A sales narratives that sells

A step-by-step process. Explained.

Creating a strong sales narrative in B2B sales is hard but crucial to build a well-oiled sales process that converts. Especially in more transactional deal cycles where volume is high & average dealsize is between €5k - €100k ARR range.

It's key that you can position your solution <5' during your discovery call so you:

1. Frame the conversation what discovery call is about
2. Position yourself against the alternative with your differentiated value that only you can deliver

I'm personally a big framework fan so when April Dunford's work on positioning & market strategy. When her latest book "Sales Pitch" came out I was ecstatic.

In this article I explain the step-by-step process on how we build the sales narrative at Givemefive. If you want more context - than the screenshot below - I advise you to read the book.

The Framework: Sales Pitch from April Dunford

Givemefive context

Givemefive is a sales pitching tool for B2B sales teams to simplify price conversation with prospects and customers to sell better, faster.

Givemefive's ICP are customer with a rather divers pricing & packaging strategy and / or still looking to get to pricing-market-fit.

Typically ideal-fit customers process before implementing Givemefive have

• Price calculators in Excel
• Internal price book explainer documents in PDF
• Customised powerpoint slides for explaining price to prospects
• Rather tedious process in CRM to manage quotes, line items, discounts... etc.

The challenge for Givemefive

Positioning, Messaging & Differentiation

The key challenge in the sales process is that B2B sales leader (and if you're reading this you probably are) you’ve seen so many different solutions already and you ask yourself:

• “Are you a proposal tool like Qwilr”
• “A dealroom solution like GetAccept?”
• “A quotation tool (CPQ) for your CRM?”
• “A contract agreement platform like Pandadoc?”

So when prospect start to ask "comparison questions" than you know you are already behind.

One quote I'll always remember is during one of my first market research call that I did with a RevOps professional at a Saas scale-up

“You promise me to sell better, faster.. That’s what they all say, why would I believe you and how are you different”

The solution: Give a different point of view for you ICP

The challenge here is that with our solution we need to 1) focus on the right ICP and 2) give the customer a different point of view on the problem we solve.

So let’s start - the step-by-step process of April’s book Salespitch.

I will give the Givemefive explanation each time to show you a concrete implementation of the methodology + the slides we use during discovery calls

A Strategic Sales Narrative in 8 steps. Explained step-by-step

Below the concrete implementation of the 8 steps. Each time you'll get the exact thought process of the framework, methodology and the slides we use during discovery calls at Givemefive.

• You need to read the steps below as if you're a prospect listening to an account executive from Givemefive.
• Every visual is a slide in our sales deck.
• It doesn't include the important discovery phase where we learn about the situation & challenge of the prospect

#1 Give a new insight

A) Pricing & packaging IS NOT only a data-driven science done by executives with excel calculators and models. But also an art where sales leaders needs to build a sales process for the team to translate it for the (potential) customer regarding their context.

B) Pricing & packaging IS NOT a waterfall project that you do once 1-2 years. But this is the current perception if you ask many GTM leaders. It’s too big of a project, too big of a hassle. To many tools, process & trainings to take care of.

Science vs Art

Waterfall vs Agile

A + B means that most sales-led B2B organisation feel they settled with their pricing and know they are leaving money on the table but think:

Meh, let's just settle with current pricing strategy. It's good enough, we’ll never solve it completely anyway...

#2 What are the alternatives?

Today commercial teams try to cover their pricing & packaging strategy - both the science & art - with a variety of different approach ranging from CRM features, excel price calculators, proposals slides in powerpoint, contract software, pricing consultancy services… etc.

Many of these different approach have a sub-optimal impact on sales enablement, pricing strategy & the overall ROI.

What really moves the needle is to increase your LTV:CAC ratio by selling better faster & more.

#3 What’s would a perfect world look like??

In a perfect world you have a way that supports an agile way of looking at your pricing & packaging strategy that combines the science of creating with art of selling.

All while avoiding the hassle of aligning teams, tools & processes around how you create, pitch & improve your pricing strategy.

#4 Introduce the product

Introducing Givemefive, the price configurator & pitching tool for B2B salesteam that simplifies price conversations with prospects and customer to sell, better faster.

Givemefive replaces complex Excel calculators, proposal slides and integrates with your CRM to make it easy to build sales offerings that both sales & customer will love.

We are used by sellers before, during & after the pitch. We are not to put on your website. Remember that we focus on B2B sales team with rather complex, diverse offerings like bundles, services, add-ons, discount policies... etc.

Givemefive is a sales enablement tool that helps to pitch value and explain prices better. We usually stop where quotes to cash starts but offer some quote creation features for less mature companies regarding their billing systems & processes.

#5 Explain the “differentiated Value” during the demo

The magic really happens when prospects seethe product in action. This is where the ‘wow’ moments happens so we want our demo’s to be crisp and focussed on “the daily in the life” of our 3 key buyer persona’s: Executives, Sales Leaders & RevOps.

During the demo we focus on 3 key value drivers:

A) Sales efficiencies by closing more & faster:

We create interactive sales offers that calculate prices in real-time so sales & prospects have the correct price in a couple of clicks, value is sold in the correct way, less discounts are given and sellers don’t waste time on admin work

B) Faster creation & iteration on pricing strategy for higher LTV:CAC ratio

Our price & package builder makes creating, updating & maintaining pricing & packaging easy: We combine best of both worlds: Excel to model, powerpoint for design & CRM quote & line item management.

C) Buyer Insights on how market interacts with pricing

We offer buyer analytics to see how your pricing is resonating with your different market so you can iterate and test your pricing in days, instead of quarters.

#6 Proof

A) We see 10-30% increase in conversion because of the trust & transparency it brings in the final stage of the sales process, the price negotiation.

B) Sales cycles close up to 40% faster because there’s less wasted time creating & updating quotes, communicating back and forth with the customer & controlled transparency increases trust which results in faster decisions.

#7 Objections

The main objection we were getting was:

“Your tool is great but our pricing & packaging is not yet finished so we want to do that first before implementing Givemefive ”

This is exactly why the insight at the beginning is so important. Pricing should be an agile process, not a waterfall project.?We need to plant that seed right from the start.

We’ve already seen a big improvement on overcoming, or just completely avoiding this objection since we implemented this approach in the first discovery call.

#8 The Ask

This is a sales process thing - not really a sales narrative & messaging thing but I'm going to include it anyway since it's part of the framework.

Instead of having discovery, demo & price discussions sometimes crammed in one or two meetings we now have a value driven process where:

Phase 1 l Discovery. In the first meeting we align on current & desired state around pricing & packaging and we show a quick demo to ‘wow’ the prospect.

Phase 2 l Workshop. We book a value workshop where we customise Givemefive based on their current pricing and challenges. This is an investment of both parties: the customer has some homework to share key documents and we take bit of time to already semi-onboard them. Key here is that we basically say: Look how easy & fast it is get started.

Phase 3 l Business Case. We get the project team together and align on succes metrics and what they would like to get out of the collaboration.

Conclusion

Creating a strong sales narrative is crucial for success in B2B sales, especially if you are going to scale the sales team.

Having a consistent way to position and differentiate yourself in a crowded market with lots of competitors or alternative approaches to solve the problem that you solve.

This framework from April Dunford + our exact train of thought regarding a sales solution like Givemefive hopefully will help you to speed up things internally and align all stakeholders around your sales narratives structure and storyline.

My biggest advice to you

In case you want to do a similar exercise:

1. Focus first on the storyline, not the slides itself. Write it out in a google doc.
2. Make it a project, part of your OKR if you like. It will take weeks / months to perfect it, but should only take days to have a good v1 that you can test in the market.
3. Keep iterating after every meeting you do with the sales narrative. Their are always small tweaks you should make on the words, illustrations, diagrams. Also here you need to treat this as an Agile way of working, not a waterfall project.