We understand stories are a great way to connect with customers but few startups really take advantage of a good narrative to help them market and sell their products. Are you losing deals to competitors with clearly inferior products? Do your sales meetings leave customers excited or confused? Is your marketing closer to a feature list or a set of compelling reasons to buy? In this talk, April will give you a framework you can use to build a story that focuses on WHY you built what you built in a way that is differentiating, compelling, and most importantly, gets you business.
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Grow Growth Turing Fest 2022
How To Craft a Story That Sells
Auto-generated transcript - may contain errors. Tap a timestamp to jump the video.
So great to be here. So look. Hands up if you think selling is hard. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of you. Right? I think selling is hard. Like, I think in startups, a lot of us come from the product side of the house. And so sales doesn't necessarily come naturally to us.
And that's too bad because we have to have people buy our stuff. Otherwise, we don't get to stay in business. So that's kind of important. But I don't wanna talk about that today. What I actually wanna talk about today is sort of the opposite of that.
Like, I want to kind of take the customer's perspective on it. And I'm going to say something that's maybe a little bit controversial. And that is, I think buying is hard. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. You're thinking, no, it ain't. April buying is not hard.
I wish that was my job and that's all I had to do all day is just buy stuff like shopping. That would be amazing. And that's because we, you know, we think certain things are easy to buy. Like, I like buying shoes. It's okay to buy a t shirt.
I like buying a drink at a bar. That's easy. But other things are way harder. And they're harder because if we make a bad choice, bad things happen. Like, does anybody like buying insurance? No. That's kind of stressful, actually. I'm gonna give you an example that has nothing to do with tech, just humor me for a second.
I promise this all goes somewhere. I wanna tell you this story. It's called April Buys a Toilet. So I so I live in Toronto. I I bought an old house, and inside my old house is a very old bathroom. So I'm gonna hire a guy to come and fix up my bathroom.
And so the guy comes, he's fixing it up, and he says, hey, you're gonna have to go to the store and buy a toilet. And I said, okay. But how hard can that be? I've never bought a toilet before, but okay, I'm gonna go buy a toilet. So, so I I go to the toilet store.
I walk in. Sales rep comes over and says, can I help you? And I said, yeah, you can. I'm here to buy a toilet. And he says, what kind of toilet do you want? I'm like, I don't know. Like, one that flushes? And he says, look.
We have all kinds of toilets. They're all over there at the back. You just go back there. The prices are on them and the features and stuff. Go back there. Have a look at the toilets. When you figure out what toilet you wanna buy, come and talk to me.
You know, we're not gonna have to sell you the toilet. I'm like, okay. So I go back to the section of the store where they have all the toilets, and here's what I see. There's a thousand toilets. They all look the same, and and yet they're not the same.
Some of them cost two hundred dollars, and some of them cost two thousand dollars. And I don't know what the difference is. And there's all these features on these little stickers, and they don't make any sense. They're like, this is the p f two whisper vac toilet.
I'm like, what is that? I have no idea. This one has a flapper. This one doesn't. I'm like, what's a flapper? I don't know what a flapper is. I spent like an hour in there. I'm looking at all this toilet stuff, and I'm like, I'm not educated enough to buy a toilet. This sucks.
I'm gonna have to go home and search on the Internet. So I leave the store. I go home. I get on the Internet. And, my gosh, there's toilet technology. You have no idea. There's all these features. There's like water efficiency and seat height and dual flush technology.
These freaking flappers. I don't know any idea what those are. There's like takeaways and things. And like, I learned the most disgusting thing about toilets. There's a thing called an MAP score. Now I'm gonna teach you this. MAP score, that stands for maximum performance.
That's how much solid waste a toilet can handle in a flush. Three fifty to six hundred grams is good, but some toilets can handle up to one thousand grams. That that's two point two pounds. That's like a little wee dog. Like, that's a lot.
So at this point, I'm like, that's disgusting. I know disgusting things about toilet. And I'm like, I don't wanna know anything about toilets. I don't wanna know a thing about toilets. Now I my head is full of toilet information. I I get all frustrated. I go back to the store again.
I get a different sales rep, and the sales rep says, can I help you? I said, yeah. I'm trying to buy a toilet. And he says, what kind of toilet do you want? I'm like, buddy, I don't know anything about toilets. You're the toilet expert.
And he says, do you want the WhisperVac PF? I don't know. I don't know. We look at a bunch of things. I freak out. I leave. I get this genius idea. And my genius idea is this. Maybe I don't have to buy a toilet.
Maybe I can keep the old toilet because the old toilet was fine. It it was flushing just fine. It's been working fine. Yeah. It's a little old, whatever. But I could just delay this whole thing. And I'm a busy person. I don't have time to go back and forth and learn all this stuff about toilet technology.
So so that's it. My decision. I'm just I'm just gonna this is great. I'm not gonna do this thing at all. So how did that sales process work? Oh, yeah. I spent three weeks. I twice I went to the store. I spent what felt like infinity on the Internet.
How many new toilets did I buy? None. None. Now, I'm not saying that buying your SaaS software is exactly like buying a toilet. Yeah. Actually, I am. I'm saying it's exactly like that. In fact, I'm saying it's worse than that. Like think about it.
Like a lot of the stuff that you sell are things that people have never even used before. Like, I'm a toilet user. I'm a lifelong toilet user. I know what a toilet is. A lot of you are selling a thing that your buyer doesn't even know what it is.
Here's the other thing. This is the this is the secret of b to b software. Often, the people that you are selling to have never purchased a product like yours before. Just like me in the toilet. Never bought a toilet before. So that makes it extra hard.
Like, let's think about how does a typical b to b software purchase process go? Let's take accounting software. VP finance wakes up in the morning and says, god, we're in the middle of an audit. And you know what sucks? My accounting software sucks.
I hate it. We've outgrown it. It doesn't do the things I need it to. My gosh. We need to go buy new accounting software. Does the VP finance buy new accounting software? No. She's busy. She goes into the office, looks around, and says, you, Janet, go figure this out.
Look at the accounting software out there. Get us one that is better than this one, and come back, make a recommendation, and I'm gonna I'm gonna get you the budget and we'll buy it. And Janet's like, no. No. Damn. I don't wanna be the person in charge of that.
And Janet's like, I don't know anything about accounting software. I use accounting software, the one we have right now. Maybe I used a different one at my last job. I've never bought accounting software before. I don't know who the vendors are. I don't know what the state of the art of accounting software is.
So I go on the Internet and I search, and what do I see? Nine hundred million things. There's Quadrants and there's g two Crowd and there's software advice, and Gartner Group is telling me things. And there's nine million vendors, and they all look the same.
They all look the same. I go on their website, and they say we're the world's number one accounting software. Great. That doesn't help me at all. And, like, maybe I sign up for free trials, and I sign up for many free trials, and I still don't know because every single I'm looking at each of these products in isolation.
None of that tells me which one I should actually buy. Let's say I click the button that says give me a demo. And then what happens? Janet gets in there and sales rep says, welcome. Come here into my wind tunnel of features. I'm gonna give you the product walk through.
Here's a feature. Here's a feature. Here's another feature. Here's another feature. And Janet's sitting there with her hair blowing back going, Yeah. It's like, this looks good. I don't know. Does everybody have the same features? I don't know. Why are any of these features important? I have no idea.
And she's extra stressed out why. Because if she makes a poor choice, bad things happen. Really bad things happen. Like everybody in the accounting department is maybe gonna be mad if I pick something bad. Actually, I pick something really bad, maybe we fail the audit.
That's bad for the whole business. Maybe I'm not gonna get the promotion I'm up for. Heck, maybe I get fired. What's the easiest decision for Janet to make here? The easiest decision is to go back to her boss and say, you know what?
We're busy right now. Now is not a good time to buy accounting software. It's not a good time. We should just stick with the software we have right now. And I looked at the other things. Yeah. And you know, they're all kind of the same.
I don't know. But let let's just let's just stick with the thing we've got. Research tells us that forty to sixty percent of the time in b to b software purchases, the software purchase process ends in no decision. Forty to sixty percent of the time, this is the most vicious competition you have.
And that's not because they love the old stuff. It's not because they said, oh, we're totally in love with the thing we're using right now. Sometimes that's true. But the majority of the time, they're picking the old stuff because they cannot confidently make a decision.
And so it's easier to just make no decision at all. Now let me take you back to toilet land just for a second. Just for a second. So that's actually not the end of my toilet story. What actually happened is I got this genius idea.
I'm going to stick with the old toilet. So I go back and I tell my contractor. I said, look. I I'm I'm too busy to buy a toilet. It's too complicated. Let's just keep the old one. And he's like, lady, what are you talking about? It's gone.
I I took it out of here. We recycled it. It's gone to the big bathroom in the sky. You you can't you can't use that one anymore. It's gone. I'm like, damn it. So I gotta go back to the toilet store again. So I go back to the toilet store.
This is toilet store number three. And and sales rep comes over as as this guy. His name's Lou. Come on. It's funny. Come on. You that's a tough audience. Anyway, so Lou comes over, and I said, look, Lou, buddy, I've been trying to buy a toilet for weeks here.
I cannot leave here without a toilet. This is a toilet emergency. I gotta buy a toilet today. And, and I said, look, this is it's been terrible. He says, I know buying a toilet's really hard. I'm like, it's not just really hard, Lou. It's ****.
And he said, he said, we don't use that word here ma'am. It's solid waste. I said, okay, it's been solid waste. Anyway, so he says, don't worry. I got you. I'm gonna teach you how to buy a toilet, he says. I'm like, okay. Teach me how to buy a toilet.
He says, look, all you gotta eat there's three things. All you gotta know are three things. Quality, aesthetics, space. Really? He says, yeah. See all these ones over here? They're cheaper. And these ones over here are more expensive. You know all those features you've been looking at?
P f two whisper vac with the flapper thing? That's just like all those features are either really high quality, means your toilet lasts a lot of flushes before they break, or they're kinda low quality and they don't last very many flushes and they break.
And I'm like, who buys a low quality toilet? He's, well, actually, some toilets don't get flushed all that much. It's a secondary bathroom or a vacation home or something. And so, you know, if it's a secondary toilet, you'd be wasting your money to buy one of these ones.
You'd you'd be better to buy one of these. Fascinating. Okay. Well, this is my primary toilet, so I don't want one of those. I want one of these high quality ones. Okay. Fine. Good. So don't look at those anymore. Now we got aesthetics. Second thing is aesthetics.
So, some people got fashion requirements for the bathroom. They want a gold toilet or a pink toilet or they want a, you know, a certain look on a toilet. And they're those toilets tend to be quite high quality, but you're gonna pay more for this aesthetics thing.
So if you got a, you know, fashion requirement I got no fashion requirements, dude. So, okay, don't look at those. The last one is space. So some of these toilets, the tank, you could put it in the wall. And that saves you a lot of space.
If you got a little wee spot for a bathroom, the toilet will fit. But the trade off there is, you know, now the tank's in the wall. So if it breaks, you gotta break the wall to get in there and fix it. So unless you got a little wee space, probably don't wanna pick this one.
I'm like, I got a big space, so let's not do that. Okay. Now we're down to three toilets. I'm like, this is fantastic. There's three toilets. Which one should I buy? And he says, look, lady, I gotta come clean with you. I actually work for Toto.
So I'm gonna tell you to buy the Toto toilet. And I'm like, should I buy the Toto toilet? And he's like, I work for the company. Yeah. It wouldn't work for the company if I thought it was terrible toilet. And look, you can go home and look at it on the Internet, but we get really high quality ratings and blah blah blah.
Nobody's ever feeling bad about buying a if you just wanna buy a toilet and never think about it again, you should buy the Toto Toilet. I'm like, I'm so sold. That's it. I'm sold. Sold. Ten minutes. This took me ten minutes. Ten minutes. Now was that guy acting like a sales rep?
Did he give me the feature walkthrough? Did he try to teach me what a p f two whip back blah blah blah. You know, we didn't even talk about flappers once. Like, what that guy was doing was acting like a guide. What he helped me do was make sense of all this stuff, put it into context so I could make my own choices.
Now we don't do this in software. We don't do this in software. In fact, most of us are taught or believe that we should never talk about competition. That's bad. Because we don't wanna be seen as trash in the competition. Yet interestingly, if you look at the research on this, if the research shows, this is from a big study that was done of b to b enterprise software buyers, and they asked the people, what do you want in a sales interaction?
Here's the top two responses. One is, I want perspectives on the market. Two, I want you to help me navigate alternatives. I want you to do exactly what Lou did. Do we do that? No. We're just talking about ourselves. We make the customer figure that out, And that's a lot of work for them.
It's so much work that forty to sixty percent of the time they're like, I'm overwhelmed. I can't even figure out how to do it. So how do we actually build a better sales narrative that helps customers do the thing that they actually wanna do, which is figure out how to pick you over alternatives.
Now I talk a lot about the product walkthrough. There's there's in in my experience, like when I started working in startups, there's kind of three different ways that we structure sales pitches, at least what I normally saw. The first one was the product walk through.
I just show you all the features. I mean, that's good. It shows you the product. It's bad. Doesn't tell you when to pick the alternatives. The other one I've seen is like problem solution pitch. And a lot of times what we'll do is the rep will ask a whole bunch questions about what's your problem and what are you looking for today and whatever.
And then they'll do this very specific, so here's how our product solves those problems. The problem is lots of products solve those problems. It doesn't answer the question why pick you over the alternatives. We're still in the same problem. The last structure that I've seen is, you see this a lot in venture backed companies where they'll do the vision pitch.
It's almost like the same pitch they're doing at the VC, which is all the way, here's the vision. This is where we wanna go in the future. This is where we're headed. The problem, the big problem with trying to use that pitch in a sales situation is your customer is already really predisposed to doing this low risk thing which is delay the purchase.
And you say, hey, we've got this great thing. In five years, we'll be this great thing. And the customer's like, fantastic. Come back to me in five years when you got it. The other thing is a lot of these pitches say, this stuff is the the old stuff and we're the new stuff, but that doesn't work if, you know, the customer's got a short list and they're all the new stuff.
So again, why pick you over the alternatives? So the things we're doing don't actually do this very well. What would a really good sales narrative look like? A really good one would start with your insight into the market. Just like Lou, he's a toilet expert.
He started with this my insight into the market. We're experts in the areas that we're in. So we would start with that. We would discuss the pros and cons of different approaches, not necessarily companies, but different approaches. And then we'd help the customer understand what does a perfect solution for them look like.
And then we're trying to sell stuff. Then what I'm doing is I'm showing demonstrating, here's how we do that. So here's the structure I'm proposing. Now, I first saw sales reps do pitches like this, actually when at my my very brief and glorious stint at IBM.
But and and when you build a sales pitch at IBM, they give you this like binder. This is how you build the sales pitch at IBM. And at the beginning, I thought, this is absolutely overkill. But then I built a dozen pitches with it and I was like, oh, there's actually some genius in this.
When I left IBM, I went to a startup and myself and the VP sales sat down and we startupified the structure a little bit. There's some stuff you didn't need because the IBM deals are really really big. And so we rejigged the sales narrative, and we doubled revenue in a year, and then we got acquired.
Weirdly, we got acquired by IBM. But still, that seemed to work really well. And then I've been using that structure ever since. So for me, that's seven stock seven venture backed startups as the head of marketing. And then as a consultant, I work mainly with companies, growth stage companies on positioning.
But the first thing you wanna do with your positioning is build a narrative that communicates your positioning. So I use this structure, and I've now done this with about two hundred companies. So I feel like it works. So I'm gonna teach it to you in like ten minutes.
It's gonna be amazing. Here's how it works. I'm gonna give you example, and then I'm gonna show you how it works. So here's an example, HelpScout. Maybe you know these folks. I love this company. They're so great. So what's HelpScout? They're in the customer service software space.
So they work primarily with ecommerce brands. Their big competitors are either, really small companies tend to kinda start off with a shared inbox. Like people have questions, it goes to the shared inbox. They handle it. Once the companies start getting a little bigger, what they do is they graduate up to help desk software.
So like Zendesk is the big one in that space. Now, Healthscout, if you look at what makes them different, because they've grown up with these ecommerce brands, ecommerce brands actually think about service in a slightly different way than a regular company actually. Because they see customer service as a growth driver or a way to build loyalty with their product.
Because they don't have a lot of interactions with customers except when the customer comes into customer service. So unlike, say, your telephone company or the people you buy your cell phone from, they don't see service as a growth driver there. They see it as a cost center.
They're trying to get you out of customer service as fast as possible so they spend as little amount of money and time with you as possible. Okay. So that's the situation. Now let's say I'm Help Scout, and I gotta give me a demo button on the website, and I click that.
What does my, you know, product walkthrough pitch look like? This is what it looks like. Oh, hey. Welcome to the product walk through. Here's how you get started. Here's the shared inbox. Here's how we work across channels. Here's how you do assignments and prioritizations.
Here oh, look at all these workflows and integrations and blah blah blah blah blah blah. Does that answer the question? Should I use you or Zendesk? I don't know. I don't know. Some of that stuff looks like zen I don't I don't know.
How would I make a choice at the end of that? Now, here's another way to do it. What if you did what if you did this? We're gonna start with the insight. Hey, ecommerce brands. We work with a lot of ecommerce brands just like you.
And one of the things we noticed is in ecommerce, customer service is actually a growth driver. It's not a cost center. It's a growth driver because it builds loyalty. It builds repeat business. And in fact, might even have some great stats about that.
But this is that is that's my insight in the market. Now you have choices in how you could do customer service. This is what we see in the market is a lot of companies start with a shared inbox. You know what's great about that? It's easy.
The reps love it. And when you're really small, that works just great. Problem is you grow a little bit and you want some advanced service features, like you wanna do workflow, you wanna do prioritization. It doesn't really do that so good. So then what a lot of ecommerce brands do is they'll upgrade to help desk software.
That has all the bells and whistles, all the fancy features you would want. Unfortunately, it's enterprise software, a little bit more complicated. Your reps don't love it all that much. And the other thing is if you look at that software, like the features they have and the way they treat a customer, they're doing things like trying to drive the customer to lowest cost channel.
They're doing things because they assume you're trying to drive the cost out of this. And they do it at the expense of customer experience. So customer experience on these things are not that good. In a perfect world, we would have a solution that's easy to use and adopt, that gives you all the advanced features you have so you can grow into them.
But lastly, teaches you know, treats customer treats customer service as something that really matters from a customer experience perspective. Right? We want that. Right? Now I can move into the demo. Let me show you how we do that. Oh, easy to use and adopt.
Look at how easy it is to get up and running. Here's my demo. Look at my shared inbox. See how easy that is? Just like what you're doing right now. Second thing we do, features. Like, we get to do things so you can grow up with us.
So here's how we do workflow. Here's how we do integrations. Here's how we do prioritization. Last thing, customer experience. We're super focused on customer experience. We do not treat your customer like a ticket number. And we let them choose their own channel. They can choose any channel they want because we wanna give them a really great experience.
That's a completely different sales experience than this feature feature feature feature. You figure it out. At the end of this, I can pick something. Now how we how we actually do this? A good sales pitch starts with good positioning. Like if you think about it, that kind of a pitch is really about painting a picture of the whole market and then positioning your product within it.
So a pitch like this, if we have positioning, positioning maps to the sales pitch. Now, positioning, in my opinion, consists of five things. We've got competitive alternatives, capabilities, what can we do that the alternatives can't, value, why why do these capabilities matter, so what for the capabilities.
The best fit customers, these are the customers we're targeting, and lastly, this is the market category we intend to win. On the right, we've got the sales story, and that we can map these things. So alternatives equals alternatives in the sales story. Capabilities is this. This is how we do it at the end.
The value we have is the value we deliver, which also maps to this perfect solution. If we've got a qualified prospect, best fit customers is perfect solution for your qualified prospect. And market category, this is what we know about the market that allows us to start with this insight bit.
So let me do one more example just to drive this home. So this is another company. I love these guys too. They're called LevelJump. They're in the sales enablement space. So what they do is sales enablement software. If you have a lot of new reps joining, this stuff helps you get the reps up to speed really quickly and easily.
Who do they compete with? It's a it's a bloodbath market. There's so many competitors. It's not even funny. But the competitors all kinda land in like two or three different buckets. Like, they're either a content management system basically, where you put the sales materials in there and you can see who's getting access to it, or it's an LMS, a learning management system.
I can build a course and track who took the course and whatever. These are the main competitors that they have in the market. Their big differentiator is that they're super integrated with Salesforce. So what's the value of that? The value of that is they are the only sales enablement product that can show you whether or not your sales enablement or training is working with sales metrics.
So did that training improve time to first deal? Did that training improve time to make quota? So again, let's do the two different styles of pitches. If I did the product walk through pitch, I'd be like, hey, hi. I'm gonna show you RevelJump today.
Here's how you get started. Here's how you set up the training. Here's how the reps access the training blah blah blah. Feature feature feature blah blah blah. And at the very end, it'd be like, oh yeah, like this is how you actually track the training and tell whether or not the training is working.
Right? Does this tell me why I should pick it it like how would a customer choose me if that's the way I'm talking about it? Like, it didn't even get to my good stuff until the very, very, very end. That's my big differentiator is being able to track it.
I did that right at the end. I probably lost the customer by the time we got there. Here's how we do it the other way. The other way you'd say, okay, we're gonna give you the demo here. But before we start the demo, let's have a little conversation.
I'm talking to the head of sales enablement at a big company. I'm like, you know sales enablement is important. Right? We know sales. Why is this important? Cause everyday your reps not making quota costs you money. How much money? We actually have a bunch of nice stats on that.
But that's the whole point. That's why we're doing sales enablement in the first place. Now, let's look at all the different approaches. Like most companies start with just putting stuff on a shared drive. It's fine if you only got a couple of reps.
But then most folks would graduate to a solution that looks more like a CMS. A CMS is good. I can tell who accessed what and make sure everybody's got the right version of things that the reps are supposed to have. I can't exactly set up, courses and things.
And then the big thing is, you know, I I I can't actually measure whether the training's working. All I can see is who's accessing what. Or I could buy an LMS, and that's great. Set up a course. I can tell who's taking the course or not.
What I can't tell is, did taking the course make the rep make quota faster? Mom, can't do that. So in a perfect world, if what we're really trying to do is improve these sales metrics, in a perfect world, I'd have sales enablement software that would allow me to measure the impact with sales metrics.
And then now that I can measure the impact with that, could actually improve it. And I could improve it over time because I know what's working and what isn't working. Right? Right? Now let me show you the demo. Oh, these are the two value points.
So here, measure the impact of sales enablement on sales metrics. Let me show you how we do that. Here I am in the demo showing you how we do that. Oh, we're all integrated with Salesforce. This is how we do it. Here's little features. La la la.
Second thing is improve onboarding to sell more faster. Let me show you how we do it. Here's how we show what's working. This is how we take what's working, go back and improve on it. Do you think that sells more than just feature feature feature feature?
Of course it does. Of course it does. And for these guys, it resulted in a whole bunch of growth, and then, then they got acquired by Salesforce, and everybody's rich. I I'm gonna give you some homework. This is some homework. So the first one is and this is what I think you can do with this right now.
The first one is, do you really understand the reasons why people pick your stuff over the alternatives? I mean, most companies do. Or can you write it down? And then how would you actually express that in a sales situation? Do you know how to do that?
Second thing is, what does a customer need to understand in order to understand your value? This is this market insight bit. Like, the way that toilet guy said, look, there's just three things. It's like, you know, it's quality aesthetics and space. Do you have that for your market?
Do you know how to actually do that? And could we teach customer how to make good choices that way? And then the last thing is positioning. Like, you know, if if positioning is the fundamental input to this sales narrative, it's a kind of garbage in garbage out situation.
Right? If your positioning is not so hot, then it's hard to make a really good sales narrative on top of kinda weak positioning. So when was the last time you checked in on your positioning, would be the question I would ask. And that's it. I'm gonna leave you with a few key takeaways.
So one is buying is hard. We should we should recognize that. Two, if your buyers can't decide, they will do nothing and make no decision. They'll kick the can down the road for a year or two years. You need to fight that in every situate sales situation you're in.
Your sales narrative needs to not just be an exposition of features. It needs to answer the question, why buy your stuff versus every other alternative I have? Positioning is a fundamental input to that. So if the positioning is squishy, the sales narrative is gonna be squishy, this isn't gonna work.
And then the last thing I'll say is if you're looking to hire a good sales rep, like I know a guy who's really good. He's kinda underemployed at the toilet store right now, but I think he's got potential. That's it. Thank you.