Sales Reframed | Unlock Your Hidden Value with Superpowers and Superpassions

Reframe Takeaway

After listening, you’ll see that the goal isn’t to be everything to everyone; it’s to be the obvious choice for the right people.

Episode Guests

April Dunford: Founder of Ambient Strategy; Author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch
LinkedIn | Instagram

Rob Ironside: Executive Director at League of Innovators (LOI)
LinkedIn | Instagram

Payton Beckett: Account Executive at MLSE (Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Partnership)
LinkedIn

Top Episode Learnings 

1. Discover Your Value — It Starts Within
   Before you can sell anything, you have to understand what makes you valuable.
   Think about your superpowers and superpassions. When you know what you’re naturally good at and what you love doing, you can start to see a clear map for your next move in life or work. Your personal value isn’t invented… it’s discovered.

2. The Power of “Why You, Why Now”
   April Dunford reminds us that most sales are lost not to competitors, but to confusion and indecision. People don’t choose what they don’t understand. When you make your value unmistakably clear, you help others say yes with confidence. As Rob Ironside puts it, every decision hinges on two questions: “Why you?” and “Why now?”. If you can answer both, you stand out.

3. You’re Not for Everyone… and That’s a Good Thing!
   Success comes from narrowing your focus, not widening it. Research shows that having a passionate base who loves you—your “five-star crew”—beats having everyone who just “kind of likes you”. The goal isn’t to appeal to everyone. It’s to connect deeply with the right people.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch — Books by April Dunford

The JOLT Effect: Book by Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna 

When Online Reviews Meet Hyperdifferentiation: A Study of the Craft Beer Industry: Research paper by Eric K. Clemons, Guodong "Gordon" Gao and Lorin M. Hitt 

Sons of Kent Brewing Co.: Case example 

SmartSweets: Case example

Hootsuite: Case example

Transcript

ERIC JANSSEN: Payton, I would love to hear where you are at today. Where are you working? What are you up to?

PAYTON BECKETT: Yeah, I'm in Toronto, right downtown. And I'm working at my dream company, MLSE. I'm a sales associate, currently selling for the TFCC brand season tickets and group package tickets, which is pretty amazing.

ERIC JANSSEN: That's Payton Beckett. She's an Ivey graduate and a former student of mine from a class I teach called Sales Foundations. Her journey post graduation has been really inspirational, so I wanted to talk to her about it on the show. Oh, and just so we're all up to speed, MLSE is Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, the $12.5 billion company that owns the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Toronto Raptors, multiple Minor League teams, as well as sports arenas, concert venues, and, as Payton mentioned, TFC. That's Toronto FC, the city's pro soccer franchise.

PAYTON BECKETT: I knew I wanted to end up in the sports industry, but sales was never really top of mind for me originally. After Sales Foundation, I feel like I was very fortunate with getting some knowledge from guests in the classes. A lot of successful individuals really stress the importance of sales as a foundation and how those soft skills have really helped them move their way up, whether it's C-suite levels or just managerial-level individuals. And I came to the realization very early on that sales is a foundation that I wanted to have.

ERIC JANSSEN: There's a simple question at the heart of every successful sale, spoken or unspoken, and it's top of mind for the person sitting on the other side of the table from you-- why you instead of anybody else? It can be a hard question to answer, but it's something that Payton was able to do. And it helped her land her dream job. So, this week, we're going to hear how she did it and get some advice from other experts along the way. And together, we'll tackle one of the most important sales tasks you'll ever have, how to sell yourself.

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I'm Eric Janssen, an entrepreneur turned sales professor. And I have a simple mission-- change the way people think about sales, because sales is a life skill. And this is Sales Reframed, a podcast in collaboration with Ivey Executive Education.

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When it comes to sales, I think there's a huge mistake that a lot of people make. A lot of the time, we think about it as a transaction. In Payton's example, the employer has a job, and we want it. And we need to figure out a way to transfer that value to us. And that's the mistake. Because I truly believe that to make the sale, you have to think about it the other way around. The way to unlock value for yourself, to get the job, the promotion, the sale, is to provide value to the other person, to the other party. And the way that you communicate that value is through a value proposition.

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One of the classes that Payton took at Ivey was the one I teach called Sales Foundations. In that class, we do an exercise called "sell yourself." I have them create what we call their "talent stack," where they reflect on their superpowers and super passions. It's a way for them to think about the things that they're skilled at doing and the things that they're really interested in doing. The skills are the superpowers, and the interests are the super passions. I ask them to do some self-reflection, but it's sometimes challenging to identify those attributes in yourself. It's like trying to read the label from inside the bottle. So I get them to ask their friends, employers, family members, and mentors for input. By the end of the exercise, Payton and all the other students have these notes that sort of function as a cheat sheet of who they are and what they might want to do.

PAYTON BECKETT: Being an athlete growing up, I've always been very competitive. So that's something in my nature. I always have had a great work ethic coming from doing practices early in the morning. It's stuff that's really transferable-- and as well as being organized. I was an Ivey student while doing varsity. So I'd be very organized. I came from practice for in the morning right to school. So my life had to be very organized. And I realized these skills are really, really my superpowers, especially being competitive and ambitious. I think a lot of the skills that I had from being a competitive athlete and training in sport, I see in my day-to-day life working in sales. Even just the amount of rejection I face day to day on these phone calls, I look to it as, you're not going to score every time you shoot. I was a figure skater. I fall all the time. You get right back up, and you start again.

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ERIC JANSSEN: Payton was able to use that knowledge of her superpowers and super passions to zero in on the job at MLSE. But the opportunity didn't just fall in her lap. She went after it in a targeted way, and then throughout the interview process, made it clear that she would add a ton of value for them. And a part of that was being able to answer the question, why Payton instead of everyone else we're interviewing? She had an answer, and it resonated with MLSE. We'll get more into how Payton approached her application and how she made it stand out from the thousands of others. But before that, I want to turn to our first expert. He's someone who spends a lot of time helping young entrepreneurs think about how to position their value and how they can differentiate themselves from the crowd.

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ROB IRONSIDE: I think founders, like, especially young founders, go to these events, and they have their freshly printed business cards. And they try to collect as many business cards as they can and give out as many business cards as they can because, like, I have to capitalize on this moment. And they don't realize is that if you leave that event with one genuine relationship, one general connection with somebody that is actually you connected with, and you had an interesting time and-- whether they're that that key person or not, that will deliver so much more value in your life than 14 business cards from people that aren't going to email you back.

ERIC JANSSEN: That's Rob Ironside. He's the executive director at League of Innovators, or LOI. LOI is Canada's largest startup accelerator for founders under the age of 30, which was started by the founder of Hootsuite, Ryan Holmes. Rob ends his days helping young folks get their ideas ready to take to the market. And at the core of that mission is making sure that every product coming out of LOI, whether it's a B2B SaaS platform or a gummy bear that's low in sugar, has a strong value proposition. And for Rob, a strong value proposition doesn't just answer, why you? It also answers, why now? And for a lot of the aspiring founders he sees, answering that question starts with their own personal stories.

ROB IRONSIDE: Some of our founders used to sell fake IDs in Thailand before they came to Canada. Max from Blossom Social sold cupcakes. And Blossom just raised the largest crowd-equity funding campaign in Canada, and Max's story started with selling cupcakes when he was a kid. I think a lot of people get that experience early on and then it just snowballs over time and founders get reps in, which is something we talk about a lot. young Ryan started by selling pizza, and then he built-- four iterations later, he built Hootsuite. I think that's realistically what a founder journey looks like. It's not, like, this savant model where somebody just has an idea, an "aha" moment, and then they just launch it, and then it's this billion-dollar thing. It's, generally speaking, this tiered, kind of getting reps in process.

ERIC JANSSEN: You see a lot of entrepreneurs come through. How much does the founder's story play a role in either them getting in or, ultimately, how they perform when they're in LOI?

ROB IRONSIDE: In terms of getting in-- LOI, our goal is to support 100% of the founders that we meet. So we're trying to be that community. We have some resources that are available. If you're a young founder building anything in Canada, we're sector and model agnostic. We have something for you. So I think that's our goal, is to be that place where, no matter where you're-- we just value the skills that come from it, the contributions that come from entrepreneurs. A lot of entities out there are betting on ventures. They're very venture focused. We're a founder accelerator. We're betting on founders. And we're saying, you come into our program and realize that your idea doesn't have the legs you thought it was, or potentially you're not riding this wave that you thought was there and you kind of start over, that's success for us because you've now increased your abilities, and experience, and knowledge, and community to be able to do that, and you're not just believing these things. So that's success for us where most other accelerators would consider that failure, because they're taking equity in the ventures. So for us, we're betting on founders, specifically young founders. So in terms of when we evaluate founders, we're more looking at, who can get the most at the right time? So it's like, where are you? What are your key pain points? What are the problems you're trying to solve? And the reality is is that I know that a very high percentage of our "Labs" founders, which is our biggest program, for founders that have launched a Minimum Viable Product, or an MVP, but are still locking in product market fit-- reality is is that 12 months later, 80% of them have probably made a substantial pivot, or are on a new idea, or aren't full time because of getting those reps in.

ERIC JANSSEN: I think this is a really important point that Rob's making because it shows how a value proposition is iterative. It's not something that's fixed in stone. It evolves. It grows and changes, just like we evolve and grow and change as people. That holds true whether you're talking about refining a product, or honing your own superpowers and super passions.

ROB IRONSIDE: So some of my favorite questions are like, why you? Why now? Fundamentally, if you can start by answering those two questions in an effective way, you set yourself up. Really good example is a founder faces an issue firsthand. And then they go out and they try to find a solution. And they're not happy with any of the solutions. That's a really good starting point for any business, because you are the target demographic. That's way easier to do than trying to guess somebody else's problems and what they're going to care about. So that can answer the question, why you? And then why now, it's like, well, what's changed? I mean, fundamentally, every business is the same. And this ties into our topic today. It's like, somebody is facing a pain point or need. They're willing to pay for a solution to that. Not every problem people are willing to pay for. So they're willing to pay for a solution. And you can convince them or you offer the best solution out of all of the multiple of solutions to that problem. And there's a lot that we can tie in from all of those things. Answering the question, why you, why now, and what is this pain point, how well can you describe it, do you actually have strategic and actionable insights that are unique and different and there is some kind of market pull to what you're doing, are some of the things that we look for. And have you done firsthand research? How much time have you spent actually talking to the people that you think and doing that well?

ERIC JANSSEN: For the founders that do figure it out, it being sales, any traits or keys to success or patterns that you're recognizing for those that are able to figure it out versus those that struggle?

ROB IRONSIDE: The founders that we see really struggle, like I said, maybe it's just not a problem worth solving, right? So they didn't really ask themselves that question. People value what they pay for. If you're really on what Ryan calls a wave, big wave, you can be a mediocre surfer and get pretty far, where you could be the world's greatest surfer, and if you're on a tiny wave, you're not going to get very far. So I think that's probably what we see the most, is that it's like, it's just not that big of a wave. And so you're only going to get so far. When you answer the question, why now, right, like, if you can answer that question solid, odds are there's a pretty good wave there. Every small and medium business AI spend on products and services is going to be pretty big. 20% of them are spending more than $500 a month on AI. So that's a wave, right? There's opportunity there. That's why everybody's so amped up about it. Those are the ones where it's, like, the massive ones. But if your goal is more of a lifestyle or something like that, then it's really-- it's like-- I'm going to steal a quote from, from a very, very intelligent salesperson we know. The smaller the-- the smaller the market, the greater the opportunity. They try to do too much, too often. And mastering a niche is the best place to start.

ERIC JANSSEN: So one of the things that Rob and LOI do is help young founders and entrepreneurs identify these kinds of waves in the market that might be a good sign that they're on to something, that their product is ready to surf. A good example is Tara Bosch. She's LOI's most well-known and most successful alumni, so far at least. She sold a majority stake in her company, SmartSweets, for over $300 million before she was 30 years old. It was a pretty simple idea-- make a gummy bear that tasted as good as anything else on the market, but make it with about a tenth of the sugar as the competitors. It's actually a great value proposition. People who love sweet snacks, but we all know that we should probably be eating less of them. And for folks with medical or dietary issues that might make sugar off limits, a great-tasting gummy bear that they can actually eat could seem like a miracle. So Tara went from testing recipes at home to selling bags of candy at farmers markets to a first round of funding. And four years later, she sold the company.

ROB IRONSIDE: She'd 2 SKU's (Stock Keeping Units) she sold. And it's like, if you don't think that there were 500 opportunities for her to add a drink, a lollipop, a whatever along the time, there definitely was. But she knew what-- she figured out her playbook. She mastered it. And she put all of her time and energy into doing that and rolling it out across North America and beat everybody else to it. And then she sold for $360 million, and she wasn't even 30.

ERIC JANSSEN: Part of what made Tara Bosch so successful with SmartSweets, besides having a great product to begin with, was staying niche. She ignored the noise around her that might have encouraged her to add new products or say yes to opportunities that looked good on paper, but weren't a great fit for her. And that takes discipline. Again, it's knowing the answers to those crucial questions, why you, and why now? But I think having good answers to those questions are essential not just to young founders, I believe they're essential to anyone looking to sell anything. That includes selling yourself to a potential employer. So let's get back to Payton Becket and hear how she managed to catch a wave and surf into an interview at MLSE. Let's talk about the process for landing the interview at MLSE. How did you get there?

PAYTON BECKETT: There's thousands and thousands of applicants that come through for a job at MLSE. We talk about it all the time. So I really just connected with a lot of individuals and coffee chatted to see if, first of all, if it was the right fit for me. I did some LinkedIn research. I also had a friend of a friend who knew-- who was in the program. The Sales Development Academy program is currently what I'm in. And so I spoke with him. And they mentioned my name to the hiring manager for me to get to the interview process there.

ERIC JANSSEN: That's awesome. So you realized MLSE was a good fit, combining your superpowers, super passions, or sort of a sport business hybrid there. Toronto was a constraint, so perfect geographically. In sales, an industry or a function that you were interested in. You followed the application process. So you put your hat in the ring with the application, and then during the application actually went out, proactively reached out to people. It sounds like maybe some cold, maybe some warm outreach to have conversations with people who are already at MLSE.

PAYTON BECKETT: Yeah, exactly. It was a lot of maybe some warm outreach, a few cold outreach. But the manager, the hiring manager, who's now my current manager, she was a complete cold outreach. And definitely built some really strong rapport with her before the process started.

ERIC JANSSEN: How did you sell yourself on paper?

PAYTON BECKETT: The letter to the hiring manager, I completely wrote and customized to the role, of course. But I really wanted to be creative with it. I wrote about not necessarily my life story, but that the fact that this is a dream role for me. And I touched on the superpowers and super passions in the message to the hiring manager there and talked about how I feel like it really is the right fit for me.

ERIC JANSSEN: This wasn't a copy, paste, change the name of the company, blast out to MLSE?

PAYTON BECKETT: Yeah, no, it was not a copy and paste at all. I knew I had to stand out and I needed to be a bit more bold. And I said, I feel like you guys were the right fit for me, and I think I'm the right fit for you. I knew it was a dream job for myself. And I knew I was the right person to do the role. And I was just completely honest with what I wrote. When you read it, it shows.

ERIC JANSSEN: Rob mentioned that part of what he tries to teach young founders is how to look at the ocean and recognize a wave, whether that's a gap in the market that their product might fill, or an opportunity that other people may have missed. But you can't say yes to everything or try to surf every single wave. You have to focus on those opportunities that are the best fit for you. Again, that's where knowing your superpowers and super passions comes in. The clearer you are on those things, the easier it is to focus on the opportunities where you have a winning value proposition. So enter the best sales line in history-- we're not for everyone.

[MUSIC PLAYING] There's a brewery in Chatham, Ontario, that I invested in called Sons of Kent. And they'd launched the brewery with a flagship beer, their Flywheel Lager. And I thought-- not really knowing anything about the craft beer business-- that if you launched with a good beer, sold at a fair price, from a decent location, with solid customer service and good branding, I thought you'd be off to the races. But the founders told me that if you did that, you'd probably be out of business. And that's because consumers, especially craft beer consumers, are absolutely overwhelmed with choice. There's craft beer options everywhere now. So what makes or breaks your business is actually being able to differentiate yourself from everybody else? And there's actually research specific to the craft beer industry that backs this up. A team of researchers at Penn focused on craft beer in particular because there are a lot of websites and apps where people can leave reviews. Researchers then triangulated those reviews and ratings against actual beer sales numbers. What they found was that it wasn't necessarily the highest average ratings that led to the best sales. What mattered was the polls, the 1's and the 5's. What they found was that it's more important to have a dedicated base of customers who love you-- the five-star reviews-- than it is to have a large number of people who merely like you-- the three- and four-star reviews-- even if that means that a number of people really don't like you-- the one-star reviews. So back to Sons of Kent. Instead of trying to make only a good, easy drinking beer, what they did was come out swinging with a bunch of crazy beers like boozy Scotch ales. And then they gave them really smart, easy-to-remember names like Motel California. They also doubled down on a fantastic destination venue, where they host community events. And they do one-off beers all the time for local charities and nonprofits. This stack of differentiation worked. They created a highly differentiated product that appealed to a highly informed consumer who wasn't just shopping around based on price. If you want the thing that only Sons of Kent has, then you have to go to them to get it, which makes them way less susceptible to price fluctuation from competitors. And that's a great product to be selling.

[MUSIC PLAYING] So, as companies scale up and markets get more competitive, there are always going to be more and more craft breweries, or gummy bear companies, or whatever, all trying to fight for the same customer base. And competition can get pretty intense. This isn't just a startup problem. Even big, sophisticated technology companies struggle with this. And when they do, they call April Dunford.

APRIL DUNFORD: One of the big concepts that, I think, inside tech companies that is a problem is we get so close to our own technology and our product, that we lose sight of how difficult it is for a customer that's coming at it or prospect that's coming at it for the first time, we lose sight of how difficult it is for a prospect to figure it out. One of the things we don't realize is that prospects often come to us and they have never purchased a product like ours before.

ERIC JANSSEN: April Dunford is incredible at many things, but her superpower and super passion is one thing-- helping companies make their awesome obvious. April studied engineering at the University of Waterloo and went on to have an extremely successful career in the tech industry, first as a startup executive running marketing, product, and sales teams at B2B technology startups, then she ran teams at larger companies like IBM, Siebel, and Sybase. She's also the author of two books that live rent free on my shelf for all of time, Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch. Seriously, highly recommend those two. April owns the niche of positioning. And she has a great example of how important value proposition in positioning can be when it comes to making a sale.

APRIL DUNFORD: So in general, you're selling something to people that have never purchased a thing like yours before. And so we've lost sight at how hard that is. I'll use this example of me buying a toilet as an example of something I thought it was going to be easy to buy. So I'm doing this little rant. I went in my bathroom. Contractor's there and he says, hey, I need you to go to the store and pick out a toilet. And I said, OK. I never bought a toilet before, but how hard can it be? It's just a toilet. So you go to the toilet store, and there's, like, 100 toilets. And they all look identical. They all look the same. It's, like, 100 toilets, and they all look the same. And I'm like, what the hell? And so I start looking at toilets. And some of them are a couple hundred dollars, and some of them are thousands of dollars. And I'm like, wow, what's the difference between a $200 toilet and a $1,000 toilet? And they have all these features. And these features mean nothing to me. They're talking about trap ways and gravity assistance and flappers. And I don't know what a flapper is. And some of them have flappers, and some of them don't have flappers. And I'm like, oh, my God. I'm not educated enough to pick a toilet. And I don't want to pick the wrong one.

ERIC JANSSEN: So what do you do? You have a problem you need to solve, and you need to make a decision. You're feeling overwhelmed with choices and technical jargon, and none of it seems to be applicable to you and your needs. In April's case, she had the answer to "Why now?" She needed to buy a toilet, and fast. But that other part, why you, or in this case, why this toilet, well, she was stuck. Maybe you've heard of FOMO, the fear of missing out. This is FOMU, the fear of messing up. And it's a phenomena that kills more deals than anything else. In 2002, authors Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna wrote a book on this topic called The Jolt Effect. Their research included data from 2.5 million sales conversations. And after sorting through the data, they concluded that the biggest reason companies lose deals isn't because customers choose a competitor, but because they make no decision at all. As consumers, we face an endless array of options, which ends up freezing us. Customers who actually want to buy end up struggling with how to make sense of the alternatives available. They become frozen by their fear of messing up and end up making no decision at all. Luckily, she found some help.

APRIL DUNFORD: I get this guy. And he comes over and he says, can I help you? And I said, yes, I got a toilet emergency here. I need a toilet. I need it today. And the guy's really sympathetic. He says, I get it. I get it. It's hard buying a toilet. And he says, look, there's only three things you got to worry about-- quality, aesthetics, space. That's it. And I'm like, OK. And he says, OK, first, quality. All those things you've been reading about, flappers and trap ways and all that stuff, it's just a measure of quality. It's just a measure of, how long is the toilet going to go before you have to-- how many flushes the toilet going to go before you have to call a plumber? And I said, well, who buys a low quality toilet? That sounds like a dumb thing to do. And he says, actually, a lot of toilets don't get used that much. You got a spare room or a toilet in your basement. Or maybe you got a vacation property and there's a toilet in there. They hardly ever get flushed. And so you'd be stupid to buy the $1,000 toilet. You buy the other one, it'll last you a lifetime of it. And and there you go. And I said, huh, never really thought about that, but cool. Yeah, I get that. So, look, this is a pretty busy bathroom. So I don't want them low quality toilets. He said, great. So we eliminate all the low quality toilets. Right off the bat, we're like, half the toilets are gone. And then he says, second thing is aesthetics. Some people want a certain look. They want a really modern toilet. You can get a gold toilet or whatever, you know? Those are all high quality toilets, but you're going to pay extra for that fancy aesthetics. And I said, look, I do not have any toilet aesthetic requirements. I just want a regular toilet. And he says, OK, we're going to eliminate those, so woosh. I'm like, oh, we're getting somewhere. And then he says, the last thing, space. If you got really small space, you can get a toilet where the tank goes in the wall behind the drywall. And that'll save you about 3, 4 inches. And so you get a toilet in a space that normally you couldn't. The problem with that, though, is if something happens with the tank, you got to bust the drywall. And that's a big mess, you know, to fix it. So if you got enough space, I wouldn't recommend one of those. And I'm like, dude, I got lots of space in this bathroom, so we're going to have the tank outside. Great. So now we're down to three toilets. I'm like, this is amazing. I'm like, so which one should I get? And the guy says, look, I gotta come clean. I get a commission if I sell you a TOTO toilet. So I'm going to tell you to get the TOTO one. He says, but if you want to get the American standard, that's good too. And you can go home and research on the internet. It's only $100 difference between the two. And he says, look, I would just buy the TOTO one. Everybody really loves them. That's the reason why I work for the company, really high quality toilets. If you just want to buy a toilet and never think about toilets again until you're on the podcast, buy that toilet. And I said, love it.

ERIC JANSSEN: And this is why April's story is a perfect example of why articulating your value matters so much and why it's so fundamental to sales. Her problem was that she couldn't understand what differentiated any individual toilet. She just saw a wall of options. And the features they were promoting didn't really mean anything to her. That salesperson, he was actually great at his job. And that's because he didn't try to razzle dazzle her or talk about all the features and benefits. Instead, he listened first, then he guided April to the toilet that would work best for her.

APRIL DUNFORD: Was he being pushy, pushy salesman, saying, buy the TOTO, buy the TOTO, buy the toilet? No. What he was actually doing was being a guide. And so he was giving me a rubric to understand everything I needed to know about toilets so I could make a decision and feel good about that decision on my own, with him being the guide as the toilet expert. So I don't have to be a toilet expert.

ERIC JANSSEN: So the lesson we should take away from this is pretty simple. It's not about trying to convince someone that you're the absolute best, because honestly, what does that even mean? Everyone has different needs, and everyone wants to feel like they've made a great choice. That applies to toilet sales, craft beer, and even job interviews. Making the sale boils down to being able to articulate your value in a way that's authentic and actually fits with their needs. If you're selling yourself, you're not going to be the right choice for everyone. Instead, figure out your superpowers and super passions.

APRIL DUNFORD: So what you have to do is kind of define your little box. And people think, oh, the boxes are all taken. They're not! They're not. There's so many empty boxes.

ERIC JANSSEN: April is one of the best in the world when it comes to helping companies articulate what they do uniquely better than their competitors. And she has a diagnostic process to get there.

APRIL DUNFORD: My first question is, who do you compete with? Who are you trying to beat? And then, what makes you different than who you're trying to beat? And what's the value you can deliver to customers that the other guys can't? By the way, who are those customers that are a really good fit for you? Who are those folks? And so positioning defines that. Positioning defines how your product, your offering, is the best in the world versus everybody else that someone could pick, how your offering is the best in the world at delivering some value that certain kind of customers really, really love. And so positioning defines that. So it defines, who am I actually competing with, what have I got that's different than them, what's the ultimate value that my product provides to the customer's business, and then who's a really good fit for that? What's a best-fit customer look like versus a so-so fit customer? And then what's the market I intend to win?

ERIC JANSSEN: Think about maybe someone applying this to themselves. Like, think about a person applying for a job.

APRIL DUNFORD: Yeah.

ERIC JANSSEN: Or other, you know, life applications of these principles. Does it apply? Can it apply? How would it apply?

APRIL DUNFORD: It wasn't built for that. So, caveat number one, I did not build this to help you get a date or job or whatever it is you're trying to get. But I certainly used it in my own career. I'm out there applying for jobs at tech companies, and I'm a vice president of marketing. And there's lots of vice presidents of marketing in the land. And so why pick me over anybody else? I've got to go in and make a case for myself. And so after I'd done a few jobs, I had done a lot of repositioning. And that's not a thing that every vice president of marketing does. And so I seem to have more-- not just more experience on that, but I could talk intelligently about that. Now, if you didn't have a positioning problem, who cares? So I stopped applying to those jobs and focused on places where I could see that maybe the positioning was rough, or in the interview, you could hear some signs that maybe the positioning was rough, and then I could come in and talk intelligently about that. And that was something that I had that nobody else had. And so it was just giving me an edge over everybody else, that I could come in and say, hey, I'm not saying you have a positioning problem, but I see this, and I see this, and I see this, and you could. And if you did, I could help you. And here's how I do it. And here's how I did it at the last company and the company before. And my goal was always to be the best in the world in this little box. What I wanted to be was known for being if you were a B2B tech company selling with a sales team and you had a positioning problem, only person in the world you're going to call is me. That took me a long time. I've been doing this for 10 years. I kind of feel like I am that now. Like, you know, I get calls from all over the world, people I've never met, people that don't know anybody in that main network. They google me. They find me. They read my book. They find me. And that would have never happened had I not taken a step back and sort of looked at it from the customer's perspective and answered, well, why me versus everybody else? What have I got that everybody else has? How do I dominate a little box?

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ERIC JANSSEN: I think these are universal lessons that really cut to the heart of what sales is all about. When April says, how do I dominate a little box, she's pushing people to think about what they do differently than anyone else. These are the same kinds of questions we go through in the talent stack exercise in my class. And it helps students out so much when they're trying to figure out if a potential opportunity is a good fit, or when they're put in a position where they have to advocate for themselves and their skills. Payton Beckett was one of my students who went through the talent stack exercise. And you heard her talk earlier about how it helped her get an interview for her dream job at MLSE. So let's get back to Payton's story. After putting in her application and making the first cut, she went through a few rounds of interviews and eventually made it to the finals.

[MUSIC PLAYING] It was a super competitive process. And she knew she was going to have to make a really lasting impression if she wanted to land the job. And that final interview was a bit of a curveball. There was a final round. I believe you said, like, a 10-minute presentation-based interview. So what did you do there?

PAYTON BECKETT: Yeah, so they asked for the final round for you to complete a presentation on a how to. And you can be as creative as you wanted. There was no limitations. I didn't want to do something that was really sports related because I had a feeling that a lot of the individuals who made it that far might have stuck with some sports stuff, given the company is MLSE. And I wanted to also showcase the skills I have that translates to sales. So I actually did it on how to keep the friend group alive post-grad, which I know is a story that a lot of individuals face after university. And So I did a presentation on how to do that and-- which is really a quirky little thing my friend group of 10 have done since graduating called "Waffle Wednesday," which every Wednesday, you send this a text about the new recipes, relationship, work, update, anything. And we send-- all 10 of us will send that into the group ChatGPT on a Wednesday to update each other on what's going on. And then, of course, you respond. So I also talked about the fact that the follow up is just as important as putting it together, and how you have to be organized every Wednesday, and how it's almost like project management, and all these different things that hinted at skills that I possess that translate to sales.

ERIC JANSSEN: You understood the assignment. It's not teach me something interesting. It's demonstrate that you have the skills to be successful in the role, which are-- there's an element of teaching. There's organization. There's follow up. There's attention. So I think you understood the assignment maybe more than most.

PAYTON BECKETT: They loved it, honestly. To this day, my manager tells me that she uses it for her friend group as well.

ERIC JANSSEN: What I love about this story and why I wanted to share it is because it really shows how Payton made her awesome obvious to MLSE. She was able to articulate her superpowers and super passions in a way that was memorable. That meant that the interviewers didn't just hear about her skills, they also learned about who she is. And that brings us to this episode's one thing.

[MUSIC PLAYING] This week we looked at how to answer the most important question of all, why pick me over everyone else? And the one thing you should take away from this week is that you don't need to be everything to everyone. You need to be the best thing for the right person. Payton didn't try to be the perfect candidate for every company. She focused on being the best candidate that MLSE needed for that specific role. April's toilet salesperson didn't try to sell her every toilet in the showroom. He helped her understand the few that actually fit her needs and then made it easy for her to choose. Sons of Kent didn't try to make the beer that everyone would kind of like. They made beer and an experience that their people would love. And that's your job too, not to cast the widest net, but to be crystal clear about who you're for, what value you bring, and why you are the obvious choice when those two things align. Trying to be everything to everyone and shotgun blasting out your resume to hundreds of opportunities doesn't make you appealing. It makes you forgettable. Being the best option for the right company, that's your edge.

[MUSIC PLAYING] On the next episode of Sales Reframed, we're looking at one of the most intimidating parts of a salesperson's job, the cold call. But don't worry. We're going to get help in warming up those cold calls from some incredible guests, like superstar sports agent and best selling author Shari Wenk.

SHARI WENK: So the first thing I do is think about, who do we know? Who do we know? Do we know anybody connected to this person? Is there any connection whatsoever? Did I see you at a thing? Did I run into you somewhere? Do I know someone who works in some capacity with you? Look at their LinkedIn. Who do you know in common? Is there somebody that can make an introduction? Look at their Instagram. Listen, it doesn't hurt. Send a note. Bob, I love your work. I admire your posts. I have a great opportunity.

ERIC JANSSEN: Thanks for listening to Sales Reframed. I've been your host, Eric Janssen. Thanks to my guests this week, the GOAT, April Dunford, Rob Ironside from League of Innovators for hosting me at his apartment in Calgary, and the Sons of Kent team for the great beer they brew and all the love that they show their community. Finally, a huge thanks to Payton Beckett for sharing her story with everyone. And congrats on landing that dream job, Payton. We really appreciate your help also in making this podcast a real thing. You'll find links in the show notes to all the amazing things that these folks are up to. This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with Ivey Executive Education. Part of the Ivey Business School, consistently ranked among the top business schools globally, Ivey Executive Education delivers high-impact learning experiences for organizations and leaders at all levels. From custom-designed programs to coaching and open enrollment courses, Ivey works with executives and business operators around the world to drive real results. Their mission, like ours, is to turn cutting edge research into practical insights that help people learn, grow, and succeed in a changing world. This show takes a village. I'd like to thank our executive producer Sean Acklin Grant and our editorial advisor James Greenhill. Our audio engineer and producer is Carol Eugene Park. And our narrative producer is Michael Catano. Thanks also to our creative directors, Cristina Ball and Michelle Stanescu. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.