Framework based on April Dunford's "Sales Pitch". Use when you need to: (1) structure a B2B sales conversation that builds buyer confidence rather than pushing features, (2) develop a pitch narrative grounded in competitive positioning, (3) diagnose why deals are stalling or ending without decisions, (4) train sales teams on a consistent, repeatable pitch structure, (5) translate product positioning into a sales story, (6) help buyers navigate complex markets and evaluate trade-offs, (7) create pitch storyboards with cross-functional teams, (8) extend sales messaging to content, demos, and marketing materials
This skill captures the structured sales conversation framework from April Dunford's Sales Pitch. It translates her two-phase pitch model — Setup and Follow-Through — into actionable guidance for building buyer confidence, articulating differentiated value, and closing deals that too often stall due to decision paralysis rather than product weakness.
Buyers don't stall because they dislike your product — they stall because they lack the confidence to choose among alternatives, and your job is to be their market guide, not their salesperson.
Forty to sixty percent of B2B purchase processes end without any decision. Most sales teams attribute this to competitor wins or budget constraints, but the actual culprit is buyer uncertainty about the decision itself. Buyers who can't clearly articulate what makes one option better than another for their situation default to inaction. Traditional pitch formats — product demos, problem-solution decks, feature walkthroughs — do nothing to address this root cause. They assume market literacy the buyer doesn't have.
Dunford's framework flips the script by making market education the opening act of every sales conversation. Before you show your product, you help buyers understand the landscape: what approaches exist, what trade-offs each carries, and what an ideal solution looks like for someone in their position. By the time you introduce your product, buyers already have a mental model for evaluating it — one you helped construct. That's not manipulation; it's the difference between a vendor and a trusted advisor.
Goal: 10/10. When reviewing a sales pitch or evaluating sales conversation quality, rate it 0–10:
| Score | Description |
|---|---|
| 0–2 | Pitch is entirely product-centric. Opens with features or a company overview. No market context. No competitive landscape discussion. Buyer has no framework for evaluating what they're seeing. Deals frequently stall or go to "no decision." |
| 3–4 | Pitch acknowledges a problem but jumps immediately to the solution. Alternatives exist in the conversation only as targets to attack. Value claims are generic ("saves time," "increases productivity"). No proof matched to customer context. |
| 5–6 | Setup exists but is thin — a slide or two on market trends before the demo. Alternatives are mentioned but not fairly characterized. Differentiated value is articulated but not linked to specific capabilities. Proof is present but not customized. |
| 7–8 | Clear Setup and Follow-Through separation. Market insight is specific and credible. Alternatives are described honestly with genuine trade-offs. Differentiated value is tied to unique capabilities. Proof matches customer context. Call to action is clear. |
| 9–10 | Pitch reads as collaborative market education. Buyer confirms understanding at each Setup stage. Differentiation is narrow, specific, and impossible for competitors to claim. Proof is contextually matched. Champion is enabled to advocate internally. Next steps are concrete. |
The core architecture of every sales conversation is a Setup followed by a Follow-Through. These phases serve fundamentally different purposes and must not be collapsed into each other.
The Setup (three components):
The Follow-Through (five components): 4. Introduction — Where your product fits in the landscape you just described 5. Differentiated Value — Outcomes only you deliver, compared to alternatives 6. Proof — Evidence matched to the buyer's specific context 7. Objection Handling — Anticipated concerns addressed proactively 8. The Ask — A specific, frictionless next step
Why it works: The Setup creates the mental scaffolding that makes your Follow-Through land. Without context, your differentiation sounds like marketing copy. With it, it sounds like a logical conclusion the buyer reached themselves.
Key insights:
Pitch structure applications:
| Context | Setup Depth | Follow-Through Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Cold outbound call | 60–90 seconds, 1–2 key insights | Lead with sharpest differentiation point |
| First discovery meeting | Full Setup with discovery questions woven in | Tailored to pain uncovered during Setup |
| Demo to technical evaluators | Setup emphasizes architecture trade-offs | Follow-Through centers on proof and integration depth |
| Executive sponsor meeting | Setup focuses on business outcomes and risk | Follow-Through emphasizes ROI and strategic fit |
| Proposal or written follow-up | Setup summarized in context section | Follow-Through as the main body with evidence |
Copy patterns:
Ethical boundary: The Setup is not a manipulation technique to pre-condition buyers toward a foregone conclusion. Present alternatives honestly, including their genuine strengths. Buyers who feel set up rather than educated will disengage — and they'll be right to.
The first move in every pitch is a market insight — a specific, experience-grounded observation about the problem space that demonstrates you understand the buyer's world better than they might expect from a vendor.
Why it works: Buyers default to treating sellers as biased sources. Opening with a genuine insight about market dynamics — not a product claim — immediately shifts how they perceive you. You become someone who has seen this problem across many contexts, not someone trying to make a quota. This credibility compounds: everything you say afterward lands with greater weight.
Key insights:
Insight quality applications:
| Context | Weak Insight | Strong Insight |
|---|---|---|
| SaaS analytics tool | "Companies are drowning in data." | "Most analytics teams we work with hit a wall when data requests from the business start outnumbering analyst capacity — usually around 3:1. At that point, self-serve tools get deployed but adoption stays under 20% because the underlying data model isn't business-user-ready." |
| DevSecOps platform | "Security is more important than ever." | "The pattern we see in engineering orgs that ship fast is that security debt accumulates in the same three places every time: dependency management, secrets handling, and access reviews. The first two are automatable; the third almost always requires a manual process that nobody owns." |
| Enterprise HR software | "Talent retention is a challenge." | "The companies coming to us after failed HRIS implementations share one thing: their previous vendor scoped the project around HR users, not managers. Manager adoption predicts whether the system actually changes behavior — and it's almost never in the implementation plan." |
Copy patterns:
Ethical boundary: Insights must be accurate. Fabricating or exaggerating market observations to create artificial urgency destroys trust faster than any competitor can. If you're uncertain whether an observation is broadly true, present it as a question: "We see this pattern a lot — is that consistent with what you're experiencing?"
After establishing your market insight, walk the buyer through the realistic alternatives they face — including the option to do nothing. This is where most sellers panic and either skip the section entirely or use it as an excuse to attack competitors. Both responses damage your credibility.
Why it works: Buyers will evaluate alternatives with or without your help. If you refuse to discuss them, buyers do it alone — using information that may be outdated, biased by analyst reports, or shaped by a competitor's positioning. By guiding the alternatives discussion yourself, you control which criteria matter, ensure your strengths get surfaced fairly, and build trust that you're focused on the buyer's success rather than your close rate.
Key insights:
Alternatives framework applications:
| Alternative Type | How to Present | What to Watch For |
|---|---|---|
| Direct competitor | Genuine strengths + where their approach makes trade-offs | Buyer who already has a strong preference — use discovery to understand why |
| Adjacent/DIY solution | Acknowledge the appeal of control and cost; surface hidden costs | Buyer underestimating total cost of ownership or maintenance burden |
| Do nothing / status quo | Acknowledge stability; name the active cost of inaction | Buyer who hasn't fully internalized the cost of their current problem |
| Build in-house | Fair for technical buyers; address ongoing maintenance reality | Engineering-led companies who see "build" as the default answer |
Copy patterns:
Ethical boundary: This section fails if it becomes a staged comparison designed to produce a predetermined winner. Buyers who sense a rigged evaluation framework disengage. If your solution genuinely isn't the right fit for this buyer, the honest alternatives discussion will surface that — and that outcome, while not a sale today, builds the kind of reputation that generates referrals.
Differentiated value is the outcome only you can deliver, compared to what the buyer could achieve with the best available alternative. It is not a feature list, a benefits summary, or a generic value proposition.
Why it works: When buyers can't distinguish between options, they either choose on price, choose based on existing relationships, or make no decision at all. All three outcomes are losses for you. Precise differentiation gives buyers a concrete, defensible reason to choose you — one they can articulate to their own stakeholders during internal evaluation.
Key insights:
Differentiated value development:
| Starting Point | After "So What?" | After "Compared to What?" |
|---|---|---|
| "We have real-time data sync" | "You make decisions on current data instead of yesterday's export" | "Competitors sync on 15-minute intervals, which matters when you're managing live inventory across 3+ warehouses" |
| "We offer dedicated onboarding" | "Your team reaches value faster and with less internal effort" | "Self-serve onboarding from alternatives takes an average of 6 weeks to first workflow; we average 8 days because our onboarding team handles the data migration" |
| "Our API is more flexible" | "Your engineering team can build integrations without workarounds" | "The two alternatives require you to use their SDK, which limits integration patterns; ours is REST-based with full documentation and no undocumented rate limits" |
Copy patterns:
Ethical boundary: Differentiation claims must be accurate and defensible. Overstating uniqueness — especially in technical areas buyers will verify — is not just ethically problematic, it's strategically damaging. A claim you can't back up in a technical evaluation is worse than not making the claim at all.
Proof in a sales pitch isn't a logo wall or a list of customer names. It's contextually matched evidence — case studies, testimonials, data, and demonstrations — that answers the specific question "would this work for someone like me?"
Why it works: Buyers in complex B2B purchases are fundamentally risk-managing. Generic proof that your product works for large enterprises doesn't help a mid-market buyer; a logo from a different industry doesn't speak to a healthcare buyer. When proof is contextually matched, it directly reduces the perceived risk of the decision — which is the actual barrier to closing.
Key insights:
Proof type applications:
| Proof Type | Best Used When | Caution |
|---|---|---|
| Customer case study | Buyer is evaluating fit for their specific situation | Must match industry, size, and use case — mismatched case studies raise doubts |
| Quantified outcome data | Buyer is building an internal business case | Ensure the methodology is defensible; aggregate numbers without context feel fabricated |
| Technical demo | Buyer's evaluators need to see capability, not hear about it | Demo must prove differentiation, not just feature breadth — a feature tour without context is not proof |
| Reference call | Buyer has specific concerns they need validated by a peer | Choose references who match the buyer's situation; prepare them for the likely questions |
| Third-party validation | Buyer distrusts vendor-produced evidence | Analyst coverage, review site ratings, and independent benchmarks carry credibility vendor content can't |
Copy patterns:
Ethical boundary: Do not present proof you haven't verified. Citing case study numbers you can't source, using customer names without permission, or running demos in sanitized environments that don't reflect real product behavior are all forms of deception that surface during due diligence and destroy deals at their most critical moments.
A pitch storyboard is the working document that assembles all eight components into a coherent narrative before a single slide is designed. It's a cross-functional artifact, not a sales artifact.
Why it works: Pitches built by sales alone tend to overclaim on differentiation (because sales doesn't know what product can and can't do), underclaim on proof (because sales doesn't have access to customer success data), and drift from the company's actual market positioning (because sales adapts messaging to individual deals without coordination). A cross-functional storyboard forces alignment on what's actually true and uniquely valuable — and surfaces disagreements before they reach prospects.
Key insights:
Storyboard building process:
| Step | Component | Questions to Answer | Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Market Insight | What have we learned that buyers don't already know? Is it specific? Does it connect to their current situation? | Script |
| 2 | Alternatives | What are the realistic options? What are honest trade-offs of each? Where does "do nothing" belong? | Conversation framework |
| 3 | Perfect World | What would an ideal solution look like for a buyer in this situation? What criteria should they care about? | Conversation prompts |
| 4 | Introduction | Where do we sit in the landscape we just described? What makes this the right moment to introduce our product? | Script |
| 5 | Differentiated Value | What do we uniquely deliver, for whom, compared to what? Has each claim passed the "so what / compared to what" test? | Script + visual |
| 6 | Proof | What evidence matches this buyer's context? Which format — case study, demo, data, reference — fits best? | Slide + demo |
| 7 | Objections | What concerns will this buyer raise? What are the honest, complete responses? | Conversation framework |
| 8 | The Ask | What is the specific next step? Is it clear, low-friction, and appropriately sized for where we are? | Script |
Ethical boundary: Storyboards should reflect what your product and company actually deliver. The cross-functional process is an opportunity to pressure-test claims against reality — use it. A storyboard built on aspirational rather than current capabilities sets up sales reps to overpromise and customers to be disappointed.
Dunford's framework connects directly to the five components of positioning from Obviously Awesome: competitive alternatives, unique capabilities, differentiated value, best-fit customers, and market category. A sales pitch without grounded positioning is a house without a foundation.
Why it works: Positioning determines what you say; the pitch determines how you say it. When these two are misaligned — when marketing positioning says one thing and salespeople pitch another — buyers encounter contradictory signals across touchpoints. That inconsistency reads as organizational dysfunction and erodes trust. When they're aligned, every interaction reinforces the same clear story.
Key insights:
Positioning-to-pitch translation:
| Positioning Component | Pitch Location | Translation |
|---|---|---|
| Competitive alternatives | Setup — Alternatives | The realistic options you walk buyers through honestly |
| Unique capabilities | Follow-Through — Differentiated Value (input) | The specific product or company capabilities that make your differentiation real |
| Differentiated value | Follow-Through — Differentiated Value (output) | The business outcomes those capabilities create, compared to alternatives |
| Best-fit customers | Pitch customization | Which insights, proof, and objections are relevant for this specific buyer |
| Market category | Setup — Market Insight + Introduction | How you frame the problem space and where you introduce yourself in it |
Copy patterns:
Ethical boundary: Do not use positioning to artificially inflate your market category to seem larger or more established than you are. Buyers who discover the category inflation — through analyst research or competitor conversations — lose confidence in everything else you've told them.
| Mistake | Why It Fails | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Opening with a company overview or product demo | Gives buyers no framework for evaluation; positions you as a vendor, not an advisor | Start with market insight; earn the right to show your product |
| Generic market insights | "Data is growing" or "security matters" could come from any competitor; creates no differentiation or credibility | Ground insights in specific patterns observed across your actual customer base |
| Skipping the alternatives discussion | Buyers evaluate alternatives anyway — without your guidance, they use weaker information | Walk through alternatives honestly; your credibility depends on it |
| Treating "do nothing" as neutral | Inaction has real costs that compound; not naming them lets buyers underweight the cost of their status quo | Frame "do nothing" as an active choice with specific, quantified consequences |
| Weak or generic differentiation | "We're faster, easier, and more reliable" could describe any product in any category | Run every value claim through "so what?" and "compared to what?" until claims are narrow and specific |
| Proof that doesn't match the buyer | A logo from a Fortune 500 doesn't reassure a 50-person startup; an enterprise case study doesn't address a mid-market buyer's concerns | Build a proof library organized by buyer segment, use case, and concern — and select accordingly |
| Collapsing Setup and Follow-Through | Jumping to your product before buyers have formed an evaluation framework means differentiation lands as marketing copy | Treat Setup as complete only when buyers confirm alignment on market dynamics |
| Vague or multi-step calls to action | "I'll follow up soon" or "let us know if you want to continue" creates friction and delays momentum | Define a specific next step with a date, owner, and clear outcome — make it easy to say yes |
| Pitching the champion as if they're the final decision-maker | Champions need to advocate internally; if they can't explain your differentiation to others, they can't close | Equip champions with specific, repeatable language and supporting materials for internal conversations |
| Building the pitch without cross-functional input | Sales-only pitches overclaim on differentiation and miss proof assets that customer success and product know about | Run the storyboard process with marketing, product, and customer success before finalizing |
| Question | If No | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Does your pitch open with a market insight before mentioning your product? | You're leading with a vendor posture | Develop 2–3 specific, experience-grounded insights; open every conversation with one |
| Does your pitch include an honest tour of alternatives, including their genuine strengths? | Buyers learn about alternatives elsewhere, with less favorable framing for you | Map the realistic alternative landscape; practice articulating each option's honest trade-offs |
| Does your pitch explicitly address "do nothing" as an alternative with real costs? | Buyer inertia is your largest competitor and you're not competing against it | Quantify the cost of the status quo; make inaction feel like a choice with consequences |
| Can you state your differentiated value in one sentence that names a specific outcome and names the comparison point? | You're competing on features or price without knowing it | Apply the "so what / compared to what" test to every value claim until you reach specificity |
| Is your proof (case studies, demos, data) matched to this specific buyer's industry, size, and use case? | Generic proof reduces rather than increases buyer confidence | Build a segmented proof library; select evidence that answers "would this work for someone like me?" |
| Does your call to action name a specific next step with a date and a clear outcome? | Decision momentum stalls after the pitch | Define the ask before every meeting; make the next step as low-friction as possible |
| Was your pitch built with input from marketing, product, and customer success — not just sales? | You're likely overclaiming on differentiation or missing key proof assets | Run a storyboard session with cross-functional stakeholders before the next pitch revision |
| Has your pitch been tested with actual sales reps before going to prospects? | Scripts that feel right to the author often feel unnatural to the people who deliver them | Test delivery with reps you trust; revise anything they can't deliver authentically |
| Does your pitch align with your current marketing positioning on competitive alternatives, value, and best-fit customers? | Buyers encounter contradictory messages across touchpoints | Audit pitch against positioning; resolve conflicts before they reach prospects |
| Have you reviewed and updated your pitch in the last 90 days? | Market dynamics shift; an outdated pitch signals you're not current | Set a quarterly pitch review with cross-functional stakeholders; update immediately after significant market events |
April Dunford is a positioning consultant and former VP of Marketing who has led go-to-market strategy for over two dozen B2B technology companies. She developed the positioning framework in Obviously Awesome from fifteen years of first-hand experience repositioning products at companies ranging from early-stage startups to IBM. Sales Pitch extends that positioning work into the sales conversation layer, drawing on her consulting work helping sales teams translate strong positioning into pitches that actually close.38:["$","$L3c",null,{"content":"$3d","frontMatter":{"name":"sales-pitch","description":"Framework based on April Dunford's "Sales Pitch". Use when you need to: (1) structure a B2B sales conversation that builds buyer confidence rather than pushing features, (2) develop a pitch narrative grounded in competitive positioning, (3) diagnose why deals are stalling or ending without decisions, (4) train sales teams on a consistent, repeatable pitch structure, (5) translate product positioning into a sales story, (6) help buyers navigate complex markets and evaluate trade-offs, (7) create pitch storyboards with cross-functional teams, (8) extend sales messaging to content, demos, and marketing materials","license":"CC-BY-SA-4.0","metadata":{"author":"Tomasz Staniak","version":"1.0.0"}}}]