Title: Standing Out in a Crowded Market: Lessons from April Dunford’s ‘Sales Pitch’”
Guest: Chris Goldman
Peter: [00:00:00] My guest is Chris. He is the marketing strategist and business coach with biz marketing.com. How you doing today, Chris? Doing great to hear your voice and good to get together and talk shop. Been a while since we recorded a podcast episode together, I’m excited about. Today we’re talking about a book that we discovered through Alan Dibb, who is the author of Lean Marketing and the one page Marketing Plan.
It’s a book that April Dunford wrote called Sales Pitch, how to Craft a Story to Stand Out. And win. Yeah,
Chris: it’s a pretty amazing book. It gets straight to the point. And for those of you that are business owners working on your sales pitch, this is not a long read, but it’s something you wanna really take time to digest.
’cause she puts a lot of business to business knowledge in this book and she puts a lot of principles that actually stretch right [00:01:00] into business to client as well. And so that’s why Exactly.
Peter: Yeah. Her, I, I listened to, uh, a podcast with her. With Alan Dibb and she pointed out her background was in the B2B sales for software as a service primarily, so that means like cloud-based software and worked for IBM and sounds like she borrowed some of the ideas she picked up at IBM and deployed it in other companies.
One of the things before I forget, there’s something that she says. I think really sets the tone for this whole book, and it really is a catalyst for thinking about how you approach a customer, a prospect is her question in the beginning of the book, do you sell or do you help customers buy.
Chris: What a great question.
And nobody likes salespeople for some reason. Uh, we just have a, we have a tendency to not trust them. And her whole piece on [00:02:00] this is really about trust and establishing trust with a client where they understand what we should all be doing all the time is that our interest is in a bottom line. Our interest is in helping them achieve their bottom line through our products, our services, whatever.
Yeah. When we build that kind of trust and relationship, they’re gonna wanna work with us. That’s just the truth.
Peter: I think of CarMax when I think of this question, right? I’ve bought a car a few years ago from CarMax, and they truly were helping me satisfy my desire to get the vehicle I wanted. They did not sell me on a car.
At all. They certainly sold me on their processes and the way they go, their approach, like they sold me, I was sold on their approach to car selling or to car buying, but there was never a moment where I felt any pressure at all to buy a [00:03:00] specific vehicle. Honestly, they seems like they could. I wouldn’t say care less, but it just was a totally different approach.
So I think CarMax has answered this question. They help. You buy and she
Chris: talks over and over. Something that we’ve heard from Alan did something we’ve heard from Donald Miller is the importance of allowing yourself to be a guide for the customer, for the client, where you’re helping them by educating them, teaching them, and she asks a question when a potential client comes your direction.
What is it that they really want from you? And a couple of things stood out to me is that one is that they want to know that the playing field, if you will, that in your niche, whatever it is, that your business or your competitors and the playing field, and you can help them understand it, even if it means that they go a different direction.
I like that one. But this other piece, Pete, that I brought up to you that really just captured my attention is the [00:04:00] decision maker. Whether that’s a small group or a single person, usually it comes down to one person. The stakes are high for them. If they’re buying a service or product, that’s gonna change the way that their company works because change rattles people even if we think it shouldn’t.
And that’s why she says 40 to 60% of sales pitches end and no decision because no decision means just keeping the status quo safe.
Peter: Keep doing what you’re doing.
Chris: Yeah, so if I’m to step out and do something bold with a new product or service. Mm-hmm. Even if it works well in the end. The change alone can create stress for the person who makes the decision
Peter: be clear.
We’re talking about what she calls considered purchases. So these are things that are not, and I think the one of the hallmarks of that, of a considered purchase is something you’re not doing all the time. If, if you go to the store and pick up some ice cream, you’re gonna glance in the thing, see what they got, and oh, they got Ben and Jerry’s [00:05:00] Cherry Garcia.
Okay, I’m done. But if you are, if it’s a considered purchase, I think about it in terms of our clients. So I think about we have, uh, remodeling contractors or design build companies work with roofing companies, dental practices and lawyers, CPAs. Anything that is going to take a moment to think about and generally it’s something that you haven’t purchased all the time.
You only purchase it, think about a roof. You may only do it once the whole time you own a home. So that’s the, just to put up the correct sort of context into the conversation around a sales pitch. I don’t think I need a sales pitch for a, again, a court of, uh, a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. But yeah, there are, in the book she talks about.
Some common approaches, and one of the things that I noticed is within sales pitch, she does talk about story quite a bit and she talks about these four common approaches [00:06:00] to storytelling. In a sales pitch, and I was curious if you had any thoughts on that. That was in the second chapter of her, of her book.
She talks about the, the, a couple different ways you can do it. One of ’em is the walkthrough where you just walk through the product and that’s a very common. Strategy. Right? And then she’s got the the problem solution pitch, and then the vision narrative. And then she actually calls out the hero’s journey.
She does. So what did you think about what she says about the hero’s journey, if you’re not familiar with that, is a, the cornerstone of what Donald Miller uses in building a StoryBrand?
Chris: Yeah. She has this statement while she says, while engaging in story driven, it’s sometimes Mrs. Focusing on the actual decision making process and [00:07:00] understanding the alternatives.
When I read that, I had to pause and read it two or three times to fully digest what she’s getting at. You are wanting to position yourself as the hero, not the hero, but as the guide to the hero, your client, that person is there. However, sometimes we can go so quickly into you are the hero. You’re not the hero, you’re the guide.
Your customer, your client is the hero. And we go there without understanding the decision making process that our customer client is having to go through to get there and understand it. She does give a shout out to the power of storytelling and narrative. Structure of your sales pitch, which obviously I believe in, and I think that’s very important.
But I do think sometimes that we go too quickly into that explanation of here’s who you are, here’s who they are with [00:08:00] skipping over that decision making process. Mm-hmm. Here’s the key to it. The decision making process may be the reason people say no or they say nothing. Mm. Right. You feel like you’ve done this great job with your product, your service, and your sales pitch, but the decision making process may actually be the reason they’re hesitant to say.
Okay, let’s do this. And so you can position them correctly. You can help them position themselves with the client in a great way. However, if you don’t understand that decision making process, chances are they’re going to say status quos better than changing everything up.
Peter: Right? And the decision making process that she refers to in the context of a B2B sale is you have somebody who.
Was probably picked within the organization to go find the alternatives, review the alternatives, and then recommend a, a solution. So in, we’re talking [00:09:00] about bigger organizations, but, and then the other, so that person is your champion, who obviously you want to answer questions for in, in that, but. In the context of the enterprise sale, there are other people she identified.
You could have a board of directors, you could have, so there could be some dynamics going on there that you are not even aware of. You could have a CFO who is just looking for. Very specific numbers, dollar crunching, what’s this gonna cost us? And then one of the other constituents she talks about in the decision making process that you might again not be aware of, is the users and the champion can help you get your sale done.
All these other folks they primarily serve. Ultimately they’re gonna approve, but they can also. Blockers. So you have to [00:10:00] explore who’s involved in the decision making process in order to make sure you’re answering each one of their questions and you’re arming your champion with everything they need to to to do that satisfactory.
Chris: Your sales pitch to them needs to equip them to be able to effectively sales pitch to their organization. So a, a good example of this as we’re talking about it, we recently at an office space that I work at. Needed to update the phones. And there’s probably 45 desktop phones from 2017 on those desks.
And the question came in, is it time for us to switch and acknowledge that all of our workers primarily use their cell phone? Now they don’t use a desk phone. Of course, the big question was, well, how on earth then can we transfer calls? And Ziploc came in with a solution for that. And they said, we have a way that this [00:11:00] works.
Uh, you can turn it on, do not disturb. But instead of having programmed your desk phones to go to your cell phone, you cut out the middleman and your cell phone becomes the direct line. So the question came is, why would we do that? Let save $16,000 right off the top. Wow. But secondly, most of us were going through the pain of reprogramming our desk phones to go to our cell phones.
Hmm. But in the end, we were answering calls on our cell phones because people would bypass the main call center. So in that the point person who had to make that decision knew as soon as I say yes, and we move away from traditional phones, I’m gonna have to educate everyone in the office about how to use.
So it took, I was really proud of them ’cause they took two months to work with Zippy to pull that trigger at the right time where it was the least chaotic and it was really good. So that’s the kind of thing [00:12:00] that you have to remember. There’s high stakes for that decision maker. Even if it’s saving the company money or taking them forward.
It’s high stakes because of people, like everyday people that are gonna have to use it.
Peter: Yeah. And that, that brings up one. Core point that she makes as well is that when you are, in many cases, when you are presenting a considered purchase in a sales pitch, the number one alternative is do nothing. And it is, I don’t wanna even, you could decide to do nothing.
I wouldn’t necessarily call it apathy. There is decision apathy as well, but it’s safer in many cases to. Do nothing
Chris: and it’s, uh, something you’re battling. What I want to go through her eight points. She said, all of this begins with insight. You need to know your what you do, what you sell, what you do for people.
The insight you need to be an educator of your field of expertise. Secondly, alternatives. You need to [00:13:00] understand the alternatives that any person you’re selling to can look at and legitimately choose. If they don’t like your product or your service, then the third one is to talk about your perfect world.
In a perfect world, here’s how our product or service helps them and answers it solves a problem they have, and I love that Alan Di brings the same idea up. Uh, do Miller brings the same idea up is your product or service needs to solve a problem that they have.
Peter: It needs to be a painkiller, not a not supplements.
Chris: Not a pain point.
Peter: Yeah. People buy, what do they say? People buy painkillers. They buy Tylenol way more often than they buy vitamins and supplements. Then the fourth
Chris: thing, and here’s the key, the fourth thing is the introduction. Now, as you and I were talking about when we got on before you’re ever talking to a potential client or buyer.
You’re doing the insight, the alternatives, and the perfect world thinking before you ever [00:14:00] go to them and introduce your product. And a lot of companies just don’t take the time to get those first three done, and she does a great job with this. Then after that, you have differentiation between the competition and yourself.
What makes you stand out? And then she has step six as proof. You better back up what you sell with what you’d said it would do, so that they have proof that what they purchased was worth it. And then you need to be prepared in to answer the objections. And she talks about that preemptively to answer the objections.
And then the last one is the final ask. So between introducing. Your product or service. Mm-hmm. And asking them are another four steps. So if, if you look at that process that she goes through, she really makes you think about what the people who are on the other end of this thing are hearing and feeling and experiencing.
And the psychology of that might be the most powerful thing that she brings to the [00:15:00] table. Mm. Is understanding the psychology of the cell.
Peter: The point about, I wanna jump back to a couple things. One thing, she talks about insight, so you wanna share your insight. In our case as a marketing company, one of the insights that I think we’ve developed over the years is that.
Most of the types of companies that we work with understand the value of marketing. They’ve established a brand, they’ve established a reputation, but they also fundamentally understand because they probably tried it in the past, that they’re not capable of doing it themselves. Like the DIY approach is a fail.
I would say a hundred percent of the clients that we work with have said. We know we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the ability to do it ourselves. We want somebody who [00:16:00] we can partner with to do it for us, but we want to be actively involved. Right. So that’s I think one of the insights that I’ve come up with is with respect to our marketing services, is.
We can talk about different marketing approaches and things like that, but the end of the day, our job will be to hold our client’s hand and do a lot of the tactical execution pieces and use. Their thoughts and ideas for the higher level strategic thinking. For example, we put together buying guides for our clients, and a lot of times we’ll sit down with them and say, okay, like a roofing company, what are the, what kind of questions are people asking you and.
The knowledge, the high level knowledge comes from them, and then we’re just tactically putting it together and then packaging it up, making it look pretty, and then putting it in the right places. So it’s one of the insights that we [00:17:00] have is that the people that I think we work best with have recognized the value of having somebody else do a lot of the heavy lifting.
For them.
Chris: Yes. Yeah. And when you’re able to come alongside a, a client or another business with your services and say, look, this is gonna make your life easier at the fraction of a pri of a, at a fraction of the cost, it would require for you to hire an expert to be on staff to do all of this.
Peter: Yeah.
Chris: Then once they see that, then they can understand, oh.
This came up, let’s look at this in the, a simpler form of your services. A fencing company. Mm-hmm. So we hired a fencing company. My neighbors actually hired a fencing company to do the fence, and they asked us to pay half of the shared fence. And my first thought was, is I built fences before. I think I.
We’ll save money and I’m gonna help build this fence. So I started putting pen to paper and looking at the quote that they’d given me, I think it was [00:18:00] $7,600 for our specific lot. And if I were buying everything myself and doing it, I couldn’t get the cost below $5,200. No matter which I, so then I was asking myself, is their labor and their expertise worth $2,400?
And my conclusion was absolutely not to mention the personal pain. I would feel
Peter: right now,
Chris: the reason I bring this illustration up is a lot of times when you’re talking with a company, they haven’t thought through the alternatives. What means if they say no? If they say no to making change, they need to remember why they called you in the first place.
We call these pain points. Why did you pick up the phone and call? Because something in your system was bringing a pain point on a regular enough basis that [00:19:00] somebody said, we’ve gotta do something about this. We gotta make a change. And a lot of times when you get into money and commitment, they just need to be reminded that they picked up the phone for a reason, helping them remember that pain point.
Remember, without pain, nobody makes change. We don’t change anything without pain.
Peter: Right?
Chris: There’s a reason they called
Peter: there. That’s a perfect segue into the, uh, second area. That she talks about. Again, this is in the sales pitch, she talks about alternatives and she’s not talking, she’s talking about talking about your competitors, but she’s talking about approaches and her suggestion, which I think is strong, is to position competitors.
You don’t need to name competitors unless it’s just very obvious that your customer has already. Considered a particular competitor. She said, consider approaches, right? Mm-hmm. In our [00:20:00] case, again, just going back in your case with the fence, right? It’s, so here’s an one, one alternative or one approach is just to not do anything about the fence and let it fall down, or two is to DIY it.
That’s an approach, right? And maybe there’s some. Other related approach where you could find somebody who’s doing fences on the weekend, who’s a fly by night kind of company who promises to do it real cheap. So you have like your super cheap alternatives there, right? Of course, if anything goes wrong, good luck.
Then there are other alternatives, right? You could go with some brand name or some of the big companies that we hear advertised on the radio all the time. I guarantee you their quotes are gonna be more expensive and you’re, you’re paying to some degree. You may be paying for more than you need. [00:21:00] I don’t know, maybe.
So I like that thought about when you talk about your competitors, which is step two. Just talk about it as alternatives and alternative approaches, not specific name competitors.
Chris: She uses the phrase competitive alternatives and helping them understand, yeah, you don’t need to throw anybody under the bus for you to be successful.
And she goes from there to a couple of points that I think are really valuable is to help you understand your unique capabilities and your differentiated values. So for example, if we talk about biz marketing, for example, we have a team approach. We don’t have one expert. Who’s saying, I can do all of this.
I’m a jack of all traits,
Peter: right?
Chris: We have a team approach with five or six different specialists that are coming in and working together as a team, and that is definitely, in our opinion, a unique [00:22:00] capability. As opposed to some firms that we know that are one person, now, that one person may have fantastic marketing skills and abilities, but get, chances are they don’t have the bandwidth of the coding, the messaging, the creating, the, the ability to create the images that a team like.
This marketing would have Sure, with your company or company you’re working with. So that differentiated value helps your customer understand what she refers to as your best fit customers. Now, this is a really key thing here. Who are your best fit customers? Every company knows what it’s like to go into business or sell a product or service to a client, and you get into it and you realize this was not.
A good fit. And often you may make the decision purely based on financial revenue. However, for your own [00:23:00] sanity and your company’s own sanity, yeah, you really do need to ask the question, is this customer a good fit for what we do and for what our team brings to the table? Because a bad client can eat up such enormous amounts of bandwidth that you find yourself.
Well, it’s sucking the life out of your co, out of your company. Yeah, and that’s scalable. Boy, that can be for a company with two employees or a company with 200,000 employees where it’s a big thing to deal with. There’s a funny thing I want to just bring into this conversation. Yeah. Is, a couple weeks ago in Seattle, the CTAC airport got hacked and it, it just became a disaster.
Right. I was talking to one of the Alaska Airlines employees because they. Fared through it pretty well, and I asked the question, I said, how did you guys do so well? And she made the comment, she said, we have been complaining to our company for a couple years now that we have the oldest [00:24:00] computers in the entire airport.
Okay. And we need to upgrade. Everybody else had upgraded, said ironically, the age of their computers was the thing that prevented their computers from getting hacked. And so now it’s created this whole conversation about should we even update? Now they obviously you have to upgrade technology to stay in competition.
Mm-hmm. It’s raised a new conversation. Whoever makes that sell is gonna have to come in and explain how the new technology is similar enough to the old technology to prevent the hacking. Now just think about that and get your brain around. Yeah. If you’re trying to sell Alaska Airlines Yeah. A massive new computer overhaul.
Yeah. You’re gonna have to sit in their seat of what they just experienced. ’cause they’re old and slow outperform the nude.
Peter: Yeah. So it’s not so it, it’s probably a smaller. Subset of alternatives that would be available in that case. [00:25:00] One, one thing that I did like about her talking about your differentiated value, which is what we’re talking about here, is when you have given your insight into the marketplace, the insight is all.
Always predicated on your differentiated value. So when you’re talking about your unique insight, like I was talking about biz marketing and what we’ve found to work with respect to clients. That, that, that insight that we’re sharing and that’s, that may not be a good example of an insight that a customer wants to hear.
They may want to hear something about marketing that’s actually working. Perhaps I would talk about, we found that a, the, there’s all kinds of shiny new objects that come up. From time to time in marketing, there’s TikTok, there’s Twitter, there’s any number of things, shiny objects. Everybody thinks they need to be [00:26:00] doing all of them.
We’ve found that focusing on those solutions or channels that gets the message in front of the potential customer is the only way to go. We would rather do that consistently. Then jump all over the place trying different things so that our approach, we may seem a little fashioned, if you will, but we we’re not ready to just jump onto, we’re very aware of all these things, but we’re not ready to just jump onto the latest shiny objects and say, you need to do that.
So that’s our insight and we found that to be highly successful, we save our clients a lot of money by not doing that. And the point is, is that is. Highlighting what differentiates us. So we’ve said our insight is bouncing around from all these different marketing approaches is not the way to go. A slow and steady wins the race, doing cornerstone content, [00:27:00] having a solid website, a solid newsletter approach, email approach, and all that is really.
What we’ve found that works. So then you get down to our differentiated value. We’re ready to say that’s, and this is what we provide. So I think that, I like the way that she sets it up. She uses that insight as the setup. Yeah. Then you get to the differentiated value. They’ve already heard this before, right?
In the context of the market, not necessarily in the context of you as a supplier. And
Chris: she wraps up with this great, uh, three sentences I think. She says, the key to successful sales lies in understanding and addressing your customer’s needs from their perspective. It’s crucial to position yourself as a knowledgeable guide rather than just a seller providing.
Insights and options that align with your customer’s priorities. These lessons underscore a shift from traditional selling techniques [00:28:00] to a more informed customer-centric approach, emphasizing the need for sales professionals to be educators and guides in their interactions with customers. And I know why Alan Dibb, who has certified biz marketing for what we do in business coaching.
Had her on his podcast is because what she is saying there is in alignment with lean marketing, with the one page sales, uh, plan, and goes through and helps you understand the importance of truly valuing your customer’s needs. So we loved it. Great read and a great listen, by the way, if you get the audio
Peter: book as well.
Yeah, that I highly recommend it. I will mention, because she talks about it, she has another book that she wrote before this book called Obviously Awesome, where she’s talking about positioning of your product or service and. She does refer to that in the book and saying it says you need to, there is [00:29:00] some amount of positioning that you need to do.
So that book was called, obviously Awesome, the two Go Together. She wrote obviously awesome, and then realized people didn’t have a way to turn that. Positioning statement into an actual sales pitch. So this is more of a practical guide for creating sales pitches. Goldman, this is, this has been awesome to get together again.
Again, the book is Sales Pitch. April Dunford is the author, and if you would like help with marketing, not necessarily sales pitch, we can certainly help you get through that as well. But if you help with your marketing, we are offering a free consultation. Go to our website. And we have a book consultation button on our website.
Click on that and you’ll see a calendar and you can schedule a, a meeting with one of us and we will, we will meet with you and try to understand your needs better and also offer our perspective on the [00:30:00] market and how we can help you. Go and succeed. Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life.
Done well with Peter. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.
