A History of Marketing / Episode 50
Fifty episodes felt like a milestone worth marking. So I wanted a guest who was, well, obviously awesome.
April Dunford is the authority on positioning for B2B tech companies and the author of the updated and expanded edition of Obviously Awesome. I’m a huge fan of April’s work and frequently reference her book, her blogs, and her frameworks in my daily work as a marketer.
April’s premise is provocative: positioning cannot live in the marketing department alone.
She argues that if the CEO, sales, and product leads aren’t in the room providing input, marketing is left guessing about what makes the product special and who it is actually for. Without their buy in, marketing will inevitably lose the “battle of opinions.”
In this conversation, we discuss:
Building on Ries & Trout: The positioning pioneers defined the concept in their 1981 book, but they didn’t give a how-to manual. April does.
The death of the “positioning statement”: Why filling out a template is not a methodology.
Blind men and the elephant: How sales, product, and marketing departments each hold a different piece of the puzzle.
Skip the parts people don’t read: April discovered that CEOs don’t finish books, so she cut her manuscript in half.
April is one of the most persuasive and grounded thinkers in the field. Here’s my conversation with April Dunford.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Special Thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
The Origin of April Dunford’s Positioning Framework
Andrew Mitrak: I have a confession to make. Every time I join a new company, among the first things I do is I visit aprildunford.com and I enter my new email address and I download one of your positioning templates. You probably have several of my old corporate email addresses cluttering your mailing list. Sorry about that.
April Dunford: I appreciate you jacking up my newsletter subscription numbers.
Andrew Mitrak: And a big fan of your work and I want to say congrats on the updated and expanded edition of Obviously Awesome.
April Dunford: Thanks. I’m super excited to get it out there.
Andrew Mitrak: For this conversation, I wanted to start back before you became the go-to expert on positioning, and when you were coming up in your career, when did you first encounter the concept of positioning?
April Dunford: That’s a good question. Pretty early, actually. My first real job in tech was at a little startup and I was brand new and junior, they assigned me to a product and the thinking was that product wasn’t doing very well and the plan was to shut it down. This is why I got assigned to it as the product marketer.
We didn’t end up shutting it down. What we ended up doing was looking at gathering some feedback from people that were using the product, and then we got an idea to reposition it. We didn’t know it was called positioning, we thought we were doing, we’re just doing a Hail Mary thing to see if we can make this unsuccessful product successful doing something slightly different.
We repositioned it, relaunched it, and it was super successful. Revenue started going up to the right, everybody’s happy, we’re making a lot of money on that product.
And then we got acquired by a big company in California and the big parent company assigned us a couple of products that weren’t doing very well and then said, hey, do that thing you did with the other one. I didn’t have really any idea what we did with the other one. I was worried about getting fired, I thought, okay, I better figure this out.
I did a deep dive into positioning. I figured out, A, this is what it’s called. B, I had a lot of conversations with smart marketers asking them about, how do you do positioning? If you were in this situation, what would you do? Do you have a strategy for that or a methodology for that?
I also read a bunch of books. There’s the classic positioning book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by these guys Ries and Trout, written in the early 80s, but even back then was considered the book on positioning. And then I took a couple of courses and some post-grad stuff at a couple of universities just learning about positioning.
I dumped into this whole positioning thing pretty early in my career, and I was really interested in this idea, could we get a way to do positioning in a really repeatable manner so that we wouldn’t have this problem of, we launched the thing and it didn’t work and then now we’ve got to try and change it. Could I get to a point where there is a process for us to follow to, first of all, maybe do a better job guessing at what the positioning should be in the first place, and then secondly, if we do need to change it, is there a nice repeatable step-by-step thing we could follow to do that.
Is Product Positioning Intuitive or Learned?
Andrew Mitrak: You initially positioned or repositioned a product without even knowing what positioning was or knowing that it was called positioning that you were doing. And then you went to look at the literature. What’s your takeaway from that? Does that reveal to you that the fundamentals of positioning are somewhat intuitive or can be learned, or do you feel it was just dumb luck really? Or do you feel there were parts of it where this is just obviously the right thing to do for the product? How do you overall think about, can positioning sort of just be an intuitive thing, or is it best to look at the literature that’s out there?
April Dunford: Sometimes it is really intuitive. I would say that’s true. I would say a lot of the time when I talk to founders, they’ll talk about how they built the product in the first place, and they’ll be, we saw this need, we had this idea, we could do this in a different way than the existing products that are out there.
And we looked at it, we understood what the competition was, we built a thing that was demonstrably different, we understood what the value of that thing was because it was solving our own pain, we understood what kind of customers would want to buy that, and therefore what market we position in. It’s just, it is what it is, it’s super easy. And I think that happens a lot in the early stages of a company. Not for everybody, but I do think it happens a lot.
However, what also happens a lot is if you fast forward two or three years, the market’s changed. Maybe your competitors caught up with you and the thing that made you really different isn’t different anymore. Or maybe the way people buy or what they want to do has totally changed. Or maybe your competitors did an acquisition and that changes the whole way everybody thinks about this market.
Or maybe you and your product have changed, and you now do a whole bunch of other stuff that you didn’t originally do, and that enables you to get at a different kind of customer to deliver a different kind of value. Now how do you position it? That’s where people get messed up. Sometimes it can be quite intuitive at the beginning, but then a whole bunch of things change and it’s, okay, now the positioning needs to shift. How do we do that? Because we didn’t do anything the first time, it was just obvious. I think that happens a lot.
The other thing that happens a lot is you have this thesis when you launch the product and you said, okay, we saw this problem and this is what it’s gonna be and these kind of people are gonna love us for these reasons and here’s the competitor. Then we launch it, and it turns out our thesis was incorrect.
We get out there and we’re, man, we launched this thing and we thought banks were gonna love it, but it turns out we’re selling to insurance companies, we didn’t really build it for that, but they’re buying it like crazy. Now we’re in the insurance business, hello. And they love it, but there are some things they don’t love so much, and they’re comparing us to competitors we never really thought about. How do we position this thing because we thought it was gonna be something else.
And this is not unusual, to be honest. We call that a pivot in lean startup language. It’s not unusual for a company to build something for one market and then get in the market and find out, whoops, the market’s a little bit different than we thought. People are looking at our product a little bit different than we thought. We’re getting pulled into another market, so how do we position for that? And again, that’s when having a methodology for this would be helpful.
The B2B vs. B2C Divide in Positioning
Andrew Mitrak: You did your positioning exercise initially and then went to the books, went to Ries and Trout and the others. Do you find yourself as you’re reading the literature on positioning, was it confirming what you did, oh, that’s what we did was called, or was it saying, oh, were there things that you’re, oh, I wish I had known that to start, or what was the discovery process for reading?
April Dunford: No. And I was so mad about this. Here’s how this went. I went and I’m having all these conversations with people, I’m talking to all these smart heads of marketing, right? And I’m saying, how do you do this positioning thing? What do you do? And everybody’s doing it the way we did it, which was a little bit of trial and error, a little bit of getting some feedback from customers, a little bit of, let’s try this and if it doesn’t work we’re gonna adjust. A bit of messing around until you get something that works.
And that feels terrible when you’re the head of marketing because your head’s on the block, man. And if you don’t figure it out fast enough, everyone’s gonna get mad and you’re gonna get fired. And that was unsatisfying.
And then I took some courses and read the Ries and Trout book, which does an amazing job of defining here’s what positioning is, here’s why it’s important. And then they give you a whole bunch of examples. But the examples aren’t tech, this thing was written before the internet, man. I think they have printers, HP printers or something is the closest thing in there, not even software. And I’m selling databases, and they’re talking about repositioning the country of Jamaica, and I’m, this is different.
Andrew Mitrak: It is also very B2C oriented. I think the examples are Avis or Coors or beer. Do you find that both because of the tech gap with it and maybe the B2C bias that you as a B2B tech company...
April Dunford: The B2C bias is killer in this stuff. I took a bunch of courses too, and it was the same thing in the courses. All the examples were shampoo and toothpaste and makeup, and I’m, again, I’m selling 200 grand worth of database stuff to really smart technical people. I don’t think this is the same. It’s selling a vacuum cleaner. And I thought the B2C bias is terrible.
The other thing that you get in B2B tech that you don’t get in consumer is think about it. If I got toothpaste and I’m selling that toothpaste or hair shampoo to people that have dry hair or people that have dyed hair or something like that, right? And then if I decide I’m going to do a shampoo for babies or a shampoo for old ladies or a shampoo only for people with very, very curly hair, usually what you’d do is you wouldn’t take the same product and try to evolve it into that market. You would launch a whole different product and say, I’ve got this other thing, and that’s for the curly hair people, and this one’s for babies, and this one’s for people that dye their hair, whatever.
Whereas in tech, it is very normal for us to launch a product in one market and then reposition it a whole bunch in the future. Let’s take Salesforce. When Salesforce first launched, they were aimed at the very, very bottom end of the market. Their initial deal was they were focused on companies that had sales teams of less than 10 people and the first three seats were free. And why were they doing that? Because the top part of that market was absolutely dominated by a great big competitor, and they didn’t want to go compete there. So they started at the bottom.
But guess what? They inched their way up, and by the time they got to the mid-market, the big competitor had self-destructed and they were gone, and the top end of this market was wide open. And if you look at Salesforce right now, would you say that’s a product for very, very small businesses? No way, man, too expensive, too complicated, too everything. We just don’t have that in consumer products where you’re, it used to be this thing and now it’s this other thing and now it’s this other thing.
The other thing that you’ve got in B2B is that the positioning matters a lot because the stakes are really high. Especially if I’m looking at enterprise software, the stakes are huge. You’re going to make a recommendation to your boss to buy 200 grand worth of software. You make a shortlist. You don’t just walk into the store and pick the thing off the shelf and say, oh well, if I got it wrong, I just won’t buy that one again. You’re going to get fired if you make the wrong choice. You got to make a shortlist, and it’s positioning that makes or breaks whether or not you’re going to get on that shortlist.
And then once you’re on the shortlist, you got to survive long enough for them to take a real good look at your stuff. And if you get eliminated because often the shortlist is five, six companies these days or more, depending on whose data you believe. But let’s say there’s a shortlist of six, seven companies, you got to make it to top two. Otherwise, you don’t get considered. Your positioning is really important in that because the company hasn’t done a big deep dive into all your stuff yet. We just don’t have this in consumer. We don’t go out and buy a pair of shoes and make a shortlist and have a six-month process to figure out which one we’re gonna buy. We go out and we buy it and if it stinks, we just don’t buy that one again.
Navigating the B2B Buying Committee
Andrew Mitrak: One of the other elements as well from B2C versus B2B is often in B2B the buying decision maker or the buying committee is not the end user of the product, right? And there’s this abstraction between that. And that’s the other element is how do you market to both the end user and the decision maker.
April Dunford: Yeah, that happens a lot in B2B. The economic buyer is often distinct too, right? What you have is this committee of people and you’ve got someone who’s what we would describe as the champion. And that champion, usually it’s their boss or someone that said, look, we gotta buy a new accounting package, buddy, go figure it out. You go figure it out, look at all the accounting packages and tell us which one to build, which one to buy. And then that champion is gonna go do their homework, so your positioning really matters for that person.
But the champion also has all of these stakeholders around them that have to agree, otherwise the deal doesn’t get done. If the champion, let’s say the champion is on the business side and we’re buying technology, usually they got to go to IT and make sure IT is okay with it. IT can’t make the deal happen because they’re not in charge of selecting, but they can kill a deal by saying, oh I don’t like it, it’s too hard to manage, it doesn’t integrate with the stuff we have now, it doesn’t meet our compliance regulations, whatever, whatever, right?
Same thing with end users. Often the end user is not an end user making this purchase decision, but they can have a big influence in that. If they look at it and say, well the UI is this and this is terrible, we’re never going to get people to be able to use this thing, we’re going to kill it. Or sometimes they’ll do a pilot with some end users, and if the end users give it the thumbs down, then it’s no good.
And then you got to run it up to the economic buyer, which is generally another person too. And a lot of companies get really messed up with that and they’ll say, well the person that signs the check is the CRO, so that’s the buyer. And it’s, yeah, but the CRO assigned the whole purchase process figuring out who to buy to somebody underneath them. So you better figure out who that is because the CRO just says yes to whatever that other person suggests.
We don’t have that again in B2C. This isn’t it. Sometimes in B2C stuff where it’s complicated, let’s say you’re buying insurance or you’re buying a car or you’re buying a house. Maybe there’s a spouse involved, maybe there’s a financial planner involved, maybe you get a little advice, but it’s nothing like what a typical enterprise B2B purchase process looks like. It is way more complicated.
The Critical Distinction Between Branding and Positioning
Andrew Mitrak: When you write about positioning, you make a hard distinction between branding and positioning, and you’ve written that you’re not a fan of the term brand positioning, which is a phrase you hear sometimes. Why do you draw a line between the two or how do you make this distinction?
April Dunford: Well, here’s what I think. I think marketers like to make stuff up. I think marketers like to just redefine something for the sake of redefining it. And branding is probably the most poorly defined marketing term I can think of. When you say branding, you really gotta say, okay, what do you mean when you say branding?
At most of the enterprise B2B companies that I worked at, when we talked about branding, the brand of the company was a lot about how we showed up in the market in terms of, what was our tone of voice? What was our iconography look like? It was a bit like what was the vibe of us when we showed up? What were the fonts and the colors and the pictures we used, and the way we did messaging and text, tone of voice stuff. That was all kind of branding, which is very different from positioning.
Positioning is an input to that. If the big value of, let’s say I sell security software to banks, right? My branding should convey a lot of trust and solidness and authority because that’s what we’re trying to convey. If I’m selling software for daycares, maybe I can get a bit more playful because I’m talking about kids and moms and things. And I could use different colors and more playful images and maybe a bit more casual tone of voice and all that kind of stuff.
And so in my opinion, positioning should inform what the branding looks like. But now I’ve seen other people define branding in a way that it includes all the things that I would call branding, and it also includes positioning, and we’re going to just kind of munge those two things together. That’s okay, if that’s the way you want to define it, but I still see those two things as being distinct. You got to do the positioning thing first, and then the branding thing flows from that.
Why Positioning Must Go Beyond the Marketing Department
Andrew Mitrak: And is this somewhat related to how you argue that positioning should not just be a marketing exercise? That if the CEO and sales leads aren’t in the room, that the positioning won’t stick. Is that tied to why positioning is different than branding, is that it’s beyond marketing?
April Dunford: Definitely, it’s definitely not just marketing, right? What we’re trying to do with our positioning is we are trying to define why should a customer pick us versus the other guys. And we need to think about, first of all, who are the other guys? What’s the alternative to what we do? And we should all be in agreement on that. Sales should understand that, marketing should understand that, CEO, product should understand that. We should all understand what makes us distinct and the value we can deliver to a business that no one else can.
We need to get that in marketing, product management needs to understand that, sales needs to understand that. And then we all need to understand who’s a good fit for that, which is what are the kinds of companies we’re trying to target and therefore what’s the market that we intend to dominate. That is a strategic set of decisions in a way, and it’s very easy for teams to get out of alignment on that.
It’s very easy for sales to decide, we’re just going to sell to these big companies because we like doing these big deals, man. We need to decide, is it worth chasing those big deals? Are we actually going to win them? Or are we more likely to win if we’re chasing a deal in the mid-market, for example? Again, I think this is, we get this distinction between B2B and B2C. In B2B, when I’m selling a big ticket thing and there’s a shortlist of companies to look at, we really need to understand what makes us stand out and what makes us different so that we can help the whole buying team understand what that is and move this deal along.
If I’m just selling toothpaste, or makeup or a T-shirt, it often has nothing to do with the product and it has more to do with pure branding, right? This thing is going to make you look rich or, the Kardashians wear this thing so you should too or something.
Whereas, it’s not like it’s all totally rational when we’re buying enterprise software, we don’t, there’s often quite a bit of irrationality in there in that the champion is worried about making a bad choice. The champion will often default to a really safe choice because it’s not going to get them in trouble. Or if the champion has an opportunity to look like a hero, they might take that too because it’s good for them personally.
It’s not like it’s all totally rational, but at the end of the day, they do have to make a case to their boss. And that case has to say, look, we looked at the other things and we picked this thing for these reasons, and the reasons are narrow. This is either going to help you make money or is going to help you save money and that’s about it. We got to make that stuff super, super clear. Whereas, you’re buying a T-shirt with your own money, it’s fine. Maybe if you’re a teenager you gotta complain to your mom, but… [Laughs]
Andrew Mitrak: [Laughs] Totally.
The Conflict Between Sales, Product, and Marketing in B2B Tech
Andrew Mitrak: So I’ve also spent most of my career in B2B tech and on marketing teams, and whenever I run through positioning, I do find that there’s this issue where we have a number of stakeholders in product, and they tend to be biased towards product-led growth or if there is some land-and-expand model or some freemium model, they are biased towards what product can influence as far as growth is. And sales almost always is not interested in land-and-expand. They want big-ticket deals. They don’t hit their quota—
April Dunford: I think it feels good to land a big deal if you’re in sales. I think that feels good.
Andrew Mitrak: Exactly, exactly. And they want marketing to support that positioning. Marketing, we have our own ideas and customer research as well on what we think.
April Dunford: Well, we like the ones—we like the market that’s the easiest to respond to our marketing stuff, which is often terrible leads too.
Andrew Mitrak: Right. That’s an issue.
April Dunford: We love time waster leads. We love those. It looks good in our metrics and we’re like, I don’t get what’s wrong in sales. They don’t ever convert any of our beautiful leads.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, exactly. I feel like a lot of dynamic can be summed up to either:
Sales wants more leads, okay, then marketing will get more leads.
But then sales says, “No, not those leads. We want better leads. Those aren’t high quality enough.” And then marketing adjusts and then gets fewer leads.
I feel like that’s a cycle that a lot of companies find themselves trapped in.
April Dunford: It really helps to have a clear definition of what a best-fit customer is and why. Not just that we think this is a best-fit customer because we wish we were doing deals like that. It should be: “This is a best-fit customer for us because we are the only ones that can deliver this specific value.” If you look at us versus the other things that a customer is going to compare us with, we are the only ones that can deliver this specific value, and these are the kind of people that really care a lot about that. That’s what we really need to get at the root of. And it shouldn’t just be that we like those companies because they’re bigger and they have bigger budgets. Well, guess what? If they’re bigger and they have bigger budgets, then that means we’re going to run into these competitors that can handle that. Do we actually serve that customer better, or are we better at something else? And so getting everybody together in a room to get really clear on that is going to help us with all those problems when sales says, “Well, we don’t like these leads.” It’s like, let’s sit down and talk about what an excellent lead looks like and why. It should tick these boxes because we are very likely to win those deals for these reasons.
Andrew Mitrak: In the dozens or hundreds of companies you’ve consulted with that have implemented positioning successfully, is it an equal split between partly marketing, sales, and product? Are they all like equal one-third owners of the process? Is it usually best if one is the owner of it and the other two are stakeholders? Does it need to be the CEO who is on top of it on the exercise? What’s the best model, or is there one right solution or ways to make multiple versions work?
“Marketing Never Wins the Battle of Opinions”
April Dunford: This is actually a great question. So I’m a big fan of doing a cross-functional exercise because, just in my own experience when I was in-house and working as a head of marketing, if I didn’t get everybody in the room together, I couldn’t go have a conversation with sales and think I had it and then take it to product because then they’d rip all that stuff apart and say, “No, that’s all wrong, it’s this.” Then you take it to the CEO and the CEO has got their own opinions and you end up with something else. So it’s just way more efficient to get everybody in the room together.
But if you’re going to get everybody in the room together, we can’t just have everybody in the room together just say, “Okay, why does everybody love our stuff?” then that’ll just be a battle of opinions, and marketing never wins the battle of opinions. So the way my process works is we start with this conversation around competitive alternatives. Now, what’s funny about that is the question is: if we didn’t exist, what would a customer do? At that step, I think sales’ opinion on this matters more than anybody else’s. But it doesn’t stop everybody else from having an opinion, but everybody else’s opinion is generally wrong.
Sales vs. Product Perspectives on Competition
April Dunford: So I’ll give you an example. Often what we’ve got, like when you go to product management and you say, “Who do we compete with?” they generally give you a way longer list of companies than sales does. Because product management is living a little bit in the future, right? They’re thinking about the roadmap, they’re thinking about where we’re going, and they’re looking at the superset of who could compete with us and who should compete with us. What they are not looking at is who does. Sales knows that. Sales knows that.
Now, if I go to sales and I say, “If we didn’t exist, what would a customer do?” they can tell me exactly who lands on the short list. They can tell me who’s causing us pain out in the market right now. They generally won’t consider the status quo as a competitor because a good salesperson, if they lose to status quo, they will say, “We lost to no decision.” And in the minds of a good salesperson, that is not a no; that’s a “not yet.” We’re going to get them someday, just not this week, man. And so if you’re doing this exercise, you have to pull that out of the sales team, but it’s very important for the product team to hear what the sales team has to say. Because the product team is thinking about a different set of competitors, which is fine, by the way. Because they’re building for the future, they need to be looking at that.
But when we’re talking about positioning right now, if the competitor is not causing us any pain, they may never cause us any pain. We don’t do a very good job of predicting the future that way. And the reality is if they do cause us pain next year or the year after, we’re going to adjust the positioning to take that into account. So step one, when I’m talking about competitors, I think sales’ opinions matter more.
And then we didn’t even talk about marketing. Marketing, if you say to marketing, “Who do we compete with?” they’ll list the people that are spending the most money on marketing. That’s who they worry about because that’s who they’re fighting for keywords and everything else. And they go, “Oh my god, these guys, they’re everywhere! We see them everywhere. Oh my god, they have the biggest booth. Oh my god, they’re all over the place.” But again, if they’re not causing us any pain in sales, well, maybe you’ve got some competitors burning a lot of money on pretty shit marketing that isn’t doing anything.
The other thing you get is the CEO will have this opinion. Often the CEO was really involved in sales at some point, but maybe it’s been a couple of years. Or maybe they only see certain kinds of deals in certain situations, so they’re biased towards that. Again, sales understands the reality on the ground. So when we go to step one, personally, sales’ opinions matter more, but we’ve got to get everybody on the same page.
Then we get to step two: okay, if we didn’t exist, this is what a customer would do, this is what we’ve got to position against. Now we get to step two, and step two is all about: what have we got that the other guys don’t have? Who knows that the best? Product management, by a mile. Sales doesn’t know. They don’t even pitch stuff they don’t understand. Marketing doesn’t know because there’s lots of stuff the product does that marketing thinks is useless or they don’t understand or whatever. The only people that can really give you the straight deal on “what have we got that the other guys don’t” is product management. A good product management team knows all about that. So again, other people in the group might think they know the answer to this; product management knows the answer to it.
Then we get to the third step, which is value. This is where marketing comes in a little bit because only marketing understands even the concept of what value is. So they’re helpful in that respect. But here it’s a little bit interesting. Sales knows what a customer thinks is valuable and what they don’t. So they’re a good litmus test. If we come up with a value prop, sales is a good litmus test: does this sell? Sales can tell you generally because they know customers, they’ve been selling to customers, they know what flies and what doesn’t. Marketing understands what value is, so they know what a good value prop looks like and what it doesn’t. So this is where we see a lot of sales and marketing. But again, everybody’s got to agree on what this is.
Then we’re going to get to this segmentation, which is: okay, we’re the only people on the planet that can deliver this value, but not everyone cares the same about it. So what are the characteristics of a good-fit account? And that is kind of a little bit of everybody chiming in on: okay, if the value looks like this, what needs to be true about the account in order for that to resonate? Are they bigger accounts or smaller accounts? Is there something in their tech stack that makes them more likely to make that more appealing to them or not? Is there something about their business model or something about the team we’re selling into that’s different? That’s a group conversation with everybody. So we have this team together. We obviously need the CEO in the room, and the CEO needs to believe that this is important work and sponsor this thing. But when I run one of these exercises, everybody needs to chip in, and everybody’s opinion is important at different steps in the exercise. This is why this is so difficult to do when it’s not a team exercise. It’s like that old picture of everybody wearing a blindfold and they’re all touching a different part of the elephant. The guy on the tail says, “It’s a snake,” and the guy on the leg says, “It’s a tree.” It’s a bit like that. Sales knows something, product management knows something, marketing knows something, the CEO knows something, support knows something. We’ve got to pull all of that out together and then synthesize it into something we can all agree on, and we’re all singing the same song, and then we move forward.
Evaluating Positioning Success from the Outside vs. Inside
Andrew Mitrak: As an outsider, I like to evaluate a company’s positioning or try to understand their positioning. But if positioning is this strategic foundation and it’s not branding, it’s not messaging, it’s not even just marketing, how do you go about evaluating somebody’s positioning from the outside? How do I tell if a company’s positioned well or if they just have a really talented copywriter?
April Dunford: I’m glad you asked this because sometimes what I’ll see—and this bugs me a lot—I think I’ve been guilty of doing this in the past when I didn’t know any better. But sometimes what I’ll see, and I see this a lot on LinkedIn or social media, a random person like me will pull up some B2B website and say, “Isn’t this terrible? Who could understand what this is? Look at all that jargon! Look at all that stuff. Oh, this is terrible. This should be more B2C-like. This should be really easy and it should be exciting.”
And the first time I saw one of these that I thought was really funny, this was a company that was growing 200% year-on-year on about $100 million revenue. And I’m like, my dudes, it is working just fine. So here’s the thing: it is very difficult for you to assess how good copy on a homepage is working if you are not the target buyer and you don’t even know who the target buyer is. If I’m selling something to—I was working with a company that does this stuff with airlines and I’m selling a very technical thing to people that do maintenance on airplanes—like yeah, man, you’re not going to understand what that website is talking about. And that’s okay. What really matters is: is it working with a customer, and is it doing the job we want the website to do? So that’s one thing.
The second thing is, like you say, there’s copywriting and there’s positioning. If I look at a company’s copy, I don’t necessarily understand the strategy behind it. I don’t know exactly how they’ve defined a best-fit customer, for example. So I don’t know exactly who they think their competitors are. Therefore, I can’t tell: is it doing a good job of differentiating them from those competitors? Because I don’t know them, I don’t know their competitors, I don’t know who their buyers are. It would be very hard for you from the outside to figure this out. And so I don’t think doing a homepage teardown is a particularly good way to understand someone’s positioning. I get this a lot where a company will send me a link to their homepage and they’ll say, “Can you just tell us if our positioning sucks or not?” and I’m like, “No! Because I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know who your target market is, I don’t know who your competitors are, I don’t know anything.” And so it’s really hard from the outside to assess that.
Identifying the Signs of Weak Positioning
April Dunford: Now, on the inside, poor positioning shows up in a set of very distinct ways. So the way I used to assess it—let’s say I got hired as the Vice President of Marketing and then everybody wants me to just spin up a bunch of campaigns, and I’m like, “Okay, but let’s make sure the positioning is good before we do that because otherwise I’m pouring water into a leaky bucket.” So let’s have a look at positioning.
How I would assess that is I would walk over to sales—because I’m always working with enterprise companies that have sales people—and I’d be listening in on first-call conversations. Now, this is really easy because everybody records it with Gong, so you just listen to the Gong calls. But first-call conversation, weak positioning shows up like this: the customer shows up, the rep is there, and the rep’s doing their thing and they’re saying, “Hey, let me tell you something about us, and we’re this, that, and the other thing, and we do this and that for companies like you, blah blah blah.” And you can see the customer just getting super confused, like making this face: “What the heck are you talking about, man?” And usually what you’ll get is a few minutes in, and the customer will go, “Stop, stop, stop. Just back up. Back up. Go back to the beginning. I’m not sure I got it. Go back, say it again.” And the rep’s got to go back and repeat it again. Or they’ll get halfway through and the customer will ask a question, and the rep will be like, “Oh my god, the customer didn’t understand a thing I was talking about.” If you’ve got happy existing customers but a new customer is coming in that confused, that is usually a positioning problem.
The other one you’ll get is prospects comparing you to things they shouldn’t be comparing you to. That is a clear sign of bad positioning. So they’ll come in and say, “So you’re like a CRM, right?” and you’ll be like, “No, no.” Or they’ll be like, “Oh, so you’re just like Workday?” “No, we’re nothing like Workday, what are you talking about?” And then the rep has to back up and do it again. So this idea that the customer thinks they know what box to put you in, but you’re actually living in a different box, that’s a sign of weak positioning.
And then the other one you’ll get is a customer coming in and saying, “I get it, I get what you do, I get it. But I just don’t get why anybody would pay for that. Can’t I just do that with my accounting package? Can’t I just do that in a spreadsheet? Why would I just hire a couple of teenagers to come in and do that? That doesn’t seem...” and then in that case, what the problem is, your value is not clear and compelling. So inside we can assess it; outside, I don’t know.
The Pitfalls of Tech-Forward Positioning
Andrew Mitrak: It’s very tempting to be one of those LinkedIn people from the outside, but on the other hand, I was at a unicorn B2B freight tech startup. It was in the trucking industry and won a bunch of awards, raised a whole lot of money, and our marketing was great—everyone thought our marketing was great. But at the underlying thing, the positioning was often wrong. It was very tech-forward: AI, automate your freight, Uber for trucking type messaging. Everyone was like, “Oh, this is a no-brainer, let’s do this.” And I’d listen to Gong calls in sales and hear somebody pitching all this tech to a supply chain manager at a company in the Midwest, and it’s like speaking two different languages. The startup ultimately folded in a pretty dramatic way. But underlying it, there was just the wrong positioning. It’s easy to say this looks bad or great from the outside, but really you have to get inside the company before you really pass judgment on it.
April Dunford: Fundraising’s not revenue, right? Fundraising’s not revenue. But we are in crazy times right now where there’s so much excitement about certain parts of the market where things are emerging, like all this AI stuff is so cool and the potential for this stuff is so big. We see this with pricing models changing, and now we’re looking at usage-based pricing versus subscription pricing. It makes it a lot more difficult to figure out if this company is actually successful or not.
Positioning During Rapidly Changing Markets
Andrew Mitrak: Do you have principles for running a positioning exercise through a period of rapid change? It can feel like you’re building the foundation with positioning, but it’s moving so fast it’s like building the foundation on quicksand.
April Dunford: I have some opinions about this. Stuff is changing really quickly, but I think companies are going to have to be very clear in their messaging and positioning about what’s real and what we can deliver today versus what is vision and a direction, and where we want to go, and frankly, hype. We’re building the market. Because I think if you’re building an AI company right now, you’ve got to do both. You’ve got to hype the hell out of stuff that doesn’t entirely work today, that doesn’t do exactly what we know it’s going to be able to do in the future—and we might not even be sure when—but we also have to sell what’s on the truck that a customer can buy right now.
Those two things are often different. If you look at the one I think is the most remarkable to look at, it’s the vibe coding tools. If you look at what influencers from these vibe coding tools are talking about on LinkedIn and social media, it is super inspirational. You’re like, “Wow, that is so cool. Look at all the stuff we’re going to do.” Right now, there’s a bit of panic in the markets, like, “Oh my gosh, are we just going to be able to vibe code accounting software? Why should we even have accounting software? We’re going to vibe code a CRM. Sell Salesforce, man, that stuff’s just going to go away.” But then you go to their website, and their website doesn’t say they do that at all. Their website says, “Build a nice prototype,” because that’s what they’re actually selling today.
Now, they’ve got investors and whatever, and right now it’s very difficult to be heard in the noise without being super hypey about this stuff, so they’ve got to do the other piece too. They’ve got to show the vision. They’ve got to show where this is going. They’ve got to show it in order to justify the valuations. They want people to be mucking around with it now with the idea that we should start doing some stuff with this now because in the future we’re going to do way more stuff with this. So there’s this balance, I think, between where you’re at and what you can sell today, and being clear about that when you’re in a sales process. You’ve got to balance that with this other half, which is hyping the hell out of it. When I say it, I mean the future, So, I’m hyped hell out of where this is going and what it’s going to be able to do and what’s happening in the future and all that stuff. The hype stuff changes very rapidly. What we’re selling and what customers are actually doing with it changes about the same as everything else. You’re going to have to check in on it in six months and see if it’s different or not, but in less than six months, your positioning’s probably okay. If I look at the vibe coding tools, those sites haven’t changed much at all in the last year.
Andrew Mitrak: So overall, the act and the role of positioning doesn’t change in a period of rapid technical change. There might be new vectors for positioning; there might be new ways you can position within a new category.
Balancing Today’s Reality with Future Vision
April Dunford: What you should expect is to be very careful, and you should be watching your positioning, and you should be very ready to adjust it when it needs to be adjusted. In a normal market, when I was in-house as the VP of Marketing, we would do a check-in on positioning every six months. That was more than enough, and it was rare that we would check in and have to change it if the positioning was less than a year old or even less than two years old. It’s pretty rare we would do the six-month check-in and say, “Whoops, need to adjust something”. These days, especially if you’re in this AI world, you might want to do that quarterly, and you should be very ready to make the adjustment if you think that it’s needed. But do I think your positioning’s going to change quarterly? No, I don’t. But it wouldn’t surprise me if you changed it within a year. That wouldn’t surprise me at all.
Applying Positioning Principles to Your Career
Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask about how you’ve positioned yourself and positioned your own book. It feels like you’ve been very deliberate about your own positioning. You focus primarily on B2B tech, which is where you have your experience. Do you think that marketers should be applying these same positioning rules to their own careers?
April Dunford: Maybe. I don’t know if I’m a great person to give career advice, but it certainly worked out for me. When I was working in-house, you’re applying for jobs as the VP of Marketing and you’re up against everybody else, and you’ve got to answer the question, “Why me and not the ten other people you’re interviewing?” In order to have a clear answer to that, you have to be able to say, “What am I better at? What have I done more than the other people? What’s my edge over everybody else?”
For me, because I had done a lot of positioning stuff early, that kind of became my edge. I could talk about that in a deeper way. By the time I was at a company and then we got acquired, I had positioned a bunch of things at the acquired company. So by the time I came out of that one, I had positioned five or six products. That’s a lot, really. A senior marketer could go their whole career without repositioning anything if the positioning is working. So I thought I had that as an edge. In the later part of my career, if you hired me as the VP of Marketing, you hired me because you thought maybe you had a positioning problem. I could talk intelligently about how we were going to fix it, and that’s why you brought me on.
I wouldn’t be applying to jobs where what they were really looking for was something really outside of that and it wasn’t really in my deep skill set. Yeah, I know a lot about lead generation, and yeah, I know a lot about email marketing. Yeah, we’re doing SEO and whatever; I know a lot of stuff about that. But am I going to get that job versus the person that comes in and says, “I managed this ginormous Google Ad budget at the last thing and all we did was SEO and I’ve been doing SEO for 15 years, I’m going to yak your ear off on that”? I’m not going to win that job. So I’m trying to focus on applying to jobs that are a fit for my stuff and then making sure I’m positioned in there as the best person for that job.
That’s worked out pretty well for me. As a consultant, I’m trying to do the same thing. I’m trying to stay in my lane. I get tons of calls from companies that are B2C, or they’re B2B but they don’t have a sales team, or what they actually do is professional services. I’ve done a few services companies, but only if they tick the boxes. I’m pretty serious about who makes it through my filter, and that’s because I want to make sure we’re really, really successful. If it’s outside of my wheelhouse, I don’t know, I’m just kind of guessing. So I try to stay right in my zone of excellence so that if you make it through all my filters, then I feel pretty confident that we’re going to get a good result because I’ve done 300 other companies that look just like you. And you’re probably going to pay me more money to do that because I’ve done 300 companies that look just like you. Everybody else you’re talking to has done a little of this and a little of that, and it’s not like they don’t know what they’re doing, they do, but they don’t quite have the experience level in the little box that I do. So I try to stay in my little box where I can look you in the eyeball and say, “I’m probably the best person in the world to do this.” Not this, not this, not that, not this other thing—just in this little box right here. I think I’m the best in the world.
The Strategy Behind Positioning “Obviously Awesome”
Andrew Mitrak: Did you apply your positioning frameworks and methodology to your own book, Obviously Awesome, and could you share a little of that process?
April Dunford: Yeah, so I was really clear when the book came out on what I was positioning against. What I was positioning against was, first of all, the old positioning book, which is the book that came out in the ‘80s by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Again, I love that book, and I think that book’s really good at defining positioning. What it doesn’t do is give you a how-to: step one, step two, step three. So I positioned mine against that and said, “Look, we are very much in alignment, Ries and Trout and my stuff. We agree on the definition of positioning, we agree what it is, we agree why it’s important. I’m giving you the how-to; they are not.” That’s why you need my book and not theirs.
I was also positioning against the “positioning statement,” which was a common sort of folklore way of doing positioning inside a company. A lot of companies, if I went and said, “Have you done positioning?” and they said, “Yes,” what they’d done is filled out a positioning statement, which isn’t a methodology at all. But it was just kind of the thing that everybody did. So I was positioning against that as well. In the book, there’s a mention of the Ries and Trout book and the reason why I was frustrated that it didn’t have a how-to, and then it talks about the positioning statement and why I think that’s not a good way to do positioning. So I’m positioned against that.
When I look at what I’ve got that the other guys haven’t, it’s a methodology. It’s one, two, three, four, five, six. Nobody else has a methodology. I’m going to give you a methodology. I am sure there are other ones now but one, two, three, four, five, six. The value of that is being able to do it in a repeatable way. Even if you’ve got to muck with the process, even if this is just a starting point, you at least got something.
Designing Content for the CEO Mindset
April Dunford: Then the “who it was aimed at” was primarily CEOs of companies, but also, I would say my primary audience was the CEO of a tech company, but also at a secondary level, heads of product or heads of marketing. I did a lot of research with CEOs as I was writing the book about how they buy books, how they find out about books, and how they read books. That was super fascinating. The actual product of the book looks and feels the way it does because of that research. I talked to 50 or 60 founders, and here’s what I found out.
How do you find out about books? You find out from your friends, other CEOs. It’s all word of mouth. Nobody goes to the bookstore and says, “What am I going to read today?” and browses the stacks. That never happens. They get a recommendation, people start talking about it, it’s word of mouth. So you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to spark some word of mouth on this book.
The second thing that I thought was surprising is the CEOs don’t actually read books; they read half-books. Almost everybody told me this. I said, “How do you read?” and they’ll say things like, “Well, I’ll get on the plane, I’ll do my email for an hour, and then I’ve got two or three hours left in the plane ride, I’ll pull the book out and I’ll read and get to the end of it.” They’ll basically say, “I pull the book out and I read.” And I said, “But wait, you only got two or three hours, that’s only half a book. What happens?” And they say, “Well, if there’s bits I can skim, I’ll skim it and skip forward. You know, these business books are full of fluff. Sometimes there’s a whole chapter I can skim, or if they have a case study or something, I’ll skip that. You more or less get the gist of it in the first half of the book anyways because these books are so fluffy. So basically, I never read the back half of a book.”
So I decided, “All right, I’m not writing a typical business book that’s 80,000 words or 90,000 words that takes you six, seven, eight hours to read. I’m writing a book that’s half that, and you can get through it in three or four hours.” Then I’m going to make the bits that you could skim, like the case studies and things like that, very obvious. I’m going to put them in a shaded box so that if you want to skip it, skip away. So it’s obvious what the core stuff is and what the stuff is you could skip. We’re going to make it like In-Flight Magazine—that’s what I kept telling the book guys “This is the inflight magazines”. I thought that worked pretty well. The number one feedback I got on the book after I put it out was CEOs would come to me and they’d say, “Oh my God, it was so good. I finished it in one sitting.” And I loved that. Part of the reason they finished it in one sitting is my original manuscript was like 70,000 words and we hacked at that thing until it was half the size. So yeah, I did use my process for that book.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s so cool. Well, thanks for taking me behind the scenes of that. Congrats on the book and its success, and congrats on the updated and expanded edition of Obviously Awesome. I hope listeners, if any listeners enjoyed this conversation, they definitely enjoy the book; it’s available to order right now. Also, I highly recommend your podcast, Positioning with April Dunford. I’ve been listening to it to catch up and research prior to this interview and enjoyed it a lot. It’s super inspiring. I already mentioned your website, aprildunford.com, which has a lot of great resources as well. Is there any other place you’d recommend where people should connect or follow you? It seems like you’re everywhere.
April Dunford: I feel like I used to be everywhere and now I’m not. I don’t do a lot of social media these days, for example. Occasionally I’m inspired to post something on LinkedIn, but it’s not very often. The best way to follow my stuff is the newsletter, the podcast, the books—these are the main things. If you go to aprildunford.com, you see links to all that stuff.
Andrew Mitrak: They’re all great. I’ll link to it in the blog that accompanies this post. April Dunford, thanks so much and congrats again.
April Dunford: Okay, thanks.
