In this week’s episode of The Small Business Matters podcast, we talk to April Dunford, a leading authority on product positioning, to delve into the art of creating compelling sales narratives. With a rich background spanning over 25 years as a VP of Marketing in fast-growing technology firms and collaboration with giants like Google and Epic Games, April brings a wealth of knowledge to the table. Her books, “Obviously Awesome” and “Sales Pitch,” offer invaluable insights into positioning and crafting sales pitches that resonate with customers.
April shares that the inspiration for “Sales Pitch” came from her observation that while marketing teams could effectively use positioning to craft messages, sales teams struggled to translate this into engaging stories for their pitches. This gap led her to develop a structured approach to building sales narratives that bridge marketing and sales efforts, ensuring the unique value of products is communicated effectively in sales situations.
We touch on several aspects of crafting winning sales pitches, including:
- The importance of having a constructive attitude towards selling and understanding the customer’s buying journey.
- Common mistakes in sales pitch development, such as relying on outdated materials or focusing too heavily on features rather than differentiating value.
- The distinction between helping customers to buy versus selling to them, emphasizing the need for sales reps to offer perspectives on the market and assist customers in navigating their options.
- The phenomenon of decision paralysis in B2B purchases, where the abundance of choices leads to inaction, underscoring the role of sales in simplifying the decision-making process for buyers.
- April emphasizes the need for sales pitches to start from a point of market insight, positioning products uniquely rather than leading with generic problems that competitors can also claim to solve. She also discusses the pivotal role of confidence in the buyer’s journey, where effective communication and education about the market can significantly impact purchasing decisions.
Watch Our Interview
The following transcript of our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Gary Stockton: When you talk to customers about your products and services, do you find yourself getting tongue tied with jargon? Do you have trouble getting your customers to clearly understand the value you or your product brings? Today we’re going to talk about making sales through captivating stories that land with your customers every time. Joining us is April Dunford. She is the world’s foremost authority on product positioning. With her expertise as a consultant and author, April helps companies make complex products easy to understand and love. Boasting an impressive 25-year career as a VP of Marketing at various rapidly developing technology firms, she’s collaborated with hundreds of growing technology companies such as Google, Epic Games, Postman, and others.
April is also the acclaimed author of the bestselling book, “Obviously Awesome,” which delves into the art of positioning. And her just released book, “Sales Pitch“, which unveils the secrets of crafting a winning sales narrative in the market. April, welcome to the Small Business Matters podcast.
April Dunford: Hey, so great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Gary Stockton: Thanks for joining. So, let’s talk about your latest book, “Sales Pitch”. Was there an experience, with a salesperson or. organization that gave you the idea to write this one?
April Dunford: Yeah, the idea for the book came from the work that I’ve been doing with clients on positioning.
So, my background is positioning expert. I work with companies on their positioning and what I found is that, when I was working with companies on positioning, which is getting really tight on why they win in the market, what their differentiated value is, who their best fit customers are. I was finding that if I had a cross functional team together and everybody understood that marketing had what they needed to go and build great messaging. But sales, even if the sales team was in the room and involved in building the positioning, sales team would go back, and they’d be like, I intellectually understand the new positioning. I’m just not really sure how to tell the story. And so, they would go back to the sales team and the pitch wouldn’t change.
So, I thought, there must be a way to build a good sales pitch. We must have a structure for doing this, that I could teach people to make sure that positioning survived the jump from marketing to sales. And when I went looking for it. It didn’t exist. So, I decided, okay, at this point, I had worked with a lot of companies that built a lot of sales pitches.
So, I thought it would make sense to build a book that would teach people. Here’s what the components of a good pitch look like. And here’s how to map your positioning to a sales pitch so that we do a better job of explaining why pick us over the competitors when we’re in an actual sales situation.
Gary Stockton: At a high level can you share what the book covers?
April Dunford: So, it covers a couple of things. First of all, it gives people a way to think about selling and kind of an attitude to have when they’re in sales, which I think is really important. And then secondly, it describes an eight section sales pitch structure, and how to, take your product, figure out what your differentiated value is and how you’re, and who you’re trying to target in the market.
And then it will teach you how to actually map for your product, the answer for those eight sections and put it together into a sales pitch that really helps you stand out from the other alternatives in the market.
Gary Stockton: Interesting. so, what are the common mistakes that. Sales and what are the common mistakes that people make in sales pitch development?
April Dunford: The first thing is, I’ve worked with 250 companies and it’s interesting to see what the sales pitches look like at 250 companies because, we don’t see these things. They’re not out in public, so we only get to see them if the company shows them to us. the first thing that’s really interesting is, if you ask most companies, like they’ll send me the sales pitch and I’ll say, where did this come from?
Like whom built this? And people will look at me like, I don’t know, man, this thing has been here since the year of the flood. We don’t know. And every time we put out a new release or we add something to the product, we add a slide, or we move a slide around. But nobody ever throws the pitch out and starts from scratch.
So that’s one thing. The pitch evolved over time. Nobody really knows why it’s structured the way it’s structured. And I think that’s a mistake. I think we can do much better than that. The second thing is that I work mainly with technology companies and, for the most part, the sales pitches are what I would call a feature walkthrough. If you can imagine a tech product, you can imagine we have a menu across the top, and there’s five drop down menus. Most sales pitches consist of a salesperson or a sales engineer saying, okay, today we’re going to show you the product. Look, we have these five drop down menus. Let’s click on everyone. And I’m going to explain every single thing that’s in each of those drop-down menus.
I think that’s a mistake for a lot of reasons. One, it’s overwhelming for customers on the receiving end of that. And two, it doesn’t necessarily answer the question that the customers have. Often when we’re selling to businesses, the customers are not trying to answer the question why pick you? They’re trying to answer the question, why pick you over the other guys I’m looking at? If we’re showing everything like all these features are equal, we’re not really homing in on what makes us different and special. So, I think those are the big two things that people miss on.
Gary Stockton: In the book, you say it’s not so much a book about sales pitches, but more about helping customers to buy. How are the two different?
April Dunford: Yeah, so like I mentioned before, the book starts by talking about the kind of attitude we must take in sales, at least in my opinion. And I think we’ve not thought a lot about how difficult it is to buy our product. And it is really difficult. If you think about it, most of the time, if we’re selling a product to a business, the person that’s buying that product on the business side, most of the time, you’re talking to a person that has never purchased a product like yours before.
Imagine we’re selling accounting software. It’s the controller or somebody inside the company. This is probably the first time they’ve ever purchased accounting software. So, they don’t know who the players in the market are. They don’t know what their list of purchase criteria should be. They don’t know what the state of the art of accounting software is. They don’t know what’s possible and what’s not possible. All they know is the system they’ve got right now. Maybe they used a different one at a different company, but that’s about it. Now, don’t get me wrong. Customers have done a lot of research before they talk to a salesperson. They’ve usually Googled like crazy.
They’ve read anything they can get their hands on. They’ve gone on comparison websites. They’ve looked at all kinds of stuff and what they’re generally feeling is overwhelmed. So, they have so much information. They have too much information. And so now they’re trying to figure out, Hey, I got to make a recommendation to my boss about which one of these things we should buy. And I don’t know what to do.
If you look at the research on this, what customers actually want from us is not for us to show every single feature of the product. What customers actually want from a sales rep in a sales situation is they want perspectives on the market. They want help choosing between alternatives.
And most of the time we’re simply not giving them that.
Gary Stockton: Overwhelm. You mentioned overwhelm a minute ago. It reminds me of a scene from a movie starring Robin Williams, it was called “Moscow On The Hudson”, about a fellow that comes to America to live.
April Dunford: I heard of this movie. Yeah, maybe.
Gary Stockton: He goes into a grocery store and he looks at the shelves and he, ends up and passing out in the aisle because of the choices, just so many choices, it completely, it just blew him away. And I can, yes, I can identify that particularly with a category like accounting.
Now we focus on B2B here in, in this group at Experian. I’m curious why so many B2B purchasing decisions end in no decisions.
April Dunford: This is an interesting thing. If you look at the data on this, it ties into this idea that the buyer is overwhelmed with choices and not really sure how to make a good choice.
If we think here, we’ve got this poor buyer, most of the time the person has been assigned the task to figure out. The thing to buy so let’s go back to my accounting software example, maybe the Vice President of Finance went to the Controller and said “Hey, I hate our accounting software we’ve outgrown it. Go look at it figure out what we need to buy and then come back to me and make a decision.” Like that person who is tasked with making a short list looking at all the alternatives making a recommendation to their boss that’s a really on the spot kind of a job. It’s risky making that decision.
If that person, let’s say they pick something, they take it to their boss and their boss says, no, that’s terrible. No, we would never buy that. They’re afraid, right? And they’re going to look stupid in front of their boss. Maybe they pick something and all the end users in the department hate it, or maybe they pick something, and it turns out it doesn’t do something critical that they should have known about, but they didn’t know about that person that feels like a very risky decision. And so if we put it in that context. It’s easy for that person to look at their choices, feel overwhelmed, not sure what they should pick, and then simply go back to their boss and say, “you know what? Now’s not a good time. Like the thing we’re doing right now is okay. It’s not perfect, but we have a lot of stuff going on right now. Let’s just delay till next year.”
And what they’re doing is they’re crossing their fingers that next year, the boss doesn’t point at them and say, look, you’re it. You’re the person that needs to go figure this out. So, if you look at the data on this, it shows that 40 to 60 percent of B2B purchase processes end in no decision. And if we scratch down on that to see what’s actually happening, it’s not that the buyer looked at all their options and decided, you know what the thing we’re doing now is actually fine, it’s better than anything else. We’ll stick with that. That’s not it. In the majority of cases the buyer looked at all their options, could not confidently pick one of these all of these options that look the same. They’re worried about making a bad choice and they simply say “you know what? I’m not going to do anything here. This looks too risky. I don’t know what to pick so I’m not going to pick anything here.”
I think in B2B as sellers, we really need to think about what can we do to help a buyer feel comfortable about the purchase decision that they’re making? And part of that is educating them on the entire market, not just us, but where does everybody in this market fit and how do we fit relative to everybody else so that they can feel confident that they understand their options. They understand their choices and we’ve made the right choice for this business.
Gary Stockton: Keeping that confidence going, making sure that they still feel good about it. It’s about effective communication, right? Like you said, instill confidence.
April Dunford: yeah, it’s, about, in some ways it’s about teaching. If you think about it, again, I’ve got this buyer that knows a lot about their own company and their own company’s pains and their own company’s requirements. And they’ve done a lot of research, so they know stuff about what’s possible with all the different options out there, but what they don’t have is what we have which is a perspective on the market, and a perspective on, look, these kinds of solutions are good for these things, but bad for these things. And these kinds of solutions are good for this, but bad for that. Like, most of us operate in markets that if you came and asked us, draw us a picture of the market, we could draw you a little picture. A buyer has a really hard time drawing that picture. What they see is, they go to Gartner Group. There’s a top right quadrant and there’s 30 companies in there. And they’re like, I don’t know, are these for big businesses, small businesses? Is this the right choice for me? How do I narrow it down to three? I don’t actually know. And so we as vendors, I think need to adopt the attitude of we’re really here to guide the customer.
We’re here to educate them. We’re here to help them understand their options. And we’re here to help them make confident, good choices. Even if sometimes that choice is that they don’t pick us and they pick someone else, that’s okay too.
Gary Stockton: So is Market Insight, is that a good starting point for a good pitch? And how do we figure that piece out? Is it literally a Venn diagram of the competition and seeing where you stack up? How do you use Market Insight?
April Dunford: I see market insight as a little bit of something we do before we draw the picture of the whole market. Like it’s, our point of view in the market that informs how we placed people on the picture that we drew.
Put another way. If you think about the way most tech products get built, most tech products get built because the founder looked at something and said, let’s take accounting software. Since we’re talking about that, the founder looked at accounting software and said, you know what stinks about accounting software? Accounting software doesn’t work good when we have this particular thing going on. So, I’m going to make accounting software that works for companies that operate like this. And then they build something around that point of view. And so our insight into the market is that it’s, it’s our way of saying, look, we understand a lot about this market and we built the product in a very specific way because we had a very specific point of view about the problem that we’re solving.
I can give you an example. I worked with a company called Help Scout and what Help Scout does is they do customer service software. Think Zendesk is the big product in that market, but when they built that product, they were specifically working a lot with e commerce businesses and what they, their insight into the market about e commerce was that if you’re an e commerce business, you don’t have salespeople and you don’t have stores.
Customer service is one of the few times you get to interact with your Customers. What they understand is that, if we can deliver a really amazing customer experience and customer service, that’s actually a growth driver for the business. Now, if you look at most customer service software, it’s not designed for that.
Most customer service software is designed to get you off the phone. It’s designed to push you to self-serve channels. It treats customer service like a cost center, not a growth driver. And Help Scout’s insight and the way they start their pitches is they’ll talk to a customer service person inside e-commerce business and say, Hey, you are e-commerce. You have slightly different requirements for customer service. Like you really want to deliver an amazing service here. Because it’s one of the few chances you get to interact with your customers. Now, if I start from that insight, then I say, look, what are your options here? You could use a shared inbox and a lot of e commerce businesses start by just using a shared inbox.
That’s the easiest thing to do. But then if they’re growing, eventually they want to be able to do more advanced service things like prioritizations and assignments and things like this. Then what have they got? They’ve got traditional helpdesk software and traditional helpdesk software. Has all the bells and whistles.
The problem is it’s not designed to deliver amazing experiences. Like it assigns you a ticket number. You’re not a person anymore. You’re a ticket number. It’s designed to push you to low cost or to low-cost channels and basically get you out of, get you out of there as fast as possible. And in a perfect world, the e-commerce businesses would have a solution that, you know, is as easy to use as a shared inbox, but delivers an amazing customer experience, unlike this help desk software.
So that’s how they start their pitches setting up, we’re different. We have a different point of view on this market. And that’s why we built this product differently. And we believe it’s a really good fit for a customer, like you, if you happen to be an e-commerce business.
Gary Stockton: Many companies will start a sales conversation by asking customers about their pain points, about their problems. Why do you not recommend this?
April Dunford: I was taught that when I started out. I was taught that we should come in, we should, define the problem. Or even before we define the problem, maybe what we’ll do is we’ll just ask the customers, what are your problems?
What are your pain points? What are you looking for? Do you have any requirements? What are those requirements? And we would start by asking all those questions. I think there’s a handful of problems with starting with the problem or starting with what we would call sales discovery, where we’re asking a bunch of questions about what the customer’s doing.
The first one is, the way I was taught was we would start with the problem, but if you looked at the pitches that we built, we defined the problem in this very vague way. One of the first products I ever worked on was a database product. And we started with this definition of the problem was, Hey man, there’s a lot of data and the data is growing exponentially and you’re going to need a way to manage all that data.
The problem with that definition of the problem is that. Any of my competitors can solve that problem too. So, I’m not really differentiating myself at all. If I start with that definition of the problem, I solved the problem. They solved the problem. We all solved the problem. I’m not really helping you pick me over anybody else.
So that’s an issue. I think starting with, again, if we go back to the Help Scout example. Starting with my particular insight in the market is a much better way of starting that conversation because it’s all about my point of view and it’s particular to me. The second thing is, we start with a bunch of questions and ask the customer what is their problem? What can we do for you today? The problem with that is, again, if I go back to my example of this buyer looking for accounting software that’s really overwhelmed, part of their issue is they’re not really sure what their requirements should be. They’re looking to us for perspective on that.
If we come in with this idea, okay, tell me all your problems. And then we try to, on the fly, customize a pitch and say, oh, we solve those problems nine times out of 10, we’re going to give the same pitch that our competitors would give. But part of what we really want to do here is have a back and forth with the customer.
So, I think a better way, if we want to do discovery, which we absolutely do in a first sales call, a better way to do that would be to start with our insight. So, if I take the Help Scout example, I’ll start with this insight into, customer success is a growth driver. You customer, do you agree with that? Is that true for your business? And then when we get to the discussion of alternatives, that’s a perfect place to do discovery. So, we could say, look, we work with a lot of e commerce businesses. And what we’ve seen is most of them start out with a shared inbox, but then they have these issues, and they need more features and then they graduate to help desk software. How about you? What are you folks using? Are you using a shared inbox? Is that working for you? Are you finding that you’re running out of steam on that? Are you finding that you need advanced features? What sort of advanced features are you looking for?
So, I can do it within that structure in a way where It’s a give and take. So, the customer is educating me about their specific situation, but I’m also educating them about the overall market, my perspective on that market. And I think that just works a lot better.
Gary Stockton: Now, Salesforce, they’re quite a force in CRM, right? Why do you think they are so successful in designing and selling their products? It’s an Enterprise level B2B solution. What is it about how they position their offering that makes it so unique?
April Dunford: I think Salesforce does a bunch of stuff that’s great. But, interestingly, years ago I worked at a company that was the absolute leader in the CRM space before Salesforce came on the scene.
And then when Salesforce came on the scene, it was neat to watch them position their product at the beginning. So, at the beginning they were only CRM and they attacked a part of the market that Seibel, the leader at the time, like a couple billion in revenue.
Gary Stockton: I remember.
April Dunford: Siebel was very strong at the high-end enterprise part of the market. Salesforce came in and said, we’re going to go into the part of the market that Siebel doesn’t serve, which was the very, low end of the market. So, when they first launched, they were targeting companies that had less than 10 salespeople, which, I was at Siebel. We would never have sold to a company that had less than 10 salespeople. That is way too small for us. Part of the reason we wouldn’t sell down there is because those companies that were that small didn’t even have an IT department. Our product was on premise software. So you needed an it department to get the thing stood up and to maintain the thing.
Salesforce came on the market. And they were Software as a Service, one of the first big Software as a Service products. They came on the market and sold down at the very bottom and said, Hey, little guys with less than 10 sales reps, you can get the same thing that the enterprises get. And you don’t even need an IT department to do that because, hey, guess what? “No software.”
And so they were very successful at establishing a beachhead in the market that, the leader in the market was unable to reach and didn’t care about, frankly. And then once they had established that beachhead, they just gradually moved up market. and then started also adding on to other things, beyond CRM to their portfolio and stuff they could do.
I thought they were really smart in how they started. And then for years after that, they even developed such a dominant position in the CRM space. Even after they had service cloud and marketing cloud, as additional offers the way they sold the CRM for decades I think it’s a little bit different now is if you didn’t have any Salesforce products at all, they wouldn’t try to sell you everything all up front. They would just try to sell you the CRM because the CRM in their opinion was the backbone. You needed to get your customer data, right? And then they were so dominant in that market It was an easy sell to come in and sell you the CRM not so much with the other things. So, they would come in and instead of trying to sell you everything all at once, they’d come in, they’d sell you on the CRM. And then once you were all going good on the CRM, then they’d come back in and try to sell you the marketing stuff. So the neat thing about that is that if they had tried to sell you the marketing stuff at the beginning, then they would have had to position their marketing product as the best marketing product in the world better than all the other marketing things out there, which, arguably they were or were not, but there’s a lot of big players in that space.
Instead, what they do is they’d sell the product that was the winner, which was the CRM, then they would come in and cross sell you the marketing thing and position that. Not as the best marketing product in the world, but the best marketing product for someone that’s already running Salesforce in the CRM, much easier sell.
For decades and decades, and they did that now, it’s interesting to watch them now because the portfolio is much bigger and now they have other products like, Slack or mule soft or some of these other things that potentially a customer could start with Slack and then move to the CRM and do other things. So, you’re seeing them move towards more of a portfolio approach and maybe having the AI stuff bring it all together. I think they’re still working through that positioning, but it’s interesting to watch that positioning evolve as they’ve grown up as a big business.
Gary Stockton: Yeah, “No Software.” I remember that. And I remember Siebel, I think it’s interesting that you mentioned marketing platforms. HubSpot has maybe taken a page out of Salesforce’s playbook because they introduced a CRM, a low-end CRM and they’re really branching out from that product.
April Dunford: Yeah, I think it’s a genius move because it makes sense to have marketing and CRM go together. If you have one, you want the other. And so as they moved up market in the marketing automation space, at some point you could see, like it would make sense for them to have a CRM and they, I thought they did a really great job of launching the CRM, having it be fairly full featured, and making it free for a very long time anyway, and then now it’s interesting how much HubSpot CRM out in the market, you see a lot of it.
Gary Stockton: We like to test different approaches here at Experian. How do you test the sales pitch? How do we know if it’s working? we would know. A drop in sales if it’s working really badly, but is there, some science around testing pitches?
April Dunford: Yes and no. So, I’ll tell you how I do it. I don’t know if it’s particularly scientific, but it’s worked for me.
When we make a change in positioning, what we’ll do is get a cross functional team together and we’ll work through the positioning. So, who do we compete with? How are we different? What is the value we can deliver that no one else can? Who are we going after? What’s the market we’re going to win?
Then we will map that to a sales pitch and usually we’ll start by building a sales narrative and we’ll do that with a cross functional team. So, we’ve got marketing, product, sales together in the room and we’re working on that narrative. Once we feel like we’ve got it, then usually what I would recommend is we have marketing and sales come together and build a deck, a demo, and a script.
Demo is optional. We don’t always demo things, but if it’s a demonstratable product, we’ll have a deck, a demo, and a script. Then we want to go and let it loose in the sales team. Now, one thing to realize is that. Sales teams, even they, even if they complain about the pitch that they have right now, they’re comfortable with that pitch.
New pitches are usually bad, even if the new pitch is good. We have to be careful. It’s not a fair test to just take the pitch, throw it over to sales and say, do you like it? Or do you not like it? The answer to that is going to be, we don’t like it. A better way to test the sales pitch in my opinion is we will take one salesperson. And what I like to do is take the best one. Let’s take the best salesperson we’ve got, somebody that’s been successful with the old pitch. We’re going to spend some time training them on the new pitch, giving them lots of time to work with a script and try it out internally before we let them loose on prospects.
Then let’s do some practice test pitches on prospects. And what we want to do there is have the rep do the pitch on a qualified prospect. And at the end of that pitch, usually I would do this sitting in the room with the rep. We’re both there live for the pitch. And then afterwards we could deconstruct what’s working and not working in this pitch.
If I hear the magic words, “it’s better than the old one.” Then I say, we’re good to go.
April Dunford
Usually what we’ve got is some tuning to do, oh we didn’t like this word or, Oh, and we said that they were confused. Or we have this slide, we actually need to bring that forward. So every time we do these, pitch and then we tune it we pitch and then we tune it And then after we’ve done a bunch of this tuning, it feels like we got a pitch that’s you know as tuned as we’re going to get it, and then at that point I’ve got the best salesperson in my team, and at that point the salesperson says, yep, that’s it. It’s done. I don’t think we can tune it anymore. And here’s what I’m looking for that salesperson to tell me. Yes. We’re done tuning it. I like it. I’m going to use it and it’s better than the old one.
If I hear the magic words, “it’s better than the old one.” Then I say, we’re good to go. Now what I’ve got is a salesperson that’s all trained up on this pitch and I can use them to help train the sales force and not just train the sales force, but to convince the sales force that this is better.
So, you’ve got the best rep in the land comes back and says, look, this pitch is better. I’ve got this, bunch of deals in the pipeline and I got them with this pitch. Everybody should be on this pitch. Here’s how you do it. Here’s some advice. We can record them doing it. We can base the script off how they do it. And that’s so that’s generally how I test the sales pitch.
Gary Stockton: Let’s talk about jargon. This is the last question. How do you convince product teams to limit jargon when describing what they’d work so hard on because they want to, they want people to be impressed with the feature set and the speeds of the feeds. But what’s the turnoff for that, for the buyer?
April Dunford: I have a thing about jargon. There is a time and a place for some jargon in certain situations. One of the things I like to remind teams of is I think sometimes marketers get this idea that everything must be dumbed right down, the, I’m often using this example, like people use the expression, they’ll say, we should, describe our stuff so your grandmother can understand it. And I’m like, unless I’m selling to grandmothers, I’m not sure that’s true.
So, if I’m selling an advanced database product to database administrators, it’s okay if I’m using some terminology that your grandmother doesn’t understand, but every data administrator in the land does, that’s okay, in my opinion.
What we don’t want is jargon that’s meaningless or unclear. So, when we start talking about something being next generation or innovative, it usually means we haven’t got the right word for that yet. Like when you say it’s the next generation, but just say what you mean, say what you actually mean.
If we’re saying it’s innovative, innovative, how innovative, where, why, what, I think the more specific and clear we can get on this stuff, the better. But if we have to use industry terminology to do that, as long as it’s accepted industry terminology and everybody understands it, then I’m okay with that.
And I think it helps customers develop a feeling that we understand their business. We understand the market that they’re in. I think it’s okay to use market stuff, but I think we must be careful. Like, we can’t just assume. That customers understand a term, we need to know it.
So, we need to test that. We need to have feedback that tells us, yes, everybody in our market knows what this is so we can use it. And then I think we must be really careful about using just mushy marketing language, innovation that doesn’t necessarily mean what we think that it means.
Gary Stockton: The book is “Sales Pitch”, April This has been so helpful. I really enjoyed listening to the audio version of “Sales Pitch.” Where can our audience learn more about your thinking on sales pitches and positioning?
April Dunford: Sure. My website is aprildunford.com. That’s easy. And there’s a few things there. So, I have a podcast, like if you folks are podcast listeners, it’s called “Positioning with April Dunford”, and you can check that out. It’s really on that podcast I’m doing a lot of solo episodes where I’m picking a particular topic around positioning or sales pitches and going deep on that topic. So that might be useful. I also have a newsletter. You can see it when you go to my website, but a newsletter where, again, I’m giving some very specific examples of things that I’ve done with some of my clients are going deep on a particular topic.
And then of course, there’s the books. I have one book called “Obviously Awesome” that’s focused on positioning. And then the other one is “Sales Pitch”, which is focused on translating that positioning into a sales pitch. And you can buy those wherever you buy books. Oh, and then lastly on social media, I’m on LinkedIn. That’s the only place where I am actually ever active, but you can follow me on LinkedIn. That’s easy.
Gary Stockton: Awesome. Thanks so much for sharing so generously on our podcast.
April Dunford: Thanks so much for having me.
