From Positioning to Pitch: Making Your Messaging Stick

B2B CMOs know positioning matters—but too often, it vanishes when sales starts talking.  

In this episode, positioning guru April Dunford pulls back the curtain on the disconnect between marketing and sales and shares exactly how to build a sales pitch that wins.

Drawing from her book Sales Pitch and decades of experience, April shares a battle-tested framework for building pitches that set the context, overcome indecision, and spotlight your unique value—without overwhelming buyers or falling into feature hell.

Key Mistakes: 

• Mistake #1: Treating positioning as marketing-only 

• Mistake #2: Assuming sales will “get it” if you hand them positioning docs 

• Mistake #3: Building sales pitches without a clear, compelling structure

In this episode:

• Why positioning is the starting point for every winning pitch 

• How marketing can frame the problem so sales doesn’t chase the wrong story 

• Why leading with your company history stalls momentum 

• What smart pitch sequencing sounds like in action

🐧 This Episode Is For: CMOs tired of great positioning dying in a sales deck—and want to arm their teams with pitch narratives that close. 

Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 455 on YouTube

Resources Mentioned 

• CMO Huddles 
• CMO Super Huddle  
• April’s Website: AprilDunford.com 
• April’s Podcast: Positioning with April Dunford 
• Books 
  • Sales Pitch by April Dunford 
  • The Jolt Effect by Matt Dixon

Highlights

• [3:31] 3 pitch fails marketers love to make 

• [4:18] Great positioning, now what? 

• [8:13] Baking discovery into the pitch 

• [10:56] Structure saves the pitch 

• [17:01] Teach the buyer how to buy 

• [24:04] The pitch before the pitch 

• [32:00] The pitch killer: Regret risk 

• [37:34] Make the deal less risky 

• [40:28] Why your sales team hates your deck 

• [46:52] The PLG signal that sells 

Highlighted Quotes 

“In a good sales pitch, we're looking at the differentiated value, and saying, “What does my customer need to understand in order to understand why that value is critical?’”—April Dunford 

“Often our differentiated value, if it really is unique, it's something that the customers are not really thinking about... We gotta wake them up.”—April Dunford 

“What we're doing is we're clicking on the flashlight and pointing at a thing and saying, ‘Hey, have you ever considered this?’”—April Dunford 

Full Transcript: Drew Neisser in conversation with April Dunford