133 / From Positioning to Sales Pitch: How to Make the Buying Process Easier, with April Dunford

Product Momentum Podcast

As the saying goes, not to decide is to decide. And, as April Dunford explains in this episode of Product Momentum, ‘not to decide’ — that is, the customer’s own inability to make a decision — swipes 40-60% of the average B2B salesperson’s revenue pipeline. (source: The JOLT Effect, by Matthew Dixon). B2B selling is hard, but the purchase side of the transaction is no walk in the park either. Call it what you want: dissonance, doubt, second-guessing. The anxiety that comes with the customer’s desire to avoid making a mistake can be paralyzing.

Recording Live at NYPC

Recording live from the New York Product Conference, April Dunford (author of Sales Pitch and Obviously Awesome) explains further: it’s not that buyers have determined that status quo is the better option. It’s that buyers simply can’t get to the level of confidence they need to pull the trigger.

How can product managers and salespeople work together to make the buying process less ominous?

From Positioning to Sales Pitch

“I think we need to approach it with the idea of ‘how can we be helpful to prospects,’ to help them make [these tough] decisions,” April says. “But at the same time, our mission is to sell stuff, right? So we need to communicate: ‘Why pick us over the other guys? What’s the value that we can deliver that no one else can?’ If we’re going to do that, we need a structure.”

Crafting a Compelling Story

April explains that the structure begins with understanding your positioning and then building a pitch that reflects that positioning. From that framework, “product and sales can work together to build a pitch that meets the needs of the Sales team in terms of doing discovery, handling objections, and crafting a compelling story that accurately reflects our product.” Perhaps as importantly, it also helps the buyer make a difficult choice and feel confident about it.

Learn more about how this structure works when you catch the entire podcast episode with April Dunford. You can also watch our conversation with April Dunford on the Product Momentum YouTube channel!

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Want to hear more from April? Check out our earlier episode, How To Get the Positioning Right.

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