April Dunford: prediction

Transcript context

…So the thing with that framework is I do think it works in certain conditions, but again, I think the conditions might be kind of edgy. So there's a couple of things that I think are lacking in that structure for a sales pitch. So the first one is there's actually no concept of differentiated value in that pitch, which for me is a giant miss. So in that pitch, it assumes that new is inherently valuable and old is inherently bad, and sometimes that's true. So sometimes there's just you versus the status quo and the status quo is some terrible old thing, some legacy thing or it's manual processes or something, and you're the only thing out there, then you can get away with that. But most of the time, we don't have that. Most of the time, there's multiple new ways of doing something and you just can't say, "Well, I'm the only new and the rest of you are old and bad." So usually I've got to thread the needle. And so that's the first thing. The second thing is that for most companies, if we really understood customer and decision, old is good, it's safe, it's not risky. And does anybody ever say, "No, I'm not going to buy Salesforce. That's the old stuff,"? I just don't think that happens. So in a lot of cases, I don't think you can rely, it's lazy to say, "Buy this because it's new and new is better." Most of the time, the customers are going to want to know, well, what's better about it? Tell me what the value is that I can't get anywhere else. And you're going to have to get more specific than just saying, "Trust me, it's new and new is good." So that's the first thing. The second thing is this idea of starting with a trend. On the surface it looks kind of good, but the problem is often the trend is not unique to you. So everybody else sees the trend too. And so you are starting in a way that any of your competitors could start the same way. I did this for years where I was taught to do problem solution. We would define the problem like a trend. We'd say, "Well, the change in the world." I was selling databases and I'd say, "Change in the world, data is exponentially growing." It's like, no shit. We all know that. All of my competitors could say that, and all of my competitors deal with the trend in the same way. So unless you have a particularly unique take on the trend, well, then it's not the trend at all really, is it? It's your insight into the trend. So I don't think trend is that great because it's not always unique to you. And ideally what we want is something that we can say that none of our competitors can. And typically a trend is something outside of our control. It's out in the world and everybody else can see it too. So I don't think it's great. thing that we can say that none of our competitors can. And typically a trend is something outside of our control. It's out in the world and everybody else can see it too. So I don't think it's great. I think that structure looks a lot like the structure we use in a VC pitch or an investor pitch because we're talking about much longer timelines and we can say, "Look, the world is really changing and 10 years from now there's going to be chaos and destruction and the only one standing is us and therefore there is no competition. " And because the timeframes are longer and we're talking about disruption of an entire market, which is pretty theoretical, we can get away with a lot of that stuff in investor pitch. In fact, we want to go there in investor pitch. Sales pitch is all about right now. Sales pitch is like, okay, I'm going to exchange my money for right now. You can't get too far into the future. Otherwise, all I'm doing is giving everybody a reason to delay, which they're likely to do anyway because they're indecisive about what they should do. I feel like I need a debate version of this podcast where people come on and-…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.