How to Make Your Product Positioning Impossible to Ignore with April Dunford (Founder, Ambient Strategy)

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That's K-N-A-K.com/exit-5, or just let them know you heard about NAC from Exit 5. That's us. - You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt. (upbeat music) - Hey, it's Dave Quicknote. Before we get into this episode, this is a recording from Drive 2025, our annual event here at Exit 5. This was recorded live in Burlington, Vermont, at Hula as part of our event. And we'd love to have you at next year's event. We're bringing it back to Vermont, Stowe, Vermont. You can go to exit5.com/drive to get more information, put your name on the waitlist, and maybe make it to next year's event. But we're bringing the audio recordings from these sessions to you live, well, recorded on the podcast, because we thought it'd be a fun way to show you the stuff we talk about at Drive and give you a sense of what it was like if you didn't get to be there. And if you were there, then you get to now re-listen and maybe take notes again. So this is one of the sessions from Drive. Go and check it out, get tickets, put your name on the waitlist for next year, exit5.com/drive. - All right, here we go, super excited. Look, this next speaker is someone that I have virtually, you don't know this, I don't have to blow up your head, virtually learned a whole lot from over the years. And she's an expert in the, if you can just stay in the room for a minute. We got time, unless you really gotta poop your pants, just stay in here because after this we're free all night and I wanna have everybody in here and then we're done and we're hanging out. So our next speaker is the world's foremost authority on product positioning, where which I could make the argument is the most important topic to running a business. We had a long conversation about this at dinner the other night. Every time I've had her on my podcast, it becomes one of the most listened to episodes ever. I think I first had her on my podcast in maybe 2020. And if I go sort by most popular episodes, it still is that. And every time I do something where there people tell me, I bought her book, it was amazing. I wish I could hire her, but she's full. And as a consultant, she helps companies makes complex products easy to understand and love. After a 25 year career as VP of marketing, she has consulted with over 300 tech companies, including Google, Epic Games, IBM, Postman and others. You've probably read her book, the best selling book, obviously awesome, which delves into the art of positioning. And it's on my shelves all bookmarked and dogbeard. Helped Dan and I a lot when we were at privy actually. And she has a newly released book a couple of years ago called sales pitch, which reveals the secrets to crafting a winning sales narrative in the market. She's going to share her top lessons learned from working on positioning with 300 companies. Get your phones and notebooks ready. I'm super pumped to have her here. It's an honor. Please give it up for April Dunford. (upbeat music) ♪ Got money on my mind I can never get enough ♪ - Hi, if you got to poop your pants, don't feel bad. Just go and do it. I'm not going to be offended at all. You know, I'm the last speaker. So when you're the last speaker, like you get to do what you want. So Vermont, right? So great. So great. This whole conference, like what a vibe. It's so good. Let's have a little for the exit pot. (audience applauding) I'm going to have a cool time. Except for this part, I'm a little bit nervous because I'm doing a brand new thing. Kind of came up with this idea a little while ago and I said, Dave, I want to do brand new talk. And he's like, yeah, sure. Okay. And I'm like, but it's going to suck. (laughs) But so coming a little slack on this, but some of you know me, some of you don't. If you do know me, it's probably because of this book. So I spent, as Dave mentioned, 25 years-ish as a repeat vice president of marketing and a series of benchmark startups. I think I did seven. And I made the switch to consulting about 10 years ago. Now, when I was in-house, kind of my jam was positioning. And it sort of ended up being that very much so at the end. So at the end, if you hired me as the VP of marketing, it's 'cause I kind of had this process of doing positioning. And so the founder would say, I think we have a positioning problem. And I could talk real smart about that. I'd say, here's how we're going to solve it. I got this little thing, step one, step two. So when I decided to switch to consulting, I thought, well, positioning is the thing I'm going to focus on 'cause I kind of know something about that. And I had positioned a dozen or so, two dozen products when I was in-house. And so then I came out and I spent a few years just kind of flailing around. Like I was trying to figure out, how do I actually teach this as a consultant? How do I do it? Is there a methodology I could teach people that's sort of step one, step two, step three. And I worked with 70, 80 companies doing that. Now, that's a lot because like as an in-house marketer, you don't do positioning every day. Like that's not a thing you do all the time. That's why people kind of suck at it. It's not a thing you do all the time. And so I did 70 companies that I thought, I got it. I know how to do this. I know how to teach it. I've been there, I've done that. I've seen all the things. And so then I wrote this book and that was my attempt to teach other people how to do it. And it was the book I wish I had when I was junior little marketer and I was trying to figure out how to do positioning. I wrote this book, 2019, I put it out. 2020, you know, we got COVID. And sometimes people ask me this question, when should we shift our positioning? And I said, well, you shift the positioning when big things happen, right? And so the big thing could be you put out a new release and there's a lot of new stuff and that changes the value you can provide. So we have to shift our positioning or it's you have competitors and your competitors all of a sudden caught up with you and something big happened. Maybe they made an acquisition. Maybe you made an acquisition. So we got to shift. Or the worst is when outside crap hits the fan. And often that's like, all of a sudden we've got a recession. So people used to care a lot about making money. Now they care a lot about saving money 'cause we're in a recession. Or a new regulation, compliance stuff comes up. The government says you have to do this now and everybody's like, oh no, now they really care about that, that's priority now. Or something like COVID hits. So I was working with companies that were selling into the travel business. And all of a sudden we don't have a travel business 'cause we didn't travel at all for like two years. I worked as a company that did software for stadiums. Now all the stadiums are all closed, sorry. So all of a sudden it's 2020 and B2B companies on mass, all of a big positioning problem. Everybody's wrestling with their positioning. So I got really busy and so I'm working with a lot of companies. So fast forward five years. Now I've worked with like 300 companies and that's a lot. And what I started to see after the book came out in 2019 is some of the stuff I learned after I wrote the book was actually really surprising. So I started to see this other set of patterns kind of pop out that for whatever reason I didn't notice them in the first 80 but I noticed them after a while. So I thought it would be fun to do a talk about five of those things. I'm gonna kind of randomly select five of these things. Hopefully one of these things kind of resonates with you. So we're gonna do that. So here's the first one. The truth matters. Now you're all bunch of marketers. Well, you're not dummies. We're not out there lying about stuff out in the market and on purpose. Nobody's gonna say I'm a look in the mirror and say I'm a dirty rotten liar, lie all the time. But you know what? I've worked with 300 companies and almost all of them tell me their competitors are dirty rotten liars. They do. We're not doing it, but they're doing it. And not only that, a lot of times what you've got is the marketers are very frustrated because they have a thing that's legitimately differentiating. It's legitimately cool, but they're scared as heck to go out and message around it because the competitors go, yeah, us too. Now we do that too. So let me give you an example. So this was one, I worked with this company and they had a thing and it was for optimizing this process that had kind of five steps. And so the status quo thing, I love to talk by the way, let's talk about status quo. We spent a lot of time talking about status quo me and my clients. But the status quo thing they were competing against was point of sale solutions. So most of these companies had one solution to do step one, another solution to do step two, another to do step three, another to do step four, another to do step five. And so this was really inefficient and it was driving everybody crazy. So customers are really mad at this. All they want to do is automate this thing and make it go away. And it's really hard to do because you've got five point solutions. So we're doing the positioning on this. So step one, what's the alternative? Well, status quo thing is these five point solutions. But they said, you know, it's really hard alternative we've got. We got a competitor that has all five. So you can buy one thing from them. It's actually five things, but you can buy it from one vendor. And I'm like, okay, that's the competition. So what have you got that they don't have? And they said, well, we're the only one where it's a platform, it's all one thing. We actually just extended the platform to do all five things. And I'm like, okay, that's cool. So then I'm like, well, what's the value of having it as a platform instead of five things? And they said, well, you know, it's a common data layer. I'm like, dude, that's not valued. So what, you got a common data, it's like, so what? And I'm like, well, so if something happens in step one, we already know it in step five. So you actually need that in order to do automation. I'm like, oh, that's really cool. And so they're like, so we have a thing that it used to take people four weeks to get it done. And now they can do it in four hours, you know, a day, like way more efficient, save all kinds of money. Okay, that's great, sounds good. Marketing guys sitting there like this. I said, look, we can't say that. And I said, why not? And he goes, do it, bring up the competitor's website. And the competitor's website says, we make that thing more efficient, you know, and they're like, we can't say that 'cause they say that and it's the exact same thing. And I said, yeah, but when they say it, it's not true. And when you say it is true, and then the product guys, well, it's kind of true when they say it. It's kind of true. They've got some APIs and you can make them do it. You can make it happen, but it's gonna take an army of consultants, it's gonna take you six months. So when they say that all the things connect with all the things and they call it a platform, it is, you can make it work, no one does it. Zero of their customers have done it, pain in the head. No one's gonna do it, but yes, it's actually true. You can make it happen, but nobody does. And I'm like, oh, so what we have is actually the situation where your competitor has given you a hand grenade. All we had to do was pull pain. So what did we do? So step one, really tight on the differentiated value, really tight. When they were talking about differentiated value, they weren't like, they were just talking about features. So they were saying, we have a platform and they're just expecting that the customer knows the value of the platform. So instead, we were talking about automating the end to end process and shaving four weeks off this thing, right? Which the other guys, yeah, they can automate the end to end process with a lot of professional services on their show, but they can't shave four weeks off of it. So, okay, that's step number one, really tight on the thing. Step number two, we're gonna teach the customer how to identify the lie. So what do we do? We have a whole bunch of content that talks about how do we automate this process? What happens if we were to do that? You've got five things right now and they've all got APIs. Couldn't we just write some custom code? So then we talk about how bad that is. Let's think about that, that's bad. And then we would say, and we built a buyer's guide and a bunch of things. How do you actually know what this is? And then we taught the salespeople, because we always got into these deals where we bake off against the other guys. So the salespeople, the beginning of their sales pitch was, okay, we wanna make this process really efficient, right? Yes, customers like, yes, we would like to just automate it and have it go away. Okay, number one, why aren't we automating it right now? We're not automating it right now because it's five different things and they don't talk to each other. It's five different logins and it's paying the ads. They're like, oh, okay, that's good. And we're like, look, we work with a lot of companies just like you. And we see they're either doing it like that. Now, listen, there's some companies out there will tell you that they have a platform and they'll tell you that you can automate all these things. But you should ask some questions. So you should ask this question, will it take professional services to make that happen and how much does that cost? Ask that. Here's a good question. Next time you're meeting with one of those vendors, ask them this, how many logins are there? Is it one or is it five? It's a fun question to ask. You should ask them that. And so then we say, okay, but we're the only ones that actually have this. No, we talk about the value, we talk about whatever. And so they started bringing this up in sales meetings. They started messaging around marketing and then win every time. They win every time. And the sales guy had this call with him afterwards. And the VP sales like this old dude, he's really crusty. He's one of these like old sales guys been in there, done that, got the scars, man. And he never smiles. And we're having this Zoom call and this company had a slogan and it was called, the slogan was driving customer delight. It was like the, I don't know, mission statement or something, driving customer delight. So he shows up on the Zoom call and he's got one of the Zoom backgrounds over his head. He says, driving customer delight, and he says, guy. And I said, how's it going with the new sales pitch? And he says, you know what customers love? I said, what, John? What do the customers love? They love calling vendors on their bullshit. He says, they go, I tell them the thing. I'm like, hey, ask your other vendors how many logins and they come back and they are delighted. They're laughing. They're like, we asked them how many logins and they said five. And we said they're eliminated from the sales process. (laughs) He's like, he's doing the imitation of the customer and he's like, I'm going to win it this quarter. Then when what? To drive customer delight prize from the company. Anyways, so if you have, so this is the thing. It's remarkable to me how often it comes up that we're shying away from saying the thing that we do. It's actually really differentiated, really valuable. But we got this fear of what are the other guys you say that? It's like, well, if they say that, let them have it. Okay, second one, your best differentiators are baffling to buyers, even the really technical ones. And this Diane yesterday, the messaging talk, yes, where are you? Hello, she mentioned this yesterday and I was like, oh, goody, I'm going to talk about this too. So here's the thing. We sometimes have this thing and you'll see it, especially when companies are selling really, really technical audiences, you'll sometimes have this thing that they'll say, customers are going to come and they're really technical and they've got a checklist of features and they're going to come and they want to know, do we meet the checklist of features? And so we got to tell them features and yet we can do value, but then we sound like everybody else. And so, you know, we got to just do the feature. But here's the problem, your best thing, the thing that makes you special and unique is something that other people don't have. So nobody knows why it's important. Customers don't know it. So I'll give you an example, we're with this company and they used to do the feature checklist thing. And one of the things on their feature checklist was we were the only people on the planet that have fuzzy logic algorithm. Nobody knows what fuzzy logic algorithm is, we're the only guys that do it. And we're a 12 person company, nobody knows us, nobody knows what fuzzy logic is. And so customers would come, we're selling a data warehouse and they had all these other features on the checklist that we didn't have. And you know why we didn't have it? 'Cause we didn't need it. 'Cause we had a fuzzy logic algorithm, nobody knows that. So they come in there like, have you got roll-up function? No, actually we don't. Do we have a cube function? No, we were eliminated. That's stupid, right? So we had to teach people why a fuzzy logic algorithm worked. Like, it is not our job in marketing and sales to be order takers. That's not what we're here for. When I hear you just take the order, we'll come in, check the box and we're taking the order. Like our best stuff. We actually have to teach the customers why it's important. Because even if they're really technical, they don't know what that is. So in my thinking, just my super, super simplified dumb, dumb thinking on this, is it kind of works like this. I got a feature and then I got pure, pure marketing value, per marketing textbook value. Now here's the problem. Pure, pure marketing textbook value, if we're B2B, we're all the same because we only have two points of value. We're either helping you make money or we're helping you save money. That's it. That's all we got. So if I just put on the website, we're gonna help you make money. Everybody's like, yeah, us too. We're gonna help you save money. Yeah, us too. Us too. Now those insurance people were here and they'd say, what about risk? I'm like, okay, there's three, but fine. It's mainly just two. And so here's how this works with a feature. So if I tell you my phone has 3,000 megapixels, you know what that means 'cause you've been taught and you know that 3,000 megapixels is better than 20. And you know why, you know, 'cause you zoom in and the pictures are gonna be really sharp and all that kind of stuff. So if I'm Apple and I'm running an ad, I can just say 3,000 megapixels and you're like, well, that's good. Why? Because you've been taught. Now if I roll it back 15 years or 20 years or whatever it was that people didn't have digital phones, you couldn't say that. You couldn't say 200 megapixels, they're a megawatt. What is it? And you had to say, oh, this is why. And so in that case where everybody knows the feature and they know what it is, you can just state the feature. Everybody knows how to translate the feature to value. We all know why it's important. But if you've got fuzzy logic algorithm or whatever the heck your thing is that makes you special and different, everyone's gonna look at you and say, I don't know. Now here's where it gets really tricky. I can't go all the way to pure value 'cause they sound like everybody else too. So what I actually gotta find is this sweet spot in the middle which is a little tricky. So what happens is it's like, okay, I got a fuzzy logic algorithm. So what? So I can do a really fast query on a mountain of data without using roll up and cube function. So what? Well, so if a customer calls in and has a question, I can answer it while they're on the phone instead of having to call them back in two days. Ah! Now the customer knows how to translate that to value. So I'm looking for this sweet spot point where I maintain my differentiation. So I don't sound like everybody else, but I'm going far enough for the customer to do the leap to make some money, save money. That's why this is actually really, really hard. And so a lot of times what you'll get is everyone will say, well, we're just gonna talk about the feature, it's a cop out. It's a cop out, it's lazy. We actually have to do this. This is really hard and it sucks, but we have no choice. We really wanna be differentiated. We really wanna answer the question, not why pick us, but why pick us over the other ways we could solve the problem. You gotta nail this, which is differentiated value. Okay, that's number two. Number three, overthinking your market categories like actually will kill you. And so this concept of creating a market category, it's less popular now, but a few years ago, people weren't really nuts on this. And there was this thinking around that there was no way to win a market unless you were the category leader. And so only the category leader is making any money and everybody else is not making any money. It's simply not true. In fact, I was getting at so much. I was like, is it true? Maybe it is true. Maybe all the companies I worked at that were just working in a sub-segment of a really, really big market and made hundreds of millions of dollars. Maybe we were all just weirdos. So I went and I did analysis. And at the time I looked at all the companies, tech companies that went public on the NASDAQ. So, you know, they're not necessarily big, but big enough to go public. All those companies, how many of those companies had invented a new market category and were playing in this new market category at the time they went public and 92% were not. So 92% were playing in existing market category. And the other 8% had new categories. So it's not like we never do this. Sometimes we do do this, but 92% were playing in existing. And those were companies like Snowflake, a data warehouse for the cloud. We know what data warehousing is. That's an existing market category for the cloud. Didn't stop them from being the fastest growing tech company ever in the history of the land. Now, if you look what they're doing now, now they're creating market category because they absolutely dominate cloud data warehousing. Now they're trying to create the market category. That's a different, right? So sometimes what we have is we don't like the market category we're in because it feels really crowded and we're like, "Dang, how are we gonna win?" 'Cause there's all these big companies. So let me give you an example. This company I worked with and they were in the sales enablement space. And so we did this workshop. So we started with, again, if you didn't exist, what would the customer do? So status quo was throw a bunch of stuff on a shared drive, free, easy, whatever. But once the company gets a little bit bigger, really hard to manage, really hard to tell if people are using the right stuff, whatever. This is training material for your sale of people. And then their competitors beyond that were terrifying. So Seismic, who had raised almost a billion, Highspot, 600 million they'd raised, Big Ten Can, 400 million they'd raised, MindTickle, 300 million they'd raised. Little company I'm working with had raised $1 million. What bootstrapers basically friends and family round. And they're competing with that. Now you might look at that and say, well that's pretty scary. Maybe we don't wanna be in that market. But we didn't start with the market category. We're trying to get to differentiated value. Then we're gonna make a decision about market category. So we back it up. Who are you competing against? You're competing in a shared drive. Or you're competing with these scary dudes. Second, what do we got that they don't have? Differentiated capability. So the answer in this case was, they were the only sales and enablement platform built on top of Salesforce. That's the feature. So they know the customer and you're like, so what? Well, means again, common data platform. So what does that mean? It means you can tie your sales enablement data to your actually sales performance data to answer a question which is like, did the sales enablement work? Did it improve time to first deal? Did it improve time for the sales person to make quota? That's actually crunchy value. That's actually big deal value. So we got there and it's like, that sounds really compelling. And I'm selling to the head of sales enablement. Like that sounds like something the head of sales enablement cares a lot about. And then we were like, okay, who are we selling to? We're selling to technology companies that hire a lot of salespeople. They're growing really fast. So they have a need to get a lot of salespeople ramped up really quickly. They have to have the problem in spades or whatever. And we are a really small company but we've got a good objection handling thing in that. If someone says, well, you're really small and it sounds kind of risky, our big customer was Salesforce. - All right, it's that time of year. Everybody's scrambling to wrap it up, justify budgets, get those plans in last minute and quietly hope that the numbers are gonna hold going into 2026. But here's the uncomfortable truth. Most marketing teams still don't actually know what's driving real results and what's just taking credit, there's a difference. And you can't make smart calls for next year if you're just guessing about what's working, what's not and where to put your next dollar. Paramark has built something to fix that. It's their free incrementality calculator and it takes two minutes and it's gonna give you a simple reality check on one question. If you stopped a campaign, would the results still happen anyway? I can think of a few ideas in my head right now that I would like to run this through. Maybe a branded search would be one of them. Anyway, that's incrementality and it's how the best marketers are cutting waste, tightening budgets and figuring out which programs actually deserve to make it into next year. You'll get a quick read on whether you're ready for incrementality testing and how much money you could be saving right now. So go and check it out, completely free, free tool from Paramark. It's paramark.com/calculator. That's paramark.com/calculator. - So everybody who's using Salesforce is kinda like, we might look risky, but Salesforce didn't. So we got a good proof point on that. So then we got to the market category that we're like, should we pick another market category? And in the end, me and the founder were talking about it and we were like, well, the founder says, look, I actually think we have such big value. We can beat these guys anytime we're up against them. We just wanna get invited to the party. So how are we gonna get invited to the party if we don't call ourselves sales enablement? And so in the end, we're sales enablement. Their tagline was sales enablement that drives results. If you go on their website is like 300% improvement and time to first deal and all this other stuff. But it turned out being in the crowded market category wasn't a problem at all. In fact, it actually helped that company. So they started growing really quickly because there's a really crunchy differentiated value. You can imagine, they're sitting across in the head of sales enablement. This is how the sales people pitch it. Sitting across in the head of sales enablement, hey, sales enablement, head of sales enablement. Sales enablement is really important, right? They're like, yeah, idiot, that's my job. Okay, yeah. So it's really, why is it really important? 'Cause every day your rep's not making quote or cash money. It's nice little calculation to show you how much money. If you know, it takes an extra week, texting everyone. Hey, yeah. And look, so what are you gonna do to solve the problem? You can put all this stuff on the drive. That doesn't scale very much. Or you could use any of these guys. But when your boss comes to you and asks, did the sales enablement program work? How do you answer that question? Do you wanna answer that question? If you do, we're the only way. It's super compelling. So they go up against any of these people, they win every time. They just gotta get in. So anyways, revenue goes like this. They got acquired by Salesforce. Imagine that. They didn't have to share any money with the VCs. Everybody's like 30 years old and they're sitting on a beach drinking out a coconut. Anyway, so here we are. So here we are. So lesson number four, this is more for a multi-product company. But if you're a multi-product company, you need a clear go-to-market strategy before you can tackle positioning. So lots of companies will call me and they got multiple products and they say, "Hey, April, we wanna do positioning." I'm like, "Great." And then so they're describing, "We got the company, we got all these products." And I'm like, "Good, so what are we positioning?" And you can see that kind of never thought of it that before. So if you have multiple products, there's actually a bunch of big decisions that have to happen before you can tackle positioning. So it looks a bit like this. If you're a single-product company, I have one product, the company positioning and the product positioning kind of the same. Like think about Slack before they got acquired by Salesforce. Slack the product, Slack the company, same positioning, it's all one thing. We're not separate things. Now, sometimes you might have a founder that says, "Look, man, I did have a founder that told me this once." So look, I know we only have one thing, but we wanna be the Dyson labs of that thing. So we're gonna have a thousand things. We just have one now, but once this one's successful, we're gonna have another one, another one, another one. You know how hard it is to make one thing successful like 98% of startups file, all that stuff. I'm like, how about we just be the vacuum cleaner company? And if we ever get the hairdryer thing coming in number two, we'll worry about that later, right? So it is fine. This should all be one thing. But when you have multiple products, if you sell those multiple products to the same kind of customers, you might have company positioning as an umbrella and then product one positioning, product two positioning, product three positioning. Like when I worked at IBM, we had company positioning. Why do you wanna work with IBM? We have hardware, software services, here's how you wanna work with us. And then we had software group positioning, and then we had database division positioning. And then I had my actual product positioning underneath that. It was just one beautiful cascading thing. Now, that sounds fine, but a lot of times we don't actually have that even when we have multiple products. Because sometimes what we have is we have a lead product and then we have follow on products. So let's take Salesforce as an example, but not Salesforce today. Let's run Salesforce like, I don't know, before they bought Slack. If you looked at Salesforce's homepage, the only thing they talked about was sales cloud. We're the world's number one CRM. If you looked at all their advertising, we're the world's number one CRM. They had lots of other products. They had marketing cloud, they had service cloud. But their lead product was sales cloud because it was easy to sell. They had double the market share of all the other CRMs combined. So they weren't trying to make this difficult and try to sell you the whole thing or try to say, hey, we have a menu of three things, which would you like? They say, forget about everything else. Just buy the CRM, man, let's not make this complicated. Just buy the CRM, that's the lead product. Now, once they got you with the lead product, everything else is positioned as cross sell or an add-on because it's easier. So maybe they don't have the world's greatest marketing automation, they don't. But I don't have to make the case for it to be the world's greatest marketing automation. I'm the world's greatest now. All I gotta do is position that thing as the world's greatest marketing automation for companies that have Salesforce CRM. Even though it ain't always that either, but we could at least attempt to position it that way. So you gotta make that decision. And if you look at the company positioning for Salesforce in that era, the company position was really all around the CRM. I mean, we're trying to be everything to everybody. It was just really all around the CRM. Now, sometimes that's not the way you want to do it. Like sometimes you've got a whole bunch of things and you've bundled that together into something you're calling a platform or a suite. And I'm trying to sell you a whole bundle of stuff together. Again, that's a different go-to-market strategy. It's a little bit like what Salesforce is trying to do right now. They have this thing called Customer 360. Does anybody understand it? Nobody. This is way harder positioning, right? It's hard. It's like, what is that thing? And it got a genie and a thing. And he's in the middle and he's waving a magic wand and all that stuff is coming together. I don't know how it comes together. But it's harder, right? It's harder than just saying, "I'm just gonna sell you the CRM. "I'm gonna sell you all this stuff either." But the problem is as well, I don't know. Maybe you just got slack and now I wanna, now I don't know, there's so many products. It's hard. They should call me. This is going on the internet. So here you are. My point is, here you are. You're the marketing person. And maybe somebody's telling you, "Oh, you figure this positioning thing out." Like, if you haven't answered these questions, then you can't go do that. We gotta answer those questions first. Like, do we have a wedge product and everything's an add-on? Is this thing actually, we call it a platform. Is it actually a platform? Do we wanna sell it like a platform? Or is it individual things? And when the individual is like, we gotta answer these questions first and the CEO is gonna have an opinion about that. And the sales is gonna have an opinion about that. You can make that decision on your own. So these things are really important to get right before you tackle positioning. Like, what are we positioning? Let's figure that out first. And there we go, I got the last thing. And then we're gonna go to questions. So last one is, a great story with weak positioning. This is counterintuitive, but really great story built on weak positioning actually advantages your competition. It really sucks. This is actually really disappointing and awful when it happens. But there's so many examples of it in tech where, you know, and it's a lot of category creators end up having this happen, right? Like, you come up with this great idea. You have this really compelling story that says, look, the world has never had one of these before. And now we're gonna have one of these. And it's gonna be amazing. And that story becomes so inspiring and so awesome. And everybody rushes to you when you have this fleeting moment of super joy and then a thousand million billion competitors come up and go meet you. And the story wasn't anything specific to you. The story applies to them just as much as it applies to anybody else. And so there's lots of examples of this. Like, you know, one of the ones that I was really surprised at, like, if you're really old, you might remember this, but only if you're really old. Like in the early days of the internet, IBM coined the term e-business. And then they had this big campaign about e-business. And even now, if you Google it, ChatGPT will tell you it was a really successful campaign. They were wrong. So it was a successful campaign for IBM. But the problem was it was such a good story. And it was so true. And it was like the internet changes everything. And they were the first people to grasp that. And they came out with this big story about, we're gonna do business in a completely different way 'cause there's an internet man. And they came out. And then five years later, you've never associated e-business with IBM, really, really. If you want to do e-commerce, we call it IBM, nah. And so internal the IBM, 'cause I was working at IBM shortly after that, like they considered that a big failure because they had created the story, but there was nothing in the story that really advantaged them. And so it became a great story in the market for everybody and not just them. So if we're gonna take the time to build a really great narrative, we gotta build a great narrative that is only good for us. And the other guys can't tell that story. So I'll give you an example. So I've done a lot of database startups, but my first ever company I ever worked at, we were selling a database. And somebody had told us that in the pitch, we had to start with a problem. So we're like, okay, what's the problem that a database solves? Dorn a lot of data, you know? So we have this slide that was like, here's the problem. Data's going up, it's going up, it's going up, up, up. You know what you need? Database. And then we would just show you a whole bunch of features, whole bunch of features, until you said uncle and pay us some money. And so that's our work. And so any database could solve that problem. We were like, oh, and sometimes people have been taught this, that instead of the problem, what you should do is change in the world, but it's the same thing. You know what's changing, man? We're showing a lot of data. More and more every year. So we need a database. You know, we're telling this story, but in no way did it set us apart in the way we define the change in the world or the way we define the problem. And so our differentiation certainly didn't come out in the way we phrased that. Later, I got this job at IBM and was also selling a database. And this was a terrible time to be selling a database. The databases at this point are completely commodity, right? All the databases in the land are exactly the same. Like if you were doing a feature function checklist of us versus Oracle, there's 9,000 checkboxes on there, the same. There might be two little checkboxes that are different. Like they're the same. And so how do we tell a story that makes us sound really different when the products are like 99% overlapping? Here's how we did it. So again, start with your positioning. Who are we against, Oracle? What have we got that they don't have? Well, the thing we actually had was kind of a little bit of a different philosophy that resulted in a few different features. So Oracle was trying to sell you the whole stack, the database plus the application. They ain't very closed system, but the idea was it was cheaper. You didn't have to do integration. So their thing was, we're gonna sell you the whole thing, a big closed box, one vendor, everything just works well together out of the box. IBM, we didn't sell applications. So we sold you a database that was gonna play nice with whatever else you had. And so because that was our philosophy, we were really into openness. We were really into open standards. We had great APIs. We sat on all the standards bodies. We were really about open system, open, open, open. Like we couldn't say it enough, we're all open. So that's the differentiator. Better APIs, open standards, all that stuff. What's the value of that? So what? What's the value of that? Well, the value of that is this data plays really nice with all the stuff you have now and all the stuff you're gonna have in the future too. Now, we were selling the bigger companies than Oracle was at the time when I was there. And so Oracle was selling the companies that didn't care that much maybe about innovation, but did care a lot about is it gonna be lower total cost of ownership or whatever? We were selling the big, big companies that were very worried about vendor lock-in. And so we built this story, the first setup of a sales call was an IBM salesperson. We didn't show the stupid thing with the data is growing. That's dumb. So we would come in and we'd say, "Yeah, yeah, you got a lot of data. "We know data is growing like this." None of the, you know, those guys know it. They're the database administrator, they're all sitting there like, "No shit Sherlock." Yeah, we all got a lot of data. Yeah, yeah, data is growing like this. Why? Why would we sort all this data? Why? Well, we work with a lot of companies. Let me tell you why. 'Cause we're gonna do stuff with it. We're gonna do machine learning with it. We're gonna do AI with it. It's actually not data. It's a strategic business asset. We're gonna do predictive analytics on it. We're gonna predict the future with this data, because we've had seven years of it. And now we can look at it and we can look for patterns and we can do all this stuff. It's amazing. Now, what exactly are we gonna, what exactly are you gonna do with it? Nobody knows. 'Cause we can't predict the future. But we know we're gonna do stuff with it. Do we know what the toolkit is we're gonna do it with? No. So if you're building a strategic business asset, you're saving all this data, you spend all this money, you save all the data. Do you know what's the only thing that matters? Openness. You gotta be able to get at it and use it. Do I wanna put it in a box that's all closed? No. So I took my tiny little differentiator, made it the only thing that mattered. This is what we're trying to do in a good story. So that story really works, because Oracle can't tell it. In fact, nobody can tell it except us. Anyways, that's the end, man. There's five random things here they are. Teacher prospects that tell the truth. The value of your best differentiators aren't obvious. Don't overthink your market categories. It actually will kill you. Go to market strategy first, positioning second, and you might have to get your CEO on board with that. And a really great story is not just a great story. It's a great story only you can tell. And that's it. I'm gonna take questions. But before I take the questions, I have a little announcement. Oh, you get it first. I've actually not announced this at all to anybody, mainly because I'm so lazy. I don't even do social media anymore. It's so bad. She said the other night, she said, "I haven't done marketing like a year." That's true. It's true. Yeah, so it's funny, 'cause this QR code will take you to sign up to my newsletter, which I have sent out a newsletter in like six months. I don't know. But I'm going back to this book, because there's a bunch of stuff that I know now that I didn't know then in 2019. I'm going back to this book and I'm gonna add some of this stuff. The other thing I'm gonna do is a lot of people, and you might be one of these people, a lot of people read this book and then they send me an email and they said, "On page 136, you said this thing." And I'm like, "No, I said that, but he didn't mean that. What he meant was this other thing, read my mind." And so I'm gonna about fix that too. And so I'm doing a updated and expanded, obviously awesome, is coming in February. And I will send out a notice to my email lists, once a year I do that. And I'll do that before this thing comes out. So if you want to be reminded, don't worry, I'm not gonna fill up your inbox. (audience laughs) - Yeah, take a picture of that. Get on April's, I'll give you a minute to do that. - Get on it. No, I might start writing. - We'll save your applause for the end. Let's do questions for April, yeah. - No, but applause, no. - No, you want to do applause. No, it's like, all right, well, you can do both. (audience applauds) Now I'm always torn when to do it, because I feel like sometimes you wait, like you do a big one early and then Q&A and it's less, and I want the one big one, so it's pretty good. - And then you're like, "Want, want." - Yeah, we'll get you two, we'll get you two. - And you can ask me a question about anything, it doesn't have to be the five things. - Hey, April, so I've always been a huge advocate for positioning and kind of the problem I've run into is heavy in advertising, working with clients, getting their subject matter experts, the executives, and people to lean in and just be more involved in that process, it always seems like it's getting pushed off, like, just do your job, just run the ads, and I don't understand, I feel like a crazy person when I ask, what makes you different and better, and it's like-- - And they can't really answer the question. - So, I know this is hard and it takes time and it's intensive, and my question would be like, what would you recommend as an approach to get those individuals more bought into the value of positioning? - So it's hard for you if you're on the advertising side, really focused on marketing, but what I've found is nobody gives a shit about positioning until it impacts sales. So if I got hired as the vice president of marketing, I would go in and hang out with sales for the first couple of weeks, and then I would listen for where things are going off the rails in sales. So bad positioning on a sales call looks like this, right? Prospect gets on, we got a whole pitch, whatever. Sales person is talking about their stuff, and the customer is making this face, like, and then you get to slide number four or something and they're like, wait, what, dude, back up, back up. Go back to the beginning, what are you? Again, so there's this kind of like, we don't even know what it is. And we don't get to second call with those customers if we don't get the light to come on, right? So we lose them to no decision, all the stuff we were talking about before, like now's not a good time or whatever, but a lot of times it's just, we all don't even know what the heck this thing is. I couldn't even figure out how to put you in a bucket. Like, second thing on a sales call you'll get is like, oh, I get what you are, you're just like Salesforce, and then we're like, oh, let's go back to the beginning, no, we're not Salesforce, you know? So they get what we are, but they're comparing us the wrong way, or they'll say, I get what you do, I just don't get why we would pay for that. So they don't get the value of it. And so if I see that in sales, then I can take the vice president of sales and go for lunch and say, I'm hearing this, that's killing us in pipeline. Like, are you hearing that? And nine times out of 10, if it's actually a problem and the VP sales is, oh yeah, it's terrible, oh my God. Like, it takes us three calls before the light goes on or whatever, whatever. And I'm like, okay, dude, this is a positioning problem. Here's what positioning is, they don't know. Sales doesn't know anything about positioning. So like, here's what it is. Here's how we're gonna fix it, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, great, we can fix that, that'd be great. Then I go to the CEO and I say, we're getting killed over in sales. He says, I don't know, what does John Sales say about that? I'm like, I don't know either, man, let's call him. I already got John, I got John in my pocket. Then he calls John and John says, John says, yeah, I've been thinking about this for a while. Think it's positioning. And then we go do the positioning thing. But I could never convince the CEO if it was just a little marketing thing. Now I'm in B2B, mainly an enterprise software. So sales is king in those companies. And so I had to convince them that there was massive sales loss happening because our positioning was smooshy, so we'd have to fix it. And I'll tell you, some companies are gonna have a positioning problem and you just can't talk them into that. And you are never gonna be able to do great marketing on top of weak positioning. You gotta walk from those clients. - So you mentioned, nobody gives a shit about sales or nobody gives a shit about, you work back to positioning from a sales problem. - Yeah, but the root cause of the sales problem is weak positioning. If it's like sometimes we have a sales problem where there's all kinds of other sales problems. Sometimes you got sales person, it's just a jerk. And you're like, we should fire that person. That would be a good way to fix that. So not all sales problems, but if you hear those things, like we don't get what you are, we don't know who to compare you to. We don't get the value. Those are positioning things. And so if I hear that, then I convince sales to be on board to do the repositioning, then I can get the seat. - That's the reason Dave didn't invite them. This is cause some of them are jerks. And your number, point number four is to get the go-to-market strategy solved before the positioning. So if the CEO says something's wrong with sales, we realize it's a positioning problem. Then I have to go back and convince them, okay, actually we need to solve this go-to-market strategy problem. And they go, well, I don't want to solve that now. I want you to do the positioning. You want to write a book about that for us? When it comes to solving the go-to-market strategy problem, do you have advice? - So here's my advice on the go-to-market strategy problem. Most of the time it hasn't been tackled cause no one's asked the question. Like most of the time, if you just sit down and say, like it seems to me, like sometimes you'll see in the sales data, right? It seems to me like everyone buys this first and then they buy the other things. Is there some reason why we're not just having this as the lead product and everything's cross-sell upsell? Most of the time the CEO's not really thought about that. And they're like, ah, yeah. So, you know, bringing it up sometimes actually solves the problem. Or there's this thing of like, okay, we got company positioning, we got product positioning. How are we actually gonna manage between those two things? We have to solve this first or that first. Like, dude, we're gonna do positioning. That's great, but there's more than one thing to position here. And a lot of times they haven't thought about that. Especially CEOs that are venture-backed company because the only pitches they're doing are pitching to investors. And that's a totally different pitch. And it's about the whole thing and the big all singing, all dancing thing we're gonna be in 10 years that has nothing to do with the reality of where we're out in the ground right now. So, a lot of these things they haven't thought about 'cause they don't know a lot about positioning, haven't really thought about it. So, good smart marketer just show up and ask a dumb question. Like, hey, maybe it's a dumb question, but kind of seems like, and it helps if you give them an example. So, I've had lots of CEOs where I give the Salesforce example and then they're like, oh, shit, that's actually exactly us. But they kind of gotta hear an example before light comes on and they do it. But we're gonna have a chapter on this in the new book. Not a whole book, but, you know. - Hi, so my company doesn't have a sales team, but we're a multi-product enterprise software company. - So, is it all product like growth? It's all zero touch? - I'm sorry? - You sell through the channel or is it all zero touch sales, how do you sell? - It's all through word of mouth through our existing customers. - But they just come on and sign up. They don't talk to a salesperson. - No, so they just sign up. So, when we're having these conversations with our CEO, where do we even look? If we can't look at a salesperson? - And this is why I don't work with companies like you. (audience laughing) But here's the reality of my process is this process was designed with the assumption that I have a human being that talks to a customer when they're in the purchase process. So they know, your salespeople know who are they getting compared to. They know, not perfect, but they know a little bit about how customers make a decision. If your pure product grows, zero touch sales model, that information exists, but you're gonna have to do customer research to go get it. And so you gotta do that first. And so because I don't do customer research and I don't wanna do customer research, companies like you call me. I say, I got a friend of mine who does customer research. You should call her. Georgiana Loudish, very good. But yeah, and it's just 'cause I don't do that work. I don't specialize in that. So I only do the ones that have sales teams. But it's the reality of it. The reality of it, even the first step, which is if you didn't exist, what would a customer do? You don't know. You are just guessing. And there'll be lots of theories about it internally, but everybody's opinion counts the same. And nobody cares about marketing's opinion, right? So the CEO has an opinion, whoever product has an opinion, but you don't know unless you actually go and get the data. And then that kind of customer research is actually hard to do. And you need to be careful how you do it. Because what people wanna do is they wanna do the customer research where you go in and you say, "What do you love about our product?" And they'll tell you a bunch of things. But that is not necessarily, and often, not the reason they picked you over the alternatives. Like they'll say, "You know what I love? "I love you. "Easy you. "I love your customer support." Oh my God, I called them. They're amazing. They call me right back. But they had no exposure to your customer support before they actually signed up and everything else. So what made them sign up? And so what you have to do looks more like a jobs to be done interview. You wanna say, "Take me back. "Take me back to what were you doing before? "What made you wake up in the morning "and decided you couldn't keep doing it that way? "What did jobs people call it the struggling moment? "What was the struggling moment?" Then you had that struggling moment and then what did you do? How'd you make a short list? What were your criteria for making a short list? How did we end up on the short list? How'd you find out about us? How'd you find out about the other guys? When you know all this stuff. And then, okay, then it's like, okay, you picked us. Why'd you pick us? And here's a really good question to ask. Why not the other guys? 'Cause often you won the deal 'cause the other guys messed up. The other guys didn't have some other thing. And so you didn't actually win it. They lost it and then you won. But it's good to know. And then you asked them the question, okay, you went through all of that. You bought us. Was there anything surprising, positive or negative? Which means if it's a negative surprise, it means something in our positioning set you up to make you think that we could do this thing. And then you've got into it and whoops, if it's a positive surprise, then it's something we should pull into the positioning because they should have known about it beforehand and we shouldn't be living the good stuff till after they purchased. But that research is gonna have to get done. My stuff assumes that I can do the cheat code for doing that research is product interacts with customers, marketing team interacts with customers, sales interacts with customers. We know a lot about what customers do. That information is not equally distributed amongst the teams. But if I can get the teams together and have product, marketing, sales, CEO all sitting in the same room, I can run them through this process and we can get there. But if I don't have a sales team, all bets are off. I gotta go do customer research. I don't want to do that. So call my friends or again, yeah. - All right, let's do a warm one. Give it up for April. (upbeat music) - Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you liked this episode, you know what? I'm not even gonna ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit five. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website exit5.com. Our mission at exit five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit five. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers, building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group. Or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk-free. And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out, learn more, exit5.com, and I will see you over there in the community. (upbeat music) This episode is brought to you by our friends at Customer I/O. Remember when a personalized message in marketing meant just putting someone's first name into the email? And that was magic, hello David or hello Gerhardt or whatever fake name I put into the form. Well, those days are long gone. 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