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Summary and Key Themes

"Sales Pitch" by April Dunford provides insights into the complexities of purchasing decisions from the customer's perspective and emphasizes the importance of positioning and teaching in sales. I personally really enjoyed the way that the book helped you to understand thinking about just how hard things are to buy.

Here were the key themes in the book and after the key thems I've written out the main quotes that I found interesting.

Customer Perspective

• Understanding the difficulty customers face in making purchase decisions.
• Recognizing that customers often find the decision process overwhelming.

Positioning

• Positioning defines how your product is the best solution for a specific type of customer.
• It's not just about why customers should pick you, but why they should pick you over all other alternatives.

Considered Purchases

• Considered purchases require more time and effort due to potential negative consequences.
• Customers are more concerned about making the wrong choice than missing out.
• A considered purchase is anything over and above something you do automatically. It's something you have to think about.

Helping Customers

• Sellers should act as knowledgeable guides, helping customers navigate their options.
• Educating customers on the market and their choices can instill confidence in their decision-making.

Teaching

• Sales reps' teaching skills are crucial in creating a world-class sales experience.
• Buyers value sellers who help them make informed purchases by understanding their options and trade-offs.

Defense of Doing Nothing

• Sometimes, the best decision for a customer is to not make a decision.
• Between 40-60% of purchase processes end in no decision.

Understanding Competition

• Think of competition as different approaches to solving the problem rather than just other companies.
• Positioning against the buyer’s status quo is as important as differentiating from competitors.

Clear Next Steps

• Always have a clear next step in the sales process to keep the momentum going.
• Consistency in follow-up actions can help refine the sales approach.

Content Creation

• Creating a buyer’s guide can help prospects understand what they should consider when making a purchase.
• Visuals in sales decks can help position your offering and differentiate it from competitors.

Sales Pitch Format

• Introduction: Briefly introduce your company and product.
• Customer Perspective: Acknowledge the challenges customers face.
• Positioning: Explain how your product is the best solution for their problem.
• Market Education: Educate about the market and different approaches.
• Considered Purchases: Acknowledge risks and provide detailed information.
• Teach Through the Pitch: Guide the audience through their options.
• Differentiate from Competitors: Define competition as approaches to the problem.
• Clear Calls to Action: Ensure each section has a clear next step.
• Use Visuals: Incorporate visuals to illustrate key points.
• Create a Buyer’s Guide: Help prospects understand the purchasing process.

How hard things are to buy

The book is brilliant in that it forces you to see from the customers perspective. It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of selling a product and forget how difficult it is for the customer to make a decision.

We dramatically underestimate how difficult it is to make a considered purchase decision.

As sellers, we are often so preoccupied with how difficult it is to sell a product that we completely lose sight of how buyers are feeling during the purchase process.

April Dunford

Considering your product in the ecosystem of all possible solutions

Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering something a certain type of customer really cares about.

Positioning is the answer to the question, 'Why pick us over the alternatives?'

April Dunford

Vendors tend to assume the question the prospect wants them to answer is, 'Why pick you?'

Instead, the question the customer really wants the vendor to answer is, 'Why pick you over all the alternatives?'

If the vendor really wants to answer that latter question, they need to go beyond talking about their product and its features in isolation.

April Dunford

Why considered purchase decisions are hard

Considered purchases take more time and effort because there are potentially negative consequences if you make a poor choice.

April Dunford

Customers, it turns out, are much less worried about missing out than they are about messing up.

April Dunford

Trying to buy a toilet

There is a great story in the book about trying to buy a toilet. It's a great example of how difficult it is to buy something that you know you need but don't know much about. Essentially there is 50 different toilets and you have to chooe, but then you don't actually know what you are looking for.

How Hard Is It to Buy Your Stuff? Think about this for a minute.

If it’s this hard to buy a toilet, how hard is it to buy your product? We all know what a toilet is. We are all long-time toilet users.

Your product, however, might be something that folks have never seen or used before.

April Dunford

But then a toilet guide saves the day and provided an easy way for her to think about toilets and make a decision.

What he did was give me a way to categorize all of my options so I could make an informed choice for myself based on what was most important to me.

He was acting like a knowledgeable guide, and in doing so, he taught me how to confidently make a purchase.

I believe that for any considered purchase, we can create a pitch, in the form of a story or narrative, that teaches customers how to buy.

Not only that, but I also believe that we can create a narrative that helps our best-fit customers easily understand why they should choose us and feel very confident in making that decision.

April Dunford

If you ask for a customers problems they might not know

Each meeting turns out to be exactly the same.

The call starts with the sales rep asking questions about Joey’s company and its requirements for accounting software.

Joey answers as best he can, but the truth is, he isn’t entirely sure his list of requirements is correct or complete.

April Dunford

In defence of doing nothing

This book helped me understand that sometimes the best decision is to do nothing. It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of selling a product and forget that sometimes the best decision is to simply not make one.

The easiest, safest purchase decision is often no decision.

April Dunford

You might believe that the decision to do nothing happens infrequently, but you would be mistaken.

In their 2022 book, The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision, Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna reveal that between 40 and 60 percent of purchase processes end in no decision.

April Dunford

As a vendor, you always need to position against the buyer’s status quo, even if there are other vendors to worry about on the customer’s shortlist.

Part of positioning against the status quo is making the case for change.

April Dunford

Help customers make an informed purchase by teaching them how to buy

This part of the book calls back to the toilet seller and how he helped her make a decision. This time it's up to you to help the customer navigate the landscape that they know very little about.

But as it turns out, customers want more from vendors than they generally give them.

In the groundbreaking 2011 book The Challenger Sale, authors Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson reveal that buyers placed the most value on a sales rep’s teaching skills.

April Dunford

They found that the key characteristics of a world-class sales experience all related to the sales rep’s ability to help customers figure out how to make an informed purchase.

April Dunford

The importance of helping customers understand their options

Research tells us that in a sales call, buyers expect sellers to help them understand their options.

Buyers would like vendors to help them understand the trade-offs between different approaches to solving their problem.

They want to understand potential pitfalls and how to avoid them.

Buyers are looking for ways to understand what choices are available to them and how they should choose between them.

This stands in stark contrast to what many companies are currently communicating across marketing and sales.

April Dunford

It is impossible to differentiate yourself without addressing the alternatives.

April Dunford

You cannot teach customers your differentiated value and why it matters without talking about the alternatives in the market.

A good sales pitch addresses the alternatives and helps customers understand how to categorize them, and what their strengths and weaknesses.

April Dunford

Discovery usually happens in a first sales call. Done well, discovery is a conversation during which the buyer teaches the seller about their pain, problems, and situation,

but the seller is also teaching the buyer about their point of view on problems and solutions in the space.

April Dunford

Identify stories that pique buyers’ curiosity and move them to action.

April Dunford

'Stop selling. Start helping.' — Zig Ziglar

April Dunford

Summing up her sales pitch approach

The goal of a great sales pitch is to help customers understand all their choices, the trade-offs between each, and when to pick your solution.

April Dunford

Help prospects understand the entire market, including other common alternatives beyond your product and the pros and cons of those alternatives mapped to their particular situation.

Accommodate the salesperson’s need to do in-depth discovery.

Help prospects clearly understand your differentiated value versus other alternatives and why the unique value only you can deliver is critically important.

Accommodate a product demonstration (should you choose to do one) as a natural part of the narrative flow of the pitch.

Include a clear call to action for what the prospect should do next.

April Dunford

Setting up the customer and teaching them about the market

The Setup: This is where you have a conversation with the prospect about the market.

Specifically, this is when you teach prospects the market context they need to know to understand the importance of the value only you can deliver.

It makes sense to do this before you talk about your differentiated value.

April Dunford

How do you beat Bobby Fischer? You play him at any game but chess. — Warren Buffett

April Dunford

A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. — Steve Jobs

April Dunford

Problems Aren’t Unique, Insights Are.

April Dunford

An awesome reframe of your competition as approaches to the problem

Think of your competition as 'approaches to the problem' rather than individual companies.

The easiest way for prospects to make sense of a market is to stop thinking about it as an unorganized list of different independent vendors and products and start thinking of it as groups of vendors that share a particular approach to the problem.

April Dunford

We don’t compete with companies or products. We compete with approaches.

April Dunford

It’s Okay to Position a Competitor in a Way They Would Disagree with as Long as You Believe That It’s Objectively True.

April Dunford

Helping customers understand the value only you can deliver should be the centerpiece of everything you do in marketing and sales.

Value is why customers buy your product.

April Dunford

Always have a clear next step and be confident

The next step could be a fully customized demo in front of a wider group of stakeholders, getting the client signed up for a trial version of the product, asking if you can prepare a detailed quote, or simply asking for the sale.

Whatever it is, be sure that the meeting doesn’t end without a clear next step.

April Dunford

If your company is new and your sales process is less evolved, a good starting point to get some structure is to be consistent in what you ask the customer to do after the first sales call.

This will also give you a starting point to at least test which call to action works best with your customer set.

April Dunford

On creating content for your site, create a buyers guide

The Buyer’s Guide: One of my favorite categories of marketing content is the buyer’s guide.

As I told you at the beginning of this book, many prospects have never purchased a product like yours before.

They are desperate for information that can help them make choices they feel comfortable with and can also defend to their boss and other stakeholders.

A buyer’s guide is a great way to walk prospects through what you believe a knowledgeable buyer should consider.

April Dunford

Visuals to help with your decks

A visual can do a lot to position your offering and tell a story about how you are different from your competitors.

You can find some examples in the downloadable materials available at aprildunford.com/books.

April Dunford

Futher reading on this subject

The co-founders of HubSpot, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, famously wrote Inbound Marketing to articulate how marketing was changing and how companies should be reacting to that change.

April Dunford