April Dunford on Why Your Sales Pitch Structure Is Broken

Nobody Knows How to Build a Sales Pitch

April Dunford has worked with roughly 250 companies on positioning. Only one could explain the structure behind their sales pitch.

The rest? Decks that have been around "since the year of the flood," with slides added or removed after each product release. Or worse: straight product walkthroughs where reps click through all 12 dropdown menus with zero positioning.

The problem isn't laziness. It's that marketers have been taught storytelling structures that don't work for sales. Most marketing teams default to some flavor of Hero's Journey—customer is the hero, you're the guide, epic quest, promised land. Great for case studies. Terrible for first calls.

This is not a story about entertainment. This is a story about, look, customer, you have choices. There's lots of choices. And the customer is trying to figure out what are good choices or bad choices for me? What should I pay attention to? What should I not pay attention to? Why pick you over the other things that I could pick?

— April Dunford

That's why her new book, Sales Pitch, exists. After publishing Obviously Awesome on positioning, she watched sales teams walk out of workshops saying "yep, agree with the positioning" and then have no idea how to change their pitch.

You're Losing to Indecisiveness, Not Competitors

Here's the stat that should scare you: 60% of B2B deals that start never finish. Not lost to competitors. Just... abandoned.

The reason? Buyers aren't trying to answer "what's so great about you?" They're trying to answer "why pick you over the other guys?" Most SaaS pitches are all about us, us, us. Here's our value. We're amazing. You should pick us.

But if you can't agree internally on who you compete with—and most companies can't—how can you position against them? Dunford walks into companies and asks product and sales "who do we compete with?" and gets totally different answers.

We can't really figure a lot of this stuff out before we all get in agreement on, well, you know, who do we gotta beat in order to win a deal? And how do we win a deal? Like what's the value we can deliver that no one else can?

— April Dunford

This is why she runs cross-functional workshops. Marketing, sales, product, and the CEO in the same room for three half-days. Two days on positioning, one day translating it into a sales pitch. Everyone leaves aligned on competition, differentiated value, best-fit customer, and how to tell the story.

The Tuna Net Problem: Why Your Positioning Thesis Is Probably Wrong

Dunford was involved in 16 product launches across seven startups as a VP of Marketing. The positioning thesis was never once completely correct.

Sometimes way off, sometimes slightly off. But always wrong about something—usually the value customers actually cared about or the type of customer who'd go crazy for it.

Her advice: treat your first wave of customers as validation of your positioning thesis, not the final answer. Launch with loose positioning. "It's a net for fish, all kinds of big fish." Then see what people actually catch.

Maybe what happens is they pull it up and they go, oh, you know what? This is full of grouper here. I never really thought about the grouper, but now that I know, I got, you know, I actually got the world's greatest grouper fishing net and now I can just zoom right in on that and go run at the grouper market.

— April Dunford

Don't invest heavily in brand and acquisition before you know who you're going after. You need an actionable segmentation—a definition of your target specific enough to build campaigns around—before you can scale.

Build the Value Ladder Before You Build the Pitch

Dunford's process starts with a simple exercise: list everything you've got that competitors don't have. Features, product capabilities, company capabilities. Then go down the list and ask "so what?" for each one.

Why does a customer care? What value does that capability enable for their business? You'll see themes emerge. The goal is 2-3 value buckets, not 9,000 points of value.

This gives you differentiated value: "We're the only company on the planet that delivers a combination of this plus this plus this." The features sit underneath.

Then flip the question: who cares a lot about that specific combination? What are the characteristics of accounts that make them really care about the value only you can deliver? That's your best-fit customer. That's where marketing and sales resources should focus.

If they don't care much about your secret sauce, you'll lose. Someone else has secret sauce they care about more. Sales is expensive. In enterprise deals that take a year to close, you can't afford to spend seven months on deals that won't close.

Your VC Pitch Will Kill Your Customer Pitch

Venture-backed companies struggle with positioning because they confuse two different audiences. Your positioning for VCs—giant TAM, taking over the world—is fundamentally different from your positioning for customers.

VCs and customers have completely different definitions of value. Different timeframes. Different priorities. If you spend months perfecting your fundraising deck and then use that same pitch for customers, you're toast.

Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. Well-defined is the key. Not "the whole world is my customer" because you're pitching an $8 zillion TAM.

Weak positioning shows up immediately on first sales calls. If you want to diagnose it, spend a couple weeks listening to your team's first calls. You'll hear the telltale signs. Fix the foundation before you pour resources into lead gen on top of sand.