The way a lot of companies do this is they'll have inside sales, do a qualification call before they set up a first call with a sales rep in that qualification call, you're trying to make sure, you know, is this the right person? Do they have a need that we can actually meet? Is this actually a good fit for what we do? And if they're not, they don't even make it to the call.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like generally, you've had some kind of qualification. Happen upstream. And so that qualification could be done in lots of different ways. Like if you got some kind of product like growth motion in the beginning, you're looking for signals in that. And if the signals aren't there, then you're not talking to them.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use a shared inbox. It's free. It's easy to use. There's no problems there. Just use it, right? If you're really worried about bringing the cost down in a customer service center, maybe you should use Zendesk. We can act as a guide in this situation and come in and say, look, these guys are good for this. These folks are good for this. And we're good for this. And you might not care about that. And if you don't care about that, we're not the one for you. You shouldn't pick us. But I think that this calm confidence idea is that where we know the client should pick us, we should be unafraid to fight for that business. But we should totally walk away from business where we're not the best fit. We shouldn't be chasing that business at all.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the posture, I think you should assume in a sales situation is, I had all bosses to talk about this, is the posture we should have is calm confidence. So where that calm confidence comes from is we really understand why people should pick us, so this differentiated value. We really understand it and we really understand who that's a really good fit for and we don't even bother trying to chase anybody else. So we should be able to come in and say, look Sales enabled that delivers results if you don't care about those results, you shouldn't pick us. And so generally, what we're trying to be is extremely honest. So we're trying to come in and actually give credit where credit is due with the other approaches. Because typically the other approaches work just fine for other kinds of companies. Like if you're really”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like the way I look at it is the companies I work with, the way I look at it is if you're in market. And you're selling, and you have happy, engaged customers, there's differentiated value there. That's why they picked you. That's why they love you. That's why they don't churn out on you. It's there. You might not know what it is. We might have to do a little process to get at it, but it's there and it exists.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The differentiated value doesn't work in a sales pitch, which you'll get is the company going, Why would I pay for that? Like, it's not value for me, buddy.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It absolutely is like that the insight is basically the context that makes your differentiated value important. What is the thing you need to know to understand the importance of my differentiated value? In the case of Hell Scout, the insight is, look, digital businesses like customer services growth driver. Where does that come from? Like if you look at their differentiated value, it's there. And so we can just reverse it, flip it around, even if the product wasn't necessarily constructed with that insight. Maybe we got there sideways or the roundabout way or whatever. We iterated our way into that. We can look at the differentiated value and then basically reverse it out to the insight.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if we really want to solve sales enablement, don't we really want to have something where we can measure whether or not the sales enablement is working with sales metrics? Yeah, we do.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so when we first had a conversation about it, there were five or six different answers to that. So, what question? But the big answer was, well, because we're built on top of Salesforce, my sales enablement data is integrated with my sales data. And then you say, well, so what about that? Well, because then that means if I can actually tell, did the sales enablement improve time to first deal or improve time to make quota? Well, so what about that? Well, if I improve that ramp time, then we get way more revenue faster. So that's the differentiated value. When I go to do that in a sales pitch, I can translate that into my insight. My insight is every day your rep's not making quota. It costs you money.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a company I work with a few years back, they recently been acquired by Salesforce called Level Jump. And so they're in the sales enablement space, which is terrible. There's a million companies in the sales enablement space, and they all kind of look the same. And so level jump, you know, so if you look at, well, you know, what's the competitive alternatives? If I look at all the companies in the sales enablement space, you can kind of put them into two buckets in terms of approaches. They're either a CMS, like a jazzy content repository where you can make sure that people are using the right content and whatever. Or they're an LMS, a learning management system, which I can build the course and certify you on the course, and that's how we're going to train the sales reps. If you look at level jump, they're differentiated capability. Is there the only one that's built on top of Salesforce? That's the feature. You know, we're built on Salesforce. The other folks aren't. And then who cares? Like, so what?”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, you got advanced AI, whatever the heck the thing is. So, why? Why does anybody care? And the answer to that, so what is your value? And because it came from this differentiated feature, it's generally value that the other guys can't deliver because they don't have the capabilities that underpin it. So, if I give you an example”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In order to win a deal. So I can stick my stake in the ground. Sales knows the answer to this question. If you have a sales team, they know the answer to this question. What would a customer do if we didn't exist? They know. And then we get to the next step is, well, so what do we have that's different? And that's capability-wise, feature function of the product or capability of the company. So it could be features. It could be your pricing model. It could be we have support in a way that the other folks don't. So there's all kinds of things. It could be, it could be the breadth of the portfolio that you have beyond that one product. We can fill whiteboards with this stuff. And then what we do is we go down that list of features and we say, so what?”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so differentiated value is kind of the answer to the question why pick us over the other alternatives. And so the way we get at that in positioning is we start with, you know, putting a stake in the ground of who do we actually compete with? And so, you know, if we didn't exist in the market, what would a customer do? And so typically there's some status quo thing. It might not even look like you. It might just be a spreadsheet or do it with the intern or manual labor. And then there's whatever else ends up on a short list against us. And it's basically the definition of, you know, I got to beat all this plus indecision.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so once we've done that work, it is very natural then for us to work together on the sales pitch that reflects that. What typically happens is not that at all. What typically happens is products working on some stuff, sales working on some stuff, marketing's working on some stuff, marketing in their own little bubble comes up with positioning. They might build some stuff for the sales team, keep it over to the sales team. Sales team looks at it and says, I don't get what any of this stuff is. I disagree with this. This doesn't match what I see. And they just throw it out and they go back to doing the same pitch they've been doing since the year of the flood”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're just pitching features. Like, here's the drop down venues, here's what they do. And so the first step in fixing this, I think, is to have a cross-functional team work on positioning. So if I've got product marketing and sales together in the room working on defining what our differentiated value is, then I'm going to get all the good juice out of the product team that deeply understands the product, deeply understands what's differentiated about it, deeply understands value.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So here's what I think The core of a good sales pitch is really deeply understanding your differentiated value, which is what is the value I can deliver that no other solution can often what I see at companies is you got a smart product team and they know a lot about the stuff they're building and why it's important and what the value is to the customer. And they did all this work on that when they were building it. But that information never made the jump to sales.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if we haven't sold anything yet, then we don't know yet. It's hard for us to help you buy something if we don't even know how to sell it. But if I've done 10 deals, I know what happens. I know I got a pretty good guess of what IT is going to say when you try to implement this stuff. I have a good guess of what's going to happen when we go to roll it out. I have a pretty good guess of what your boss might object to or might get excited by. And so I don't necessarily need a research team to go figure this out. This is just me trying to be helpful and help the champion do their job of getting this deal to the finish line.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so it's B2B products if you don't have a sales team, like if you don't have a sales team, I still think you can use this structure to build a story that marketing can use and you can use in different ways. We can talk about that. But in the companies that I work with, they're B2B. They've got a sales team. And so the immediate thing we're doing is we're making a shift in positioning. We're building a sales pitch that reflects that positioning. We can immediately implement that in sales, even though it's going to take a while for us to forklift the messaging and do other stuff and change our campaigns and everything else to match this new positioning. But we can tighten up the sales pitch and have an immediate impact over in sales on that. Second thing is that I've worked with tons of companies where it's the founder is the only sales rep. And this works pretty good for that. I don't think we need a ton of resources to do it, but I do think we need to have enough traction in the market that we understand how a deal typically goes.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, does this need to go to purchasing? And they'll say, Yeah, it probably does. Oh, well, you know, here's what typically happens in purchasing. They're going to do this, this, this, and we're going to give you this stuff, and that's going to help you get it through purchasing.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, we're SOC2 compliant. We do this, we do that, we know because we've done 15 deals and we know what these deals are like and we know what the stuff is going to be. You might have the champion come in and say, well, I don't know, you know, end users might not like it. And it's like, okay, well, here's how we're going to get your end users on board. This is the training we have. This is the stuff we're going to do. The neat thing if you have a product like growth thing on the front end of that, it takes that objection off the table. You know, and you might have other things like, you know, you're going to take this to your boss and they're going to want to know ROI numbers and blah, blah, blah. And we've already done that. Look, here's our calculator. You know, if you give us this information, we can put this in. Here's how you sell your boss. So that's what we're doing. We're trying to arm them because we've done a million deals. They've never bought software like this before. So half the time you'll be doing deals and they don't even know what the purchase process is. And so, you know, if we're being good partners, we're like,”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if we're really smart, we already know because we've done lots of deals, right? So if we're being a good partner in this, you know, we're in sometimes even in the very first meeting we're saying, hey, look, you know, in that spot where we're talking about objectives, we're going to say, hey, look, IT is going to come in and they're going to be worried about this, this and this. And don't worry, we got you.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A thousand ways. So the way this works is you have to, your positioning and your pitch needs to really work for the champion. Because if it doesn't, you don't even get to talk to anybody else. Like, you don't even get to go near anybody else. We don't make it on the shortlist and you don't get the deal cooking. But once the deal is cooking, it is on you to arm that champion, to handle all the objections, potentially of all the other groups. So, you know, so if you're the line of business buyer, let's say you're in the sales department and you're buying a CRM. IT is going to have to get involved at some point and IT doesn't really care about the value of your CRM, but they do care doesn't meet the security requirements. It doesn't integrate with the stuff we already have and how much of a pain is this thing going to be to manage. And so we're not actually pitching value to those people. We're just handling objections. And so once we realize that, then we can get really tight on our positioning and our sales pitch. Like what we're really trying to do is just cook the champion, get the champion. And then once the deal's going, we got to arm the champion for how to handle all these objections.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now you totally get fired for buying IBM. I don't know what happens. The other thing you bring up is I think an interesting thing to think about too that really messes people up in these situations is that in B2B, typical purchase process, we have five to seven people involved in making a deal happen. And so there's this complexity we don't have a consumer, right? A lot of people, I think, overcomplicate that. Like in a typical B2B purchase process, we've got someone in that buying team is what we would call the champion. So that person is the person who's been tasked with, hey, pick us the accounting software or pick us the CRM. You figure it out. And so that person is the person that does the initial research, makes the short list, probably sits on the first calls. And then there's all these other people. Now, the other people can't make a deal happen, but they can kill it.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another problem. Well, this is the thing. It's so easy to default to the market leader in that situation. Like the market leader has this big advantage that you can say, you know what, who's going to get me in trouble for picking Salesforce? Nobody, right? Like it's so easy to just flip back.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So he's just the best. And so one of the things I think of is like normally when we come at this, we're like, well, how can we convince the customer that we do the job that they need to have done? And obviously we need to do that. But there is this kind of secondary job that the champion of the deal is, and that's how do I make a decision without getting fired. And so we ought to help them accomplish that job. Otherwise, we don't get what we want, which is the money.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do things like sometimes we have services and support that are going to help you if things go bad, and this is how we're going to make sure. So this idea of being able to take risk off the table is a really serious one if we've got a customer that is actually paralyzed because of this indecision thing.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they're just like, forget it. I'm doing nothing. Now I'm totally paralyzed. And so there's an assumption that companies are very motivated by this FOMO thing, but I think that that is not always true. And if the customer is actually indecisive throwing in this FOMO thing isn't going to do it. So what does work in that situation is, one, giving them the tools to make the decision. So that includes paying the picture of the market, teaching them how to buy essentially. So teaching them, look for customers like you, you just have to worry about these three, four things. And all this other stuff, it doesn't apply to you. That applies to bigger companies. That applies to whatever. So this idea of teaching a customer how to buy is one way to take that stress down. And then there's a whole bunch of other techniques you can use. So one is, you know, you could, if it's a really big deal, we can split it into smaller pieces. We can do things like offer you money back guarantee.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, they are less likely to close the deal if you throw that in. And the idea is that they're already stressed out. And you're just putting more stress on them by pressuring them, by saying, oh, this is how the bad things are going to, you know, you're like, ah, bad things will happen if I do something bad things will happen if I don't something. What do I do?”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And say, look, you're missing out, like the competitors are all doing it, and you're not doing it. And so this is an interesting question. And so I was super excited, Matt Dixon wrote this book called The Jolt Effect. And in that, they studied two and a half million sales calls that recorded on Gong, and they studied it with AI. And then they looked at what happened after the sales call. So were these successful or not successful? Did a deal happen or whatever? It's pretty rare that we get a chance to dig into some data like this. And so what his data showed is if a customer is indecisive, throwing FOMO into the mix makes it worse.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'll throw something out about that So, and I've heard people talk about this a lot that, you know, one of the things we could do in this situation when a customer is feeling this indecision is to kind of lean into this FOMO.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think that hurdle is a lot more than you think, right? So we obviously have to compete with status quo. Like we can't ignore status quo because sometimes status quo just is good enough. And so we can't ignore that. We still lose deals to status quo. But we lose an awful lot of deals to just plain customer indecision, customers being more afraid of screwing up than missing out.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you can just think of it that way. You don't need to know every single feature, every single thing. I'm giving you a bigger picture of the whole market and helping you feel good. Well, if you choose this or you choose that, now you know why.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once you sort of get into that mindset, I think then you look at the situation a lot different. Like I think we've seen the statistics on this that says, you know, the buyer is 80% of the way through their buying journey by the time they talk to your sales rep. Yeah, maybe, but they might be 80% of the way to say, and nope, I'm not buying nothing. And in fact, that's true. 60% of the time. And so how do we combat that? Like the way we combat that is not just talking about ourselves. It's actually about trying to be healthful to that person in this very stressful situation that is trying to figure out how do I make a really good decision. So what we should be doing is giving them a way to think about the whole market and say, look, like, you know, in the case of Help Scout, look, there's shared inbox. And then there's Help Desk software. And then there's us. And I don't care who the vendor is. I'm going to put them in one of those buckets.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“end in no decision And then when you look at, if you scratch on that data, the majority of those aren't saying, well, I'm not making a decision to buy something new because the”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Software buyers want in a sales interaction is perspectives on the market. And help weighing their options. And we don't do that. We're just like, here's our stuff. You figure it out. It's up to you. You figure it out. And so as a result, what we get are these buyers come in. They're overwhelmed with all this information. They come in and they sit in our sales process and we overwhelm them even more with more features and more information. And what they're really worried about is what if I make a bad choice here? Because I've never done this before. And I'm going to have to recommend to my boss. And if I make the wrong suggestion to my boss, maybe my boss thinks I'm stupid. Or maybe I buy something in the whole department hates me because it's awful to use. Or maybe I pick something and it's just bad software and then bad things happen for the business. Maybe I get fired. And so the data on this shows that for B2B, 40 to 60% of B2B purchase processes”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Market like, what are the different approaches to this problem? Like, forget about products, like, what are the approaches to the problem? Where do the products fit in those approaches? What's a good solution for me look like? What should be my purchase criteria? Like, that's really hard for buyers to figure out. And in general, in a sales process, we're not doing anything to help the buyer figure that out, even though we know it. We eat, sleep, and breathe this market. We spend all day looking at competitors and thinking about this stuff and whatever. But we've got this idea, well, we shouldn't do this because, you know, first of all, we can't talk about the other guys because we'd be seen as bashing our competition and that's bad, right? The other thing is even if we did give our opinion, nobody would trust us because we're biased. But if you look at the research on this stuff, the research doesn't support that. Like the research actually says what B2B...”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Like one of the key things to think about in all of this stuff that I think we don't think about enough as software vendors is that, you know, customers will come to us and they've done their homework, right? They've Googled around and they've looked at stuff. But that doesn't mean they have perfect understanding of the market. In fact, it's usually far from it. If we think about it, most of the folks in B2B software, most of the time your buyer has never purchased software like yours before. This is the first time they've done it. And their boss has come to them and said, hey, figure this out. Like, go find us a CRM and go, you know, look at all the CRMs and figure it out. And the buyer is looking at it, going, geez, I don't know, man. Like there's a lot of CRMs out there. And I'm looking at all the things. I'm on G2 crowd and there's 24 CRMs in the top right corner. And I'm looking at Gardner Group and I'm looking at this thing. And I am actually doing my research, but I'm overwhelmed. What I don't have is a clear picture of the...”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We get to the end of the setup, we should either be aligned, like yep, this looks like a good prospect for us. Yep, we can do something. Yep, they got a problem we can solve. This all looks good. Or we kind of jointly come to the conclusion, hey, this just our stuff just ain't for you, man. And that's it.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sales pitch thing one more thing on that is that part of what we're doing in that setup is what salespeople would call discovery. And so that setup part should not be me talking at you. Like it should be a conversation between me and the client saying, do you agree with this? Like, is this what you're seeing? Like, did you start with a shared inbox? What are you doing right now? Like, did you ever consider using Helpdesk software? Why, yes, why no? What do you have any constraints on what you're looking at? Like, what have you tried before? What are you looking to trying right now? This is part of the discovery that we do in a first substantive sales call that your sales reps would know how to do this. Typically, one of the things we don't have in the pitch decks that I see in SaaS companies is there's no good place to do this discovery. So it kind of happens outside of the structure of the pitch. In this pitch structure, there's a definite spot for discovery. So by the time”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zenda's going to win that deal. But if you've done this properly, your insight should resonate for the target account that you're trying to go after. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't going to be other objections. And usually there's all kinds of other objections. But the objections are more on a level of, you know, if I can get you hooked at the beginning in this setup, then we go to the value, which is just proving I can do what we already agreed we wanted to get done. Then the objections tend to be more like operational stuff. Like, yeah, this sounds good, but I don't know if we can afford it or this sounds good, but boy, we're going to have to migrate off the old thing or whatever. So mentally, they're kind of sold already, but they're worried about, well, what's IT going to say? And, you know, can I actually get budget about this? And in B2B, we've got this network of people that we've got to go get agreement from to move forward on this thing. And so often there's objections around that. The beginning of...”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Typically, when we're starting with insight, our insight into the market, if we're doing this well, the insight is generally not all that controversial. So you could think of it this way. So it's kind of the reason you built what you built. So most founders, when you talk to them, like they didn't just come up with the idea out of nowhere. They woke up in the morning and said, you know what sucks about email? This thing sucks about email. And so I'm going to build this different kind of email that solves that problem. Or in the case of Help Scout, it's like, do you know what sucks about customer service? It just wasn't built for these kinds of businesses. And so if you've got a point of view on the world and you're talking to a customer that just fundamentally doesn't agree with that, so like in the case of Help Scout, they come in and they say, no, actually it's a cost center for us. Like we're just trying to get the cost down. They should disqualify that deal because they can't serve that customer better than Zendesk does.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say we can do, which is often a customer case study, or it might be independent third party verification on stuff. But usually there's a proof step. There's an optional step after that, which is handling objections that haven't come up during the call. So sometimes we'll have a silent objection like, yeah, that sounds really good, but it sounds really hard to adopt. Or yeah, that sounds really good, but it's probably pretty expensive. Or, you know, yeah, that's okay, but it probably doesn't meet our needs for security or whatever. And so we handle that at the end in this special objection step. And then we end the pitch with what I call the ask, which is whatever we want the customer to do next. So, you know, it could be just asking for the sale or it could be, hey, we want.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then out of that conversation, we have a conclusion, which is what I call perfect world, but just kind of like, can we agree that if we really wanted to solve this problem and knowing what works, it doesn't work in the alternate solutions, can we agree really good solutions should tick these boxes? This is getting the customer aligned with your worldview. If they're aligned, then we switch to the follow-through. The follow-through has a handful of steps, but the main step is this differentiated value step. So usually what we'd start with is an introduction, hey, we're help scout, you know, we do customer service stuff specifically for digital businesses. And then we would move on to here's the value we deliver, here's how we do it, here's the value we deliver, here's how we do it, here's the value we deliver, here's how we do it. We generally end a sales pitch with a couple of little steps. So one is after we talk about the value, generally there's a step for proof, which is how can we prove that we do what we do.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Case the insight is hey, customer service is just different for digital businesses. And this is really a growth driver, not a cost center. So we need to think about customer service in a different way. That's their insight. So we start with that. The second piece is pluses and minuses of alternative solutions. What we want to do is paint a picture of the entire market and talk about what's good and bad of the other ways of approaching the job.”
2023-10-22 · Lenny's Podcast · A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source