How to Frame a Sales Conversation

Welcome to the positioning show where we discussed topics related to the practical application of positioning for marketing, sales, and product teams. I'm April Dunford, a consultant, author, and the world's leading expert on positioning for BAB technology companies. Hello, welcome to another edition of the positioning show with me, April Dunford. How's everybody? Hey, I took a little break for a couple of weeks. Did you miss me? I bet you did. All right, that's okay if you didn't. Because this is going to be a good episode. What I wanted to talk about today specifically relates to crafting a great sales pitch. And in particular, I wanted to go a little bit deeper on how we frame a sales pitch. Because I think the beginning of a sales pitch is actually really important. And you have choices in how you do this. And in the companies that I've worked with, people tend to do it in different ways. So I want to talk a bit about the pluses and minuses of the different ways of starting a sales pitch. I think there's kind of three big ways of doing it that I've seen. The first one is where we define the problem. So we say, hey, there's this problem and we're the solution. And let me show you how we solve that. That's the first one, probably the most common one. If people do any kind of framing at all, I probably see that one more than anything else. The second one that I see a lot is this framing of, hey, the world is changing. There's a change in the world. And because of this change in the world, the way we think about solutions in this space is going to be different. And the solutions need to be different. And let's talk about that change and why you might want to switch from what you're doing today to what you want to do in the future. That's the second one that I see a lot. And then the third one is interesting. A lot of companies will essentially in the sales pitches really concentrate it on features and functions and they're going to do an overview of that. But often the reps will start by doing discovery. So there's been some sort of lightweight qualification that's happened before this first substantive sales call. But one of the big things you need to get done in a first substantive sales call is we need to do discovery. So what is the customer doing today? What is the customer looking for? What's their situation? So we're trying to get a lot of that information out. And so a lot of sales reps will start with that. And that'll be the first thing that happens in the sales call. So let's take each one of these and talk a little bit about pluses and minuses of each one of these. So let's start with the problem. Now this is the one I learned when I was a baby product marketer starting out, went behind the ears. I was told we do that. And at the first company that I worked at, we had this pitch deck that had existed since the dawn of time. And it started with the problem. And the thing we were selling was the database. And the way we defined that problem was really vague. And it literally had a chart. And it showed some data about how much more data companies were storing today versus 10 years ago. And the headline was something like, you know, enterprise data is exploding. And it was kind of like, oh man, we got a lot of data in enterprise. We need a database to store that stuff. And so that's how we do it. There's a few problems with this. So what is often that slide, like when we did it in pitches, it was a throwaway slide. We would often have this look of like no kidding, buddy, the face of the customer. Like, yeah, we know you're talking to a roomful of data people. You don't have to tell us the data is increasing. Like that's why we're here. So it was sort of a throwaway slide. We didn't tend to dwell on it too much. The customer kind of glazed over it. Like to be honest, I often felt like we diminished our own credibility by starting with this obvious statement of fact that we then, you know, didn't do anything with. We're like, yeah, lots of data. You need a database. Okay, let me tell you about our database and off we went. So there was that. The other thing is, you know, there's an old thing that we know is that customers are experts in problems. We are experts in solutions to those problems. And so at a philosophical level, it always felt a bit laughable that we were going to come in and tell you what your problem is. Like, you know, listen, buddy, here's your problem. And like, who are we to do that? So that always just kind of felt sort of off to me. But the real problem, the real problem with the problem is that the problem was just so generically defined that any of our competitors could solve it. So you know, I'm saying that the problem is we got too much data. So we need a good database to, you know, figure that out. Well, you know, Oracle is a good database to do that with. And so I base had a good database at the time. Microsoft had a good database. So you know, it was kind of, there was nothing specific about the framing of that problem. And that would give us a way to tell a story about why pick us over the other guys. We framed the problem in such a way that you could pick any of the other people too. And that would be just as good. So I think there's a really weak start to a sales pitch. And I know a lot of people do it. But, you know, and you know what, in certain cases, you might be able to frame the problem in a specific way that does advantage you. I'm going to get to that later in this episode. You know, so if you got this problem thing and you think it works for you, like, bad, don't let the podcast lady tell you to stop doing something that's working. Like, carry on. But if you're feeling like you're throwing this slide up and everybody's going to go and yeah, sure lock. We know. Then maybe you want to rethink the start of this thing. So that's the first one, the problem thing. The second one is this change in the world thing. And I've seen this one used more frequently in VC pitch decks. And I think that's kind of where it comes from is if we're pitching to an investor, it's often really good to talk about, you know, what's making space for a new category of solutions in the world. Because that's what a VC really wants to invest in. They want to invest in this. It's going to be this big new thing. And so in order to convince them that there is a billion dollars worth of value going to come out of this thing, we kind of have to convince them that something new is going on. That's going to open up this big opportunity and where the right people is stepping to that space and make it happen. The timeframes on these things are longer, right? Like we're thinking about where's the company going to be in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years a long time away. And so we can talk about this bigger picture thing and say, look, like the world is really changing. And we used to do all this stuff manually, manually, but now we have 4G, you know, or we used to do this stuff manually, but now we have the cloud or we, you know, we used to do it this way. And then some big thing happened and then this happened. And so, you know, the way you're doing things now aren't, that's not going to work anymore. Now in a sales, you know, investor pitch, I think this works very well. This is a good way to start. Talking about market forces or trends or things that are happening in the market. For a sales conversation, this one, you know, I think is maybe not as strong as it could be. Now, that said, there are certain situations where this one can work and it works best in a situation where I am only competing against status quo. I am only competing against pen and paper, Excel spreadsheets, the intern or some janky old enterprise thing legacy system that, you know, hasn't been updated in 20 years and you're like, look, that's the old crap and we're the new hauntness. Now, I think that's in that situation. It works better. Now, but there's a problem, right? So there's a couple of things. So one is the minute you've got another hot new thing, well, you know, what's your differentiation against them? They're not old, right? They're not the old thing. So that's a problem. It's kind of set up with this idea that new in itself is valuable, right? You don't want the old thing. You want the new thing. Everybody wants a new thing, right? But often we have to get into the guts of, well, why is the new thing valuable? But it's the value of moving to the new things. It's hard to move from the old thing. So what's the value of the new thing? So, you know, it's kind of missing this concept of value and maintaining the old thing, new thing. For me, much like the problem starting point, what I don't like so much about starting with a trend or change in the world is that isn't unique to us as a vendor. Like if that change is out there happening in the world, everyone can see it. Now some vendors might not choose to react to it, but others will. And they could. And especially if you start getting some traction by talking about this change, I mean, they could talk about the change too. You don't own it. It's not specific to you. It's, you know, it's the world that the world is changing. And so again, you may find yourself in a situation where this is not not a differentiated place to start. Like you're saying the world is changing and your competitors are saying, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, we see that change too. And so we handle it this way, they handle it that way. And so now you, again, you're not framing the conversation in a way that advantages you or in a way that is unique to you or your point of view on the world. So yeah, so this, you know, the change in the world, like it can work and I have seen companies use it in ways where I think, yeah, that actually works pretty good. But often it works in the short term and doesn't work in the longer term because you'll get a me to competitor piles in that says, yeah, yeah, us too, we do the same thing too. And actually we're even newer. So we're the newer, newer hotness and they try to put you in the bucket of the old or whatever and then bad things happen with that. So I don't think that one's great, but it can work in some situations. The last one is more of a philosophical thing and this is, I'm gonna start by doing discovery. And so that means, you know, the customer comes in and say, look, you know, we're gonna get to a demo, but first let's talk about you, you know, and you know, tell us your problem, right? Why are we here today? What are you trying to get done? What is your problem? What are your goals with this new solution? Do you have any requirements? What are those? What's your situation? Have you tried other things before? What have you got? Who else are you looking at? You know, it's this kind of a thing. Now, discovery in my opinion is super important. We have to do discovery, deep discovery on a first substantive sales call. It's key, it's critical. I'm not saying don't do discovery. That would be a dumb thing to say. But when we start with discovery, I think that sometimes we're given up an opportunity to reframe the way the customer thinks about the situation that they're in. And, you know, so I think doing discovery is okay. But if you've got a competitor that's doing a really good job of framing the discussion, often what you'll have is the customer will come in and say, this is what I need. And this list of what I need matches exactly to what your competitor has convinced them that they need. So I give you an example of this. I worked for this company and we sold the CRM and we had this big, big, big competitor and everybody looked at that competitor. If they were looking at us, they were looking at this competitor. And the competitor's big thing was just this kind of bedrock CRM stuff. They were really good at pipeline visibility. Like if you were tracking this crap on spreadsheets or manually or whatever, implement this CRM and what you're going to get is more predictability, you're going to be able to have better visibility in your pipeline, better estimating, better forecasting. You're going to hit your number, no exactly, no surprises. That was their big thing. And so customers would come in and if we started with like, hey, what are you looking for? They'd say, that's what we want. We want better visibility. We want more predictability in the pipeline. blah, blah, blah. We want this like that's what a CRM is for. That's why we're buying a CRM. We want a CRM. Now the problem with this is that like we did that too, obviously. But did we do it better than them? No, we didn't. We were small and crappy. They had, you know, they had some bills and whistles on that. So if that's all you really wanted and that's how you were evaluating CRM's, like, we weren't going to win that fight. They were just kind of a better standard CRM than we were. And if you looked at what we were really good at, we were really good at-- we were very focused on investment banks specifically. And what we were really good at is this modeling relationships between people that didn't work at the same company. And so in investment banking, what we found is a lot of these senior investment bankers were on paper keeping track of these relationships between people like, hey, there's John and Rebecca. And they don't work at the same company. But I know John and Rebecca know each other because I know they used to sit on a board together. Or I know they used to work at the same company. Or I know they both belonged at the Harvard Club or whatever. And so we saw these investment bankers were tracking this stuff on paper. And so what our system could do is it could do that digitally and make it available to everybody on the team in a way that was really shareable. And so this reason to call would allow a rep to-- like, every touchpoint they had with a client, they could come back and say, I got a reason to call. I just talked to John. Now I got a reason to call Rebecca. Because they know each other. And I got a call Rebecca and say, hey, I just had lunch with John. And I talked to him about this thing. And we said, this is the reason to call thing. And so it was really our value was about making it really easy for a rep to get the next call to leverage every action they had to get a next action to get more stuff in the pipeline have more conversations, do get more deals, cooking ultimately, drive more revenue. So that was our big value. Now if we went in and said, hey, what do you want? A CRM? No one's going to answer that. Because no other system could do that. So if we came into a discovery and expected the customer to tell us that was their problem, that was never going to come up. So a customer would come in and they'd list all these other requirements, some of that stuff we could do, some of it we couldn't. And then we were left trying to pivot the conversation into, hey, let's talk about this reason to call thing. Now a good senior sales rep can do this. And you probably have reps that are doing this right now, because they're good at it. They know how to do it. They can turn any starting point or any discovery conversation around to something they want to talk about or they want to drill in. But a new rep, a less experienced rep, this is a very difficult pivot. And sometimes what we would have is a less experienced rep would come in and say, well, they listed a bunch of things they wanted and we were not that great at that stuff. So I disqualified them, which is bad. A better way to do it would be to frame the conversation in a way that advantages you rate out of the gate. So instead of doing the discovery rate at the very beginning, I could frame the conversation a little bit first and then do discovery within that context. So in this example, I could come in and say, hey, you're an investment bank. We work a lot of investment banks. And here's what we've seen in investment banks. We've seen that good successful senior investment bankers track these complicated relationships and they often do it manually to figure out who knows who. And what they use that for is a reason to call. And these folks tend to outperform their peers. We'd some date on that. And then we then we'd get into a discussion and say, but what's interesting is that the current set of CRM tools that we have on the market were not designed to track that. They only designed to show you who works at a company. So you've got a company in the CRM and here's John and Joey and whoever works at a company. And there's another company and Rebecca's over here at this other company. There's no way for us to model that John and Rebecca know each other. So wouldn't it be cool if we had a CRM that could track that? Now I can do discovery from that point forward and say, what are you currently using for CRM? How do you track those relationships? Do you think your investment bankers are doing that stuff on paper? Have you seen that? How valuable is it to you to have a reason to call? Does that sound like a good thing? Do you think that would improve your revenue? What other things have you tried? And so now I'm having a totally different context around this discovery that is really oriented around my strengths. And it's not oriented around all this stuff that maybe I don't do so well. So that's just a different way of doing it. Now some people will tell me, that's all well and good, April. But we need to start with discovery. Discovery needs to be the first thing we do because we expect our reps to tailor the conversation or the whole call based on what they've learned in that first bit of discovery that happens. And I get that. But I also think that's a little bit bullshit. And so here's why. One is, yes, we absolutely need to discover. No question about that. But in most of the reps that I've seen, there's a deck. And it's not like you're changing the deck based on the answers you heard at the beginning. Now you might put a slightly different spin on some things that you've heard. And you might, for example, use a different example than what's on the slide and think on your feet and tailor some things towards what you heard in that very first five minutes. But most of the time what we're seeing, particularly again, if it's not a really experienced rep, we do this discovery and they get the same pitches everybody yells anyway. And the second thing is that, like, I'm not advocating taking discovery and putting it at the very end. I'm advocating doing a little bit of framing. And then we do discovery. And then we have the whole rest of the pitch and that happens the same. So we're still getting-- we still have an opportunity to tailor things, however we want. But the reality is, most of this tailoring in a B2B enterprise sales situation, the first meeting is not all that tailored. The second meeting gets really tailored based on what we heard on discovery and the conversation we had with the customer in the first substantive sales call. So I don't think that's a reason to have the first thing out of your mouth be, hey, tell me your problems. So this kind of-- leads into so how should we do it? So if we don't want to do it with this problem thing, and we don't want to do it with the change in the world, and we don't necessarily want to start right out of the gate with discovery, how do we do this? And so in my sales pitch structure, what I'm advocating for is starting with what I would call our insight into the market. What I like about this is that our insight is very specific to us, unlike the change in the world or the problem. Insight is just us. We look at the world differently than our competitors do, and that different point of view has resulted in a different solution that has different value that it can deliver. So what I like about that is we can come in and do that very specifically, and right from the opening of the conversation with the customer, we are kind of pointing them at our value that is distinctly ours, and no one else can have the same conversation that we're having. So let me give you an example. So in the previous example that I used with the CRM, instead of coming in and saying, "Hey, what do you want and what are you using?" or whatever, or saying, "There's some change in the world." I don't even know how you do it change the world, one on that example. There was no change in the world that resulted in our solution. Maybe could have force fed one in there, or we could have started with the problem, but again, we would have had to have a very specific framing of the problem. Instead, we would come in and we would immediately be starting talking about this. Reason to call is that important. Here's what we see. What if you could do that digitally and scale that across your organization? What's that worth to you? And then we would do discovery of me, like we would start with that framing, and then we would do discovery, and this worked much better for us. So here's another example. So I sit on the board of a company called ScreenCloud, and what they have is a solution. You can think of it specifically as digital signage for screens that communicate inside an enterprise, typically. And they could have started their sales pitch with the problem, and the problem might be, "Hey, you'd like to have your sales team be able to see the live weekly sales forecast on screen." Or we'd like to be able to show people's birthdays and special things on a screen. Or we'd like to have some safety information or training stuff or emergency stuff show on a screen. These are the problems that digital signage that communicates solves. But if we started that way, then it would just sound like everybody else. Now, if you look at ScreenCloud, one of the things they do really well is a lot of these digital signage solutions were designed for departmental use. So the sales department has their three screens, and they do a thing, and then somebody else has screens, and they do a thing. And the difference with ScreenCloud is it's designed to be an enterprise wide solution. So there's centralized management in this. So IT can manage it in a central place, which ensures that one, the screens are never sitting there blank. If there's a problem, IT can handle it remotely. And two, it ensures that the screens are always secure. If you look at most of the companies they sell to, they have some screens already, and it's a disaster. And you probably seen this in the company where you work or other companies you've been, or just, you know, in your life walking around. There's, you know, there'll be some screens they were deployed. Now, they're sitting there blank, or there's an error message, or it's, you know, it's the windows screen of death or something. So this is a barricade IT. Two, a lot of these old screens, the way you updated the content was you stuck a USB stick in it, very, very insecure. This thing is connected to the network. It's not good. Big security risk. And then, you know, in general, these things were very difficult to update the content or create content for them. So because it was so difficult, people just gave up on building new content. And so they just sit there not providing any value. So again, when when screen cloud comes in, they start with their insight. And so their insight is based on, here's what we know about screens. Here's what we've learned from doing all kinds of deployments. So they come in and they say, look, like, you know, you probably got some screens in your organization right now. And the problem with these screens is they're in these little pockets. You got one solution for this department. You got another solution for this department. Who knows what's there? Two, those things are half of them are sitting there blank. And you know, that looks bad and looks bad on you IT. They're just sitting there blank in the CEO walks by it every day going, why is that thing just blank here? This looks bad. And then the flip side is you're not getting any building business value out of these screens. And now why are they sitting there blank and whatever it's, you know, it's because we can't centrally manage them. And we don't have an easy way to update the content on these screens. So we wish we did. And then and then the last thing is these things represent a security risk. Now, once I've sort of framed the conversation this way, then I can get into get into discovery. So now I can say, so what do you guys got? Have you got some of those? Do you worry about the security of those things? What happens when one of those things are broken? Can you remotely manage it? Or do you actually have to go on site and fix it? Is it how many different digital signage solutions do you have? Do you even know? Is it more than five? Is it more than 20? Some companies they work with. It's a lot. And so now I can say again, do discovery within the context of what I actually want to talk about, which is all the stuff I'm really good at. So that's it. That's what I want to talk about today. I think that this idea of leading with your unique insight in the market is much more powerful than something that feels a little bit more generic like the problem or this change in the world, which may or may not be relevant to my stuff. Again, sometimes these things can work, but in I'm always looking for the general case that would work no matter what's going on. And I think a better way to do it would be to lead with your insight and then use that framing to do very specific discovery that is again very specific to your differentiated value. I think you're much more likely to get a good substantive conversation with the customer, understand their needs within, you know, what are we really good at and what are we able to do if the customer is not interested in any of that stuff then we're going to be able to quickly disqualify them. If they are interested then we've really hammered our differentiated value right from the very opening note of this conversation. Anyways, if you want to learn more about that, like I talk about this idea of insight, which I think is, you know, conceptually it's a little hard to get your head around, but once you do it's really, really powerful. So I talk a bit about this in my most recent book called Sales Pitch. So you can look that up if you want to go deep on that. You can also check out on my website. I've got a couple of articles where I go into this in a little bit more depth. Anyways, that's it for today. Thanks for joining. You guys are awesome. I'll see you in a couple of weeks. Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you're listening to this podcast near, think of yourself, Hey, my company could use some help with positioning. Maybe we should talk. So as a consultant, I work with tech companies, but very specifically B2B tech companies that have a sales team. I don't really have a size requirement. I work with very, very large businesses, but I also work with growth stage companies. They're as small as 10, 20, 30 million revenue. The work I do with companies is focused on getting a very tight definition of how you win in the market and then taking that and translating it into a really compelling story that clearly answers the question, why pick you over the other guys? If you're interested in learning about how we might work together, you can visit aprildoneford.com/consulting. Thanks again for listening.