Decisions to Make Before a Positioning Exercise

Are you ready to actually position anything in your business? If your product is brand new and it hasn't been launched yet, what we would actually be doing is not positioning. What we would be doing is developing a positioning thesis because you haven't launched it yet. So you're just guessing. Now it might be very educated guess, but it is still a guess. It's up to you how much of that thesis you want to expose when you first launch the product. And in fact, my advice usually is that, hello everybody. Welcome to a very special edition of the positioning show with me April Dunford. It's been a while. This is the first podcast I've recorded in almost a year. What you've been doing April, you might ask, well, I've been busy. Mainly with client work and in fact, I got so busy with client work this year that I decided to take a pause on the podcast and write the newsletter and post it on social media and a lot of those things because I was just busy with clients and that was fun to do. And I thought, you know, when I have something new and good to talk about, then I'm going to start it back up again. And so, well, I guess today is the day. I do have something new and cool to talk about. So one of the things I've been working on and I guess I started work on it last spring is I've been working on a second edition of my first book called Obviously Awesome, which is the book that focused on my method for doing positioning. And that book first came out in 2019 and the last year. So I've been thinking about revisiting some of the parts of that book. And finally, earlier this year, I decided to pull the trigger on it and just actually do it. So there's a few things that have changed in that book and I thought it might be fun to do a podcast mini series, dive in a little bit deeper on the things that are different from the first edition of the book to the second edition of the book. For the most part, most of the things that have changed are things that I've changed my thinking about due to working with clients and also because I've gotten a lot of feedback on the book from readers. That book has been way more popular than I ever would have imagined. I think I've sold close to 100, well, actually over 100,000 copies of that book. And a good proportion of those people have taken upon themselves to corner me at conferences or send me email and say, hey, I love this bit or hey, this bit confused the heck out of me. And what did you mean when you said this? And there were a handful of things in the book that people came back and asked me questions about and I thought to myself, you know what, if I was to write that book again, I'm not sure I would have said it in exactly that way or that my thinking has evolved on it. So I thought, all right, let's just tackle it. Let's go back, we'll look at the book and we'll see here. There are new things I want to do with it. And I worked on that over the summer and that new book is coming out in February, maybe March, 2026. So by the time you're listening to this, maybe it's already out. But at the time of me recording this is not quite out yet, but we've finished the book and it's in the, you know, the last pages of getting ready to be sold. So I thought it would be good to go and look at all the things that I've changed in that book and maybe do a deep dive. So this is intended as kind of a mini series. I envision there be in five, six, seven episodes here. Each episode, I'm going to pick a particular piece that I changed in the original book and I'm going to dive down a little bit deep on that and explain why I made the changes, what the changes are, what's changed in my thinking. So you might find this interesting. I don't know, I hope so. I thought it would be fun to do as a companion of the book regardless. So let's jump into it. One of the things that I found really surprising in terms of feedback about the book was that, you know, and maybe this is because I'm dealing maybe with tech people and, you know, I'm tech person myself and tech people are really into numbers, you know, numbers are a thing where numbers people. And the original book was 10 steps. The process was 10 steps. And if you are familiar with the process and my methodology, there's 10 steps, but there are only five component pieces to positioning. And let me tell you the numbers. People did not like that discrepancy. People, I had a lot of people, a lot of people email me, coordinate conferences, CEOs pulling me aside, what we're doing work. And they would say the same thing. They'd say, look, it's five pieces. Why is it not five steps? And, you know, after a while, I started to wonder myself. Did it have to be 10 steps? Could it be five steps? Can we fix that? And so when I approached the new version of the book, I decided to make a change on that. So instead of there being five, 10 steps and five components, there are now five steps, five components. Oh my gosh, what happened to the other steps? April, well, let me tell you. So the first three steps were really around, um, preparing for a positioning exercise. Technically, I think you could make the argument that those are not steps. So those did not go away. They're still there. They're just repositioned. I did that. Yeah, we repositioned the first three steps as prep work that you should do before a positioning exercise. And then the last couple of steps are things that you should do after a positioning exercise. And it's my advice on how do you take this positioning now that you've developed it and make it real. So we now have prep work, five steps and post work. And I'm hoping I never get an email again for as long as I live from somebody saying, hey man, there shouldn't be five components and 10 steps. Now there are five components in there are five steps. So in this episode of the podcast, what I want to do is I want to dive into the prep work part of that or the things that I changed on the beginning part because I think my thinking around that has changed a lot, having done a lot of workshops like more than 300 of these workshops. I thought, you know what? I've learned some stuff about this. So first of all, if you bought the original book, obviously awesome, the first edition of it. There were three steps. And the first one was understand customers that love your product. The second one was form a positioning team. And the third one was align your positioning vocabulary and let go of your positioning baggage. When I came back to this after I thought, man, like there's a lot of things that you have to do before a positioning exercise. And I've just kind of thrown them into three random buckets in these three chapters. And they maybe don't even make logical sense. And so I thought really what we have is two things we have to do before a positioning exercise. The first one is there are a set of decisions we need to make. And then the second thing is that once you've made those decisions, there's a bunch of things you need to do in preparation for a positioning exercise. So let me explain how I see the difference between those two things. Okay, so let's talk about the decisions you need to make before a positioning exercise. The first one, and this is one that I often have a conversation with folks about when they reach out to me and they're looking for help, the first thing is what I would call the positioning readiness check, which is you need to answer the question is now a good time. And are you ready to actually position anything in your business? I talked a bit about this in the first edition of the book, too, but here's the thing, if your product is brand new and it hasn't been launched yet, if we were to take this methodology and apply it to that unlaunched product, what we would actually be doing is not positioning in my opinion. What we would be doing is developing a positioning thesis, meaning we'd go through the five steps and we'd say, look, this is who we think we're going to compete with and this is what we think we have that's differentiating. Therefore, this is the value we can deliver. No one else can. These kind of customers are going to love us and therefore this is the market that we intend to win. But it is going to be pretty theoretical because you haven't launched it yet. So you're just guessing at all that stuff. Now, it might be very educated guess. Maybe you've done a lot of customer discovery. Maybe you've talked a lot of prospective clients. It's an educated guess. I hope, but it is still a guess. Now, in my experience, there's a lot of value in having that structured way to think about your positioning. There's a lot of value in writing down the positioning. But in my experience, we never get it right before I started consulting and I was an in-house marketer. I launched more than dozen products. I think 16 in total and we never got a right once. Now, sometimes we were way off. Sometimes we were kind of closed, but we never got it perfectly right. So my thinking on this is that you can do this process. You can work through it. You can develop the thesis. You can write the thesis down. And in fact, my advice is to advice usually is that you actually want to keep the positioning kind of loose before you launch the product because what we want is we want to feel where the market pulls us when the product is launched. And if I tighten up the positioning too much and say, Hey, this thing is only for investment banks, all the certain size, doing a certain thing. And I'm wrong about that. Then I never really gave it a chance to be used by anybody else. Maybe what I want to say is, Hey, this thing is for, I don't know, financial services businesses. And let's see where the market pulls us. The reality isn't an unlaunched product. When you launch it, you're not doing zero touch things to get your first handful of customers. You're doing very high touch things. You're working your network, you're working your, your boards network. Everybody you know is a potential victim. And you're out there trying to get your get whoever's out there using your stuff. And so your positioning could be a little loose while you do that because you're having a lot of conversations. This is kind of a high tech onboard and get these people on. And so it's okay to have the have the positioning be loose. And then once you have that first wave of customers in, you can then tighten up the positioning based on whatever it is you learn. Maybe you thought it was going to be investment bank, but it turned out retail banks are actually better fit or maybe it turned out it's impossible to get a meeting with an investment bank. So you had to abandon that and go somewhere else. So that's the first thing. You know, are you ready for a positioning exercise? Has the thing even been launched yet? Is the first question? The other situation where you might not be ready for a positioning exercise is like, let's say the entire company's history has been selling to a particular kind of customer in a particular market space. And you've got this new idea to branch into a new market. Maybe you've updated the product and you've got some new functionality. You want to branch into this new market, but you haven't sold anything there yet. This is kind of the same situation. You know, you can you can work through the positioning exercise, but what you come up with is going to be largely theoretical. You know, we think these are the competitors that'll end up on the short list of the gains does. And therefore, this is what makes us different. Therefore, here's our differentiated value and who's going to love us and the market we're going to win. A better way, again, might be to just get out there and sell the first bunch of customers and see what happens. And then worry about tightening up the positioning after that. So you can use this methodology to build the thesis. If people call me and say, can you help us? Can you come in and help us with the thesis? I usually say no. Because I say, you know what? I think you can do that on your own. It's just a thesis. Like, I wouldn't spend money on an outside consultant of any description to help me figure out what the thesis is. I would get the thesis good enough. I would go out and get the first wave of customers. I would see what I learned there. And then if it looks tricky and the positioning looks hard to do, then you could think about whether or not you need some outside help. So this is the first one. The positioning readiness check. This is the first decision you got to make. Are we even ready to do this right now? Is now the right time. Here's the second thing. And I get this a lot more people that call me is this method and everything described in obviously awesome is positioning for customers. It is not necessarily intended to be used for positioning for investors or positioning that you might do to attract a prospective employee or any other kind of positioning for any other kind of audience. It's not necessarily positioning for partners depending on the kind of partner you're doing. So before you start a positioning exercise, it's good to get everybody on the same page about that because sometimes what you'll have is the marketing team says, let's do the positioning exercise. And then they bring the founder in and the founder says, well, this has to be the story. But the founders thinking about the story for investors. And the marketers think about the story for customers. So the decision you got to make, you know, when you're thinking about going into one of these exercises is this thing for customers because if it's for investors, then I think other rules apply. And I think positioning for investors is a lot more about the future. It's a lot more about the vision. It's a lot more about where we intend to be in 10 years positioning for customers is really about right now. Like, it's really about, hey, I'm going to give you my money right now. What do I get? And it's a lot about why pick our solution versus the other things that the customer could do right now with the alternatives that are available to them right now. And then, you know, we have other types of positioning we do inside a company like there's, you know, if you're doing a lot of hiring, you might have a positioning or a company story that is designed to attract talent. And that story is more about things that employees care about. So they care about, you know, is there a career path for me here? Is there, are there ways for me to learn here? They care about compensation. They care about the long term viability of the company and where they're going. They care about, you know, a lot of times they care about the mission of the company and what the company is doing in terms of giving back to the community that they're in and things like that. So you may have a story around this. And again, that's great. And I think you should have those stories, but you should recognize that those stories are different. There isn't just one story. And obviously, awesome is designed specifically for customer positioning. So this is the next decision like, you know, we're positioning for customers, right? Is everybody agreeing on that? Right? Okay. Good. Now we can now we can move forward. The third decision is a really is a really important one. And this is particularly important if you have multiple products. The company needs to make a decision around what exactly they intend to position. Now if you're a single product company, in my opinion, there is no difference between your product positioning and your company positioning. And we could go into why I believe that's true. Like you might think, oh, yeah, man, we, you don't understand all the products we're going to have April. We're going to be like the dice and labs of this stuff. We're going to have thousands of products. So we got to have we got to establish this company positioning because you know all these other products are coming. But you know what? A lot of companies don't make it there. They could come a lot of companies have a plan to do multiple products. And one of two things happen either the first product is so successful. They just run with that product and they never make it to the next one because they never have to a lot of companies. The first product is really unsuccessful and they never make it to get the second product because they don't survive. And we all know that survival rate of startups is not very good. So if you're just a single product company, I would say, hey, you don't have to have separate company and product positioning. They're the same. I wouldn't add that extra burden to yourself. I mean, it's hard enough to position one thing rather than two things. It's complicated for customers. Like why are these things different? When and if you get to product number two, you can worry about separating those two things. But so if you're a single product company that what are we positioning? It's the product. It's the company. It's the same. And we just, we could all agree on that. Now where things get tricky is where we have multiple products. So if we have multiple products, then now we got decisions to make. So we can be positioning a single product because we think that's important and we sell that product separately. We could position the company, which includes the capabilities of all the products we have or we could be positioning some combination of products. So it could be maybe you have a suite of products. Maybe you have what you consider to be a platform of products and you want to position that. If you're a really big company, you might have multiple platforms and multiple suites and divisions of things and there might be all kinds of different ways where you want to actually close the aperture on this and say we're just going to position this one thing. The important thing here though is to understand what it is that you're positioning and why you want to position it. So it requires some thinking on the part of the team about your go-to-market strategy. So for example, let's say you have multiple products, but you always sell one first. This is a bit like Salesforce back in the early days, not so much Salesforce right now, but you know, we roll back Salesforce five, ten years ago. If you looked at their positioning on the website or in any of their advertising, they never talked about anything except sales cloud, the CRM, the idea being they just want to sell you the CRM and then once they landed you on the CRM, everything else in the portfolio was positioned is cross sell or upsell. So if you have that situation, then I think it's really important to land the positioning of this lead or wedge product that is the first thing you're going to sell to customers and you don't necessarily have to burden them with all the other things that you could potentially be selling them. If the go-to-market strategy is let's just land in the account with this one thing and then after we've landed in there, we'll worry about how we sell all the other things in the account. So that might be your situation. You might have a different situation where you're like, you know what, sometimes we lead with that product, but sometimes we lead with a different product and you know, it's up to the customer to decide where they want to start and we're going to meet them where they are. And if we're selling all these things to the same kind of buyer, then it may make sense to package them together and have a positioning that covers all these things together so that a first meeting with a client, you could say, "Look, we have a variety of products. Here's how they fit together." Because the goal is to eventually sell them everything, even though they might just want one of these things right now, it's important to sort of pull it all together and say, "Look, what are the reasons you want to buy us?" It's because we have this full breadth of offering and here's what it's like. And then the customer say, "Ah, yeah, that's interesting, but I just want this one thing now." And then we can switch gears and just sell them that one thing, but it may make sense to position everything together. And then you have special cases where the things are actually together, like it's sweet and we actually want to sell you everything together and maybe you could turn bits and pieces of it on and off, but we're going to position it as a platform or something that's all together. The important thing that I'm trying to drive home here is before you start the positioning exercise, you should decide as a group or whoever's leading this, here's what we want to position and why. This is a very important decision to make. If you don't make this decision ahead of time, what'll happen is you'll get to step one or two of this positioning process and everybody in the room will say, "Well, hang on, are we positioning the platform or the company or the product or the thing or whatever?" And then you'll just have a great big bite and you'll never make it past step one. And so it's way easier, way better. Everything is better. Your life is better. If you make this decision before you walk into the positioning exercise, before you even assemble the team to do a positioning exercise, there should be a decision. Made about what exactly is it we're positioning. Once you have established that, then I think it's worthwhile to have a discussion around personas and to get agreement on who precisely are we positioning for. So we've agreed on the product we're positioning. That product is probably appropriate for a certain market segment, but that's part of what we're going to determine in the positioning exercise itself. But I think it's worthwhile to have a bit of a conversation around, like, there's different personas involved in making a purchase decision for this particular product or group of products. And we should agree that this positioning should be oriented at the persona who is the champion of the deal. Now this idea of having a deal champion, you know, salespeople are very, very familiar with this idea. Marketing people maybe a little bit less so product people, I don't know so much. But, you know, in any big B to B deal, we do, you know, there might be a dozen stakeholders involved who have to agree that this thing should be purchased. But those stakeholders are not all considered equal. And typically what we have is a stakeholder that is designated as the champion, what we would call the champion. That person has often been given the job to like go make a short list, figure out how what we should look like. Make sure the right people are involved, make a recommendation up to the economic buyer for the ultimate purchase. We call that person the champion. Now if you think about positioning work in particular, our positioning needs to really resonate for the champion. If it doesn't resonate for the champion then we don't even get to, you know, we don't even get past first base here. We don't make it on the short list. We never get past anybody else. We never get a chance to even interact with any of these other people that are potential stakeholders. So we need to have this thing really sing for the champion. This is an idea that I think it is important to get this idea circulated with the team that is going to work on this stuff early. Because otherwise if you don't talk about this then this will lead to a fight later on when you are doing a positioning exercise. Now you might have situations where the answer to this question who's the champion is not that easy. It's not that easy. So often we'll have, well, you know, if it's this kind of a company, we got a champion that's on the business side, but if it's this kind of company, we got a champion that's on the IT side. That's okay in my mind. And I've done a lot of workshops where, you know, in some situations the champion persona looks like this, another situation the champion persona looks like this. And we just make a note of that at the beginning of the session. And when we get down to value, we often have the discussion around does this work for both of these personas? Often what you have when you have one on the business side and one on the IT side is each side knows that they can't get a deal done without meeting the needs of the other side. So they often will look for value that satisfies the need on the other side even when they're making a short list. So for example, IT will say, look, it's got to do these three things or else I'm never getting the guys on the business side to agree to this. Or the other way around where the business people say, look, you know, the person that runs IT really worries about this and this and this. So if it doesn't meet these criteria, then, you know, we're not even putting you on the short list. But again, this concept of, oh, the persona, like, you know, who is the actual person that we're, that we're thinking about when we're doing this positioning for is pretty important. And we're not trying to position for everybody on the deal team. We're actually really focused in on positioning for the champion so that we make it on the short list so that we can get to the second meeting so that we can get further in the deal. And when we are further in the deal, we will worry about the opinions and and and potential objections of everybody else on the deal team. But if we don't have this thing work for the champion, then we're sort of dead at step one. So everybody needs to understand that. And that's it. So that sort of covers the set of decisions that I think we need to be made and the things that need to happen before we even start on a positioning exercise. These things are really important because they're going to influence who you decide to bring together for the positioning project itself. And it's also going to influence the way you frame the project for the team and how you set everybody's expectations. So it's really important to think about these set of decisions and do it. In the next episode, I'm going to talk a little bit about the other thing you need to do, which is there is some prep work. Now that we've made these decisions, we can now assemble a team. There's a way you should assemble that team and a bunch of prep work that needs to happen before we actually start the positioning exercise. I changed quite a bit of this in the book for the second edition. So I thought I'd like to go through that in episode number two. So that's it. Thanks so much for listening. And thanks for coming back after the big hiatus. I hope this is interesting for you. And like I say, new book comes out in February and I'm so excited. Obviously, awesome. Second edition. Ooh, so exciting. I'll see you in a couple of weeks.