Building a Cohesive Sales Narrative

You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

Once you understand how to think about all the necessary components—and have them mapped out—you can put it all together into a cohesive narrative.

What Is the Problem?

You need to identify the business pain you’re seeking to solve as crisply as possible, so your audience can quickly evaluate whether what you’re talking about is relevant to them.

Consider the following examples of possible business pain scenarios.

There may be particular nuances and levels to the problem in question. In the case of TalentBin, more advanced sales conversations addressed discovery, contact, and management of recruiting conversations too. In the case of Salesforce, there’s a distinction to be made between the problem individual reps have and the problem sales managers have. But at least identifying the baseline is key.

A good test of whether you’ve got it is to pose the problem statement to someone in the industry. You’re in good shape if you say, “Have you encountered this?” and she not only says yes but can then proceed to have a deeper conversation about it.

Know, and be able to articulate, the problem you’re addressing.

Who Has the Problem?

Equally important is identifying the person who has the problem. We’ve already touched on this a little bit, since the person with the problem will often pop up in the problem statement—they’re somewhat hard to separate, and that’s fine. But you need to know the players who are navigating, or trying to manage, the business hassles you’re tackling.

This is both so you have a strong sense of who you should be addressing with this narrative and so that when you are addressing someone, they themselves can make the same evaluation. Are you talking to the right person, and do they want to listen to what you have to say?

In B2B software and sales, there is generally a specific person, or group of people, whose job it is to solve the problem you’re proposing. Identifying them is the goal here. There can be more than one person, and generally as an organization gets larger, what might have been the problem of one person, or a slice of a person, becomes the distributed problem of more people. The collective business speak for this is stakeholders, but you want to focus on those who are purely responsible for solving the business pain. If the person in question can say, “Well, that’s not really my job,” then you know you have the wrong person. You need to understand the different players in your narrative.

You might say, “Well, the CEO is the one who has this problem, because the buck stops with her.” But generally speaking, you want to be talking to the people who have specific functional responsibility for resolving the problem you’re addressing.

For, say, Zendesk, the most direct stakeholders would be the Head of Support or Customer Success and the individual customer service people who solve customer issues.

For a CRM solution focused on rep efficiency and managerial insight, this would be a Manager, Director, or VP of Sales Operations or, absent that, the sales leader who is most concerned about sales efficiency as supports revenue growth.

A good rule of thumb for targeting the right stakeholders is to look for the person who has control of the budgetary resources allotted to resolve the pain point you solve. Or, alternatively, identify the person who spends meaningful amounts of time, day to day, resolving that pain point.

As organizations get larger, you see more specialization and focus with regard to who would be the owner of a given business pain and thus ought to be the target of your message. In a small organization that has a single sales rep, with the CEO focused on sales performance, they would be the individuals to target for a sales automation solution. As an organization gets larger, you might have a Director of Sales managing six sales reps, and that Director of Sales would be your target. And as that organization gets larger still, the pure responsibility for sales enablement and operation may be specifically split off into its own role, with titles like Sales Operations Manager, Director, and so forth, at which point, those people would be your best target.

Relatedly, and we’ll get into this more when we talk about account qualification, just because there’s someone at an organization who addresses your problem doesn’t mean that the organization is necessarily qualified for your solution. An organization with a single customer service rep who is also the office manager and is managed by the CEO has someone who addresses customer success issues. But the amount of time—and, by extension, budget—that is spent on those issues will be far below that of an organization with dozens of customer service people. Engaging with this smaller account would therefore be far less likely to be worth your time. Generally, having a crisp sense of the specific titles you’re selling to will help lead to the right accounts, because accounts that don’t have those titles in-house won’t be qualified. We’ll get into that more when we talk about prospecting.

What Are the Costs Associated with This Problem?

Understanding the costs associated with the problem you’re addressing will help you frame an argument for why would-be customers should expend budget on your solution. Depending on your space, you might be looking at what it costs to solve a given problem—or what it will cost not to solve it. Either way, you’ll want to calculate the return on investment (the mythical ROI) associated with your solution.

Often, these are very clear costs.

In cases like this—where the implementation of a given solution clearly and directly minimizes certain costs—you’re dealing with what’s known as hard ROI.

Other times, the costs a solution addresses may be opportunity costs. Consider the customer support example above. The flip side to the cost of additional support personnel is the opportunity cost of customers who stop being customers due to insufficient support. So while one problem companies need to consider is the cost of adding more personnel as they add new customers, they also need to consider whether these new customers may end up becoming former customers if they aren’t sufficiently enabled or supported. The cost here would be the opportunity cost of those customers not renewing their licenses or purchasing more seats of the product being supported.

Lastly, there may be more directional costs and opportunity costs and benefits. These are often harder to quantify. Information technology vendors often sell the value of increased agility—users will be able to more quickly execute projects for their internal customers and thus allow the businesses they support to capture opportunities better. That’s great, but that’s a pretty big domino rally of cause and effect and hypothesized impact to take to the bank, and another example of soft ROI.

Once you have a sense of what these specific hard costs or opportunity costs are, it’s an easy trick to simply scale them up or down based on the size of the potential customers you are looking to engage with. As you do, you’ll better understand the potential opportunity of sale for your organization and the value of your solution for the prospect organization (which goes to qualification and, later, prospecting).

But at the very minimum, you need to understand the unit costs of the problems you’re addressing so you can position the value of solving them with your solution.

How Do People Currently Solve This Problem? Why Do Current Solutions Fail?

​important​Knowing the current solution paths for your problem will be important, in that the thrust of your sales conversations will be to persuade your would-be customers that the means by which they currently solve the problem—or their continued non-solution of the problem—is insufficient for their business and that they should be implementing your solution instead. You’ll have a hard time driving that argument, or even identifying the current state of the world within a target organization, if you’re not clear on the typical solution paths and their shortfalls.

No Solution

In high-technology, innovative solution sales, where your solution is brand-new, one of the most common answers to this question will be “we don’t solve this problem.” Your challenge, then, is to persuade prospective customers that it’s worth solving—in that the current non-solution is costly, whether that means actual hard cost or softer opportunity cost; hence the importance of understanding and being able to model the costs of non-solution.

Solution via Process

Organizations that already solve the problem via process are one step further along.

So, too, for sales organizations that don’t have a robust CRM solution and associated reporting in place. In lieu of that reporting, the sales organization might use a process of status meetings or habitual cc’ing of sales management on ongoing deal conversations.

In these cases, you need to address the question of why that existing process is an inferior solution path. Often it comes down to the time cost associated with it and, beyond that, with the general frailty of process.

In the TalentBin case above, the use of normal search engines in a manual process of candidate discovery is very time-consuming; while the outcomes could be valuable (a quality candidate hired), the time cost to get there may be substantial. Or a pertinent candidate may be missed, delaying the speed of hiring. In the example of the sales organization, the time cost of the reporting process keeps reps from spending their time on selling. Moreover, what’s reported is self-reported, without an audit path—potentially allowing reps to provide information that makes them look good but actually diverges from the reality of their sales pipelines.

Solution via Service Providers

A step beyond organizations that have implemented processes to resolve their business pains would be those doing so with service providers. Rather than subscribing to a media database like Cision to help their PR team keep tabs on relevant journalists, an organization might just have a PR firm on retainer. Or instead of solving their engineering-hiring problems with process or products, an organization might just work with a recruiting agency.

Solving a business pain with a professional service could be a totally viable solution for the organization in question, but it will have downsides. Cost will typically be one of those downsides, in that service providers need to make a margin for their businesses to be successful.

Solution via Product

Lastly, we have the most advanced organizations, those that already are using products to solve the problem in question. These products won’t necessarily be pure competition—they might simply be in the same general space as yours—but this introduces a larger concept that includes competition. These organizations are using solutions that are competing for the budget and user time you want. But that’s often a good sign when you’re qualifying an account (more on this later), since the organization has sufficient conviction in the importance of the problem that they expend budget on tooling to solve it.

While TalentBin is a talent search engine with advanced recruiting CRM features, with pure competitors in the market, there are a variety of other solutions that organizations use to solve the business problem of engineering recruiting: job postings on a traditional job board, subscriptions to a traditional resume database, or the business solutions of professional networks like LinkedIn.

This is where things can get complicated, in that the more mature a space, the more variety or alternative solutions there may be—including those that are perhaps not pure market substitutes but instead are complementary or cooperative solutions. I’m a fan of sales professionals being students of the game. The more you know about these other solutions and their relative plusses and minuses, the better. But there will invariably be diminishing returns in knowing everything about every potential solution under the sun; having intimacy with at least the most common ones should suffice, so you’re rarely surprised in a conversation.

​important​This isn’t just about knowing who the players are, and their deficits. The only way you’ll be able to build an authoritative narrative is if it is credible, and that means recognizing the strengths in existing solutions too—even if that’s as simple as their low cost. While recruiting agencies may be costly, they’re extremely useful if you need candidate flow immediately or don’t have in-house recruiter labor. Or while job postings may not be very helpful for hiring in verticals where candidate demand and supply is out of whack, that doesn’t mean that job postings are fundamentally problematic; they are very helpful for hiring proactive, motivated job seekers, like sales or customer success staff.

Having a deep understanding of the myriad ways organizations resolve the problem you’re addressing will position you well, so you can frame your solution’s narrative in the larger context of the market.

What Has Changed That Enables a New Solution?

​important​Typically in product innovation and the associated selling of those products, something has changed that enables a new solution. It’s important for you to understand the underpinnings of the change, because your narrative will need to explain it. In fact, that change will be crucial to how you frame the new opportunities that have opened up for your would-be customers.

In the recruiting world, the creation of LinkedIn as a professional network, which was adopted by a segment of the populace, enabled recruiters to tap into a much broader set of potential employees than traditional job board resume databases offered.

Or the falling price of flash memory made it cost-effective to create datacenter storage appliances made purely of flash memory, with companies like Pure Storage helping organizations take advantage of this development.

Knowing what has changed will not only allow you to pose a credible narrative but will also point to the trends you can expect in the market. Pay close attention to those trends and what they mean for your sales narrative—whether they support it or undermine it.

In other cases, these changes don’t enable a new solution—they demand one. With the rise of the iPhone and other smartphones, consumers now spend much more of their “online time” on their small mobile devices, rather than on desktop or laptop computers. As a result, time spent online shopping is following suit, putting pressure on existing e-commerce brands to produce mobile-first offerings. Those vendors are now responsive to companies promising solutions to this new problem, like mobile-app development firms, software vendors that make existing e-commerce websites mobile-friendly, and so on. Again, a change precipitated the need, and thus the attractiveness of the solution.

How Does the New Solution Work?

Of course, if something has changed that enables a new means of attacking an existing problem, or creates a new problem to be solved, you’re going to need to explain how your solution goes about addressing that change.

Conveniently, for most founders this should be pretty easy; they will generally have strong market and product intimacy. The more important thing, though, may be to have a good sense of how to easily and clearly explain your approach to prospects. Often a good way to do that is to compare your product to existing solutions that your prospect understands.

For Salesforce, this would be something like, “It’s like your traditional CRMs, but it takes advantage of the browser and the web to let you access your CRM whenever you want, wherever you are. And it’s way less clunky, and always has the most up-to-date features.”

Or for Groupon, it might be, “We have acquired email lists of tens of thousands of would-be customers in a given geography, whom we’ll help you access by offering compelling coupon-like deals, once a day, that get them in your door.”

The level of detail that you’ll have to delve into will vary depending on the audience. But at a minimum, you’ll have to be able to explain the nuts and bolts of how your new solution takes advantage of change to help resolve a problem.

Qualitative and Quantitative Proof of a Better Solution

As you can see, each part of the narrative builds on the part before. This will be true for every piece of marketing collateral you produce—messaging, email and web copy, slide decks, and so on. And once you’ve covered what has changed and how you take advantage of that change, you’ll naturally want to get to, “Here’s why we know our solution is better.”

Because you are now intimate with the problem space, the costs associated with the problem, and the means by which the problem is typically solved, quantitative comparisons should be easy. You already know the general metrics by which existing solutions are measured. Take another look at how you answered the question of what are the costs associated with the problem. Now it’s time to present why your solution does a better job, as measured in the same language as existing solutions. Typically, it’ll be as simple as, “Our offering does more X” or, “Our offering requires less Y.” What that X and Y are will depend on the space, but that will typically be the formula.

So for the recruiting space, where TalentBin plays, key metrics are cost per hire, time to fill an open role, and quality of hire. Of course, each of those metrics involves a lot of moving parts. So while you’ll want to be able to address the big picture, you’ll have to address the constituent pieces too.

A recruiter or recruiting manager will typically look at candidate databases to determine how many of their target candidates they can find and then recruit, and whether the contact information for those candidates is readily available.

You’ll need to do this for each part of your offering’s value proposition. In this case, search discovery is only part of the workflow that a recruiter engages in. Outreach is another. When assessing how a product can help with candidate outreach, recruiters might be interested in email-address availability and the speed with which they can execute their outreach. If you were selling to recruiters, then, you might start by noting the one hundred InMails per month that a recruiter gets through LinkedIn Recruiter and the amount of time it would take to send those InMails without templating or mass-outreach functionality. Then you would present the volume of email outreach that could be achieved in the same amount of time using your solution.

This is also where you can do a good job of guiding the conversation, based on your deep understanding of the problem, market, and existing solutions. Your competitors may try to cite metrics that don’t matter. In the world of talent acquisition, that’s often large numbers of resumes in a database. “We have two hundred million profiles!” That might be interesting, but what does it matter for a recruiter focused on physician assistants or iOS developers if there are only twelve possible candidates in those two hundred million profiles?

You can also spotlight qualitative differences between your solution and the competition, but this should be in supplement, where possible, to metric-based comparison. And ideally you should have numbers to support those qualitative differences. If you were presenting a mobile CRM offering that promised better usability than desktop CRMs (a qualitative claim), ideally you would have metrics to support those claims. Logins per day or data-quality metrics could help prove that as a result of this enhanced usability, actions that can be counted—and compared—are happening more or less often than with existing solutions.

Third-party validation is another means by which to present your offering’s superiority and lend credibility to your claims. This would be things like customer counts, customer testimonials (which ideally feature the metrics and qualitative claims you’ve defined above), deeper case studies, press and analyst coverage (which we’ll get into more later and ideally features large parts of your narrative, restated by the author), and so on. This isn’t a core part of the narrative, per se, but rather a means by which to say, “This is who agrees.”

There are all manner of ways to respond to, “Okay, so how do you know your product’s better?” Whichever you choose, though, having them at the ready is a requirement for your narrative.