How to Craft a Story that Sells with April Dunford

0:00hi I'm April Dunford in this talk we're going to explore a little bit about how difficult it is for buyers to actually buy most buyers have never bought a solution like yours before that means they have to spend a lot of time making sense out of the Alternatives making sense out of features and things that they've never had to think about before our job in that process is to really think less like sales people and think more like a guide a guide that can help customers make sense out of their options so that they can make a choice that they feel good about I want to

0:34start with a question for you though like how many of you think that sales is hard how many of you are liars no I'm just going to some people are you know in startups generally we think sales is hard like we come from a product background we come from an engineering background and sales is hard and unfortunately we have to figure it out because we don't get to stay in business if we can't figure out how to get stuff into customers hands get stuff to me get customers make a purchase but um I actually don't want to talk about that today what I want to talk about

1:07today is kind of I want you to think about stepping out of your vendor shoes for a minute and step into the shoes of a customer and and what I want to talk about is how hard it is to buy buying is hard now I know some of you are like what that's stupid buying's not hard I wish that's all I had to do all day you said around buy stuff um but buying actually is really hard like let's think about for a minute for a B2B product how does a B2B buying process actually get started you know I get started the boss wakes up in the

1:46morning and says ugh I hate the way we do invoicing I hate it it's full of mistakes it takes too much time we need to do invoicing better where the boss wakes up and says eat the way we track customer data it's terrible maybe we need a CRM I think maybe we need to buy a CRM we should buy it for the boss wakes up and says you know I can't the team's not working together good we don't collaborate well people don't share information well we need something to kind of fix that and does the boss go and buy it no the boss does not what the boss does is he

2:21walks into the into the office and says Janet why is a CRM would you go go get out there look at the CRM things and fix this problem for me and Janet's like crap crap I don't want to do that for starters two yeah maybe I've used a CRM but I know nothing about crms I don't know who the CRM vendors are I spent zero amount of my time thinking about this stuff I don't know who the vendors are I don't know who the I don't know what the key features are I don't know I I don't know anything this is almost universally true in B2B

2:59software the person making the purchase decision for your software has never bought software like that before ever so the first thing they have to do when they embark on this process is they got to figure out how to make a short list so they Google it and what they see is 900 000 million companies that look exactly the same that look like they do the exact same thing there's so many like so I got Loom escapes and I got Gartner quadrons and I got all kinds of things and I go in G2 crowd which is terrifying there are 9 000 company logos up in the top right

3:39and they're all amazing and does a 4.7 versus a 4.8 on customer satisfaction matter I have no idea there's all these things and the data actually shows that a typical B2B buyer consults seven information sources before they make a purchase decision seven and interestingly if you look at the top ones there a lot of those ones on top are us so they come on our website they're looking at our information they're listening to our podcast watching our videos they're maybe they're signing up and doing a free trial they're talking our sales rep they're going our events doing that kind of stuff and what do they get when they get there

4:17well they see a lot of information that looks good seems credible but is also totally contradictory so everybody's website says we're the number one supplier of blood it's like all 29 of you can't be the number one supplier there's something's going on here that all sounds good but I don't really know what what to do and then if I'm lucky enough and I get through this process I decide on a short list then Janet's gonna call a bunch of you and book a sales meeting maybe if you've got sales people and then what happens in the sales meeting well the sales rep is like welcome to my wind tunnel features

4:57you know I'm going to give you the product walk through here's a feature here's a feature here's another feature oh did I mention we have features I got this one that one this one that one that one that one there's another one and Janet's like oh my gosh I don't know how to make sense out of any of this so buyers are drowning in information that they can't necessarily make sense of so the question is like do we actually know what a buyer wants and so there's interesting data on this they're drowning in information nope into the interesting data on this is um for B2B purchase processes

5:35uh 40 percent so four out of 10 times when a company embarks on a purchase process it ends in no decision 40 percent and if you look at the data on that it's not like it ended in no decision because we thought all the solutions were crap it actually ends in no decision because there was so much information and there were so many different options we could narrow it down to an option and feel good about making that choice so we just said you know what spreadsheet's okay it's okay to just do this on a Google doc let's just not make a decision at all so customers can't figure out what

6:20to do so they actually do nothing it's a terrifying stat and in every company that I worked for that was actually true like we lost about 30 40 of our deals if we were tracking it in the CRM we lost no decision which means we lost to the status quo which means we're actually getting beat by Excel and Google Docs and things like that um what do customers actually want from us this is interesting data too um so um uh there's been a bunch of studies done on this where they went and interviewed B2B enterprise software buyers and said hey what do you want in a sales meeting and the responses there

6:58are really telling so the number one thing that people actually want from you as a vendor if they get down the path is um they want perspectives on the market and they want help comparing Alternatives navigating alternatives that would make sense right we have too much information I'm trying to figure stuff out I want help um making sure that I avoid potential landmines I I want you to educate me on issues and outcomes this is not stuff about our product is it it's more about the market and where we fit with everybody else's Solution that's what we want so we're not actually giving buyers what they want for the most part in our

7:40marketing and sales efforts we don't talk about the competitors we figure nobody wants to hear our opinion about the competitors we're not trying to educate customers on how to make trade-offs and instead what we're doing is we're just contributing to this information overload and it's kind of weird too because Janet hasn't spent five seconds thinking about CRM or how to pick a good CRM or what's the best CRM on the market and we the CRM vendor that's all we think about that's all we do all day so we have this deep deep expertise on exactly what Jan is trying to figure out we refuse to give it to her

8:17right um so customers they actually don't want a product sales pitch what they want is Market insight so I'm going to give you a really stupid example and then I'm going to give you two like software examples that are left less stupid but the first really stupid example is just you know for education purposes um this is a story it's called April buys a toilet um so uh I live in Toronto I don't know if you've ever been to Toronto Toronto's feel really old crappy houses and all of those really old crappy houses have terrible bathrooms I bought one of those old crappy houses a terrible bathroom I

8:50hire a contractor contractor's fixing and he says April you need to go buy a toilet and I'm like no problem I'm gonna go buy a toilet how hard can that be right so I go to the toilet store and man there's a lot of toilets oh my God there's so many toilets the first story there's literally like a hallway of like 100 Toilets toilet salesman comes up to me and says can I help you and I said yes you can I need to buy a toilet and like how do I do that and he says uh well you're looking for a particular kind of toilet foreign

9:26the toilets are over there go over there look at all the toilets all the prices are there just you know when you're ready to buy one just call me I'll be over here so I go to the so I go to list the toilets and they got all these features and some of them cost 100 bucks and some of them cost a thousand bucks and they all look identical like they all look the same and I'm terrified and I leave like I don't know how to buy a toilet so I go to the second store I get toilet salesman number two and I'm like he says can I help you ma'am and I'm

9:53like yes you can I'm here to buy a toilet and he says well what kind of a toilet are you looking for and I said I'm not sure I really know yet and he said you want a single flush toilet or a dual flush toilet I'm like is that important just a personal preference some people like a single first Charlotte and I'm like okay and he says you want flapless or no flap what's a flap I don't even know what the flap is I'm like like is that important do I need to know about the flap because no not really I mean some people like to

10:21Flap I mean maybe you want the flap and I'm like I don't have enough information to actually purchase a toilet so I leave there and I go home and and I get out to Google and so I'm like I need to actually educate myself on toilets because otherwise I'm going to buy the wrong toilet and the last thing I want to do is ever buy a toilet again so I go on Google and I find consumer reports and all these other things and there's so many features on toilets I had no idea there's like uh water efficiency and different seat Heights I had no idea dual flush technology flapper

10:55flapperless there's you know visible whatever whatever trapways I don't even know what a trapway is Consumer Reports has a thousand things and they're rating all these toilets against all these things and I'm like I have no idea here's the most disgusting thing I learned about toilets now I'm going to teach you and you won't be able to unsee it once I tell you there is a rating and it's called the map rating and this is done by an independent standards body and they take the toilets and they test them to see how much solid waste the toilet can flush and 300 to 650 grams is very good

11:27but there are some toilets on the market that can flush 1 000 grams which is 2.2 pounds yeah I went to the grocery store and bought a bag of carrots two pounds I'm like it's ruined me for two pound things forever I can't look at two pound things anymore without thinking of the map score and so at this point I officially have more toilet knowledge than I want ever parts of my brain are occupied with this that I wish weren't and I'm surely there's somebody out there that's done this for me looked at all these things figured out you know and just tell me which toilet I'm supposed to buy and so

12:00then I find this guy this Terry loves toilets um and he's a toilet expert and every year he puts out the rating of toilets and uh the really but even Terry is like so deep into the toilet Tech that I have no idea what he's talking about so there's a thing on there that says um you know find out which water efficient gravity assisted pf2 slash whisper vac Gateway toilets that work because apparently some of them don't this guy's like the gardener group of toilets so at this point I'm like forget it I can't do it I'm not doing it I'm a busy person I don't have time for

12:40this so I am not buying a toilet so I go back to my contractor and I'm like look I'm not what about the old toilet let's just use the old toilet and just keep your old toilet he's like lady we kind of broke the old toilet take it and it's long gone you can't go it was 20 years old why would you want to keep the and I was like because buying a toilet is taking them my whole life over here I don't want to do it and I'm like well that's it maybe we're just gonna have a bathroom with no toilet I'm like hey kids you know how the dog goes in the

13:08backyard we all go in the backyard now that's how this works but anyways the contractor's like no you gotta buy a toilet I'm like okay okay I gotta buy a toilet um so I go to last toilet store and I meet this guy um it's actually stock photo that's not the guy but can you believe there's a stock photo of that that in itself is funny um but I meet this guy and uh I can't remember his name so I'm gonna call him John it's funny right I thought of that John that was in the UK I'd call him Lou anyway so John comes out and I have this

13:41amazing interaction so John comes up and says can I help you and I said yes I need to buy a toilet it's a bit of a toilet emergency here John we got to get this done today and he goes it's terrible by the toilet isn't it too many choices so many choices he says look first thing you gotta know about toilets notice how these ones over here are all cheap these ones over here are kind of like there's kind of a jump they're way more expensive that's because these ones are for places where a toilet doesn't get used much maybe you got a toilet into the basement or a vacation property or

14:12something and they don't get used much so they use cheaper parts and that's fine because they don't get a lot of flushes and they'll last you forever and that's fine so you know if you don't use the toilet every day don't pick one of those and I'm like huh interesting I do use this toilet if it's going to get a lot of use so like let's let's focus on these okay so now we're down to half the number of toilets and then he says okay see those ones over there they're fashion toilets some of them are purple and some of them are made out of brass and some of them

14:37have fancy things or do you care about fashion I'm like not at all so he's like okay we're gonna eliminate all those so now we're down to kind of a reasonable number of toilets here I'm like this is looking good and then I said well what's the difference between these ones mainly the big thing is space like some toilets some bathrooms are really small and so if you don't have a lot of space we put the tank in the wall and we drywall it and then just a bowl and it's just less space and he says how big is your bathroom I pull out the plans or

15:01whatever so oh you got a lot of space there he says you probably want to go with the one that's not on the wall because if it breaks and it's in the wall you got to get in the drywall is hard to fix whatever so okay fine so we're into that now we're down to two toilets I'm so excited I'm like there's American standard toilet a total toilet total toilets 100 bucks more I'm like how do I pick between the two and he says wow you know they're really kind of the same like there's really no different here they're both great toilets they're both good brands

15:24whatever and I'm like what toilet would you pick and he says well I'd spend the hundred bucks extra go for the Toto toilet like nobody ever brings one back nobody ever complains about it and if it was me I'd never want to think about buying a toilet again I'm like sold so you slap down the thing so I get it done in like 10 minutes 10 minutes so what happened there like was that guy giving me a hard sell on toilets no what he was doing was sense making he's helping me make sense out of all this information all my choices and he did it in a way that I could understand he

15:57wasn't talking to me about the PV slash two whatever he did not mention the map score once which I appreciate it and and you know any help me get this thing and not only did I get the thing I made a choice that I feel good about like I feel like I made the right choice I feel like it was an informed choice so now think about how hard that was that is a product that I'm familiar with that is a product that I am a user of a decades-long user of imagine how hard it is by your stuff your AI machine learning Advanced data analytics blah blah blah that nobody's

16:36ever heard of that nobody's ever used even once imagine how hard it is for a buyer to figure out your stuff it's terrible buyers are struggling they don't really know what they want product research is actually really hard understanding features and value is really really hard making a purchase decision is hard and doing nothing looks really attractive that's why the 40 of the people just throw up their hands and say forget it I can't figure it out I'm just going to keep doing the same thing I'm doing so we don't want a salesperson we want you to Obi-Wan this and be our guide and help us on our you know

17:15journey of taking too many choices I want you know like what I actually want in this thing is toilet Obi-Wan I'm like teach me the ways of stories anyways and he'd come in and help me make a choice that I'm feeling really good about if nobody takes a picture of this slide and puts it on Twitter I'm gonna be really disappointed I worked hard on this and I built this lab um now what some people say when I get it is they'll say yeah but hang on the guy in the toilet story he's selling all the toilets like you know maybe he's not biased he doesn't really care what

17:48toil you buy that's not true I believe he was biased I actually he sold me a pretty expensive toilet I think he gets commission I think he was totally biased but he gave me advice in a way that seemed authentic and it seemed like he really wanted to connect me with the right product I felt like if I had a set of toilets in the basement I just needed the cheap one he just sold me the cheap one so I actually think that our knowledge and experience about a market even though it's biased and a customer knows it's biased is actually really really valuable to purchasers

18:25um the key on this is it's not about going out and trashing the competition it's about coming in and saying look this is our point of view on the market this is the way we look at it this is what we think customers like you should do you decide but I'm going to at least give you my point of view on what this looks like so let me give you a software example because I can't talk about toilets all day that never invite me back um so uh so this is a company I worked with there called level jump and they're in the sales enablement space so they

18:52make software that helps uh helps you onboard a new sales rep that's the space that they're in so let's start with the situation the situation is who's their competition there are thousands if you look up the G2 crowd grid on this thing there's thousands of sales enablement software companies out there but really they kind of fall into like two buckets so the first alternative that customers have what most of the customers are doing to start with is we're just going to put all the stuff all the sales materials on a shared drive that actually works fine if you don't have very many sales people whatever it's

19:26fine but then there's another group of solutions and essentially what they do is uh Version Control and distribution so you could think of them as like a CMS that's the approach and so there all the solutions are slightly different but I could lump them all in there there's the CMS folks and then the other group are the folks that actually have you know you can set up a course and people can get assigned with course it gets certified on a course so we could put them in a bucket that says they're an LMS so that's what I've got you know roll your roll and put it on a drive CMS

19:58is an LMS is that's who I compete with now level jumps big secret sauce is they're the only sales enablement tool that's built inside Salesforce so what they do like one of the key features they have is you can actually combine your sales onboarding like Effectiveness data with the sales data so I can see did the onboarding work like did it improve sales metrics did it improve time to First deal did it improve time to quota that's the value that they deliver right so they're built on sales for what the value is I can actually tell whether my sales enablement stuff is working now who cares about this not

20:35everybody some people just have a few sales reps or they don't have a lot of turnover or they're not hiring a lot of new sales reps and putting it on the drive or having a CMS or doing an LMS just fine but if you're hiring a lot of sales reps because you're growing or you just the nature of your business is there's a lot of turnover this thing is actually really super good fit for you so that's a situation now here's how we pitch it so I could and in fact these guys did at one point very early days if you came in and said show me the product they would

21:06show you the product right because that's what you asked for so you come in and say we're logging in uh here here's how you navigate around the app here's how you set up the training here's how the training gets assigned to sales reps and at the very end of the thing we'd say oh yeah and by the way here's how you track whether or not the training is work it's working and so the customer on the receiving end of that they've already done the sales pitch with the CMS and the sales pitch with the LMS and they got their checklist of features and they're like well how hard is it to set up the

21:39training and do you have the blah blah feature that the other guys were talking about and they're going down their little checklist and they don't even notice your thing at the end because they don't know whether that's important or not now if I were to rework this as a point of view story I would tell this story very differently so I would start with this it my insight into the market which is why these folks built the thing they built in the first place their Insight is look why is sales enablement important it's important because every day your rep isn't making quota costs you money that's why it's important

22:12so look at our Alternatives here we can put the stuff in the shared drive we could use a CMS and that's great you know again if you don't have too many sales reps and stuff doesn't change too much that's okay and you know or you could buy pay a little extra buy an LMS and I can tell exactly who's taking what or whatever but you know when none of these things do none of them tell you where the training's working so you know if that's important to you and they're typically selling to the head of sales enablement so they're like you ever have to prove to your boss

22:43whether or not this enablement stuff is actually working I'm like yeah like if that's important to you then let me show you how we do it then I get into the demo and I'm focused on that I'm focused on my key differentiated value and I'm teaching them what matters um so in the case of these guys they grew really fast they got recently acquired by Salesforce everybody's happy Rich um so the point here is the point of view pitch transforms here's what we build which is what we usually do with a product walkthrough into here's why we built it so you as a customer can make sense of

23:17it and know whether or not this is the right choice for you so a point of view pitch the way I see it it starts with your Market Insight it recognizes that buyers have choices it can successfully communicates the pros and cons for each of those choices and this is where it gets uncomfortable it freely admits that sometimes you are not the best solution and it disqualifies people um and then it describes the unique value that you have for your best fit customers so um so how do we actually build a story that effectively communicates this point of view like could we do that in a

23:54systematic way because I think this stuff is hard now my day job is you know I used to be a repeat VP marketing but now I'm a consultant and I my focus area is positioning and so this kind of came out of the work I was doing with companies trying to help them with positioning um it's really the answer the question like I have this position or Market but how do I effectively tell a story around that how do I teach my sales reps to talk about that so here's how I think this point of view pitch can get constructed so the first bit is we start

24:27with our Market insight and it's often the reason we built what we built because we saw this Gap in the market right so the Insight is eh you know there's pros and cons so all the other Solutions out there number two this is the Alternatives but hey look at this Gap and then the last bit is you know this is the value company like you could get for clothes in that Gap and then here's how we do it instead of just jumping into you know here's how we do it that stuff can actually all map very cleanly to your positioning kind of positioning maybe you thought I

25:04was going to go this whole talk and not talk about positioning wrong um so when I say positioning what I mean is first step in this is you got to get really clear and really tight on who do I actually compete with and that includes the status quo right that includes do nothing whatever that is and then I'm looking at well what do I got that they don't have my differentiated capabilities then I can translate that into value like so what for those capabilities why does a customer care that's my differentiated value and then importantly who cares a lot about that value because not everybody cares the same

25:41right look at my level jump example you're not hiring a lot of new sales reps it's kind of not the right thing for you you're hire a lot of new sales reps you really need this thing then the last one is what's the market category the category you win I can map this stuff to this point of view pitch where I start with this Insight in the case of level jump it's like hey like why are we doing sales enablement in the first place like shouldn't we be able to track this stuff then we get to the Alternatives I got cms's I got lms's and then I talk about the Gap look nobody

26:10none of those things can help you measure this and then I'm like here's the value we can enable if you can measure it you can do it better if you can measure it you can change stuff you can see how it's working all this stuff is going to make you money with your new sales reps that come on this way and then we show you how we do that so that's the point of view I'm going to give you a second example um here's another company I work with these guys I love them they're so great maybe you know them help Scout um they're in the uh customer support

26:40market and specifically if you look at their competitive Alternatives basically their competitive alternatives are like traditional help desk software and nine times out of ten it's zendesk so you know they're competing with zendesk or something that looks like zendesk um and then you know when we looked at what capabilities they had that were different than zendesk there was a whole load of things like they have a shared inbox to make sure that a customer never gets lost they always get taken care of they don't assign customers a ticket like people get assigned to people they have this integrated experience across channels they let a customer decide what

27:17channel they want to deal with you through instead of just automatically pushing you to a low-cost Channel um the value of all this is everything that help Scout does is really oriented around giving the customer the best possible experience as opposed to getting them dealt with in support as quickly as possible so we can get on with the work that we actually want to do so who cares about this well this Insight came from help Scout working with online businesses a lot of online businesses don't actually deal with their customers ever except when they call support so a lot of online businesses look at this and say this is

27:54a golden opportunity to build loyalty if we're a directed consumer brand loyalty is really really important so being able to give an amazing customer experience that's really customer Centric is actually super super important here so that's who cares so how do I construct a point of view pitch around that so again it starts with this insight and so this Insight is look there are companies out there that see support as a growth driver and not a cost center if you look at all the other Alternatives out there zendesk whatever things that look like zendesk they actually treat your customer like a pain in the neck like not even a person we're going to

28:34sign you a ticket you're a ticket to me um The Gap is we're not doing what we could do in Customer Support to actually Foster relationships get deeper with the customer love the heck out of the customer and incent them to renew with us and be loyal to us and keep working with us so um we see the Gap here is this is wasted opportunity to drive growth and so the value that helps out delivers is the ability to optimize your support experience for customer happiness and loyalty to ultimately Drive Revenue this is very different than me going on and saying I got a share it inbox

29:13customers can choose any channel blah blah blah and putting it on the customer to figure out does that matter why does that matter why do I care about these three or four kind of esoteric sounding little features instead what I'm doing is I'm telling the whole story about why we built it that way why do those features matter that's it um these are the key takeaways one buying is super hard um uh our job at sales is actually to be a guide uh not to be a slimy sales person that trashes the competition um a point of view story um helps is designed to help customers

29:50make better decisions in order to do that you have to kind of start with your positioning um and you know last one is buy a Toyota toilet if you ever gotta buy a toilet that's my advice you should just do that this is how you can contact me if you want to contact me and uh and you know they're doing podcasts here and if anybody wants to do a podcast with me I'm here all day we should go to the podcast booth and make a podcast um but anyways thank you that's it are we gonna do questions yes we are oh great yeah Screech was me standing right

30:22by that speaker I love the question part thanks April yeah that's awesome we have time for questions who would like this Throne at them are you good so I'm uh I'm gonna continue the toilet related questioning unfortunately um so let's say we build a product like a toilet seat that could add value irrespective of the big decision that our customers have already made to buy the toilet that they're in does what you presented change at all for products that are plugins add-ins value add on top of larger systems where we could complement all of those other like depending on what other big decisions we could make complimentary yeah I mean you

30:58still have a buyer right he said to buyers like to toilet manufacturer for example right so what you have to do is like you've got these differentiated features and I assume you know when you built the toilet seat you woke up in the morning and said you know what sucks about toilet seats you know they're too hard or something I don't know like and then you built your product to fill that Gap and so if you're selling to the manufacturer it's about you know he here's what you get with everybody else here's the thing only we can deliver and here's why it's good for you like here's

31:32the value for you and in your case if you're selling to you know the manufacturer is going to incorporate your thing and then sell it on it's usually about here's how you're going to sell more toilets by incorporating my thing in your toilet so you know here's how you're going to make money off this thing occasionally it's a here's how you're going to save money on this thing but for the most part it's you're trying to describe the value to the to the purchaser you know why adopt this thing into your product and here's the money you're going to save awesome thanks you're welcome over here April in the middle hello here

32:11we have two boxes so oh I have two boxes oh wow that's confusing sorry it's like it's like when they get the balloon going at the concert um so back to your like salesman at the toilet store you seem pretty analogous to an affiliate marketer like he kind of is a third party helping you pick and from what I've seen the good sources provide that POV to affiliate marketers to kind of help them create the content like but I never see that as much in B2B are you seeing people try looking for affiliate marketers in B2B or is yeah it's just too hard so so I actually

32:51believe that vendors have an awesome opportunity to do that themselves and they don't they don't because they don't think buyers will believe them and they don't think buyers want their point of view on why you should pick us versus the Alternatives I don't think we have to rely on third parties like he's you know maybe he's like an affiliate marketer maybe but but he absolutely makes more if I buy a more expensive toilet but the thing that he did that was so good which I think you can do as a vendor is he came into that discussion with like with me helping me make the right choice right at the center so

33:35we're often too chicken to do this in sales because we want to sell everybody but the reality is we should really only be trying to sell people that are really good fit for our stuff because if we sell the people that aren't a good fit they're going to turn on us and this is bad that actually costs us money and so most of the companies I know that do a really good job of this and the two companies I use as an example there do exactly this in their sales meetings and most of the bigger software companies I've worked at do exactly this they paint a picture of

34:07the market and they say look if all you want is XYZ pick the other guys it's a better fit because if you pick us you're going to turn because we don't actually have differentiated value for you so I think that there's wasted a huge wasted opportunity here particularly in startups because we pussyfoot around this like we don't want to talk about competitors but like if you look at level jump for example like they never mention the competitors by name occasionally a customer will ask them well what do you think about showpad or what do you think about you know competitor X and they'll say well they

34:44kind of fit in this LMS bucket so they're really good if you want to do this but if you want this they can't do it you decide it's up to you to decide customer but I'm going to be the guide and tell you so it is the same thing with help Scout like they're always against zendesk they don't say zendes sucks you should buy us right everybody should buy us it's not true some people are actually great fit for zendesk but what they do is they come in and say look if you're worried about this we're a super good fit and they acknowledge that if you don't worry

35:14about that maybe you're not a good fit maybe you should buy the other guys and so I think if we can do that in a kind of straight up authentic sort of a way customers love it and you sell a lot of software so I didn't really ask you a question I don't know a lot of people doing an amazing job of affiliate marketing most like most of the companies I'm working with are B2B and so they don't do a lot of that stuff but I do think we have massive opportunity to do it ourselves

35:46um so my cut I serve people who in a community that has been really underserved for decades and so most of my customers believe that they have to choose legally they have to choose something like my product but most of them suck and they just think all of them suck and I just how do you address that in your POV what like how do you show the question like how do you address this the idea that perhaps you could get actual value from this if you bought from me right right sometimes we have this thing that customers have been so burned in a segment with terrible solutions that we

36:27show up with something great and they're like yeah sure we've heard that before um there's a few ways to address this so sometimes we actually end up addressing it by positioning ourselves in a different Market we can't always get away with this because people are actually looking for that solution and other things so you can't actually hop markets but sometimes you say you know what those guys are that and that sucks we're not that we're this other thing and then you explain what that is so sometimes we can get away with that um other times we can't like we actually want to stay in this market and then our

37:03challenge is is you know not just to talk about the value but prove that it's true and so you know we have options for doing that sometimes we can have you know independent third parties review us or you know analysts review our stuff or things like that sometimes we spend a lot of time you know working with customers to get good customer case studies and good quotes and good things sometimes we get deep into the metrics and show them the metrics and say look here are the metrics this is what you can expect with us you know the the other folks don't have those numbers we

37:38can do it this way but the big thing is to go really heavy on you can't just say it's true we actually got to prove it's true if we've got a terrifically skeptical audience because that has heard the lies before been burnt by the lies before and then we're coming in later and they're like yeah sure you do it um so you have to really lean into this we don't just say it we actually do it here's the proof that we actually get it done so you can overcome that objection you're welcome April over here over here over here over the past 10 years we've heard a lot of

38:13um a lot of positioning has been described typically to talk about the psychographics about the end user or the buyer so yeah typically what's the gain for them or what's what's the pain point or how does their job description you know how does your product essentially help them I noticed that a lot of your positioning doesn't necessarily include that kind of conversation I'm wondering if you're if you have like a you know a riff or something that maybe doesn't like you're against that or is that why does that fit into your Matrix of positioning which I love I mean but yeah yeah yeah so um so when I started in marketing

38:55um I was taught that right we have to start with the customer's pain and most of the sales reps I worked with at when I started in marketing had been trained to do that so what they would do in a sales meeting is they would walk in and do this have the pain discussion you know like what's your pain like what are you struggling with all this stuff and then the Reps would then try to build a custom pitch to respond to whatever the customer's pain was and that on the surface of it that actually makes a lot of sense until you actually dig into it and it's

39:28like my dude we have this crummy little piece of software that does two things I don't solve everybody's pain I don't solve all the pains I can go in and have that nice conversation but the end of the day I only solve these two little things so why don't I just lean into that so I think we spend too much time with this customers have all this pain and we need to understand the pain like most of our software doesn't actually solve 9000 pain points it solves a very limited number of them and so if we've done our job right in customer Discovery before we built the

40:08product and then observing what happens after we get our first wave of customers we know the pain that we solve better than anyone else and so we should just run at that the trick of this isn't actually figuring out the customer's pain the trick is figuring out which customers have the pain that we solve and are there enough of them to build a business on if there isn't then we need to go back to the drawing board on product so I think we we spend too much time pretending we're Consulting businesses we can solve all the pains with custom software we're not building custom software we we have a thing and it only

40:44does five things and so what we really so it's kind of a pointless conversation the other thing is that um it puts a lot of the onus on the customer like you're asking the customer to know a lot of stuff and I think really good sales and marketing involves quite a bit of commercial teaching where we're saying look these are your options this is what you could do if you think this is interesting you should come to us because we do this stuff instead of sort of saying like we solve all the pains we don't solve all the pains we don't always love a tiny little bit of the pain

41:21so that's my kind of practical advice on that I think I think we act like we're custom software houses when in fact we just have a product that just does these four things and we should just focus on that I don't know if that answers the question last question over here uh I recently put a new landing page that was comparing my product with other products and it is one of the biggest drivers of growth at the moment but as a solopreneur who doesn't have a sales team to reach out and and go through these kind of pitches how do you kind of get people to start you know how do you

41:55how do you give them that point of view walk through is it Just landing pages you know at different ways or like yeah yeah so the question is like how do you do this if you don't have sales people there's so many ways to do it and I've seen companies do this in like super creative ways like um I wish I had included in the deck now but um the level jump one of the companies that I talked about in this at one point people were so confused because there's so many products and categories in sales technology people were so confused they created this piece of content and it was

42:30called sales Tech explained using donuts and so it was like uh you know so there's something like you know call listeners it was like you know I find out who likes the donuts you know and then then whatever is you know I've you know I find out who you know who's doing something else with the donuts but then they got down to their their segment which is this sales onboarding sales enablement and they were like sales onboarding sales enablement is really about um I teach people how to sell the donuts as opposed to all the other things so you can do some creative things with content I've seen other folks really

43:08lean into um like kind of the story of The Gap right so they're focused on look there's Solutions out there and some of those are solutions are really good is some of the solutions are really good at this and some are really good at this but look at this Gap and we're here to to fill that Gap and so I think you can do that in your marketing and your content I've seen folks do like the equivalent of that sales pitch in a white paper I've seen folks do the equivalent of that sales pitch in a buyer's guide buyer's guide is actually in my opinion super underutilized and always fantastic

43:45performing piece of content every company I ever worked with we did a buyer's guide it always worked because it works because it solves this problem of how do I buy and so the other thing is it's great signal like if somebody downloads your buyer's guide my God they're in the middle of a sales process maybe you should pick up the phone and call them right or send them an email and say hey can I help you and be toilet over me Obi-Wan right at that moment um but so I think there's a lot of ways to do this in your marketing and in your content and the way you talk about this

44:15stuff I've also seen companies that are more product-led growth really get into this in the way they onboard customers to try to make sure that they get at this differentiated value super early so um level jump did a little bit of this where it's like you know instead of taking you through the 19 steps to do whatever you know they got you right into this metrics thing right in the beginning because you need to experience that to really understand the differentiated value if you don't get to that you're going to be like why am I not just using LMS you know this is just like an LMS

44:52so I think there's a lot of ways to do this without actually doing it with a sales pitch but I think if you have sales people I think the rubber really meets the road in a first sales meeting if you can do this well on a first sales meeting you close a lot of business but I think marketing can do it I think product can do it yep [Applause]

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