Ep 555 How to Get Your Employees to Sell Like You, and Why Positioning for Customers Fails With Acquirers, Featuring the World's Leading Positioning Expert, April Dunford

**Colin Morgan** (0:00)
Hi there, and welcome back to another edition of Built to Sell Radio, the podcast designed to help you punch above your weight in a negotiation to sell your company. I'm the executive producer Colin Morgan, and if you're a founder who is also your company's best salesperson, selling your business is going to be tough. You're unlikely to get full value and very little of it upfront. Most of your deal will be structured as an earn out or an equity rollover, mechanisms designed to keep you, the rainmaker, locked in.
They're golden handcuffs, and for a freedom seeking founder, it's like trading one prison for another. The secret is to get your employees to sell like you do. The problem is, they can't tell your company story like you can. Nobody can. And that's the problem April Dunford gets called in to fix. April is the world's leading authority on positioning.
She spent 25 years as an executive at seven B2B tech companies and startups. Businesses acquired for a combined total of more than $2 billion. And her books, Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch, have become the standard playbooks for winning deals. And in this conversation, she explains how to extract the pieces of your founder's story so a brand new rep can tell it without sounding like a fraud. And why the positioning that wins customers can fail you completely when you're pitching to an acquirer. Without further ado, here is John Moorlowe with April Dunford. Enjoy.

**John Warrillow** (1:39)
April Dunford, welcome to Built to Sell Radio.

**April Dunford** (1:41)
Okay, it's great to be here.

**John Warrillow** (1:43)
So we do this little huddle at Value Builder every morning. We do like, you know, what's up, and what's everybody's priority for the day. And it came to me, and my priority was interviewing you. And I said, I get to interview one of my heroes today. And so everybody got to roll their eyes and said, oh, here we go. But no, in all seriousness, you are one of, you know, Jack Trout and Al Reese wrote Positioning the Battle for Your Mind in the Early 70s, I think, right?

**April Dunford** (2:07)
I read that kind of late 70s. I think the book, the initial edition came out 81, but there was an article before that and blah, blah, blah.

**John Warrillow** (2:16)
Yeah.
But that changed the way I think about marketing totally. And then I haven't really been moved since I read your book, Obviously Awesome and then Sales Pitch. So you're in great company. I'm so thrilled to be talking to you about positioning. Yeah. As we talked about Optimite, there were two themes I want to explore. The first is for a lot of our listeners, they are probably one of, if not the best salesperson in their company. And that's both a blessing and a curse. It means they're probably super efficient at selling, super good at selling, at the same time makes their business hard to sell and not less valuable as an acquirer. And then the second theme I thought we'd explore is this idea of how positioning changes when you're trying to sell to a customer versus sell to an acquirer or an investor. So those are the kind of the two themes I thought we'd explore. Let's walk through an example where you have a founder who is the primary salesperson for their company. And they don't necessarily maybe think of themselves as a salesperson, but if you look at the revenue at the end of the year and you say, how did this revenue all get done or get created? The founder had their hand in a lot of it. They maybe haven't codified their positioning per se. They think that's kind of fancy talk for big tech companies, but they're just doing their thing. And yet, for a lot of founders in that space, their number one challenge and frustration is not being able to hire salespeople. Many of them have tried hiring salespeople and they just can't get it. They can't sell as well as the founder, and so the selling continues to fall back onto the shoulders of the founder.
If you're talking to someone that's sort of in that, gosh, nobody can do it as well as I can, what advice would you have for someone like that?

**April Dunford** (4:08)
So I get this call a lot. So this is probably the number one call that I get from founders and CEOs, even at giant companies, even at giant companies that have huge sales teams. I will get this call. Or the CEO calls up and says, you know, April, if you put me in a room with a customer, we never lose. Not once. I close them every time. But I listen to the way the salespeople talk about this stuff, and I hate it. It's nothing like the way I do it. They don't know what they're talking about. I don't know what to do. We've had people in to train them and blah, blah, blah. And we just can't get them to, you know, what do we got to do so that everybody on the sales team is telling the story in the right way?