Sales Pitch

When was the last time you tried to buy something complicated—say, new software for your business—and found yourself overwhelmed by choices? In Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win, April Dunford argues that the same confusion plagues your customers. Her claim is simple but profound: great selling isn’t about persuasion; it’s about helping customers buy with confidence. To do that, you need a powerful sales pitch built around a clear, differentiated story of value—not a spreadsheet of features or a pushy script.

Dunford, best known for her earlier book Obviously Awesome on product positioning, now takes her expertise to the front lines of sales. She contends that even the best positioning work fails if it doesn’t live inside the sales pitch. A marketing department can define what makes your product different, but if your sales team can’t tell that story convincingly in the first meeting, the message dies before it reaches the customer.

Why the Sales Pitch Matters Now

Dunford opens with a striking observation: there are countless books about negotiation, cold calling, and objection handling, but almost none about how to build a sales pitch itself. Yet the sales pitch is the make-or-break moment when a potential buyer first hears your story. In a world where buyers are drowning in information but starving for clarity, the company that can simplify choice wins. This makes the sales pitch a teaching moment rather than a selling monologue.

Dunford emphasizes that selling software or technology today means guiding buyers through a high-stakes, fear-driven decision. She notes that decision paralysis, or the dreaded “do nothing” outcome, kills between 40 and 60 percent of deals (as Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna found in The JOLT Effect). Most buyers aren’t choosing a competitor—they’re choosing not to choose.

The Shift from Selling to Guiding

At the core of Dunford’s philosophy is a mindset shift: from selling to guiding. A true salesperson acts like the toilet-store salesperson in Dunford’s humorous story: an expert who categorizes options, explains trade-offs, and teaches the buyer how to decide. Just as that guide helped her choose between hundreds of toilet models by clarifying what mattered—quality, style, and space—a good sales pitch helps a buyer navigate complex, high-stakes options. The goal is never to ‘convince’ but to illuminate a logical path to decision-making.

This approach reframes the salesperson as a trusted advisor. Buyers, Dunford says, are the experts in their pain; vendors are the experts in possible solutions. A great sales story bridges the two by helping the buyer understand not only what your product does but why your differentiated value matters and how it compares to alternatives. This methodology is grounded in the insight that confidence—not persuasion—drives purchase decisions.

The Core Framework: The Eight-Step Pitch

To bring this vision to life, Dunford offers a complete eight-step structure for crafting a winning pitch that works for startups and large enterprises alike. The structure is divided into two phases—the setup and the follow-through:

• Insight: Begin with a unique perspective on the market—your key learning that sets the stage for your differentiated value.
• Alternatives: Paint a clear picture of how buyers currently solve the problem, and the pros and cons of each approach. This serves as a discovery moment.
• The Perfect World: Define what an ideal solution should look like for your best-fit customers—and ensure it aligns with your value.
• Introduction: Introduce your company and situate your offering within the right market category.
• Differentiated Value: The centerpiece—show (not tell) how your product alone delivers the key outcomes customers care about. This is where a demo lives.
• Proof: Back up your claims through case studies, statistics, or third-party validation.
• Objections: Handle key deal-killing questions proactively—such as integration, pricing, or complexity.
• The Ask: End with a clear next step that keeps the buyer moving forward.

The first three steps—Insight, Alternatives, and The Perfect World—form what Dunford calls the “setup.” This is where you teach the buyer how to think about the problem and market. The next five steps—starting with Introduction—constitute the “follow-through,” where you connect that learning directly to your solution. Each step intentionally prepares the ground for the next, ensuring the buyer’s journey mirrors a learning path, not a persuasion funnel.

Positioning as the Foundation

A successful pitch can’t exist without strong positioning. Dunford revisits her previous framework—defining Competitive Alternatives, Unique Capabilities, Differentiated Value, Best-Fit Customers, and Market Category. These become your inputs: your insight (what customers must know), your map of alternatives (competitors and the status quo), and the value only you can deliver (why you win). As she puts it, “Garbage positioning in, garbage pitch out.”

When positioning is clear, the pitch becomes an educational narrative. Dunford likens it to teaching the buyer “why pick us?” instead of simply “what we do.” Help Scout, Postman, Funnel, and Gearset—real companies Dunford spotlights—illustrate how a structured pitch powered by positioning can transform customer understanding and accelerate revenue growth.

Why This Framework Works

What makes Dunford’s approach stand out is that it blends empathy with structure. By combining storytelling techniques with positioning science, it replaces scattered sales talk with a repeatable, confidence-building journey. Drawing from the Challenger Sale framework’s idea that great reps teach, Dunford extends the lesson: it isn’t enough to challenge; you must guide. You become the “toilet Obi-Wan” of your industry—trusted, practical, and focused on helping your audience make sense of complexity.

This focus on making sense gives your team a strategic edge. A standardized pitch ensures every rep tells the same powerful story, accelerates onboarding, and brings marketing, product, and sales into alignment. It also ensures that what worked for one rep can scale—and that prospects hear consistent, credible messages about why your product is different and better.

The Payoff

In her conclusion, Dunford makes one promise: if you guide buyers to clarity, you win their trust and their business. The best companies, she argues, don’t just sell products—they sell understanding. By combining empathy (“buying is hard”) with mastery of narrative and structure, Sales Pitch delivers a complete playbook for converting insight into sales conversations that feel authentic and helpful to both sides.

“Stop selling. Start helping.” — Zig Ziglar, quoted by April Dunford to summarize her philosophy.

In essence, Sales Pitch teaches that every great company must be able to teach. When you move from convincing customers to guiding them, your pitch stops being a performance and becomes a path—which is what every overwhelmed buyer secretly wants.

One of Dunford’s most compelling insights is that buying is harder than selling. Selling may seem exhausting to those building businesses, but from the buyer’s perspective, the decision-making journey is often fraught with complexity, fear, and risk. The most formidable competitor? Not another vendor—but the buyer’s decision to do nothing at all.

Considered vs. Unconsidered Purchases

Dunford distinguishes between unconsidered purchases—the low-stakes decisions we make daily, such as buying toothpaste—and considered purchases, where the cost, consequence, and number of stakeholders are high. Most B2B technology products, from accounting systems to security tools, fall into the latter category. Buyers don’t make these decisions lightly because if they make a misstep, they could lose thousands of dollars—or their reputations.

Her vivid “toilet store” example grounds this point in humor and reality. When remodeling her home, Dunford found herself lost in a jungle of options—trapways, siphon flushes, flappers—none of which she understood. The experience mirrors what happens to many buyers of tech products. Overloaded with jargon and flooded with similar-sounding options, they quickly feel overwhelmed and paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake.

The Fear Factor in B2B Decisions

Fear drives many B2B purchases. Buyers fear wasting money, looking incompetent, disrupting their organization—or even losing their jobs. Dunford references Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna’s finding that 40–60% of sales cycles end with no decision. Not because the customer preferred a competitor, but because they lacked confidence in their ability to decide safely. As Dunford puts it, “No decision is as likely a vote against change as it is a vote for the status quo.”

This perspective flips traditional sales thinking. Instead of seeing indecision as rejection, Dunford sees it as a signal that the rep hasn’t given enough clarity. Buyers are drowning in information yet starving for insights that make sense of it all. Typically, they are assigned to make a critical purchase—say, replacing an accounting platform—without ever having done so before. The salesperson who helps them feel informed and secure earns trust far faster than whoever has the flashiest deck.

The Buyer Wants a Guide

Dunford’s turning point in her toilet-buying dilemma came when she encountered a salesperson who didn’t try to sell but to teach. This “toilet Obi-Wan” simplified her choice into three dimensions: quality, aesthetics, and space. Instantly, thousands of options became three manageable trade-offs. That fifteen-minute conversation accomplished what three weeks of research couldn’t: clarity and confidence.

Translating this lesson to B2B sales, Dunford argues that what buyers crave most is a roadmap to navigate complexity. They don’t want a vendor—they want a knowledgeable guide. The vendor’s job is not to pitch product features but to teach customers how to make a smart buying decision. This involves articulating trade-offs, clarifying categories, and establishing what really matters based on the buyer’s goals.

Implications for Sellers

This shift changes everything about sales behavior. Rather than crafting pressure-driven closings, strong sales teams design educational experiences that move the buyer from confusion to certainty. Instead of focusing on persuasion—"We’re best because we have X feature”—they ask, “How can I help this buyer feel informed enough to act?”

“Prospects who can’t confidently make a choice between options will generally take the lowest-risk option, which is to simply do nothing.” — April Dunford

By viewing buying as the harder act, sellers reclaim empathy and purpose. They act not as talkers but as translators—experts helping customers make sense of an overcrowded market. The customer’s relief becomes the true measure of sales excellence.

If buying is hard, then the best salespeople are those who make it easier. Drawing on research from The Challenger Sale by Dixon and Adamson, Dunford underscores that what customers value most in a sales interaction isn’t friendliness or persistence—it’s learning. Buyers want to be taught how to make smart, defensible decisions.

Teaching the Buyer, Not Just Pitching

Many vendors focus solely on their products. Their websites feature features. Their sales calls revolve around demos. They leave it to the customer to infer why their product matters or how it differs from competitors. Dunford calls this a mistake because it asks the buyer to do the hardest intellectual labor. What customers truly want is help deciphering the landscape: understanding trade-offs, pitfalls, and how to choose between seemingly similar options.

In B2B sales, buyers must justify purchases internally to bosses, IT teams, and legal departments. What they truly seek is a defensible decision—one they can explain and defend. When your sales rep gives them clear frameworks for decision-making, they gain confidence and align organizational stakeholders faster.

From Features to Contextual Advice

To illustrate this, Dunford analyzes Help Scout, a company in a crowded help-desk market. Competing against big names like Zendesk, Help Scout’s mission wasn’t simply to show off features—it was to teach prospects how to think differently about customer service. Traditional vendors treated support as a cost to minimize. Help Scout reframed it as a loyalty driver for digital-first businesses. Their pitch, therefore, wasn’t, “Here’s our shared inbox and automation tools,” but “Here’s the philosophy gap between cost-cutting support and loyalty-building support.”

By doing this, Help Scout didn’t just sell software; it educated buyers about a new mental category. This shift mirrors storytelling strategies from Simon Sinek’s Start with Why—but with tactical precision: helping buyers link philosophy to product features, and product features to concrete business outcomes.

Buyers Are Experts in Pain; Vendors Are Experts in Solutions

Dunford reframes one of sales’ oldest clichés. Yes, “know your customer” remains true—but she adds that customers know their pain, not the solutions. Vendors, by contrast, live and breathe the possibilities within their category. They think daily about what’s possible, what’s coming next, and what pitfalls to avoid. The sales pitch should merge these two expertises: the customer’s intimate understanding of pain points and the vendor’s expansive understanding of solutions.

In this way, a sales pitch becomes a bridge between two worlds. You’re not imposing knowledge—you’re co-creating clarity. You illuminate the market, the buyer tests those insights against their experience, and by the end, both parties share a richer understanding of what “the right fit” really means.

“The question customers really want answered is not ‘Why pick you?’ but ‘Why pick you over all the alternatives?’” — April Dunford

When your pitch answers that second question with clarity, humility, and insight, you stop sounding like a salesperson. You become an ally. That transformation—turning sellers into guides—is what buyers secretly crave and what builds the strongest, most sustainable relationships.

Dunford lays the groundwork for all great pitches through four foundational principles: qualification, discovery, demonstration, and differentiated value. When these are executed well, each customer interaction not only moves a sale forward—it deepens understanding on both sides.

1. Qualification — Start with the Right Conversations

Before pitching, ensure you’re speaking to the right person at the right company. Qualification screens out prospects who would never be good fits for your product, saving everyone precious time. Dunford reminds us that wasting a prospect’s time erodes trust just as much as missing a revenue target. In practice, this means filtering leads based on company size, goals, technical compatibility, and budget before presenting your story.

2. Discovery — A Two-Way Teaching Moment

Discovery isn’t just about collecting requirements. Dunford reframes it as a dual learning exchange, where you teach buyers your way of viewing the market while they educate you on their situation. This mutual exchange is essential for aligning around the true nature of the problem. A great discovery conversation both gathers data and primes the buyer for the narrative that follows.

3. The Demo — Show Value, Not Features

Buyers often say they want a demo, but what they crave is understanding—how a tool solves their problem better than alternatives. Dunford warns against product walkthroughs that simply show every menu or function. Instead, your demo should reinforce each dimension of your differentiated value. If your product does one thing uniquely well, make sure it takes center stage, even if the buyer didn’t specifically ask to see it. As she jokes, “If your killer feature is rarely requested, you’re showing it too late.”

4. Differentiated Value — The Heart of It All

Value answers the “so what?” question behind every feature. If your software automates reporting, so what? That’s only meaningful if it saves time, reduces errors, or drives higher revenue. Differentiated value goes one step further: it’s the value you can deliver that no one else can. Dunford insists this must anchor the entire pitch. Helping the buyer see how each feature drives unique, defensible value turns technical details into strategic decisions.

“A great sales pitch tells the story of the value that only your product can deliver and why that value matters.” — April Dunford

These four principles elevate selling from performance to pedagogy. The buyer isn’t dazzled into purchase—they’re educated into confidence. When every demo and conversation connects back to your unique value, the decision feels not risky but inevitable.

Most companies use one of four storytelling structures to sell: the product walkthrough, the problem/solution pitch, the vision narrative, or the hero’s journey. Dunford examines each method, celebrates their strengths, and exposes their blind spots. The result is her creation of a fifth, more relevant structure: a sales story that helps customers evaluate options rather than just listen passively.

The Product Walkthrough

This is the default for many startups: “Here’s what our product does.” While comforting, it drowns the buyer in features without linking them to business outcomes. It’s like dumping a bucket of LEGO pieces on the table and expecting the buyer to visualize the castle. Dunford argues it often leaves prospects wondering, “So what?”

The Problem/Solution Pitch

This approach adds context by articulating a problem first and then unveiling the product as the savior. It works best when the only competition is the status quo. But in markets full of similar solutions, this format fails because competitors define the same problem in the same way. Without unique framing, you blend in.

The Vision Narrative

The vision pitch paints a bright future—“the new way.” Perfect for investors, terrible for short-term buying decisions. Buyers hesitate to purchase what doesn’t yet exist. As Dunford cracks, “Come back when the shiny vision actually ships.”

The Hero’s Journey

Popularized by Donald Miller’s StoryBrand, this story casts the customer as the hero and the company as the guide. It’s emotionally engaging and works beautifully for case studies or marketing content. But it risks skipping the one question burning in the buyer’s mind: “How do I choose between all these apparently similar options?”

Building a Better Frame

Dunford’s improved framework fuses clarity, guidance, and context. Borrowing IBM’s practice of anchoring pitches in market insights, she designs a structure that teaches prospects how to think about their choices, contrasts approaches, and leads naturally to her company’s differentiated value. It’s not about dazzling stories—it’s about decision-making confidence. (Notably, this approach echoes Melissa Daimler’s observation in ReCulturing that “clarity is kindness.”)

By focusing not on the hero’s transformation but on teaching evaluation, Dunford turns narrative from entertainment into strategy.

This framework becomes the backbone of her eight-step sales pitch. Its genius lies not in clever phrasing, but in how it harmonizes empathy, logic, and differentiation—the three currencies of confident buying.

At the heart of Dunford’s methodology lies her eight-step model—a precise architecture for transforming positioning into a confident, teachable narrative. Structured in two phases, it helps sales teams guide buyers through orientation and conviction.

Phase 1: The Setup

• 1. Insight: Start with a truth only your experience could reveal. This is your differentiated perspective on what customers often overlook. It instantly builds credibility and frames the rest of the conversation.
• 2. Alternatives: Educate the buyer on the different ways others try to solve the problem—status quo, competitors, or DIY options—while highlighting trade-offs. This doubles as discovery.
• 3. The Perfect World: Synthesize everything into criteria for an ideal solution. Essentially, you’re co-defining what “success” should look like, in a way that conveniently mirrors your value.

These first three steps form a structured conversation that builds intellectual alignment. You’re showing that you understand the market, their pain, and the landscape of options better than anyone else.

Phase 2: The Follow-Through

• 4. Introduction: Shift from the market to your company and solution. Briefly frame what you do using your chosen market category—“We’re the marketing data hub.” Explain where you fit in their world.
• 5. Differentiated Value: The centerpiece. Show how only your product delivers the critical value discussed in “The Perfect World.” Organize any demo or explanation around 2–3 core value themes, not a laundry list of features.
• 6. Proof: Back up each claim. This could be with customer success stories, stats (“We cut onboarding time by 50%”), or third-party validations.
• 7. Objections (optional): Proactively address fears—deployment, cost, compatibility—before they stall momentum. It builds trust and transparency.
• 8. The Ask: End with clarity: propose the logical next step, such as a proof of concept, deeper demo, or agreement to involve other stakeholders.

This formula replaces improvisation with intention. Each step flows logically into the next, reducing uncertainty for both seller and buyer. For example, companies like Postman and Funnel have applied this model to clarify their value in crowded spaces—data and APIs—by leading with market insight, mapping competing approaches, and positioning their tools as the “perfect world” solution.

“The goal of a great sales pitch is to help customers understand all their choices, the trade-offs between each, and when to pick your solution.” — April Dunford

By the time you reach “The Ask,” the buyer isn’t guessing anymore. They’re informed, reassured, and ready to move from uncertainty toward confident action. The structure doesn’t manipulate—it clarifies. And clarity, Dunford reminds us, is the most persuasive force in business.

A structurally perfect pitch still fails if its foundations—your positioning—are weak. Dunford argues that all storytelling rests on five interconnected components: Competitive Alternatives, Unique Capabilities, Differentiated Value, Best-Fit Customers, and Market Category. Getting these right ensures your pitch has a solid spine.

How the Five Components Work Together

• Competitive Alternatives: What would your ideal customer do if your solution didn’t exist? These include direct competitors and the status quo.
• Unique Capabilities: What can you do that others can’t? These include both product features and organizational strengths, such as partnerships or expertise.
• Differentiated Value: What is the outcome or benefit that those capabilities create for your customers?
• Best-Fit Customers: Who cares most about this value? What traits or situations make them ideal buyers?
• Market Category: How do you describe what you are so customers immediately understand your context?

Dunford demonstrates this with her client LevelJump. Competing in sales enablement, the company’s unique advantage is being the only solution built directly inside Salesforce. This enables it to tie training initiatives directly to revenue outcomes like “time to first deal.” Their pitch flows naturally: insight (sales enablement is about impact, not courses), alternatives (shared drives, content management systems, LMS), perfect world (easy training that proves revenue impact), and then LevelJump’s differentiated proof.

The clarity of this structure also dictates who they target (fast-growing sales teams onboarding new reps quickly) and how they describe themselves (“Sales enablement that drives results”).

This exercise reveals a consistent theme across Dunford’s work: positioning defines not just what you sell but how you tell. Weak or fuzzy positioning yields feature lists instead of persuasive narratives. Strong positioning turns your story into the customer’s decision filter.

“Garbage in, garbage out. Weak positioning equals a weak pitch.” — April Dunford

Before writing slide one of your pitch deck, tune your positioning. It’s the difference between a story buyers forget and one they repeat internally to get your deal approved.

Even the best-crafted pitch must prove itself in the real world. Dunford cautions against rolling out new sales stories too fast. Instead, she advocates for controlled testing, refinement, and long-term stewardship. A sales pitch isn’t a project—it’s a living system that evolves with markets, teams, and buyers.

Test Before You Scale

Her method starts with a trusted rep—ideally a top performer involved in the design—who tests the new pitch on live prospects. Marketing leaders attend calls, gather feedback, and iterate lightly (wording, clarity, examples) but avoid overhauling structure. The goal isn’t statistical proof yet but qualitative validation: does the pitch build confidence? Do good-fit customers move forward faster? When your best rep voluntarily adopts the new story, you’ve passed the test.

Rollout and Ownership

Once validated, turn the test into training. Record video walkthroughs, run internal demos, and certify reps before they pitch externally. Lead with credibility—your test rep should present first, because peers learn best from peers. Assign clear ownership of the pitch to someone in product marketing, who maintains documentation, ensures version control, and coordinates updates.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Spending too long on the setup phase—get to your differentiated value faster.
• Using generic “insights” (like “data is growing exponentially”) instead of something specific to your experience.
• Letting reps improvise inconsistently, creating “pitch drift.”
• Using irrelevant proof points—case studies should match the buyer’s world.
• Ending without a clear, doable next step (“Call us if you have questions” doesn’t qualify).

A Living Story

The final insight is that your pitch is never done. As competitors, technology, and buyer expectations shift, your story must evolve. Revisit it at least twice a year. Train new reps rigorously. Certify existing ones to prevent drift. Above all, treat the sales pitch as a strategic asset—one that connects positioning, messaging, and experience across the company.

“The sales pitch is where positioning gets real.” — April Dunford

By applying discipline, empathy, and structure, you turn a set of slides into a company’s core teaching tool. The result? Customers who don’t just buy—they believe.