← Positioning with April Dunford
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- [00:01]
April Dunford
Welcome to the Positioning show, where we discuss topics related to the practical application of positioning for marketing, sales, and product teams. I'm April Dunford, a consultant, author, and the world's leading expert on positioning for B2B technology companies. Hi. Welcome to another edition of the Positioning show with me, April Dunford. How are you doing? So great to see you. Hey, got a guest on the show today. I'm super excited to have Brent Adamson. You know, back when I started this podcast a year or so ago, Brent was on my list of people that I really wanted to get on the podcast. You might know him as the co author of the Challenger Sale and the Challenger Customer. This is the groundbreaking work that he did when he was part of ceb, the corporate executive board, which then got acquired by Gartner. And he did a lot of good work with the Gartner folks talking about customer indecision. And you also might know him for a really great article in Harvard Business Review called Sense Making for Sales. Haven't read that. I think you should. It had a really big impact on me and my thinking around not just positioning, but also how we take positioning and translate it into a sales pitch. And a lot of my understanding of what works and doesn't work in sales comes from the research that Brent was leading or participating in back when he was CEB and also at Gartner. So it's really, really cool to get him to come onto the podcast and talk to me. He's also just a super fun gu to talk to. So we had a really great conversation about what works. It doesn't work on sales teams, what he's seeing in the future, what he's seen in the past, things that he thinks we should think about when we think about specifically how do we arm sales teams to go out and win in the market. I think you folks are really going to enjoy this conversation. I know I did. Let's get into it. I'm so happy to have you on the show, Brent. It's so great. How are you?
- [01:57]
Brent Adamson
I'm good, April. It's a long time coming. Although we didn't know it was a long time coming, but now that we're here together, it seems like, boy, this, we should have done this a long time ago. So I'm super excited.
- [02:06]
April Dunford
Yeah, we should have done this a long time ago, but now we're doing it, so it's good. You know, one of the reasons I want to have you on is like, so Challenger Sale and Challenger Customer too, which in my opinion, doesn't get read enough. But Challenger Sale is probably the book that I've recommended the most, like across my entire career. When people say, you know, whenever you go on a podcast, someone says recommend some books. And it's always on the list of books. And by the way, that doesn't work.
- [02:33]
Brent Adamson
For me because I can't say, have you read my book? Because that would just be cringy and weird. Do you know what I mean?
- [02:39]
April Dunford
I guess so, yeah. I guess that's true. Like when people ask you for a recommendation, no, you can't say your own book.
- [02:44]
Brent Adamson
You can't say your own book. But have you read. Hold on, wait a minute. Have you read this? Because that right there is obviously awesome.
- [02:50]
April Dunford
So that's a power move.
- [02:52]
Brent Adamson
There you go.
- [02:53]
April Dunford
You're listening. He's holding up my book. That's very exciting. That's actually now. Now I'm all like. So I want to talk about Challenger Sale a little bit, but I also want to talk about this article you wrote for Harvard Business Review called For Sales. Because I, I. That also had a big impact on me and the way I think about a lot. Bunch of stuff. But anyways, so I wanted to start with, you know, not everybody's familiar with Challenger Sale. You know, the kids these days maybe haven't. Haven't read it. But you know, in Challenger Sale, you folks were looking at what top performing sales reps were doing that were different from reps that were not top performing. Were you folks surprised? Like when you did that original research, were you surprised at what you found? Or is that was the going in hypothesis that it would look like that? I always wanted to know whether you guys thought, did it go. Did it go In a way you were like, what? We didn't think it was going here.
- [03:52]
Brent Adamson
So, so two thoughts. So the, the folks were the. Is the team at Corporate Executive Board, which then of course became cb, which was then ultimately acquired by Gartner Time Corporate Executive Board. In the sales practice, the way back machine, no one really cares, but it's called the Sales Executive Council. At the time was the sales practice within the Corporate Executive Council.
- [04:10]
April Dunford
I remember the Sales Executive Council.
- [04:11]
Brent Adamson
Yeah, that was us. So, so 2008, you know, for those of us who were selling then, we all remember 2008. It's hard to forget it was a disaster because no one was selling. And we. And that's when we launched right in the sort of the thick of those that year launched this study of trying to understand what the best sellers were doing that was so different and that we lay kind of that background out in the book. But specifically to your question, were we surprised? So the answer is kind of yes and no. So back then it was our sort of mode of working. So every year we do one of these very large quantitative driven studies of sales. And of course we had colleagues down the hall doing marketing and supply chain and hr. And so this is what we did at Corporate Executive Board and I worked with the marketing and the sales teams, the research teams, I should say. So every year we'd ask questions and inevitably we'd get back data that bent our brain in some fashion. Or by far the most mind bending thing we ever found in our research is the highlight of chapter one and the Challenger customer, which I'll just put a pin in that. We can come back, talk about that if you want. But for Challenger, we actually had already seen in the study we'd done the previous year, we'd actually already landed on this idea of commercial insight. I don't know if we'd named it commercial insight yet at the time, but we'd begun to already see in our research, going back actually to a marketing study that we'd done probably three years previous, that the companies, the brands, this is all B2B. So the companies that tend to win and drive loyalty, that is growth with customers, not just customers that stick around, but customers that grow with you over time, had this ability to teach those customers something new about their business. So that core premise was already there in the findings. And so when we built the Challenger study, which is specifically not about companies but about sellers individually, we built some of those hypotheses into the attributes that we were testing. And lo and behold, they kind of shook out as maybe not surprising. We'd already found in some ways that the best companies were doing this. So in some ways it wasn't a real surprise that the best reps were doing this. I will tell you though, April, and maybe you'll appreciate this. So it was 55 different attributes we were testing, so different behaviors and skills and knowledge. And we lay all that out in the book in terms of what we were testing in that particular study that became the Challenger sale. But when we first ran the research and the data, we got it all back. It all came back in the form from our head of research, our quantitative analysis time guy named Timur Hitchelmus, who's still out there and amazing and brilliant. And when Timur first presented the data to us, he presented it to us as a bar chart of those 55 attributes and what's really interesting is the 55 attributes. That is, the 55 bars in the bar chart were almost all identical.
- [06:48]
April Dunford
Oh, really? Yeah.
- [06:49]
Brent Adamson
No, really, Right. I mean, it wasn't like. What we're always looking for, at least back in the day, was we were looking for a phenomenon we called big bar, little bar, which is like one really big bar, one really small bar. And that. That's the interesting story is always in the variability of the data, Right? And this data was there was some variability, but it wasn't a big bar, little bar. It was like 55 things, and you kind of have to be good at it all. And it's like. It's like sad trombone. It's like, what do we do now? We just spent six months gathering data that says you got to be good at 55 things. Let's go to the market and tell them that in the world's worst down economy, you can appreciate where that was a dark day at that table. Right. So we don't. We didn't put this in the book. You wanted the backst. This is the backstory. So then what happened is that Timur ran what's called a factor analysis, which is just a cluster analysis on the data, and tried to figure out how these different 55 attributes tended to group. And so when did certain attributes, like, when I'm good at this, what else am I typically good at? When I'm bad at this, what am I typically or not as good? What I'm typically not as good at. And lo and behold, there was a statistically significant grouping of these. These attributes into these five statistically distinct buckets or profiles or categories. We ultimately called them profiles. And so once we found that, then we just compared them to commercial performance and likelihood to be a star performer, and out popped five groups. And, like, we had to give them names. And so we called the one that won Challenger because they were out teaching customers or challenging customers something new. I'd been on the road doing sales kickoff keynotes during that season. So I came back, the team sat down, said, we really excited to show this to you. They showed it to me, laid it all out, and said, we're gonna call this Challenger. And I said, that's a horrible idea. That's a space shuttle. It blew up. We're not calling it Challenger. And then they said, brent, you're wrong. We're calling it Challenger because that's how things rolled back then. And they were right. And the rest is history. There you go.
- [08:37]
April Dunford
Did you ever get. Did you ever get pushback on that name, like, I'll tell you right now, I feel like there is a. There is. It's been a few years, right? So people misunderstand what Challenger is. And I think a lot of people come to me and they'll say, oh, I, you know, I know all about Challenger. It's, you know, it's. It's about you going in and telling customers what they should do. And it's like that word. People have a reaction to that word. Like, we're not allowed to be. We shouldn't be challenging customers. Or. And there's this kind of negative connotation to it. Like, did you ever get that pushback? And like, what do you say when you get that pushback?
- [09:17]
Brent Adamson
Endlessly, is the answer.
- [09:18]
April Dunford
I'm just assuming that you do, because, like, I get it, and I'm not.
- [09:21]
Brent Adamson
You.
- [09:21]
April Dunford
You must get it. Like, every day, like, when I talk.
- [09:23]
Brent Adamson
About, people are like, but what's fun is. But. But it. But as a result, it allows us to engage in conversations that we wouldn't have had otherwise. So as a positioning expert, I. I think you'll totally appreciate this. Right. Everything is in the name. And so. And particularly, just as a quick footnote, my background before I came to research sales was researching linguistics. I'm a linguistics Ph.D. so I. I love language. Language is sort of my playground, Right. And so, not surprisingly, I was like a pig and slop at cb, because we'd sit around and debate, literally, not for days or for hours, but for weeks, what we would name things, right? And so. And Challenger was no different. And the idea is, when we first looked at this, we said, well, these best sellers are approaching customers in some sort of fundamentally different way. They're not showing up saying, what's keeping you up at night? They're showing up with an insight saying, here's something that should be keeping you up at night. Now we can again park for a little bit, come back to. If you want. Like, you have to do that culturally, correctly. You have to do that diplomatically. So this isn't as Matt Dixon likes. Say we didn't call the profile the jerk, because that would be bad. Right. But nonetheless, so. And again, since you're a backstory kind of person, so I'll give this.
- [10:28]
April Dunford
Like, that's what people think. Like, people think, like, I'm going to come in there and be a jerk about it. You're right.
- [10:35]
Brent Adamson
I'm sorry I interrupted you, but you're right.
- [10:37]
April Dunford
No, no, go ahead.
- [10:38]
Brent Adamson
But we were solving for a different problem, though, which is we weren't solving for will they accept it? What we were solving for was the false positive problem. And this is. You know, people say, like, so this is what keeps me up at night. So we were in a business at the time, and I still am today of being deeply contrarian, but in a helpful way. That's why I call myself sort of a. You know, I like this whole idea of productive disruption. Like, how can I help us think differently about something in a way that's productive? Right. And in order to be disruptive, you have to create a contrast. If you want to get geeky about. It's like a Hegelian dialectic, right? It's like a thesis and antithesis that meaning is constructed in the difference between two things. And so you have to construct a difference. You have to create a gap into which meaning can be created. Right. And so here's the backstory. The backstory is, we looked at these profiles. We said, okay, this person is approaching customers in a different way. They're challenging or teaching. But that is really the basis of the new relationship. Aha. I've got it. Let's call this the New Relationship Builder. So that was our first name. There was the Old Relationship Builder and the New Relationship Builder. And we began to talk about this and we tested it briefly. But you didn't need a lot of market testing to know that as soon as you set out and said, there's a new relationship builder, 90% of the people who are going to see this were going to say, oh, yeah, I do that already. And we knew from data that they didn't do it already. So this is the false positive problem. So whenever we come up with these new ideas and share them with people, whenever we heard from someone, this confirms a lot of what I'm already doing. Or this is a confirmatory, or this, this. This is, like, interesting.
- [12:09]
April Dunford
We have this problem a lot, right?
- [12:10]
Brent Adamson
Like, exactly.
- [12:12]
April Dunford
The new Coke or the new thing. Like, it's just been proven that that doesn't work over and over and over again. There's lots of people out there saying, like, oh, we're the new whatever. And it's actually really hard because what you're doing is anchoring off the old thing. And then everybody thinks you're just the old thing. There's no.
- [12:26]
Brent Adamson
That's exactly right.
- [12:28]
April Dunford
Ignore the new part.
- [12:29]
Brent Adamson
Yeah. So we had to create some sort of contrast. And. And goodness knows we managed to do that. Called it the challenger, because what they were doing was challenging customers thinking. And then, so now what that did lead, unfortunately, I Solved the false positive problem because part of that story was relationships, but it created two new problems. One is, you're saying relationships don't matter. So then I had to backpedal and no relationships matter. But it's a relationship like this, not like that, but allowed me to engage in that conversation. Because now your opening posture to me is you're saying relationships don't matter as opposed to your opening posture to me, as I agree, relationships do matter. Do you see what I'm saying? It's a totally different conversation, right? And then the flip side is challenger then. So I had to bring you off of your relationship position, but I had to bring you to the challenger position. So there it is. So be a challenger. Hold on. Challenger is obnoxious. It's jerky. It's. You know, it's typically, particularly outside of the U.S. it's so American, right? It's like here, there's Americans showing up and tell me what to do, you bastards. Right? So the. I got a lot of this. So the.
- [13:30]
April Dunford
So then it was the Europeans with that. I never even thought about that.
- [13:33]
Brent Adamson
But I'll tell you, and with huge respect, and this isn't tongue in cheek, it was a huge respect. The Japanese in particular were very upset with them. Not upset, but they. They had a heart. They struggled with the language because I said, it's just antithetical to our culture that you would show up and challenge someone particularly personally. And so. So the. Back off there. And you know, there's a. We could dive into this if you want, but. But I'm kind of at the meta level now, but the. The shorter inside the story version of that is, you know, I sat down with a group of Japanese managers once at a company I was working with, and I said, well, think about your best clients. And they said, okay, so now think about why are they your best clients? And okay, now someone. Why. Why do you have such a great relationship with them and say, well, because we bring them new ideas and we help them think about their business in ways they haven't thought of it since. All I'm talking about is, oh, if that's what you mean, then we're on board, right? So. So it wasn't too hard to get someone on board with the word challenger once they understood what it was. And so I was solving for the bigger problem of the false positive than the false negative. And so that's why we chose the language that we did.
- [14:27]
April Dunford
Makes sense. It makes a lot sense.
- [14:28]
Brent Adamson
It's hard, though. It means you wind up arguing with everybody. But I kind of like that. So I'm o.
- [14:37]
April Dunford
All good things, though, come from a little bit of friction, right? Like. Like, if we were all agreeing about everything, then there wouldn't be. You know, there wouldn't be. There's two things I want to come back to. So one is. So one. One is this thing you said about, you know, you set out in the. In the worst economy of all time to figure out, like, h. How do we sell when everything is so bad? And look, here we are in the crappy economy again. Like, do you think, like, how do you feel like the Challenger stuff holds up? Like, particularly in the situation we're in right now where everybody's complaining about the economy, then.
- [15:13]
Brent Adamson
So. So this is a. You tell me if you want to go, because this. This could take us into another hour. Because I'm. I'm working on essentially the next book and the next body research, and I think, in many ways, so excited. I know. I am, too, and I'm also terrified.
- [15:26]
April Dunford
So let's talk about that. But no question. And then let's.
- [15:30]
Brent Adamson
This is kind of where it goes. Because where it goes is Challengers. We know. And by the way. So just to be super clear on. It doesn't matter a lot, but people kind of find this interesting and they're sort of curious. So because we produced all the Challenger work at the corporate executive board, which is then bought by Gartner, which then we built a training business around, or my colleagues built a training business around, which then Gartner decided they didn't want to be in, which totally fine. They said, great business. We're just not a training company. So they spun that out. So there's now a company called Challenger, and they own all. So all of the ip, the books, the training, all of that is owned by this company, of which I am not affiliated. So I have no official affiliation with Challenger. I just have a belief in the body of work because it was there.
- [16:10]
April Dunford
I was aware of that. They run a great podcast.
- [16:13]
Brent Adamson
Yeah. And Jen Allen was there for a while, did an amazing job. She's a dear friend. A lot of friends have moved through that company over the years. There's a few still there. But the thing that is still absolutely true, nonetheless, is that we did the original research in 2008. The book came out in 2011, and the world has changed and moved on a little bit since then. So I think my position on Challenger today is I still 100% stand by it. In other words, if your posture towards customers is to show up and say, what do you got to get right this year? What's keeping you up at night? Or what are you working on? And you're asking the customer to essentially educate you. You're not really bringing anything of real value to that particular organization. So that's so bringing insight.
- [16:56]
April Dunford
That's still so true. Like, I mean, talk to good sales reps or in particular, leaders of great sales teams like that. That hasn't changed a bit.
- [17:06]
Brent Adamson
I agree. By the way, even back in. In the day, I sound so old now, but back in the day, get off my lawn. But you do.
- [17:13]
April Dunford
I say this all the time. I'm like, when I was your age. Let me tell you, this is a bad economy.
- [17:19]
Brent Adamson
Can I just tell any of your listeners who are now 35 years old, the road from 35 to 55 is a blink of an eye. That's all I can say. Just it' blink of an eye. But in any case, people would look at challenge originally, and it's so interesting how people want to dismiss it, which is totally fine. I have no problem with it. But one of the ways they would dismissively react to it is say, there's nothing new here. And I think they were kind of resentful that it was taking off the way it was. And they say, there's nothing new here. My best people are doing this already. So all you did was give a name to something my best people are already doing. And my response was always the same, which is absolutely true. It's just like we know your best people are doing this already because it wouldn't have shown up in the data unless it was already happening. So the question isn't what are your. It's that. That's exactly right. So how do I take that and package it and bottle it and export it to everyone else? That's really what we're up against, right?
- [18:08]
April Dunford
Yeah.
- [18:08]
Brent Adamson
And I think if you fast forward today, it's still the same thing, which is the best sellers are still engaged in this behavior and a whole set of other behaviors. But it's really the story for me today is not so much how selling has changed, which is what we're always focused on in sales and for that matter, marketing. And, you know, when I put my marketing hat on and I hang out with Matt Hines and others in the marketing world and all my buddies over there, you know, B2B marketing is such a. You know, we're constantly talking about the same sort of phenomenon. But the thing that's interesting is that it's not so Much selling or marketing has changed. The marketing's probably changed a lot in terms of technology and all that kind of stuff, but the fundamentals in marketing.
- [18:49]
April Dunford
Doesn'T actually change all that much. Like the techniques change a lot. Right. Tactically stuff changes, but the underpinning stuff, like you know, positioning for example, being one of those things, like that's not something that changes every year.
- [19:04]
Brent Adamson
Like thank goodness, right?
- [19:05]
April Dunford
Because then, yeah, I mean otherwise, otherwise we'd be obsolete and whatever. There'd be nothing to learn from modern timers.
- [19:12]
Brent Adamson
But you know what, you know what has changed though? I think, April, the thing that's so interesting to me is what's changed radically in the last 10 years is the customer context or the buying context, or if you will, more broadly, the deciding context. This has become so much more difficult and so much more complex for customer stakeholders to make these large scale decisions on behalf of their companies. Whether it's five or six or seven or maybe even eight figure deals, whether it's pounds or euros or dollars or whatever, they're spending huge amounts of money on long term bets. Although as we get into the recurring revenue models, maybe the, you know, the bets are, which is interesting, but that's a whole nother conversation. But you move to a monthly basis or a renewal basis or even a consumption basis, but one way or another they're making pretty large scale bets on behalf of their company.
- [19:54]
April Dunford
Even in those cases where it's renewal stuff and whatever, like change management, like making a project go, if we're talking about enterprise stuff, like you say six figure deals, seven figure deals, eight figure deals, like these are big deal decisions. These are not like click on the thing and sign up for my hundred dollar.
- [20:14]
Brent Adamson
That's exactly. It's not a product led sort of individual consumer sort of thing. Right. And whatever you're buying, whether it's a long know, a monthly basis or a yearly basis or whatever it is, it's still displacing something. And whether it's displacing, you know, a DIY or what, I'll tell you what.
- [20:28]
April Dunford
It'S really manual processes and all kinds of junk. Exactly.
- [20:31]
Brent Adamson
You know what it's really displacing to your point is it's displacing a set of relatively ingrained behaviors. It's not just a machine or a technology, but it's a culture. It's a set of behaviors, it's a set of activities. It probably set of metrics and measurements and maybe even things like compensation structures. And so it's highly disruptive. And in that environment, which, in which customers are making those kinds of decisions for reasons we can discuss if you want, but there's more people involved in that decision than ever before as those bigger solutions touch more people in the customer organization across IT and Internet and our data security and you name it, different industry or different geographies, purchasing, blah, blah, all of it. Right? So that's like, you know, the last numbers that we touched at Gartner I think was, you know, on average there's 11 people and typically involved in a B2B purchase.
- [21:15]
April Dunford
I was talking about every year, like we used to say, we used to say 5 to 8 and then it was 7 to 9. And then again I saw this 11 number the other day and I was like, how does anybody get one of these deals done, man?
- [21:28]
Brent Adamson
Well, that's exactly right. Right. So the last survey that at least I was involved with at Gartner was 11 point, I don't know, 8, 11.9. I was talking to a tech company that we would all know just last week and they said they're doing deals with 80 stakeholders involved on the customer side because they're stitching together platforms and business units and geographies and they've got 80 people trying to make one decision. And it's how does that. And it's your point. It's like how the bleep is that supposed to even happen? I mean, sometimes when I look at the world of buying today, this is tongue in cheek and it's not. At the same time, I'm kind of amazed that commerce still happens at all. Do you know what I mean? It's like, and the answer is because commerce has to happen, you still have to buy certain things, you have to fulfill orders and replenish and all that. But it does honestly make me wonder, and I mean this sincerely, is how much more commerce could happen if it were just a little bit easier for customers to make a decision, if they were a little less overwhelmed by their own internal decision making complexity, if they were a little less overwhelmed by the amount of the massive amount of information that's out there, if they're a little less overwhelmed with their inability or their struggle to just align on what are they trying to do in the first place. And this to me is the big opportunity. So if you think of Challenger, going back to where we started, Challenger was a story of how can I as a seller differentiate myself today in this current marketplace, given how everyone else is selling and showing up at the time in 2011 to say 2019 with an insight about the customer's organization, help them make money or save money in ways they hadn't fully anticipated, was a really powerful way to stand apart from most sellers, because most sellers were still showing up and throwing up with product and features and benefits somewhere around 2015. However, as you know, because you lived through this too, I think it was like one morning, I don't know, in the spring, every single CEO woke up in the morning, looked in the mirror and said, I've got it. I know how we're going to stand apart. We're going to become a thought leader. Right. So everyone decided on the same day that we're all going to be a thought leader. And being a thought leader is going to allow us to stand out in the marketplace. And so they all doubled down in marketing. God love marketing. My best friends in the world all said, I can run with that. I know what to do with that mandate. So they invented something called marketing content marketing. And then all of a sudden, here comes Martech saying, I got stuff I can sell you for that. And then there's marketing automation. Then we got better data. And so now we're spamming the world, not just with content, but frankly, with really good content. Right. I call this the smartness arms race. We're all trying to stand out by being outsmarting everyone else. And is that, you know, it's somewhat of a canned line, but I think you'll go with me on this, which is, you know, the smartness arms race has ended in a tie, and the only one to lose is your customer, because they're out there just like everybody. You're telling me to Z, tell me to zag. You're telling me to go on a completely different axis. Y'all have data, y'all have evidence. I don't even know what to do. And even if I could figure it out, I've got 79 other people in my organization. I gotta get on board. It's just like. It's just too hard. Yeah.
- [24:11]
April Dunford
And I'll tell you, I think marketers misunderstand this point a lot because, you know, they get all wound up in that stat that says, oh, your buyer has. Has gone this far in the purchase journey before they ever talk to you. And so they figured it all out and, you know, and we should just get out of their way and be order takers. And I'm like, dude, they've spent this huge amount of time. That's true. And they've looked at all this stuff, but nobody knows how to make sense out of any of it.
- [24:38]
Brent Adamson
Exactly.
- [24:39]
April Dunford
Like all of it's contradictory.
- [24:41]
Brent Adamson
Yeah. Right. And so. And it's funny, I was presenting this back and this goes back to the.
- [24:46]
April Dunford
Art sense making thing, so it's exactly right.
- [24:49]
Brent Adamson
So you mentioned the sense making for sales article in hbr, which, you know, it was as my byline.
- [24:53]
April Dunford
We'll put a link to it in the note.
- [24:55]
Brent Adamson
Cool. Yeah. It's on HBO. I think it's January of 2022, if I'm not mist. And the. And again, as I mentioned, it's. It's a Gartner. It's my byline, but it's a. It's a team effort. So behind it, I just, I. I'm a Nebraskan. I'm very humble. We like to.
- [25:08]
April Dunford
Nice of you.
- [25:09]
Brent Adamson
But it's also true.
- [25:10]
April Dunford
My colleagues. Yeah, we got it.
- [25:12]
Brent Adamson
Okay. All good article, though.
- [25:13]
April Dunford
Everybody should read.
- [25:14]
Brent Adamson
Yes. Read my art. I just like, read my book, read my article. But the, the thing about it that's really interesting is it takes as a starting point the fact that customers are overwhelmed. And so you're telling me to zig, they're telling me to zag. Everybody's got data. I don't know what to do. I think I'll just study this longer and look at it longer. I've got a little shtick that I do in my sales kickoff keynotes around this idea, which I actually quite like because it's quite true. The same phenomena shows up for all of us as consumers. So on the consumer side, there's a long version. I'll give you the short version. But it's kind of like going to. Have you ever done this, April? You go to Amazon and you try to buy something relatively simple. I usually tell this like a dongle because it literally happened, right?
- [25:54]
April Dunford
This is going to be. You're like, it's a little thing. How hard could it be? Right? And the next thing you know, you got to be a dongle expert, right? Things you got to think about.
- [26:05]
Brent Adamson
Dongle, you know, laptop, the USB C. Because everything's changed now. You need a USB C. I put it and put in the specs. Amazon's like, no problem. Here's 1500 options. Okay, I didn't see that coming. But Amazon tries to help you by saying, here's Amazon's choice and recommended. Great. So you're buying. So you take a look and say, okay, looks good. Yep, yep, yep. 15 bucks. No big deal. You say, let me just read a couple reviews real quick and then we're good to go. And you Read review. It's like, oh, hold on. Five people said it broke in five minutes and everyone else loved it. And I better look at another one. And like, three hours later, you're still shopping for a $15 dongle. And now you don't hate Amazon, but you kind of hate yourself, right? And it's like, it's so annoying. And so at some point you get so frustrated. I did this with gym shorts. It's a pair of freaking gym shorts.
- [26:44]
April Dunford
How hard?
- [26:44]
Brent Adamson
Right? It's literally just banal stuff. And at some point you realize it.
- [26:48]
April Dunford
Should have been an unconsidered purchase and it turns into a very considered purchase.
- [26:53]
Brent Adamson
Exactly. But you know what happens.
- [26:55]
April Dunford
Go ahead.
- [26:56]
Brent Adamson
No, no, go ahead.
- [26:57]
April Dunford
So I have this bit that I'm doing in conference talks right now about me going to buy a toilet. Same thing. Like my contractor's like, buy a toilet. I'm like, how hard can that be? How hard could that be in the toilet store? And toilet salesman is like, well, right, what kind of toilet do you want? And I was like, dude, one that flushes.
- [27:14]
Brent Adamson
Like, you want the round? You want the oblong? Do you want the white? Or do you want the almond? Do you want the power?
- [27:22]
April Dunford
And then there's all these tech, like gravity assistance, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff.
- [27:27]
Brent Adamson
And you're like, right, we haven't even gotten to the bidet part. I just like, holy mackerel.
- [27:31]
April Dunford
Exactly. So many things. And so. And you think, like, if it's that hard to buy a toilet, imagine trying to buy a million bucks worth of enterprise software. Like, stuff that's legitimately difficult to figure.
- [27:43]
Brent Adamson
Out, because what happens? By the way, Amazon's got a solution for this, which I find really fascinating. I always, I like to bring my wife into these stories just because I think it's hilarious. But my wife and I both shop a lot on Amazon. It's. Every once in a while I check on her account and she has. Because Amazon has a solution for this. They have a little button and the button says, save for later. And if you press save for later, the pain stops, right? It's like it all just goes away. And my wife has 580 items saved for later in her Amazon account. That's the truth. So that's 581 times a low considered purchase. Stalled out completely because of just frustration or timed out or whatever. And then to your point, now you scale this up to multimillion dollar purchases with five to 10 to 15 people involved. And again, I come back to. It's kind of amazing to me that commerce still happens at all.
- [28:30]
April Dunford
And then the other thing you've got with that five to 15 people is like, you know, if I buy the wrong gym shorts, you know, it's not the end of the world.
- [28:39]
Brent Adamson
Frustrated, but you send them back, right?
- [28:40]
April Dunford
Yeah, like it's not the end of the world. But you know, but if I make a bad decision in this million dollar thing, there's absolutely stakes for 100% in my career. Like maybe I'm going to get Passover promotion, maybe I'm going to get fired, maybe I'm going to get like the pressure on that decision is nothing like buying a can of water.
- [29:01]
Brent Adamson
Right. And you, and you can't do the whole Zappos thing where he's like, I'll just buy six pairs and send three of them back. Right, Exactly. Imagine I'll buy three CRM systems and send two back. It doesn't work that way.
- [29:11]
April Dunford
And there's this giant project to get it deployed and everybody's, there's all these people involved and everybody's life is going to change. Like again, it's amazing anybody sticks their neck out to make these decisions. Like these people that are championing these deals like, have to have guts.
- [29:28]
Brent Adamson
They do. And this is why I think so many times it comes back down to, you know, we better look at this a little bit longer, we better study this a little bit more, we better talk to a few more people, we better come. And the thing is, by the way, this is if this is assuming that they've even made it to the point where they're picking a supplier. But this still has to happen at the solution level and initially at the, the problem level. Right. Because you have to have this discussion of which problems are worthy of our attention in solving this year given our limited budget in the first place. You have to have the debate around the problem. Then once you figure out, okay, this problem is worthy of our time and resource this year, what's the right solution irrespective of supplier? Is it on prem or cloud? Is it, you know, outsource or whatever it might be? And then I got to get to who's the right supplier. So you have to go through this process three times. And so it's still. And this is what. And by the way, and when we back solve for it from the sales side, what happens more often than not is we solve for the supplier side first. So. Or the supplier selection problem first. So we convince our customer that we're the best supplier for that particular problem, but then they decide that they're going to solve for a different problem altogether and you wind up being the supplier's number one solution for their number three problem. And that's a really bad place to be. Right? Yeah. So bottom line. So this all goes back to a question you asked about, I don't know, 20 minutes ago. Sorry, but like I loved it. So if we think about Challenger today, none of this is in Challenger because this wasn't nearly the problem 11 years ago that it is today. So it's not like we left it out or we forgot or we made a mistake. It just wasn't our reality then as it is today. And so when you play out Challenger in this kind of environment and it's a little unfair to Challenger, which again I'm a huge. I still completely support and I'm behind the Data supports, it's 100%. But nonetheless, the word that I think of when I think of Challenger today is the word context. Because we have to think about what does Challenger look like when you play it out inside of this context, which is if I show up to the customer with an insight and say here's a different way to think about your business, a new way to save money, it's very possible the customer will say, oh great, just put that on the stack of 15 other insights and white papers and I'll get to it when I can. It's just not, it's not helpful. But if I show up all of the sense making and sales sense making for sales article and say there's a lot of information out there, I would imagine you've seen this video series, you've probably seen these two white papers. Here's our insight, here's our take on it. I imagine it's a lot. It's a little overwhelming. Oh, you have no idea. Why don't we take a step back and let me see if you're open to it. Maybe I can just help you kind of put a framework around all of it and just kind of help you think of irrespective of the content you read. And we think these three pieces in particular, one from Gartner or one from whatever. We think these are the better ones. But. But whatever you read based on. Here's the phrase I always like to use in working with other customers like you. Social proof, you know, I'm just a broker of information and working with other customers like you. I know, I do too. I've used it a lot. I've built my whole career off that phrase, I think. But the. But in Working with other customers like you, here are the kinds of questions we find are most helpful or most urgently in need of an answer. So what I've done is I've taken something that's very big and very overwhelming and I've just tried to chalk the field a little bit. I've tried to chalk the pitch. So just narrow it down and put a framework around it such that you still have degrees of freedom to make your own choices within that framework, but it's a little less overwhelming. And I call this frame making. So if, if Challenger is all about being frame breaking, you know, changing the way you think about your business, this is all about being frame making. And I think if, if, like, if Challenger salt, this is pepper or we are yin and yang or what, like what is, I don't know, Bonnie and Clyde? I don't pick whatever pair you like. But the, but this is it, the, it's the other side of Challenger that we need to talk about today is how can I help customers feel more confident in their ability to navigate their own internal decision making complexity? How can I help customers feel more confident to navigate information? How can I help them feel more confident in, in, in aligning with their colleagues in the alignment they have with their colleagues around what they're trying to do in the first place? Yeah, it's just all comes back to.
- [33:22]
April Dunford
The idea of like decision confidence.
- [33:25]
Brent Adamson
Like, it's so interesting.
- [33:26]
April Dunford
It's so interesting. Such a big idea. Like tactically, like, like, so if I'm in marketing and sales tactically, what can I do to help ramp up that confidence? Like, you know, so like one of the things that, that I'm talking a lot about with my clients right now is like in positioning, we're trying to position against, you know, other folks. And a lot of times what we have is the customer needs like a rubric of like all the different approaches they could use to solve the problem. And we generally don't talk about that in sales, but we could. Good, right? And every time we do, like when I've seen companies that do it that say, hey, like there's three different ways you could solve this problem. You could solve it like this, or like this or like this. And let's talk about the pluses and minuses or the pros and cons of each of these approaches is such a power move in sales in my opinion. But I'm interested, I'm interested in your opinion on like, how do we get to this decision confidence? Like what can we be doing in marketing and sales to be able to.
- [34:24]
Brent Adamson
So, so I think that's, that's an example. I think it's a powerful example of, of what to do. Which again is what you just shared is an idea of putting a framework around it. Right? So like. Right. And making. This is why we call travel agents today, even though we can book everything online because if you've tried to book a Disney trip lately, it's impossible because there's so much information. Like you call someone, say, just help me figure out what I should even be asking. And it's your toilet story, right? It's like I don't know what are the attributes of a toilet that I really need to be worried about? I don't know exactly.
- [34:51]
April Dunford
Like, and not only do I not know that I don't want to be an expert in toilets, I don't want to be. I don't want to kill my precious brain space with toilet.
- [35:01]
Brent Adamson
Now play that on the consumer level. You can play like buying a home, buying a car, you know, insurance, right.
- [35:08]
April Dunford
Like it's overwhelming, very high stakes. Like if I screw that up, bad things could happen. There's so many options and like it's amazing any insurance gets bought.
- [35:17]
Brent Adamson
So, so one of the very sort of tactical ways, and it's one of the first things I did when I joined Ecosystems about a year and a half ago was, and we used to do this at CEB all the time is maturity models. So they jumped the shark because everyone has one. But for the moment at least, I think there's still some meat on this bone. But you know, a maturity model is.
- [35:37]
April Dunford
Small companies don't use these enough. Big companies know how to do it. But startups, every time I talk about maturity models and startups like not that many are using them and everybody's like, whoa, totally. Or it's like the sense making thing.
- [35:50]
Brent Adamson
The kissing cousin of maturity model. Is that gross, Sorry, but the diagnostic exercise or some sort of self assessment, Some sort of framework that helps me ask a specific limited number of questions to figure out where I am on some sort of. To your point rubric is another one. It's just a fancy pedagogical word. Like the word pedagogical. But the. But. But it's 100%. It's like, it's just, it's all it is is a framework. It's something that takes something big and overwhelming and boils it down to something that's manageable, scalable and repeatable. And, and that's. I think customers find that and again, this is what you're pointing about sales and marketing. I can build a maturity model and put it on my website. I can build a maturity model and put it in a video. I can hand it to my sales reps. I can do it. I can go direct to. There's like I. I see sales and marketing today more or less us more than anything is channels to market more than different. There are 100 different set like marketing largely owns brand and things like that. That is absolutely true. But. But I'm more interested in digital communications with customers and human LED communications which traditionally are owned by sales and marketing. That's where I tend to camp out. But what you do around positioning is it sits at a higher level and it's super, super important. But. But anyway, so that's a, you know.
- [36:57]
April Dunford
I'll tell you buyer's guide. Buyer's guide is. I don't know why everybody doesn't have a buyer's guide. It's super hard to buy. Like, why not give them a guide? We got guides for everything else.
- [37:08]
Brent Adamson
Why don't we have a buyer guide? Why not have a stakeholder, like a sales. Excuse me, a stakeholder alignment coaching guide. So in your buyer guide, one chapter is on. Here are the five people in your company that need to be involved. Here are the questions they're likely to ask. Here are the objections they're likely to have. Here's the spreadsheet or the Data or the PowerPoint slides that you need to go have that conversation not with me, but with your own colleagues. League. Right. It's very practical stuff. And notice this is again, it's not inconsistent with Challenger, but it's sort of beyond Challenger. Right. It's like we didn't talk about any of this stuff in the book because again, it wasn't really part of the. It wasn't as necessary then as it is now.
- [37:47]
April Dunford
Yeah. It also wasn't quite part of the scope. This was more specifically about sales stuff. But I love how all this stuff does kind of all fit together. Tell me about this book. So you writing this book? Like, when's this book?
- [37:59]
Brent Adamson
I'm telling you about it right now.
- [38:01]
April Dunford
When we need dates, we need specifics. We need, like, are you, you know, like people say they're writing a book. I said I was writing a book for like five years before I actually popped the book out. And then, and then the book came. And then immediately after I was like, I got this new book idea and it took me like four.
- [38:16]
Brent Adamson
There you go. So I'm in the process of essentially clearing the decks for 2024. So. And there's a lot of change. Me personally, 2024 is I'm going to put one or two very large bets on the table and this will be one of them. And hopefully, hopefully, you know, next couple of weeks will be the tell. We'll tell the tale of the tape but hopefully we'll have it out in the fall. So fingers crossed.
- [38:38]
April Dunford
So I know how you got that book written already. You're getting out in the fall.
- [38:45]
Brent Adamson
Yeah, it's up here. Fortunately it's not on paper. So that's the thing. And then there's also a set of best practices. Right. So I want to do just like we used to do it is like show me an actual company that does an example of a great maturity model or a diagnostic or a sense making. What does that look like in practice? And I've got lots of talk about this.
- [39:05]
April Dunford
I've got a handful of my clients that I think just do an you're.
- [39:08]
Brent Adamson
My new best friend.
- [39:09]
April Dunford
Ace of job of this. Like, like in particular. And I'm having him on the podcast soon too. But the guys over at Postman, in my opinion have done a very, very good job of this with a very technical product for a very technical audience and just beautiful.
- [39:25]
Brent Adamson
I love, you know the other one, I'm super interested. I was just talking to a company last week. Week. It's not in the clear yet. Well, maybe someday, but hopefully. But I've seen versions of this over the years, stakeholder alignment workshops, which is let me as a seller take my selling hat off and put my facilitation hat on. And if that's too hard, then bring in a subject matter expert or someone. But to sit down, ideally literally face to face in a room with the five or six different customer stakeholders that are involved in this conversation or in this decision. And my point is not to try to sell them them. My point is just to facilitate a discussion among themselves to get agreement on what the bleep are they even trying to do in the first place. So you start with objectives. You work through objectives, then tactics, then metrics, then targets, then timelines and get an alignment. All those things. I've got this rift that I've developed which is we're so convinced that we need to convince our customers of our value. So there's a lot of value selling and value based selling approaches right now and if I can just demonstrate my value to you, you're going to say oh my God, you're so valuable. I'm going to buy Right, but, but what I've become really convinced of in the value world is that we tend to think that showing our value, demonstrating our value to our customer is going to generate confidence. And then what happens? So you build this really great business case, this business calculator, whatever it is, you show it to your customer and they look at it, say, no, I agree with the math, but we've decided to go in a different direction. Right, I agree with that, but it's not based on our data. But it's like your calculation. Your business case dies a death of a thousand doubts. But not because they doubt your math, because it's not the math that's the problem, it's the context of the math. And what I've kind of learned and what we all know to be true is that rather than using value to demonstrate your. Excuse me, rather than using value to generate customer confidence, what if we use value to demonstrate customer confidence? And specifically it's to demonstrate their confidence in themselves that they're aligned on these five dimensions on objectives and tactics and metrics and targets and timelines. So that when you show them their value, if it's an output of those five things and their alignment of those five things, then the value makes sense. If they're misaligned on any one of those five levels, your value will always be suspect. Not because they doubt your value, but because they doubt their agreement on what they're even trying to do.
- [41:28]
April Dunford
That's right.
- [41:30]
Brent Adamson
And so that's the alignment workshop idea.
- [41:33]
April Dunford
I love it. I love it.
- [41:34]
Brent Adamson
It's cool, isn't it? This stuff is so interesting, by the way. The other thing I appreciate though is like, can I just say this, not tongue in cheek? Selling is freaking hard. I mean, oh my God, this is hard because buying is hard. All of this is a little overwhelming. Do you know what I mean? It's like, can't I just show up and tell them what I sell and say it's really great and have them buy and just be done with it?
- [41:52]
April Dunford
And it's just, that's, that's, that's the dream. That's what everybody wants. Everybody, you know, the dream. The dream one step beyond that is can, can't they just self serve themselves and click on the button and then we can short.
- [42:05]
Brent Adamson
It doesn't even work with gym shorts or dongles. Why would it work with multi million dollar purchases?
- [42:09]
April Dunford
But yeah, like, like, yeah, yeah, you be.
- [42:14]
Brent Adamson
By the way, there's a. You mentioned decision conference. All of this takes as a starting point something we found at Gartner, you know, several years ago, probably about 2017. It's the first time to show it up. I think we were still CB at the time. It doesn't matter. Somewhere in there. But we began doing these studies of buyer behavior and we found that the single biggest driver of customers making a large scale purchase decision by far was the degree to which they were confident. Not in you or your brand or your product, but they were confident in themselves and the decision they were making on behalf of their company. Did we ask the right questions? Have we done enough research? Have we thoroughly explored alternatives? Notice, all of that stuff is supplier agnostic. Agnostic. It's all customer centric.
- [42:53]
April Dunford
That's true.
- [42:53]
Brent Adamson
And it's funny. So then we all wake up one day and say, oh, you're right, we need to be more customer centric. I know how we'll be customer centric. We'll be a thought leader and a trusted advisor. But notice, being a thought leader is. Do you think I'm a leader, trusted advisor? Do you trust me? All of the things that we do in the name of customer centricity are still deeply supplier centric. I did one of my breakdown videos on this. I do these weekly breakdown videos and I think the thing we have to think about is less about supplier centric versus customer centric and just start thinking supplier agnostic. Take yourself completely out of the equation and just ask, what are customers struggling with? Just to make a decision not to buy from you, but just to make a decision and help them with that. That's pretty cool.
- [43:33]
April Dunford
That's so cool.
- [43:35]
Brent Adamson
Yeah. This is our future. I don't know how, like, I seriously don't know how. Here's what needs to happen. Robots need to take over the planet. And my good buddy ever Gardner, Don Scheibner, I finished colleague, they wrote a book about when machines start buying and selling. And I think that's if we hand it all over to the machine. So algorithms are buying from Algorith, then we can all just go sit on the beach or something.
- [43:55]
April Dunford
Yeah, or something. Yeah. Well, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything else you want to. You want to leave us with any parting smarts? You got anything else?
- [44:07]
Brent Adamson
Oh, gosh.
- [44:08]
April Dunford
Where can people find you if they're interested in your stuff?
- [44:11]
Brent Adamson
So. So the best place to find me really is on LinkedIn. I tend to hang out there a lot. I have a website now, Brent Adamson Dot. You can find me over there. I do birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. And sales kickoffs and that kind of thing in the meantime to pay the bills while I get the book out and there'll be more to come. 2024 is going to be a big year. But can, here's what I want to do actually. Can you take two minutes? Because you and I live in these adjacent worlds and this is not. No one put me up to this. I have not had a chance to sit down with your new book yet. And I'll just be honest with you and I'm excited to. But can you give me the two minutes on it? Give me the thumbnail on your new book. I'm super excited for it.
- [44:47]
April Dunford
Okay, so here's what the new book's about. It actually borrows a lot of these ideas like from, from this, from Challenger sale, from Challenger customer. From this sense making stuff from mass new book jolt effect.
- [45:02]
Brent Adamson
Yeah.
- [45:03]
April Dunford
And so here was the problem I was trying to solve in the new book. So I'm working with clients and we're working on positioning. And we work through the component pieces of positioning. We have this cross functional team. We get to the end of that exercise, everybody's like this is great. We, we're all in agreement alignment. Here's who we compete with, here's how we're different. This is, you know, this is a really good fit for our stuff. This is the market we're going to go win. And marketing's happy and they go off and to build all this great, you know, marketing stuff, messaging and thought leadership stuff and whatever. And sales is like, this is all great. And then off they go and nobody knows how to tell the story.
- [45:39]
Brent Adamson
Yes.
- [45:39]
April Dunford
How do we actually take that positioning and wrap a story around it? And in particular, how do we take this positioning and turn it into a first call day deck? That's it. Like just that simple. Like how do we take positioning map to a first call deck. And so that the new book is basically here's how we build a first call deck. And so it starts with our insight, which is kind of a challenger idea. But this idea of here's what we believe the problem behind the problem is or the problem inside the problem or this is our point of view on the problem. But then there is a discrete step where we map out the market and we give them this rubric.
- [46:14]
Brent Adamson
Rubric.
- [46:15]
April Dunford
So we say, look, you know, we do this a lot and here's what we see.
- [46:20]
Brent Adamson
Cool. Yeah.
- [46:21]
April Dunford
We see that there are three or four different approaches you could take to this problem. And here's the pluses and minuses. Of these. And then we, and we can also do discovery at this step because it's a natural place to do discovery. What do you think? What have you guys been seeing? What are you guys wrestling with? We do discovery and then what we're trying to get is alignment on the point of view. So we're like, so, you know, can we all agree that if, if, if this is what's going on and if these are our options, can we all agree that in a perfect world we'd have an option that ticks these boxes?
- [46:50]
Brent Adamson
Yeah.
- [46:51]
April Dunford
And then if the customer goes, well, yeah, we would. Then you're like, great. This, this is what we do. And so the idea is it's a first call. We're not getting into all the gory details. If it's a big, big deal, we're going to have 9,000 calls after this. If it's a smaller deal, maybe we close the deal on this call.
- [47:07]
Brent Adamson
Yeah.
- [47:08]
April Dunford
But this idea of how do we set up the first call where we kind of expose our point of view on the market. We draw a picture of the whole market and say this is how we look at it, have a discussion with the customer and then we get our differentiated value. Here's what we could do for you that no one else can on the table to kind of level set at the very beginning of a sales process. Here's what we can do. So that's what the idea.
- [47:31]
Brent Adamson
It's brilliant. It's, it's like I don't need to write the book anymore. I just, I'll just refer.
- [47:36]
April Dunford
No, your book, your book, your book is very much needed in this thing. Like mine is trying to solve this really specific little but in the right way.
- [47:44]
Brent Adamson
It's an example of frame making. It's. I can't wait to read it. That's, it's genius. I love it.
- [47:48]
April Dunford
Yeah, I want to, I promise.
- [47:50]
Brent Adamson
I've been really busy, but it's on my list. Christmas.
- [47:53]
April Dunford
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll send you one Christmas present.
- [47:56]
Brent Adamson
Thank you.
- [47:57]
April Dunford
The. But I think that, that, you know, it's interesting to me that despite us knowing all this stuff, if you see what happens in a first call in sales, it is almost always a product walk through.
- [48:10]
Brent Adamson
Yes.
- [48:11]
April Dunford
Almost always that even for stuff that's really expensive, it's amazing to me that a first call is usually, hey, we're these people. And let me just show you the product. Look, there's 15 drop down menus and I'm going to walk you through every single 15. Like it is amazing to Me how that is kind of the state of the art. Even though, like, we know better, we should know better.
- [48:34]
Brent Adamson
Here's the. Here's the hill I think I want to die on, at least for the next five years. And insofar as anyone wants to die in any hill, but is instinctively and to some degree, officially through training, sellers so dramatically want to change the way customers think about us. The supplier in a sales call, it's like, my job is to go in there and change the way this customer thinks about us, our product, our brand. And everything I've seen in all this research is a bigger picture idea. Is that the best way to really drive up the likelihood of a sale isn't to change the way the customer thinks about you, but to change the way a customer thinks about themselves. And if you approach that sale from that posture, right. If you approach that conversation of posture, it's like, I'm here not to get you to think differently about me. I'm here to get you to think differently about you. And at the heart of that, I think, April, is this very human story, which I just. Which deeply resonates with me just as a, you know, as a human, but also as like a liberal arts guy, maybe. I don't know. But, yes, all my training is liberal arts, so. But it's that it's kind of like the basis of really great friendships and great, you know, marriages and relationships. The whole thing about when you love someone or you really enjoy being around, it's like, I love you because I love you, but I really love you because I love me when I'm around you. And that, to me, is like, how can I. How can I create an exchange and experience with a customer such that the customer kind of loves themselves just a little bit better as a result of their presence or engagement with me? That's. That's a superpower, and that's what your best people are doing already.
- [49:55]
April Dunford
Oh, my God, I love this. I can't wait for this book. This is going to be, like, the best book ever.
- [49:59]
Brent Adamson
I don't know, but that. But. But I could put it under the other leg of the kitchen table, then it won't wobble in either direction. So that'd be perfect.
- [50:07]
April Dunford
That's so awesome. All right, well, thanks so much. I appreciate you.
- [50:11]
Brent Adamson
Thank you.
- [50:12]
April Dunford
This has been so.
- [50:13]
Brent Adamson
Cheers.
- [50:23]
April Dunford
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you're listening to this podcast and you're thinking to yourself, yourself, hey, my company could use some help with positioning. Maybe we should talk. So, as a consultant, I work with tech companies, but very specifically B2B tech companies that have a sales team. I don't really have a size requirement. I work with very, very large businesses, but I also work with growth stage companies that are as small as 10, 20, 30 million revenue. The work I do with companies is focused on getting a very tight definition of how how you win in the market and then taking that and translating it into a really compelling story that clearly answers the question, why pick you over the other guys? If you're interested in learning about how we might work together, you can visit aprildunford.com consulting thanks again for listening.