April Dunford: evaluation

Transcript context

…Awesome. Another question that's been in the back of my mind since we started talking about differentiated values is just how honest should you be about the competition? Obviously there's a spectrum of extremely honest to super biased, what's your guidance on just how honest to be there? The posture I think you should assume in a sales situation, I had an old boss used to talk about this, is the posture we should have is calm confidence. So where that calm confidence comes from is we really understand why people should pick us. So this is differentiated value, we really understand it and we really understand who that's a really good fit for, and we don't even bother trying to chase anybody else. So we should be able to come in and say, "Look, we're sales enablement that delivers results. If you don't care about those results, you shouldn't pick us. You should pick someone else." And so generally what we're trying to be is extremely honest. We're trying to come in and actually give credit where credit is due with the other approaches, because typically the other approaches work just fine for other kinds of companies. If you're really small and you're not growing e-commerce business, use a shared inbox. It's free, it's easy to use, there's no problems there, just use it. If you're really worried about bringing the cost down in a customer service center, maybe you should use Zendesk. And so I think the more we can act as a guide in this situation and come in and say, "Look, these guys are good for this, these folks are good for this, and we're good for this. And you might not care about that, and if you don't care about that, we're not the one for you. You shouldn't pick us." But I think that... We're not the one for you. You shouldn't pick us. But I think that this calm confidence idea is that where we know the client should pick us, we should be unafraid to fight for that business. But we should totally walk away from business where we're not the best fit. We shouldn't be chasing that business at all. And this comes back to teaching them how to buy again and again. For these cases where you're like, "This is not a fit." Ideally you know that before you fly to their office and pitch them.…

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