Ep 555 How to Avoid an Earn Out and Get Your Employees to Sell Like You, Featuring the World's Leading Positioning Expert, April Dunford

Hi there and welcome back to another edition of Built to Sell Radio, the podcast designed to help you punch above your weight in a negotiation to sell your company. I'm the executive producer, Colin Morgan and if you're founder who is also your company's best salesperson, selling your business is going to be tough. You're unlikely to get full value and very little of it up front. Most of your deal will be structured as an urn out or an equity rollover, mechanisms designed to keep you, the rainmaker locked in. They're golden handcuffs and for a freedom seeking founder, it's like trading one prison for another. The secret is to get your employees to sell like you do. The problem is, they can't tell your company's story like you can, nobody can. And that's the problem April Dunford gets called into fix. April's the world's leading authority on positioning. She spent 25 years as an executive at 7 B2B tech companies and startups. Businesses acquired for a combined total of more than $2 billion and her books, obviously awesome and sales pitch, have become the standard playbooks for winning deals. And in this conversation, she explains how to extract the pieces of your founder's story so a brand new rep can tell it without sounding like a fraud. And why the positioning that wins customers can fail you completely when you're pitching to an acquire. Without further ado, here is John Moorlow with April Dunford. Enjoy. [Music] April Dunford, welcome to Build the Cell Radio. Okay, it's great to be here. So we do this little huddle of value builder every morning. We do like, you know, what's up and what's everybody's priority for the day. It came to me and my priority was interviewing you. And I said, I get to interview with my heroes today. And so everybody kind of rolled their eyes and said, Oh, here we go. But no, it all is serious. You are one of, you know, Jack Trout and Al Ries wrote positioning the value of your mind in the early 70s, I think, right? I read that. Yeah, that's kind of late 70s. I think the original initial edition came out 81. But there's an article before that. And blah, blah, blah. But that changed my the way I think about marketing totally. And then I haven't really been moved since I read your book, obviously awesome. And then sales pitch. So you're in great company. I'm so thrilled to be talking to you about positioning. Yeah, yeah. As we talked about up my third, so two themes I want to explore. The first is for a lot of our listeners. They are probably one of, if not the best salesperson in their company. And that's both a blessing at a curse. It means they're probably super efficient and selling super good at selling at the same time makes their business hard to sell and not the less valuable. And that is required. And then the second theme I thought would explore is this idea of how positioning changes when you're trying to sell to a customer versus sell to an acquire or an investor. So those are the kind of the two themes I thought would explore. Let's walk through an example where you have a founder who is the primary salesperson for their company. And they don't necessarily maybe think of themselves as a salesperson. But if you look at the revenue at the end of the year and you say, how did this revenue all get get get done or get created, the founder had their hand in a lot of it. They maybe haven't codified their positioning per se. They think that's kind of fancy talk for big tech companies, but they're just doing their thing. And that for a lot of founders in that space, their number one challenge and frustration is not being able to hire salespeople. Many of them have tried hiring salespeople and they just can't get it. They can't sell as well as the founder and so the selling continues to fall back onto the shoulders of the founder. If you're in, if you're talking to someone that's sort of in that, gosh, I know what he can do it as well as I can, right? What advice would you have for someone like that? So I get to call a lot. So this is probably the number one call that I get from founders and CEOs, even a giant companies, even a giant companies that have huge sales teams. I will get this call where the CEO calls up and says, you know, April, if you put me in a room with a customer, we never lose. Not once. I close them every time. But I listen to the way the salespeople talk about this stuff and I hate it. It's nothing like the way I do it. They don't know what they're talking about. I don't know what to do. We've had people in the tree and blah, blah, blah. And we just can't get them to, you know, what do we got to do so that everybody on the sales team is telling the story in the right way. And often when you scratch down at this, there's this confusion and it's not just in sales. It's actually across sales, product, marketing and the CEO/founder in that everybody has a slightly different definition of the inputs into a good story. So for example, if I'm going to build a sales pitch or even if I'm just going to work on good positioning, which is an input to the good sales story, there's components of that. So the first one is, who are you trying to position against? Right? So you're telling the story about why pick us over the other guys? Who are the other guys? Do we all agree on that? And what's interesting to me is even if I asked that question, if I got a room full of people together and I had the CEO/sales marketing product together and said, you know, who do we compete with? You often get wildly different answers. Like what? Like, so some people, I'll give you an example. Basically in software, we'll go in and head a product, they'll say vibe coding tools. They're going to vibe code, dis thing and build it themselves by scratch. That's who we compete with. But then you look over at the head of sales and you say, have we ever lost to one of those? Head of sales will say no. No. In fact, we've never even seen one on a short list. Okay. So, doesn't mean we're never going to see them. We've got to be clear on that. Doesn't mean we shouldn't be scared about them next year and maybe be working into our product row map, how we're going to beat them next year. But do we have to position against the ghosts today right now? No. If the customer doesn't consider them competition, they're not competition. I don't have to position against them. So if I'm not clear on that, I could have marketing out there saying, hey, this is why we're better than vibe coding. When the reality is what they're really comparing you to is Excel. Why should I do this thing instead of just doing it in spreadsheet? That's really different positioning. I'd be telling a really different story if I was trying to win you over over Excel, wouldn't I? Here's the thing. First, we got to agree on, if you didn't exist, what would the customer do? This is the first question we have to answer. And we all got to be an agreement on this. Your frontline salespeople, and if you're a founder or CEO and you're doing all the selling, you got to think about what's the status quo thing we're replacing. Maybe it's Excel, maybe it's doing it manually, maybe it's a pack of interns. Who knows? Right? And then we got to beat that in order to win a deal. We also got to beat whatever ends up on the short list against us. So maybe vibe coding, maybe you could vibe code your thing. But if it never ends up on the short list, then buddy, we don't have to worry about positioning against it not yet. Not yet. Because positioning is, when you work through this with customers, you're positioning today. You're not worried about trying to position a couple of things. Or Lausia predicted in the future, right? Right. So who do you sell against today? And well, and the deal is, the deal's happening today, man. Now, can I change it? Next year, of course, of course. And if I start seeing that these vibe coding things start coming up, then I'm going to have to adjust the position you account for it. And if I predict that, you know, I look into the future and I say, and we're not seeing it yet, but it's common, then I better have the product roadmap that helps me fight against them because I know that fight is coming. But I don't need to fight to fight yet, right? There's the enemy still way over there beyond the hill. I can just forget my sword all I want, but there's nothing I'm hitting. And it's picking me away from going after the competitor that I actually do have to beat right now, to get the deals right now. Do that's that competition thing is the first thing. The second thing is I got to understand what I've got that's different than that competition. So if I narrow it down and say, look, what I'm really competing against with here is Excel spreadsheets and these two competitors, then I got to understand, well, what have I got that those guys don't have capabilities wise, right? Maybe we're smarter at this. We're better than this. We're better, but all the things you can write, you can write down all the things we're better at. And then I have to translate that into value. So you might say, you know, we're much more scalable or we do the query way faster than someone else. Blah, blah, blah. To what? Why does the customer care? So what's the value? Has that helped in the customer make money or helping the customer save money or helping the customer reduce risk? And you might say, well, we do the query faster. Well, so what? Well, so if you're in a customer service situation, you could answer the question faster. So what's that's going to do? Happy customers improve your retention, decrease the cost of service, things like that. So we have to just benefit. And then we have to then we have to lean back and say, okay, we're the only people. So we'll get to this spot where we can say, we are the only people on the planet that can deliver customers a combination of say this value and this value. And the features are underneath. This is how we get it done. Then we can lean back and say, "Okay, really only people can deliver that." But the reality is not everybody cares about that. Not everybody cares about that. Look, if I think about this fancy relationship modeling thing, I had it my CRM company. Lots of companies didn't care. So then you're like, "What are the characteristics of a target account that make them care about the stuff they can only get from me?" This is my bottom's up way of getting at what's an ideal customer look like. So in the case of that CRM company, we looked at who really cares about modeling relationships that are outside of companies. It's people that are doing this deep, deep relationship selling. So they want to know all these two people sit on a board together, but they don't actually work at the same company, things like that. And had we done that exercise at the time, we'd have known that investment banking was the way to go, because it would have been the only one that met the criteria or one of the few. If you can get your arms around that, then you can lean back and say, "I got this value. I'm trying to position it for these people. Am I a database or a business intelligence tool? Am I you a member or am I a chat?" So what's my best market category to position this thing in? Okay. So let me back up for a second. So the first step in this process that you would take this fictional founder through is, first of all, get alignment around who the competition really is. Like, who are you losing deals to and position with? That's the first step. Does a customer consider to be your competition? What does a customer consider? If you didn't exist, how would they get this problem solved? That's right. So that's step one. Step two is defining your unique capability and then what are the benefits of that? Here's the challenge that I have experienced. I'd love to have you react to this. Most of the business owners listening to this show will say, "Well, that's easy. We provide the best customer service." That's what makes this unique in the marketplaces. We provide the best service. And so all your features and widgets and all this crap you do in technology means nothing, I provide the best service. That's why our customers choose us. Yes. I get that a lot. In fact, I don't know. I can probably count of the 300, 400 companies I've worked with. I can probably count on one hand where that didn't come up as a key thing that we do. We love our customers more, man. We're treating them so great. Even big companies that you think traditionally don't do a very good job on service like IBM and Google and stuff. They'll say, "No, no, service is fantastic. Everybody tells us. We do the survey. They tell us our service is amazing." Here's a thing to think about. There's a difference between what I would call acquisition capabilities and retention capabilities. And so customer service falls into this bucket of our retention capability, meaning the customer doesn't usually get really exposed to your great customer service until after you've made the sale. Now sometimes that's not true. Sometimes you'll do a proof of concept or you'll do some kind of a, you know, mean-- Highlighter thing. Highlighter something. So they'll get a little bit of exposure to it. But in general, they don't get the full exposure to how amazing you are in customer service until after the deal's already been done. So this is more of a retention feature. It's not like it doesn't matter. It absolutely matters, right? Because they'll dump you if your service is terrible. So it matters. And if you go ask your existing customers right now, why do you love us so much? Lots of them are going to say, "I love you because of that amazing customer service." But let me tell you that's not why they picked you. It's not why they picked you in the first place because they didn't know. You said it. Your competitors said it. Everyone said it. Now they didn't pick you for that. Most of the time, it wasn't actually a factor in the actual deal, the actual initial deal. We have to be a little bit careful about this because sometimes we have this claim, but there's no way to actually prove it other than to experience it. Now you might have something about customer service that is truly differentiating. Like we do 24/7 and the other guys don't. Or we do service in eight languages and they only do one. Or we do whatever. But most of the time, it's not. Like you got to actually feel the service to experience it. So you can say it in the sales process, but it isn't going to hold all that much weight because it's really hard to prove. It's really hard to prove. So what if you had a CEO listening to this, a founder, a 30 employee company, who says, "That lady April doesn't really get it because when I go into a sales meeting, I tell them we offer the best service and they buy from me nine out of 10 times." Yeah. But what often I see when the founder does a pitch, the founder often does a really great job instinctively of pitching against the status quo thing or the big thing that the company is doing right now or the legacy thing that maybe they're using because it is the history of the company often. So often what you'll get is the founder will come in and say, "Let me tell you about why we did this business in the first place." I was working at this company and we were using this piece of garbage software and I said to myself, "That's junk. Why did they build it that way? That's so dumb. I'm going to go and build a thing that's way better than that that is going to do XYZ that I always wished the other thing would have done and that's why I built it." And that actually is a pretty cool pitch because what does it do? It defines who the competition is. It defines how you're different than the competition. It defines the value that you can deliver that the other guys can't, all that sort of stuff. And as far as the founder's concerned, they're just telling the history of the company. Right? Now, I'm the sales rep and I'm the junior sales rep. I don't know any of that stuff. And I could come in and try to recreate that story but it sounds like an idiot, right? I didn't start the company. I didn't do the thing. It wasn't my pain. They can't tell that story and hate their story to tell. So somehow what you have to do is understand the piece parts that made that story great. What was the competition? What was the competition lacking? What's the thing that you've got that the competition doesn't have? What's so special about that? What's the value you can deliver because you have that? What are the kinds of companies that really care about that? Pull those piece parts out and then build a generic sales pitch that even a brand new sales rep could run it could come in and say, look, we work with hundreds of companies that look just like you. And here's what we see. We see this and the companies are struggling with this. Do you struggle with that? Mr. XYZ? Well, yes, actually I do struggle with that. Uh-huh. And so have you tried doing it with this? Yes, we did. And it was terrible. Well, we were built to solve that problem. So we did it in a different way and here's how we did it and here's the value you're going to get. So we have to teach them to tell that story, which has the same components of the amazing founder pitch. It's just, you know, you got to tell it in a way that a person who's not the founder can actually tell it. I love that. I'm so grateful for you sharing that story because I think a lot of maybe founders don't realize they have the the Asus Bades, which is the founder story. They can tell they can pull it out of their pocket at any time and basically trump anyone with here. Let me tell you the story of how we got started, which it oozes with credibility and authenticity and and and kicks all the boxes of a great sales pitch. Here's the here's the bad thing. Here's why it was a problem. Do you guys feel that problem? Of course you do. Here's why here's why we built we built it in a completely different way. And when we did it, it solved that problem in a different way. And get a little value that the other guys can't touch like it's all the perfect staff. And most founders will tell that by gut instinct because it's you know, it's true. The story they told themselves while they were built. But your job as the founders, what I'm hearing from you April is is you've got to go beyond that bottle that and somehow basically instilled that story, the tenants, the core tenants of that story so that other people can tell it without that to see. We'll try to get them to memorize your script because frankly, it's going to just sound flat for it's 23 year old brand new sales rep to try to draw something that you weren't even born. Right. Right. You're new sales rep are going to sell like an idiot if they try to say that. Yeah. Well, what we're trying to do is extract the piece parts, which you know, again, the founders not even conscious of the piece piece parts because they've been telling this story for 10 years and they just tell it by gut and they're amazing at it, right? So, you know, so we can't even start with the founder pitch, like forget about it, right? We got it back all the way up and say, what are the piece parts? Okay, let's all get an alignment and if you didn't exist, what would we do? What do we actually have to position against? What makes us different? What's the value we can deliver? No one else can. Who's this a really good fit for? Now let's map that into a structured sales pitch that any bowzo off the street could come in and do. Like in the work that I do with clients, how I measured the sales pitch at the end because most of the people I work with, you know, they're selling a really technical thing to a really technical audience. And when we build the sales pitch at the end of the day, the test for me is, do I think I could get a deal cooking on this and I know nothing about this stuff. That's the asset test. It passes the April. If I get to get it and I say, you know what, I'm an idiot, but I think I could go in here and do a first call pitch and do it, do an okay enough job that we would get the second call. And usually we can get to that. So if it works for me, then it's for sure it's going to work with the sales rep who knows more than I do. Okay. So you've I don't know if it's a controversial take, but your positioning framework starts with competitive alternatives. What do we have that others don't? And there's another school of thought which kind of flips it on its head, which is basically, okay, let's understand the customer. Let's really genuinely understand the customer. What are their pain points? What are the challenges that they have and then let's build our positioning based on fulfilling the challenges the customer has? So starting with the customer challenge, you're doing the opposite. You're starting with like the company. What do we do wet better than anybody else? So for folks who are like, that's wrong, that's wrong. Yeah. You've got to be customer-centric. You've got to lead with a customer problem. Not with what makes you, what's your rebuttal to that? Well, so I do think this is a very customer-centric thing because we're not starting with us. We're starting with, how does a customer think about how to solve the problem? The problem's baked in, right? Here's the thing. Here's the problem with the problem. Like when I started, when I started, I was a junior product marketer. We had to build sales pitches and we used to always start with the customer problem. So my first product I was working on was a database, you know, databases in the land. And so we would define the problem as you got a lot of data and you need to manage that. It's a fundamental problem that a database solves, but guess what? Every database solves that problem. So I can say, look, there's lots of data and you need to manage it, right? Right. Okay. Well, we do that. That's a shitty sales pitch. Like, fundamentally doesn't answer the question, why us versus other guys? So instead what we're doing is we're starting with this idea of, and again, this wouldn't work if you weren't already in market and you hadn't already sold a whole bunch of stuff, my process doesn't work. This isn't the process for figuring out what new thing you're going to go build. This is not what this thing is for at all. But I'm already in market. I'm already selling stuff. I already have a product. If I say, if we didn't exist, what would the customer do baked into that is the problem. It's baked in. And this is the fundamental question that a lot of your works that's around is this, if we didn't exist, what would the customer do? Right. Like, if you, if you ever eat clean, Christian's and stuff just be done. This was kind of the big aha moment I had about this. You know, when I, when I broke things down into component pieces, I was like, where do we start? Like do we, like do we start with problems? We start with this. We start with, and I wasn't sure. And there's a very famous story in Clayton, Christian's in the milkshake story. And so this story is, there's a fast food restaurant and they got a milkshake and they're trying to figure out how do we make the milkshake better. And so they're looking at all the sales data for milkshakes and they discover in the sales data that they sell a lot of milkshakes in the drive through in the morning. And they're like, what the heck is going on? So they send a researcher out to go interview people and they're in the drive through buying a milkshake at 7 a.m. And they're like, what are you doing? And the people said, well, you know, I got a long drive and it's really boring and I'm really hungry. And so I can't eat at breakfast sandwich because I'll mess up my suit and I can't have a donut same thing. And it's a long boring drive like the donut is over really fast and I want something, you know, so I got a milkshake. It does all the things, right? It fits in my cup holder. It's nice and neat. It's filling. It's kind of entertaining for more than five seconds. It takes all the thing. Now, and so what they did was they made the milkshake thicker and they made sure it fit in the cup holder and there's all these other things, right? And I really got thinking about that story. I was like, you know what they really discovered there is the competitive alternative because everyone in the room at this fast food company was saying, what's the competitive alternative coke? They were thinking donuts. They weren't thinking breakfast sandwiches. So what they learned in the research was, if you didn't exist, what would you do? You'd buy a donut. Oh, Lee. Well, that's different. And we just learned a whole lot about the problem, right? And then you got that a donut doesn't have, well, last longer or whatever, like, you know, if I worked through that problem for that, the milkshake example, we'd get to the right positioning on that. So that was a moment for me. I was like, well, if I really understand the competitive alternatives, then the job to be done is baked into that. So that's where I got to, you know, if now if we haven't sold any yet, it's a brand new product. Well, I don't know. I'm just guessing. But if I have sold a lot and I have salespeople that talk to the people that are buying every day, like, same thing. If I didn't have salespeople, they were just buying off the website. I don't know what the alternatives are. I'm just guessing. But if I have salespeople, they say, well, they say who else is on the short list or they'll say, oh, we're talking a work all in. How come you don't do the thing that or you know, so, so I know, well, so on the short list, I know what we're replacing. We've had a bunch of sales conversations. I know what I'm dealing with here. So if I know what that is, then I can put my stake in the ground there and say, okay, that's my stake in the ground. This is what I got to beat in order to do a deal or put another way. This is what I got to position against. So that's why we start there. But it's weird. I know. Like most people know it's like, why wouldn't we start with thinking about the problem? And it's like, well, we all solve the same problems. It's really good. It's very, it's somewhat counterintuitive to sort of marketing 101, but it's actually, I think, I think kind of brilliant. So again, if you're the CEO, but it's like it comes up all the time. And particularly when I first started consulting, everybody was like, well, that's wrong. We shouldn't be paying attention to what the competitors are doing and trying to copy the competitors. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's not at all. Because they're thinking about competitors. I'm talking about alternatives, right? Alternative approaches to the problem. So when you're saying competitor, you're thinking the other company up the street that looks just like you. And I'm thinking about Excel or a couple of interns or writing this all down on paper or donut in the case of the market. I don't know. Right. Right. So if you're a CEO doing most of the selling, you nail it when you're in a room, but you're underlings cats, the first step is to number one, define what would your customers do if you didn't exist? Right. And then what is the unique benefit that you can offer the unique feature and then translate that into a benefit and then figure out who it is in the world that cares a lot about that benefit? That's right. What does that company's care? That's the basic framework. And then once we have that, we can map it into a sales story. So when I started doing this work, I thought, well, we could just do the positioning bit. That's all the marketers need. Right. So if you're the marketer, you don't have to pitch this thing. Like, I just have to do value propositions and do copy on the website. You make the pretty pictures lady and we'll do the hard work of actually selling it. Right. Well, you tell me, well, this is the value. This is the differentiated value. I'm like, great, I can go run and do copy. If you tell me, these are the people we're going after. This is the value. This is who the enemy is. Whatever I can go right copy. But what I found was that if we didn't translate it into a story that the sales people could do, then the positioning would die in the gap between marketing and sales. Sales would just show them all the features. That's a lot of stuff. But you stepped in and said, and said, no, I'm going to teach you how to sell. Like, I'm going to teach you. We're going to teach you how to, once we have this positioning, I'd teach you how to build the story around it. So the story part, I think, is really key because a lot of times, like again, going back to this idea of the problem. Like when I first was learning how to do sales pitches, nobody really taught me how to do pitches. We just had pitches were around, right? And if we put in a new version of the product, we would just update the pitch a little bit. We never threw the pitch out. We never started from scratch. And these pitches were looking at the back of it now. These pitches were terrible. But what they really were, we're just like, we were going to show you as much stuff as the product as we could. And we would just assume that you could figure out why that was important and why you should pick us versus the other guy. We're just going to show you all the things and then you're going to go, wow, that's great. We need to buy this. And if we were being really fancy, we'd talk about this problem up front. So in the case of my database thing, we'd say, look, enterprise data is exploding. We showed this chart, you know, like you don't buy 2020, whatever, you're going to have a billion, a billion terabytes of data. So you need a database, right? One that scales, we all scale, you know, like, and then we would show you all the things and we'll hope you buy it. And then I got this job at IBM and when I was at IBM, they, they, they, I was at least releasing this new product and they said, well, you've got to, you got to build a sales pitch for this thing. And I said, okay, I can do that. No problem. And then they said, no, but you got to build it according to this, this IBM sales pitch structure. And I was like, oh, boy, never seen one of those before. Let's see it. And the structure was horrifying. It was like 59 pieces. And oh, my gosh, it was so overkill. And I really hated it a lot, but I built a bunch of pitches with it. And, and a lot of it was very specific to IBM, like just enormous deals that took years to close, you know, and so the way they do a pitch is really particular back then. It's different now, but back then the way they did a pitch was very specific to IBM. But there was two things I really loved in the pitch. One was the setup bit like they would never come in with this problem. They would come in and so, you know, I mean, IBM and they're selling a database too, right? So the way they would start the database pitch is they'd come in and say they would talk about IBM's point of view on the problem. Different. Now at the time we had this database, we were selling it as Oracle. And our big thing that was differentiating was our database was super open. Like it played nice with any application and anything you might want to do. So this data would be really available to anybody else anywhere. Oracle's big thing was they never sold the database on itself because they wanted to sell you the application too. So those two things are really tightly bundled. It was a very close system, but it was a little bit cheaper, a little bit easier to manage. You know, they had their own set of benefits. So we would come in and we knew what our benefits were. So we would start the pitch with our point of view on the problem, which, you know, framed the problem in a way that would that would advantage us. So we'd walk in and say, data, you're saving a lot of data in the customer and say, yep, we're saving a lot of data. Well, in fact, we said we did the research like by 2020, whatever you're going to be saving blah, blah, pair by the data. Yeah, it's a lot of data. And then we'd say, so why you saving all that data? Right? Well, look, here's what we see. You're saving all that data because you think it's going to be a strategic asset. You're going to do something with that data. You're going to do predictive analytics with that data. You're going to do machine learning. You're going to do AI with that data, right? You're going to do all kinds of stuff. Things we haven't even thought of yet. How, what tools will you use to manipulate that data or get the value out of that data? No one knows. Tools that haven't even been invented yet. So if you're going to go save all that data, where are you going to save it? It better be something that's really, really open. That makes it really easy to use all that data. Otherwise, you're never going to get the value of all that data you were paying all that money for to save in the first place, right? So we'd start to pitch like that. So that's not talking about the problem. It's our perspective on the problem. And our perspective on the problem is openness is everything, man. And if you agree with me, then I got the deal. It's mine because I'm the only one that's got that. If you say, you know what, we don't care that much about openness. We're just really trying to meet the budget here, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, or whatever you might say, but then we're not going to win that deal because we're not cheaper, right? Oracle's cheaper. Who will buy Oracle at the time? Right? This is way back when. So we would start the pitch with this framing that you could only get out. If you really, really understood what our differentiated value was. So if we start with the positioning and I really understand what my differentiated value is, then I can do a setup on the pitch that makes that thing everything. And I'm basically saying, look like, you know, we look, we worked lots of companies. We understand the problem behind the problem here. This isn't about saving a lot of data. This is about extracting value out of your data. So if you're thinking about it that way, we're the only game of town. So I think the key to doing a really great pitch is figuring that part out. It's, it's a great jumping off winner segue to the kind of the idea that starts or the story that starts the book sales pitch. For me, you drew me in with that story and really set up the entire process of selling and how it's different in the context of having good positioning by going to buy a toilet. Oh, it's story. Do you want to tell me this toilet story? Oh my gosh. You know, I like that story a lot, but some days I regret it because for a couple of years there, you know, people would like see me in the airport and stuff and say, Hey, it's the toilet lady. I'm like, I really want to be the toilet lady. But so here's the thing. Like I work a lot with founders and they've got technical product, you know, and they, they're selling this thing by talking about the features and, and I'm trying to convince them like, you know, you know, a lot more about your product and your offering than your buyer does because, you know, your buyer, how, the let's say you're selling a counting software, like how often you buy a counting software, like once every 10 years or something. So, you know, the buyer doesn't know the state of the art of accounting software and what possible and not possible accounting software and I don't know all this stuff. And so you go and overwhelm them with a bunch of features and, you know, you just lose them. And so I was trying to find a simple analogy for this and so I used this one for my own experience. So I bought this house and there's a bathroom in the house. It needs to get renovated. I hire this contractor. He comes in. He's renovated the bathroom. So one day he says, look, you know, we got to get a new toilet for this bathroom. So you got to go buy a toilet, like pick out what toilet you want or buy it and bring it back and whatever. I said, okay, fine. You know, like I never bought a toilet before, but I was like, fine, okay, how are we going to be able to go buy a toilet? So I go to the toilet store and salesperson comes up to me and says, can I help you? And I said, yeah, I'm here to buy a toilet. And the salesperson says, what kind of toilet do you want? And I'm like, wasn't it flushes? I can do nothing. It's just a toilet. I'm thinking, what do you mean what kind of toilet toilet? And he says, look, we got a lot of toilets. They're back there in the back corner. You know, go on back there and have a look. And there's little signs on each one and it'll tell you what the features are and how much they cost and stuff. And you tell me which one you want. I'm going to sell to you. So, okay. So, I go back to the back and there's like a thousand toilets and they all look identical. Like they're all just white toilets and they all look the same. And they've got these, but they've got features, right? And there's these things and they're talking about all this technical toilet jargon that I don't know what you think about. So they're talking about trap ways and single and dual flush technologies and scurting and I'm like, I don't know what any of these things are. I'm going to sell them costs 100 bucks and some of them cost like thousands of dollars. And I'm like, whoa, I'm not smart enough to buy a toilet. So I leave and I go home and I'm googling it, right? I'm like, I got to know how to buy a toilet. Like this is a big decision. I don't want to get toilet that breaks all the time. This would be panicking. I don't have googling it. And there's like all these, there's comparison sites. It's just like software. There's comparison sites and they're comparing all these things. And there's all these features like so many features and I don't know anything about any of them. And there's like hundreds of these things and like, there's this, there's a score on toilets. And when you go to the toilet store and they'll have this score and the score is the amount of solid waste that a toilet can handle in a single flush. And I now know that 300, 600 grams is good. But there are toilets out there that can do over a thousand grams, which is 2.2 pounds. That is the size of a little dog. And I was like, oh my god. And at that point I was like, you know what? I can't do this. I don't have time to be a toilet expert. I'm a busy person. I'm running a business here. And then I got this genius idea and the genius idea was, you know what? The old toilet wasn't broken. It was fine. It was working just fine. So you know what? We'll keep the old toilet. We'll use the old toilet. It's not perfect. It's going to quit on me at some point. But it's good enough for now because I don't have time to deal with this for now. And so this is just like software. This is exactly like software. We overwhelm the buyer with all these features. To the point where the thing they're using now seems pretty good. They're like, you know what? This seems scary and hard to make this decision because there's too many things to look at, too many things to figure out. And I'll just stick with the thing I had. And so I use this story as a, you know, as this kind of like, why is the existing, but why do you get these deals that seem to go right to the end? And then all of a sudden the customer is ghosting you. And it's because they're looking at you. They're looking at the other guys. You're saying, I got GryppleGromance. They're saying they got GryppleGromance. And you're like, I don't know. GryppleGryppleGromance. I don't know which one is better. And maybe I'll just stick with the thing I got right now. It's not perfect, but it's okay. Now in my case, the end of this story is. Like, I went the next day, like the toilet guy, the bathroom renovator guy comes back and I said, look, I went and looked at the toilets and whatever. It's too hard. And let's just use, we'll just use the existing toilet. And he looking at me and he says, lady, what are you talking about? Like we recycled it. It's gone. Like it's gone to the big bathtub in this guy. Whatever. And I was like, no, so I actually had to go buy a toilet. So I went to a different toilet store and I got a really good sales rep. And so the sales rep walks in and he says, can I help you? And I said, yeah, dude, I got a toilet emergency. I got to buy a toilet today. I don't know anything about toilets. And I need some help. And he says, he says, oh, yeah. He says toilets are hard. And I said, I said, dear, really hard. Like they're shit. He says, we don't use that word here, ma'am. It's solid waste. I'm like, yeah, it's been solid waste, buddy. Just sell me the toilet. He's like, look, I'm going to teach you how to buy a toilet. I'm like, please, do it. And he says, look, there's only three things you got to know. He says, one is quality, aesthetics. And pinnahal since I told this story, I'm trying to say, but what the last one is is quality space. So the first one is quality. He says, look, like, you know, a lot of these features, they're just measures of quality. And he says, see these ones over here? And they were all the really cheap toilets over there. He says, they don't have this. They don't have that. It's just a quality thing. He says the other ones have better qualities. They're going to last you more flushes. These are going to last you less flushes. And I said, well, who buys a low quality toilet? And he says, well, actually, a lot of toilets don't get used a lot. Maybe you have a spare bedroom or a basement bathroom or vacation property or something. Toils hardly ever get used. You could buy a really low quality toilet and it would be fine. And I said, well, interesting. I really thought about that. I said, well, look, this is a main bathroom here. Like we don't want the low quality toilet. I want the toilet high quality toilet. This is great great great He says okay the second one is aesthetics He says some people got a certain look they're going for they want a gold toilet or they want to like fancy You know whatever toilet. He says those are all high quality toilets But you're gonna pay extra for the aesthetic thing and I said look I don't have any toilet fashion requirements. So let's eliminate those so great now we're getting somewhere We eliminate low quality toilet. We eliminated those now we're down to like not fair many toilet He said the last thing is space like some of them have the Tank goes in the wall and so if you've got a really small space you put the tank in the wall and it saves you a lot of space You can get the toilet in space It's the problem is that if it breaks you're gonna have to go through the wall potentially to fix it And he says so if you have more space usually you pick the one with the toilet outside of the wall Because it'll fit and it's easier to fix and I said hi Interesting I got a pretty big bathroom. So I take the one with the toilet on the wall I said great now we're down to like three toilets. I'm like this amazing and I said well, you know Which one should I buy and the guy says look? I got a I got a cup clean with you He says I work for Toto and I'm gonna tell you to pick the Toto toilet because I believe in them to most He says but they're pretty much all the same. He says you can go home and research them and whatever whatever But people really like the Toto toilet is a couple hundred bucks more But if you just want to buy a toilet and never think about toilets again, that'd be the one I'm picking I said so give my card bought the toilet So what happened right what happened was he trying to explain every single feature to me? No, was he trying to be pushy pushy salesman? Did he come in and say buy the total toilet? No I could about one of those cheapy toilets and said well look it's in the basement Hardly ever gonna get flush. You would have happily sold me that toilet. So what he was doing was Being a guide He was teaching me how to make a smart decision that I felt good about not only did I buy it I knew why I bought it I understood the whole thing and I felt very confident and he didn't like three minutes We can do the exact same thing with the products we're selling We just have to have the guts to be able to go in map out the whole market and say look these guys are really good at this They're bad at that these guys are good at this or bad at that We built this thing because we're awesome at this. No one else can do this And if you care a lot about that you should pick us That's the way we sell stuff. I think love it love it Let's switch gears a little bit because the listeners of this show not only are trying to sell Their product or service to their customers. They are also in the early stages of trying to sell their business to either an Acquire or an investor Right, and I think in some of your writing you said that founders often make the mistake of Assuming that positioning your product for the markets for customers to buy is the same as how you might position it for an investor or acquire and I think your belief is that those two things are very different. Walk me through your thinking and how those are different or similar Yeah, so again like if we think about if we break positioning down into the components And then we run through the pieces and say I'm talking about Selling the product Versus I'm selling this thing to an investor. It's different, right? It's different because They're the definition of value is different the time frames are different the comparables are different So they're not comparing me to my competitors They're comparing me to other investments they could make right or other acquisitions they could do Because you answered your first question. What would they do if we didn't exist? That's right. It's not that they would necessarily By the product it would be that they might make a different investment. They might make a different investment So if you think about VCs VCs is is trying to answer the question is this thing going to make me hundreds of millions of dollars 10 years from now That's what a VC is trying to decide and so when you tell them the story They don't actually care that much. I mean they do but they don't care that much about what you're doing right now They care about the big vision they care about how are you going to upset this whole market and when the whole market gets Turned upside down. How are you going to be the last one standing and be a hundred million revenue 200 million revenue a billion dollar business? Customers don't think like that right the customers want you to be a business five years from now because they're making an investment in your thing But the customers are giving you today's money for today's value This is not the same as an investor usually red. It's certainly not the same for a VC VC has got a long-term view of the thing and so you can really Spin the vision and you are expected to spin the vision if you're selling to a VC and you're trying to convince them to be on them On this path with you it really has to be about how are we upsetting this whole thing and so You're usually painting a picture of yeah, we have this thing now But in two years we're going to be this other thing and in five years we're going to be this other thing and then maybe we make an acquisition after that Or maybe we have this much data and then we can do this thing and then we're actually going to be this other thing and so you may be selling one thing today But the thing you expect to be selling in 10 years is something actually completely different and so, you know That's what you're trying to pitch to a VC is this all singing all dancing thing that is going to look like in 10 years now if you are trying to sell to say a Strategic buyer sure this is kind of this is interesting too because I've been on both sides of this so You know I worked for a company That got acquired by IBM and then later when I was at IBM I worked on a bunch of acquisitions where we were the acquiver and so the way the things we thought IBM was really really Interested in when they were looking at buying us like when we were the acquiver was Completely different things so for example we thought That the buying company Caret a lot about our revenue and how many customers we had and all this sort of stuff But in fact the buyer of that particular company what they cared about is Could we take this product and sell it to all of our existing customers and by the way our existing customers are huge Huge huge multinational corporations so when they looked at our list of customers They actually didn't care about 90% of them They cared about the 10% that overlapped with their customer base and they were looking at How much revenue could I make if I took this thing and put it on the price list with all my existing sales people and Sold it into accounts that we already have a relationship with how much money can we make out of that? They didn't give a crap about our existing AR or anything else we had what they were looking at is how do we grow this thing? How much does this thing add? We did other acquisitions where we didn't care about the revenue at all What we were actually doing is plugging a hole in our technology portfolio So we were buying a bit of technology and we were just speeding up the roadmap if we bought this thing and plugged it in We could get moving faster than if we had to build this thing ourselves We did acquisitions that looked like that and then we had other acquisitions where we actually did like a couple We did one particular acquisition while I was there that was a very big acquisition that really did move the needle on Revenue and so we were looking at could our sales rep sell this thing? Could we keep the customers that they had and keep them happy? How much could we grow it? How would we grow it? What would this look like and so we were looking at this, you know, Five-year-ten-year-fifteen-year plan of we're gonna spend this much money to make this much money and how did that all work? And so if you're the company that's pitching It like if you're the the company that's about to get acquired or you're the company that's trying to sell You need to understand what the motivations are of the buyer is the buyer interested in just adding to their revenue Or is the buyer interested in plugging a technology hole or a hole in their portfolio? Are they interested in taking your thing and selling it to existing accounts? Are they interested in taking their stuff and selling it into your existing accounts? You have to kind of understand what they want before you could know how to pitch this thing because you know Whatever it is you're assuming they're interested in you might actually be totally wrong And it goes back in an interesting way to the very first step in the process Which is what would they do if we didn't exist? Right Right because you might think like I remember that I work for a company We almost got acquired by this by this other company that was They were kind of in trouble. They had a product. It was sort of And silery to ours like you know Like if you bought one thing you'd want to buy the other and so they wanted to sell their stuff to our accounts Because they had sort of bled their own accounts We had lots of accounts, but not a lot of revenue in each of the accounts And so that's what they were looking at So the alternative was another company that wasn't actually competitive with us But it was also sort of on the fringes of what they sold and they were doing the calculus of us versus the other guys Then once we found out who the other one was that they were looking at we changed our pitch a lot Because we were doing a lot of pitching on you know what our growth was and other segments of the market We wanted to get in and things they didn't they didn't even care about And instead we started really pitching hard on This is how many of our accounts don't already have a solution that you have that you could come in and sell to. And so we went in and did that analysis. We ended up not getting acquired by them, but we got acquired by somebody else and it ended up being a really good deal. But the one that actually acquired us paid more and that acquisition was strictly to take us out of the market. Because we were winning it, we were quite a small company. We were winning deals against them in big accounts that was annoying to them to have us around. And so they looked at our engineering team and the people on the team and they were growing really fast and they kind of acquired us, shut the product down, instantly gave up any customers that didn't care about any of the customers that weren't customers that they could sell to and then went in and sold all of those customers their thing instead of our thing. So you can't always know what the buyers are looking at and you need to kind of tailor your pitch to whatever it is that you think the acquiring company wants. It's such a good reminder that and again, it sort of reiterates the kind of point I made earlier, which is like selling your product or service to your customers is a totally different endeavor than selling it to totally totally different endeavor, totally different endeavor. Yeah. I could riff with you for hours, but I know your time is precious. We're if people want to reach out to you, obviously they should buy the books. They are obviously awesome, which has been recently updated and sales pitch is the second book out of interest in before I let you go. It's briefly what precipitated the second iteration of obviously awesome. Why did you write the second version? Yeah, a handful of things. So the original book I put out in 2019, 2019 and at that point, I thought, you know, I've worked this process with a lot of companies. I know how it works. I know where people get stuck and I could write this up and anybody that wanted to do this thing without me, you know, on their own in a company could get it done using this book. And then I learned a lot between 2019 and 2025 is just when I started working on the second edition of the book. And I started working with different kinds of companies. So for example, I worked with a lot of companies that were bigger. I worked with a lot of companies that were doing acquisitions. And so there's a specific set of positioning challenges when you have positioning and then you acquire something and you want to bring that in. So I thought that would be an interesting thing to tackle in the book. I worked with a lot of companies that had multiple products when I originally wrote the book, you know, I was thinking about a single product company with only one product. But lots of companies had multiple products and there were all these ways to get jammed up in your positioning, thinking about multiple products. And then so I thought I would be great to expand the book to include that stuff. The other thing is like, if you write the book, like you would know this, but you know, you write the book. You do the best job you can in explaining some stuff, but you don't always hit the nail on the head, right? So there was a handful of things that I thought I explained it so clear. But like my inbox is fully emailed, said like, dude, on page, whatever you said this and I don't understand what the heck you're talking about. And I went like right back and say, I know I said that. But what I meant was this other thing. So I thought, you know, the book was still selling a lot of copies. But I thought, you know what? I should go back and this stuff that I think is valuable, fix all this stuff that I know. I just blew it on the first chance. And you don't always get a second chance to go back and fix this stuff. And I was like, I'll go back and fix that and then I'll clear up my email. I just put it out. So the second edition came out earlier this year. And I think it's really new in the job to be honest. That, you know, I haven't had, I've sold a lot of copies of the new edition. And I haven't had a lot of complaining. Your inbox is a little less busy than it was before. Yeah. So I think obviously a lot of the things that were really driving people crazy. So and then also, you know, I think there's some, there's some new good stuff in there that I think people will appreciate. But yeah, second edition is good. It's better. Obviously awesome. Get the second edition. So you avoid sending April, er, it emails and sales pitch is the follow up book. If folks want to reach out to you on social or what's the best way for them to do that? Yeah. You know, I'm pretty bad on social media these days. So I, you know, I occasionally fool around over on LinkedIn, but less these days than I used to. I have a newsletter and I'm a pretty lazy newsletter writer as well. And I have a part. You sell it as well. Yeah. And I have a part, but, you know, but it's quality man. Like I do, I only write when I got something, but I got to be in my bonnet about something. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to write this article about this. You know, so you won't get overloaded with emails from me. You sign up for that. And then same thing with the podcast. I have podcasts too that, you know, occasionally I'll, you know, I did a set of set of shows specifically focused on the new stuff and the new book, but it's April done for dot com. If you go there, you'll see the link for the newsletter, the podcast, whatever else we want to talk to be. There's a form you can fill out and we can do that too. The books are always the best place to start. Awesome. And we will put your website in the show notes and build the sell dot com. The books are obviously awesome. The second edition and sales pitch April time for thanks for doing this. Yeah. Thank you for having me. This is great. And there you have it for today's episode between John and April for show notes, including links to everything referenced in today's show. You can visit April's episode page over at built to sell dot com. If you know of someone who be a great fit to be a guest right here on the podcast, you can nominate them. You're built to sell dot com forward slash nominate where they're going to have a chance to nominate yourself or someone else to be a guest right here on the show with John. Also a reminder, you can watch these full video interviews over at our YouTube channel at built to sell special thanks to our group of advisors who help us bring our message to you. Our advisors are experts in helping you build the value of your company to get in touch with an advisor or learn how to become one yourself head over to value builder dot com. I'm Colin Morgan. look for to talk me again next week.