"40 to 60% of B2B purchase processes end in no decision 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 old thing we were..."

"make the decision to do today my guest is April Dunford April is the world's foremost authority on product positioning she's the author of the bestselling book obviously awesome which is my favorite b..."

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"tools or trying to run your own experiments through a clunky marketing tool when I was at Airbnb one of the things that I loved most about working there was our experimentation platform where I was ab..."

"thing forever and it's and that was like a year ago it feels like a lifetime but it was about a year ago but what you've done with it is amazing right like the growth in it and everything else like it..."

"for this conversation is for listeners to leave this podcast with better skills at pitching and selling their product which I think every product leader and founder will want to do and get better at h..."

"and they weren't all that great and for the most part what the what was happening in the sales pitch is there was no positioning going on in the sales pitch at all the sales pitch was essentially a pr..."

"let me give you an example and I'll do before and after what this would look like um so I work with these folks help Scout and so they're in the customer service space so think zenes or you know whate..."

"you know they they don't care about any of that and and so they're all about driving the cost down so if we look at help Scout in their positioning the alternatives to help Scout are a handful of thin..."

"digital business comes in and they say hi we're helps coat let me show you how to log in let me show you all the features look there's a shared inbox thing there that's really great oh look you know w..."

"here's how that pitch would look like customer comes in and help Scout says Hey digital business uh you know we work with a lot of companies like you and I'm going to show you the product but before w..."

"case Insight is hey customer service is just different for digital businesses and and this is really a growth driver not a cost center so we need to think about customer service in a different way tha..."

"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 differentiate..."

"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..."

"askk cool I wanted to actually talk about objections because I imagine going through this companies often don't agree with what you're saying and I wonder how you handle that so you're going in this l..."

"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 b..."

"that is that part of what we're doing in that setup is what salese 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 clien..."

"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 tha..."

"this stuff that I 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 they've Googled around and they've lo..."

"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 buye..."

"get are these buyers come in they're overwhelmed with all this information they come in and they they sit in our sales process and we overwhelm them even more with more features and more information a..."

"know what now's not a good time let's not do it now let's do it next year we just we just just delay it because that is the safe risk-free thing for that person who's on the hook to make the decision ..."

"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 saying nope I'm not buying nothing and in fact that's true 60% of ..."

"worse so they are less likely to close the deal if you throw that in and the the idea is that they're already stressed out and you're just putting more stress on them by pressuring them by saying oh t..."

"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..."

"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 ..."

"it integrates with Salesforce and like you start with I just one of the best community form software because we're trying to build something really different and unique and you end up with like okay 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..."

"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 short list and you don't get to deal cooking but once the deal is cooking it is on you to arm t..."

"deal moving forward how do you actually do that is it ask them what are all the concerns you're hearing is it ask the individual stakeholders what are your B concern if we're really smart we already k..."

"for this to be useful because smaller companies don't have all these reps and they may not have the resources to do all these things you're describing who is this framework useful for can you use this..."

"excited by and so I don't necessarily need you know 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 lin..."

"question if you have a sales team they know the answer of this question like you know what would a customer do if we didn't exist they know and then we get to the next step is well so what do we have ..."

"pitch I can translate that into my insight my insight is every day your rep's not making quota cost you money so if we really want to solve sales enablement don't we really want to have something wher..."

"trying to come in and actually give credit where credit is due with the other approaches because typically the other approaches work just fine for other kinds of companies like if you're really small ..."

"measurement tools built specifically for B2B in Tech LinkedIn generated a 2 to 5x higher return on ad spend than any other social media platforms audiences on LinkedIn have two times the buying power ..."

"overtaken by fast followers so if we look at the CRM Market SEO 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 ..."

"at this company we were we thought we were enterprise software we narrowed it down to CRM for investment Banks and so we literally Drew bowling pins for our investor and said lead pin is CRM for inves..."

"the universe so it's where I say okay we've had our little discussion about the pros and cons of the other Alternatives and we say so look so are you with me man like can we all agree that a really go..."

"would be on a beach drinking out of a coconut oh man let's let's make it happen um okay so that's the setup what do you call the second part again uh the it's it's the follow through which is really f..."

"in testing that are really important so one is we absolutely need sales involved in building the pitch if we don't have sales involved in building the pitch the pitch is never going to stick like the ..."

"through the pipeline because these customer are understanding your value better understanding why to pick you better it's just easy low hanging fruit to do when it when the economy is bad to give peop..."

"that's G to be just a couple more questions one is to motivate people to do this what kind of impact have you seen at companies that invest this time and rethink the way they pitch well so you know pe..."

"going I think that's not unusual I worked at a company where we did it in-house we we where I was the VP marketing and we within two quarters had doubled the revenue just by tightening up the pitch ju..."

"impact on how much stuff survives down the pipe and again if folks want to go deep into the positioning step your first book obviously awesome is a great guide and our first podcast episode goes throu..."

"so the thing the thing with that framework is I do think it works in certain conditions but but again I think the conditions might be kind of edgy so there there's a couple of things that I think are ..."

"that's the first thing the second thing is you know this idea of starting with a trend on the surface it looks kind of good but the problem is it often the trend is not unique to you so everybody else..."

"unique to you and ideally what we want is something that we can say that none of our competitors can and typically you know a trend is something outside of our control it's out in the world and everyb..."

"anything like there's lots of ways to do everything and so I think people should mess around with stuff and for any of these Frameworks I think they should look at it and and see if it works for them ..."

"shoes but it was good I got the job that is an excellent segue to our next question which is is there a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really like right now I'm kind of into like..."

"start you Google it these are beautiful pens and then if you haven't written with a fountain pen it's it takes a minute to get used to it but then it's like gosh it just feels great like you'll never ..."

"everything's cool that super resonates and as much as you say that to yourself it's still hard to convince yourself of that sometimes right but that is a really good motto I'm going to steal that myse..."

"over here like nothing's a big deal it's clear where all that comes from now yeah final question you do a lot of traveling you do a lot of speaking you go to a bunch of cities I'm curious just what is..."

"French people oh man sounds dreamy Paris I see how that could be a favorite April we I think we accomplished everything we were hoping to accomplish I think everyone that has listened to this podcast ..."