April Dunford: prediction

Transcript context

…In terms of knowing if this is working and if your differentiated value works or if your insight works, do you have kind of a heuristic of a success rate that feels right? How often should this work for you to feel like "I think we have it?" Well, so generally if the sales pitch isn't working, it's because the positioning was weak. And so companies that jumped straight to building the new sales pitch without going back and really making sure that they really nailed the differentiated value, who knows? Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. And a lot of times it doesn't, I think. And so in the work I do with my clients, we go all the way back to the beginning. So we go right back to let's work on the positioning first. Now, if I've got the smartest people from the company in the room and we've done enough deals that we are pretty knowledgeable about how customers buy and what they like and what they don't know. If I've got the senior executive team in the room and they've got a reasonable amount of customer experience, we can pretty much feel good that the positioning we come up with if we're following a process will be good. Then it's just a matter of taking that positioning, mapping it to the sales pitch and then going to test it. So I think there's a bunch of things in testing that are really important. So one is we absolutely need sales involved in building the pitch. If we don't have sales involved in building the pitch, the pitch is never going to stick. The rule with sales reps is even if they don't like their current pitch, they're comfortable with the current pitch and they know it and they've memorized it and they have a little joke they tell on slide three. So they're not going to give up the current pitch without a fight. So you got to get sales management involved in building a new pitch, and then I would never just build the new pitch and then heave it over the wall and say, "Good luck, Chuck. " Because what'll happen is they'll come up with all kinds of excuses why they can't use this pitch. Instead, what you do is you take your best sales rep, your best one, and you bring your best sales rep over and you train them on the new pitch. They got to learn it, they got to pitch it to you, pitch it to the head of sales. We do a bunch of repetition on that, and then we have that rep test the pitch with qualified prospects. So we don't go to existing customers. They've already been polluted with the old positioning and the old pitch, and this needs to work with a qualified prospect, so let's do it in the way it was intended. We're going to take qualified prospects and work that new pitch with them. Usually what we'll do is a test period where after every pitch we'll huddle and say, "What worked? What didn't work? Maybe that word is tripping people up. Maybe we need to move this slide from here to here," and so we'll tune it. And then after we've done a bunch of pitches, one of two things happens. And so in this test structure, I am very much relying on the expertise of my best rep to know what's good. nd so we'll tune it. And then after we've done a bunch of pitches, one of two things happens. And so in this test structure, I am very much relying on the expertise of my best rep to know what's good. So after the best rep is comfortable with the pitch, done a bunch of pitches, re-twizzled it, at some point the rep will say, "Okay, I think we're done optimizing this pitch, and I'm not going back to the old pitch. I'm sticking with this pitch because I think this one works better." An experienced sales rep will know that, whether the pitch is better than the old pitch, if you give them the opportunity to feel comfortable with it, work with it a bit and pitch a bunch of new prospects with it. So if your best sales rep says, "Oh, this is way better than the old pitch. I can just feel it from the way people react to it and the number of times we've been able to convert people over into actual opportunities from a first call." Then what you do is at that point I call that pass. So then we take that rep, we can film them doing the pitch for training, and then we can take that rep, go back to the rest of the sales team and have that rep sell everybody else on it. So that rep goes back and says, "Listen up people, you're stupid if you're using that old pitch, which sucks. This new pitch is way better. Trust me, I'm the best rep on this whole team. By the way here's the list of deals I have cooking in the pipeline that I got using this deck. You should go do it and I'm going to teach you how to do it." Now I got sales, teaching sales, teach and sales instead of marketing, sort of throwing something over the wall and crossing their fingers and saying, "Hey, I hope this works." What we should see is an immediate uplift in what happens after first call. So most of the time what that is we get a higher percentage of deals converting into opportunities after that first substantive calls. Sometimes depending on the quality of the pipeline we had coming in, we're actually disqualifying more. But sometimes that's a good thing. But what we should see is an immediate uptick. It's stuff coming into the pipeline. It's a neat trick to pull, especially right now when everybody's budgets are really tight and you're just trying to squeeze more juice out of the lemon. It's a really easy way to get some more juice out of the pipeline. Just go in, tighten up your positioning, tighten up that sales pitch. And we can have instant impact with that because we can roll that out in a couple of weeks and start getting better deals flowing through the pipeline because these customers are understanding your value better, understanding why to pick you better. It's just easy, low hanging fruit to do when the economy's bad.…

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