Podcast

How to Effectively Position Your B2B Brand With April Dunford

As a B2B brand leader, you know that clear, compelling market positioning is everything. If you can land your product in the mind of your prospect with precision, then you stand a fighting chance in even the most crowded markets.

But let’s face it: getting your positioning right is hard—because if you can’t explain what makes you different, then you risk becoming just another option that gets ignored.

Today, you’ll meet April Dunford, a startup exec turned positioning powerhouse.

She’s helped over 200 B2B companies sharpen their message, launch winning products, and drive billions in acquisitions. April unpacks the proven frameworks behind her bestsellers Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch to help you craft positioning that sells.

Whether you’re scaling a growth-stage startup or leading a legacy tech brand, you’ll leave this episode with the tools to own your space in the market—and tell your brand story in a way only you can.

What’s In It For You:

Customer feedback is crucial for successful product repositioning.
Repositioning can turn a failing product into a success.
Understanding the status quo is key to effective positioning.
Cross-functional collaboration is essential for positioning success.
Tech founders often struggle to see alternative positioning.
Positioning needs to address the actual customer pain points.
Validating communication is crucial for effective storytelling.
Understanding customer aspirations is key to positioning.
Positioning challenges differ between startups and established companies.
Identifying patterns in customer feedback is vital for refining strategies.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Brand Alignment
02:59 The Importance of Truth in Branding
06:08 Identifying Brand Misalignment
09:01 Case Study: Santa’s Wonderland Transformation
11:56 The Disconnect in Customer Experience
15:13 B2B Branding Challenges
18:02 Real-World Examples of Brand Misalignment
21:00 Listening to the Market for Brand Success
23:54 The Role of Pride in Brand Alignment
31:29 The Value of Honest Feedback
32:47 Unveiling Brand Insights through AI
34:13 The Power of Brand Assessment
39:25 Emotional Promises and Brand Identity
42:34 Democratizing Branding for Small Businesses
46:30 The Importance of External Perspectives
49:23 Mapping the Journey from As-Is to To-Be
51:29 The Depth of Brand Experience
58:29 Delivering Value Without Excuses

Transcript of Show

Park Howell: Good morning, April. Welcome to the show.

April Dunford: It’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Park: Well, my good friend Sean Schroeder, who I’ve been working with on our story cycle, Jeanie said, boy, you’ve gotta track down April and see if she would come in and talk about her expertise and brand positioning.

So I’m just delighted that you’re here. That’s awesome. Well, good. And I love the fact I was looking through your bio work and whatever, and I love superlatives. I mean, I once had a client say, park, you’re like the most industrious storyteller I know. So I took that uh, and I said, yeah, I’m gonna run with that.

And I liked yours when it’s like the world’s leading B2B business positioning expert. Yeah.

April: It’s a biggie, but I’ll tell you, um, what I, the work I do is actually quite narrowly focused. Like I only work with tech companies. Mm-hmm. I only work with B2B Tech companies specifically, so I don’t do any consumer. I, I don’t even, I don’t even work with a B2B tech company that doesn’t have a sales team.

Like if you’re selling a hundred dollars thing off the website, but you happen to be selling it to businesses, that’s outside of my wheelhouse too. So it’s actually quite narrow. And I’ve been doing this for about 10 years, and in that 10 years I’ve worked with. 300 odd companies. So, so I do feel like I’ve done more of this in my tiny box.

The box is tiny, but in my tiny box, I rule the tiny box. Well,

Park: well, but doesn’t that make sense from a brand positioning expert that you’ve got? That’s right. A niche it down and And design a category, own a category with your particular niche.

April: Well, that’s it. I mean, you know, it would be kind of funny if I didn’t know how to position myself.

So, so I, I would, yeah. Then you probably shouldn’t be hiring me if that was the truth.

Park: Well, I’ve been in the branding marketing world for, you know, 40 years in April. I worked for small agencies and I’ve done literally everything in the advertising world. And I really found my niche was about brand story creation.

It’s the thing, you taking something complex and simplifying it so people get it, of course, positioning’s a big part of that. So it’s not a surprise that you have found yourself as this expert. Can you give us a little bit of a backstory? Because I imagine you didn’t wake up as a young lady and say, I’m gonna be a positioning expert.

April: In university, I studied systems design engineering. I decided I was gonna go into tech, but, um, I didn’t think I’d, I didn’t even think I’d end up over on the marketing side of the house, but it’s kind of how it worked out. So when I graduated, um, I got a job at a startup, and this was a long time ago, like startups weren’t cool.

We didn’t even call them startups back then. We called it a small tech company, is what we called it. Um, and the job that I had, it was product marketing, which is, you know, te you know, back then, sometimes that would be a marketing job, but generally not. Mm-hmm. And the requirements for this job was, you know, we were selling a database, so we’re selling a kind of a techie thing to fairly technical people.

So the requirements for this job is you needed to be unafraid of public speaking. And I ticked that box and you also needed to be able to write an SQL query and I could do that. So then my friend worked there and so she got me the job and then, um, and then that company, so. The, I got assigned to market a product or be the product marketer for a product.

So a lot of what I was doing was supporting the sales team anyways, we had a product that, um, WA was unsuccessful, let’s call it that way, like it was a bit of a dog. It never sold well when we launched it and what we ended up doing was repositioning it. I didn’t know that’s what we were doing. Uh, nobody called it that.

I don’t think anybody understood that’s what we were doing, but we were gonna end of life the product. And we thought we would mess around with it a little bit and see, well, maybe, you know, maybe we could talk about it in a different way. Maybe we could aim it at a different kind of customer. Maybe we could sell it in a different way.

And so we repositioned it and that product took off. Became quite successful. We got acquired by a big, big database company in California. Um, and then after the acquisition, my boss was the rich guy then. So he quit. And, and they made me the vice president of marketing, which is hysterical because like, I can’t even spell marketing at this point.

And, and then they transferred every crummy product they had in the company over to me and said, can you fix these two? I was like, oh man, I don’t even know how we fixed the first one. And so I embarked on this kind of years long journey, uh, to figure this out. So, you know, I had coffee meetings with a lot of smart marketing people.

I, it was working for a big company, so they had a training budget. So I did a little post postgrad marketing work, uh, took some courses, read a lot of books, and, um, and, and discovered this thing that I had done was called positioning. Um, and, and you know, and so that kind of started my interest in this stuff.

Like, and in particular, I’ve always been really interested in how do we actually get it done? In my context, which is, you know, I’m selling a big ticket, complicated technical product to very smart, educated people in markets that are extraordinarily crowded. And so how do we position something so that it actually wins in the market?

So, yes, so that’s how I ended up here. It was a weird side detour,

Park: But here we are on that first go at it, where you needed to reframe, reposition that product. Do you feel like you got lucky or do you think it was an intuition? There’s something that you innately understood and didn’t realize it? It was

April: Definitely not intuition, let me tell you that.

There was obviously a bit of luck, but mainly how we did it was customer feedback. So we had a, we had a product, we had sold a hundred of them. Uh, and because we thought we were gonna, and what kind of product…

Park: What was it?

April: The original positioning on this product was, we thought what it was was a, was a spreadsheet on steroids.

So this is a hopped up spreadsheet where you could do database things with it. So you could write a SQL query in the spreadsheet and do things like an in and outer join on a table and all this cool database stuff. Nothing more sexy

Park: Then a supercharged database spreadsheet. It was an

April: Awesome spreadsheet thing.

And so we had, we, now we had another product that sold a lot that was a compiler. So we were selling, we already had a product, we were selling to techy people. So we had gone and talked to these people and said, Hey, would you like a spreadsheet with. SQL query stuff and everyone said, yes, we would love that.

And then we, you know, so we built it and, and, and we sold a hundred at a hundred dollars each. Woo woo. So this is nothing, this wouldn’t even pay for one developer. And we had five developers working on the thing. So this is an absolute failure. And so, you know, we expected to sell like a hundred thousand of them.

And we, you know, we sold a hundred. So everybody was disappointed. And, and so they gave me the job ’cause I’m the new gal. They said, look, here’s the customer list. Call everybody and find out how disappointed they’re gonna be when we turn the thing off. And I said, okay, so first of all, I’m calling developers.

Like, do you know how much developers like to talk on the phone? Not at, they don’t answer at answer, not at all. They don’t answer the phone. They don’t wanna talk to me. So I’m calling, nobody’s calling me back. It was very depressing. I’m sending them emails where I have email addresses, I’m sending them emails, but they’re not responding to my emails.

And I finally got a bunch of them to talk to me, and I used a full on damsel and distress line. Like I would leave them this, the world’s most pathetic email and say, look, I’m brand new here and they’re gonna fire me if you don’t call me and talk to me for five minutes. And that actually worked. And then I talked to, I talked to, uh, almost a hundred of them.

I said, “Hey, what you doing with this product? And they would, and, and so, so we had this thing, I forget what we originally called it. We changed the name at some point when we repositioned it. But I said, Hey, uh, you bought this thing, I just call in to see what you’re doing with it.”

And they said, “No, I didn’t buy that.”

And I’m like, well, yeah, you did. Actually, I’ve got the record of it here. Like, you know, on this date you bought this thing, you know, it’s a spreadsheet. It does SQL, and they go, oh, that thing. Yeah, it sounded cool. We, you know, we bought it, we messed around with it a little bit, but, you know, and then we, then we stopped juicing it.

Mm-hmm. And I’m like, okay, not gonna be sad when we turn it on. I’ll put you in that bucket. And so I did like 20 calls like this, and, and 20 pe 20 people that didn’t even remember they bought it. So I’m like, okay, this product is terrible. We’re gonna shut it off. No one’s gonna cry. But then I did call 21, call 21, very different.

So I get on the call and I’m like, Hey, uh, I’m calling you from Wacom, you know, we sold you this thing. And the guy says, “Oh, I love you guys. You guys got me a promotion. Like, this is the best product ever.” And I was like, “Really?” And then he gave me this big story about what he was using it for. And it was interesting.

So this was, you know, 20 years ago, and it was in the early days of sales teams going out with a laptop. Mm-hmm. Before that sales team said no, they didn’t have a laptop. And these folks were selling a thing and they had a catalog of products that they sold. And the way it worked was they had an order system in the office and it was running on an Oracle database, and they could put in orders in the office, but they started giving the, the reps these laptops to go on the road.

But you couldn’t do an order on the road because, you know, the Oracle database didn’t work on the laptop. So what they did was took the order, they’d write it down in a Word document or something. Mm-hmm. Then they get back to the office and they would reenter it into the order system and they always forgot something or they got it wrong, or they made a mistake or whatever.

So what this guy did was he took our little, little spreadsheet. SQL spreadsheet thingy. And he wrote a little app on top of that. And what they could do was put in the order, and then when they got to the office, they plugged the laptop in and it could sync with the big Oracle database because it had that SQL stuff going.

Mm-hmm. So he tells me this big story and I’m like, wow, that’s great. You know, and I’m like, oh man, he’s gonna be sad when I tell him we’re shutting it off. But anyways, I didn’t tell him, and so I just put him down in the, you know, weird people that like our stuff box. And so far there was only one person in there, but I, so I did 20 more calls, 20 more people didn’t know.

And so in the end I did a hundred, but then I got another one. And and the guy says, oh, I love it. It’s amazing you guys made me a rock star in the office. And I said, well, what are you doing with it? And he said, well, we got these field service people and they have these ruggedized tablets and they gotta do field service stuff, but the big database is back in the office.

So now they can actually do it on the ruggedized tablet. ’cause we wrote a little application and then you can come back and plug it in and it’s so cool you guys have that SQL thing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, oh man, here’s another one. So I put ’em in the, so I did a hundred calls and I had like four or five of these folks.

So then I had to have the meeting with the execs and I’m like, good news, bad news situation here. People, right? The good news is 92% of the customer base is not gonna care when you shut this thing off. But let me tell you, there’s 5% out there that is gonna baw their eyes out because they really love this thing ’cause they’re doing this thing.

So then we had a big conversation about it and said, alright, like. What if we positioned it for that? Now think about this. Think about it. This isn’t just changing the pretty words in the marketing copy. So now I’m gonna sell this thing as essentially an embeddable database for mobile devices. How would I sell an embeddable database for mobile devices?

Well, I come in and sell your whole sales team. I’m not selling you onesie, twosie off the website. I’m gonna come in and sell you a hundred of these, or maybe a thousand of these all at once. And so I’m gonna need a salesperson to do that. I’m gonna need to change my pricing. I’m gonna need the whole go to market on this thing has to change.

And so the, the, this company, the cool thing they did was they looked at that and said, well, let’s try it out. And so we hired one sales rep. Repositioned the thing must around with the pricing a little bit. Um, we added a couple little features to make it work better in that situation and then let the rep go do it.

And at the end of the first month, he’d sold 3000 of these things. Wow. And we’re like, oh man, this is good.

Park: You’re onto something here.

April: Yeah. So then we hired a whole bunch of sales rep. Then next thing you know, revenue’s going up to the right and then we get acquired by this big, big database company.

So we were not kind of, you know, trying to come up with the magical creative copy that was gonna sell this thing. It wasn’t like that at all. It was looking at this surprising way that customers were getting value out of this thing and then saying, well, can we position around that? Mm-hmm. Could we do that?

And I’ll tell you the rest, when, when. So later they made me the vice president, they gimme all these products and a lot of these products, you couldn’t actually get that information from the customers. You know, like you talked to a lot of customers, but it was hard to see the pattern. Mm-hmm. So I got kind of obsessed with the idea, like how could we have positioned it better in the first place?

Like could we have figured this out without having the pain a failure first? Yeah. And that’s what I started to get really obsessed about.

Park: And that’s what you do now. And I think it’s so interesting that you found that 5% of your customers, those initial 100, really got it found. It gave you that positioning that you needed.

But isn’t that so true though, quite often when you’re rolling something out and you’re beta testing it and you’re, you think it’s gonna do one thing that everybody wants, and then you start asking your beta testers and it turns out no, it’s actually this thing that they want.

April: Yeah. I mean, sometimes you do get that, but man, you really don’t wanna be relying on that.

Yeah. Because you’re basically relying on your customers to tell you what you are. Mm-hmm. And, and if we’re in tech and we’ve invested, I don’t know, $10 million of building this thing in the first place, and then we find out it’s something else, and oh, by the way, that’s something else isn’t particularly business viable.

Park: Mm-hmm.

April: Like, that’s not good. Yeah. So, so it is true that, that, you know, so after that experience, I was involved in a lot of product launches. Um, and you know, a better way to do it, I think is to figure out what, like, to be very deliberate in your positioning thesis. To sit down and say, well, okay, so who do we think we’re gonna get compared to?

And what do we have that’s different from that? And so therefore, what’s the business value we can deliver to a customer that no one else can? And then how do we put a box around, these are the kind of customers that are really gonna love that and therefore this is the market we’re gonna win. If we had done that for this first product, you know, we would’ve said, okay, well who are we gonna get compared to?

Well, we’re probably gonna get compared to spreadsheets, other spreadsheets. And then we’d say, well, what if we got that the other spreadsheets don’t have, well, we have this SQL thing. And then we would’ve asked ourselves the question. Well, so what? Like what’s so cool about the SQL thing? Well, the main cool thing about it is it’s interoperable with other SQL databases.

And if we’d really sat down and thought about that, we’d have said, well, hey. That means there’s a whole bunch of things that you could do with this, and you could make it the little database that lives outside of the main database, but syncs up with it. Mm-hmm. And we would’ve landed on this embeddable database for mobile devices, but because we never sat down and did that, we went and talked to customers and said, Hey, do you want this?

And they said, yeah. And that was good enough for us. We didn’t get too deep into, well, what would you do with it? They just thought it sounded cool. Mm-hmm. So, and, and the first, you know, couple hundred folks that bought us, that’s why they bought it. It sounded cool. Hey, that’d be cool. We can do like prototype applications on it or whatever, and they messed around with it and went, eh, nah.

It really doesn’t do anything. It

Park: really well, I think even though you focus in the B2B world and positioning that all listeners, whether they’re B2B or B2C or whatever, can certainly learn from, especially in the tech world, because you are dealing with so much noise, so much competition out there. What are two or three of the biggest mistakes people make when they haven’t positioned or they first start thinking about positioning?

April: Yeah, there’s a handful, like in tech, the, the biggest mistake that people make is they think that there’s only one way this product could be positioned. So a lot of times what you’ll get is. Um, the founder of the company gets an idea for a new product and it comes from their own pain, right? So they’re working, you know, they’re a tech person working in a manufacturing plant and they say, man, the way our ERP system does this is terrible, I’m gonna make better ERP.

Or, you know, they’re using their email and they’re like, you know what sucks, email sucks. It’s terrible. I’m gonna make better email or whatever. And then they go and they make it right? And then they, you know, they’ll get a first version out and customers will say, well, I like this part and I don’t like this part, and whatever.

And so they’ll add a bunch of new features and then the customer will say, I like this and I don’t like this. And then if I fast forward a couple years, I’ve got this thing and I still think of it as email. ’cause you know, I, that, that was my original idea. I make it better, the world’s best email. But customers are looking at it and they’re like.

Yeah, but isn’t it really more like chat this thing that you got now, like, what’s it, what, like, doesn’t that, and so, but you, but we, we are so close to it, we can’t see it. Mm-hmm. And so, so that’s the first one is this trap of thinking, well, there’s only one way. Like we’re email. What else could we be like, you know, like I worked at a company where, you know, it was founded by two guys who were, you know, database people.

They had PhDs and database stuff and you know, and we had launched this thing as a database, but later we ended up repositioning it as data warehouse for machine generated data. And, and that was, it was hard for the people internally because they were like, we are database people making a database. Like it was really wrapped up in their identity as people, not even just a company.

Um. But it was clear, like the minute we did that shift in positioning, customers were like, oh, that, oh, shoot, that makes a whole lot more sense. Mm-hmm. Now we know what you are. Now we know who we should be comparing you to. Now we know what the value is. Um, so that’s a mistake. Number one, is that it’s thinking that there’s no other way.

And,

Park: and I suppose that is when you roll it out and you have to really listen to your users, your customers, and they go, yeah, you think it’s this, but it’s actually really that.

April: Well, normally in tech, I’ll tell you, your customers aren’t gonna tell you that. Mm-hmm.

Park: Because

April: they’re not experts in the market.

They’re customers are experts in pain, they’re experts in their own situation. They’re not experts in solutions. So they’re not gonna come to you and say, oh, that’s not a robot. That’s an autonomous vehicle for industrial uses. I. They don’t know what that is. They, they’re not sitting around thinking about this.

But you as the vendor you are, that’s your job. It’s your job to know what the adjacent market categories are. It’s your job to know what this stuff is like. You sometimes get very, very, very lucky and a very well educated customer might come and say, Hey, you know what? That’s actually a warehouse and not a database.

Why are you calling it that? But nine times outta 10, you just fail. You fail. ’cause you’re a crappy database that can’t win in the mar, in the database market. And that’s it. And everyone votes with their feet and they buy something else. Like this idea that we’re gonna get lucky and the customer’s gonna come tell us what the best market category is.

I, I don’t think we could bank on that. Mm-hmm. Now we can get feedback from existing customers about how it’s, how it’s working in terms of solving their problem. We can get that right, because they’re experts on problems. So they can say, well, yeah, no, we don’t use that. Or they might say, you know what? If, like, if you asked them, look, if we didn’t exist, what would you do?

Sometimes you get an interesting answer to that question, right? Like they might say, oh, well if you didn’t exist, I’d buy a warehouse. Oh, that’s different. Or If you didn’t exist, I’d probably just take my spreadsheet and plug it into this thing and do this other thing. Oh, so this, this is actually the second biggest mistake that people make.

Customer or tech companies often make the mistake of not really understanding who their actual competitors are. And so great positioning I think, starts with that. So I will very often get call from little company and they’ll say. Okay, we got this thing. It’s amazing. You know, they’ll tell me about it and I’ll say, well, who do you compete with?

And they’ll say, oh, there’s a lot of competitors. And they’ll gimme the big long list. Little bunch of little guys I never heard of, you know? And I’ll be like, okay, never heard of any of those guys, but, okay. And I say, so, you know, uh, so how do you like when you know, when you, when you’re out there, like, do these guys beat you in deals?

All these little guys? And they’ll say, no, that we win every time against these guys. And I’m like, Hmm, how do you win? They say, oh, ease of use. If you look at all of them, it’s click it, click, click, click takes 19 clicks to do a thing. But if you use ours, it only takes two clicks. So all our positioning is around ease of use.

Buy us, ’cause it’s more streamlined, easy to use, get it done fast. And I’m like, okay. And then I said, well, you ever lose those guys? No, never. I’m like, well, you don’t win every single deal. Like you’re a little weak company. You don’t win every single deal. So when a customer, when you lose, what happens? And they say, oh, we don’t lose to those guys.

We just lose to no decision. Ah, no decision. Um, so, but the customer still has the problem. So how are they solving it? They say, oh, they’re just using a spreadsheet, or they’re hiring an intern to do it. Ah, ah, so your real competition is the intern and you are positioned around ease of use. Do you know what’s really easy to use?

The intern is very easy to use, right? You say, Hey, Joey, get me a coffee. Go out there, fill out the spreadsheet when you come back, you know, like, like you’re never gonna win against the intern on ease of use. But the intern is bad at a whole bunch of stuff like the intern. Makes mistakes. The intern quits on you.

The intern doesn’t know the whole history of every interaction that you’ve ever had with this particular client. Like there’s all kinds of things that software can do that the intern can’t do. So, but step number one is recognizing that you compete with the intern and not these 19 little things that frankly, your customers have never heard, heard about them.

They’re not putting them on the short list. All they’re doing is saying, should we stop using the intern to use you? Mm-hmm. And so your positioning needs to answer that question, why me versus the intern?

Park: Isn’t that interesting? Because I could see exactly why that would work. We’re so caught up in the business and our product, right?

And we’re looking at the competitor. We don’t take a deep breath, pump the brakes, and look around and say, well, wait a minute. What is the actual human dynamic going on here? Right. And you’re competing with an intern. That’s, that’s very interesting.

April: Well, often in tech, this is often true, like in, in tech, we often have two categories of competitors.

So we have whatever the status quo is, like customer, this is a new problem, customer’s got the problem and they’re solving it. Right now, they’re just solving it with, with, you know, bandaids and binder twine. Mm-hmm. Like they’ve got spreadsheets and junky old legacy stuff that was never meant to do that.

And their IT guys are writing custom code to like, you know, bubble gum, the whole thing together. And it’s terrible, but it does the job. Right. And so, so you gotta but change into something else. It’s effort. And so you gotta beat that. You gotta beat the status quo. You gotta say, why is this worth the effort to actually change and do something different?

But when the customer does decide they’re gonna change, I mean, anybody good is gonna say, well, I’m not just gonna go with you ’cause you’re the first guy that called me. I’m gonna look at it, make a short list, and I’m gonna go through an actual purchase process. So not only do you have to build, you have to beat status quo, but you gotta beat whoever lands on the short list.

But. You know, if there’s a competitor out there that you Googled them and you looked at their homepage, they look like they’re just like you and they sound just like you, but they never end up on a customer shortlist. Guess what? They’re not your competition. They’re a ghost. You don’t have to compete against a ghost.

I don’t have to position against that. I don’t know why they’re not showing up in deals. It doesn’t matter. And if at some point in the future they do show up in deals, well then I can adjust my positioning to compensate for that later. But if they’re not showing up on a, on a short list, I don’t have to worry about it.

Mm-hmm. So if we’re the starting point on this, on a good positioning exercise when we’re in tech is do we really understand what the status quo is that we’re replacing? And do we really understand who lands on a short list and a typical customer against us? That’s our stake in the ground. That’s the answer to the question, what do I have to position against or put another way?

What do I have to beat in order to get a deal?

Park: Mm-hmm. That’s fascinating. Do you have a third one? We were talking about the top three problems. Yeah. Do I have a third

April: one? Um, let me see. Well, okay, here’s the third one. This may be controversial, but um, and, and this is probably not true in a lot of different industries, but it is absolutely true in tech, is we cannot do positioning as a little project in the marketing department.

If we do that, it will fail. And, and I learned this the hard way from trying to do it as a little project in the marketing department, right? And here’s what happens when you do that. You’ll have your genius positioning and then you will walk over to the sales team and say, this is how we’re positioning it now.

Here’s the story I would like you to tell, blah, blah, blah. And sales looks at that and says, yeah, no, don’t get it. Don’t believe in it. Don’t like it. I’m just gonna keep pitching it the way I pitch it now. And you’ll get the same thing over in product management. You’ll go over to product management and they’ll be like, no, disagree.

Disagree. This is not why we win. This is not how we win. Disagree and worst. The worst one is you have your founder. And your founder is not just talking to customers. Your founder’s talking to investors, your founder’s talking to all kinds of people, and they got a completely different point of view on this.

And you show up with your little marketing exercise. Here it is. And the founder’s like, no way. Don’t agree, no. And then, and then where you at? No place, that’s where you’re at. So trying to do this in marketing without getting buy-in from the founder and product management and sales is a waste of your time.

So if we’re gonna go fix this in a tech company, it needs to be a cross-functional exercise. I need to bring sales into the process. I particularly sales, but I need to have, if I’ve got a founder or a business unit leader that cares a lot about the way this thing is positioned, they gotta be part of the process too.

Because if they’re not the positioning, you know, you might come up with gorgeous positioning. It’s never gonna stick.

Park: Well, this is very timely for us, and I sent you the output of our story cycle Genie on your brand. Oh boy. And so, you know, we are that, that somewhat of that, of that tech founder too, taking my branding process that I’ve worked over the last 20 years and, you know, put it through an AI and we’ve got our own proprietary story cycle genie now.

And did you get a chance to take a look at what I sent you? I did not see anything from you. So, sorry. Oh, okay. Well, I’ll send it back over to you. Take a look at it. Yeah. But what I did April no, how did, how

April: did it go? Where did, what did? Tell me something. I don’t know about my own stuff. Let’s hear it.

Park: Well, and what it did is we went and just simply uploaded your website, gave it to your, oh, it’s just a website.

Most people don’t

April: find me from the website.

Park: No, but URL. And then I did, went to some of your book pages and so forth, just did some intel on who you are, gave it those URLs. And here’s the first, it first looks at it, and here’s the brand assessment. And it’s a, a very short paragraph. Let me read it to you and see Sure.

How it lands for you. Um, April Dunford positions herself as the world’s leading expert on product positioning for B2B Tech companies. With 25 plus years of experience as a marketing executive at successful startups, and having worked with 200 plus companies, she helps businesses clarify how they’re different and better than alternatives.

Her approach focuses on practical structured methodologies that align teams around positioning that makes products intuitively understood. By customers through workshops, consulting, speaking, and books. She transforms complex positioning challenges into clear, compelling narratives that accelerate sales.

All right. Did that capture you? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. For sure. Then it went on, and by the way, it ran it and it took about two minutes. And so then the next step is once it grabs your positioning, it says, okay, who are April’s top three audiences in order of priority, and what does each audience, what are their challenges, frustrations, fears, and aspirations?

So we won’t go through all three of ’em, but the first one it says is B2B Tech executives, CEOs, CMOs. CROs, that’s your number one audience. Yep. There are challenges articulating a clear, compelling story about why their product matters. Aligning leadership teams around a consistent positioning strategy, translating technical features into meaningful, uh, customer value, and standing out in increasingly, increasingly crowded competitive markets.

Sound like the challenges that you helped them overcome? I mean,

April: all this stuff is, is in actual copy on my website, so yeah.

Park: So it’s pulling it and it’s bringing it together and what the Genie does is gives you a reflection of how you’re showing up in the world. And then, um, what I’ve heard, I’ve taken about 70 brands through it now during our beta.

It get does three major things for you. It helps validate. You know, the communication and how you’re telling your story, it shows you the gaps in how you’re telling your story in that if it’s not coming up with something that you know should be there, means it’s probably not prominent or maybe doesn’t exist at all in your marketing materials.

And then the final thing is it gives you fresh, um, inspiring ways to talk about your brand that maybe you hadn’t considered before. So these firsts, these challenges, fears, frustrations, aspirations, these are gonna be the story leverage points that you would use to speak with your customers. So they’re fears, losing market share to competitors with inferior products, but better positioning, missing growth targets and disappointing investors, making the wrong strategic bets on positioning and messaging, being perceived as just another commodity in their category, their frustrations, marketing messages that don’t resonate with target customers.

Sales teams telling inconsistent stories about the product. Wasting resources on ineffective marketing in initiatives and lengthy sales cycles due to poor market understanding. And then finally April, their aspirations, what is it they want? So we’ve talked about their pain points, but what do they ultimately want?

Building a category defining company that customers instantly understand, creating a clear, compelling story that the entire organization rallies behind accelerating sales cycles through intuitive positioning and commanding premium pricing based on differentiated value. Did it capture that fairly accurately?

This is, this

April: is the

Park: big sales pitch for your

April: product we’re getting here. Sure it

Park: is. Of course it is. Because I didn’t, I

April: didn’t realize that’s what I signed up for here. Alright, go ahead. No, he

Park: signed up for your brilliance, but what better person to, to bounce this off of than someone who knows his stuff inside and out?

Well, I

April: do think that, that I, that I’m a, I’m a, you know, like Maya, you know, I’m a positioning person, so it would be a bit surprising if what you got outta that. It didn’t look like, you know what, the way I thought I was positioning them, but, but you are, you are the unicorn. But I assume that, right? I would, I’m a weird one for this, right.

But I would assume if you’re, youre the top of the but point that at anybody else’s, like a typical company’s website, there’re gonna be a lot of stuff there that they’re surprised about.

Park: Yes, there actually absolutely is. And it wrote this unique value prop for you, and that is practical positioning that makes your unique value obvious.

April: Mm-hmm.

Park: Is that something that you say on your website or is that something It just kinda, yeah, like the name of my

April: book is called obviously. Awesome.

Park: Okay, so it’s placing, so it’s coming and giving you then that. Yeah. So it’s

April: coming from, yeah, that’s coming from my copy on my website. Yeah. Review. I’ll tell you how it’s interesting.

Like most folks, this is, it’s a thing that you get into sometimes with tech companies, like what is the job of the website? Um. Sometimes in, in big ticket B2B stuff, the job of the website is to clearly communicate the value, right? Why pick us over the other folks? Um, sometimes the job of the website is not quite that, like, so, so for example, sometimes what we have is, um, product-led growth motion.

So there’s a free product available on the website, and so the job of the website is to get people into that free product as quickly as possible. So you might have, let’s say two big value propositions that you really lean into that are really important that would convert. A trial customer, a paid customer, but you may not need to go deep into those two things to get a customer into the product.

And then the goal is once they’re in the product, then I’m gonna hit them with all my other stuff, or I’m gonna allow them to, to discover this stuff in my product that, that then converts them. Or similarly, sometimes what I have is I’m trying to get end users into the product, but the sales motion is actually nothing to do with end users.

So there’s a company that I work with called Postman. They have an extremely popular free tool, uh, to do API testing. Their paid thing that they make millions of dollars on, uh, has nothing. To do with API testing alone, it’s actually a platform for developing testing, deploying for everything, the full lifecycle of everything you wanna do in an API.

So if you were to analyze their website, you might be like, oh, I don’t know if this is good positioning or not, because the website is partially tuned to get you into this free thing. And then what they do is they look at who’s what. Companies are using a lot of the free thing, and then their sales teams are coming in way over top of the end users at a C level and saying.

You guys have APIs, you’re doing a reasonable investment in testing those APIs. There’s a lot of things that impact the quality of an API upstream and downstream from the API testing. What you actually need is a platform that manages the full thing, and that’s gonna help you deliver higher quality APIs and do it faster.

Now, you don’t necessarily get that story on the website because that is not their go-to market motion. Mm-hmm. So we have to be little careful on things like this that we understand what’s the job of the website and is the website doing its job well, that’s sometimes the human comes in will come to me and say, you know, if we don’t have a perfect representation of the positioning on the homepage, then we’ve done something wrong.

But I can think of a lot of examples where that’s not the job of the homepage actually. Mm-hmm. The job of the homepage is something slightly different. But anyways, this is this, this is like the positioning 5 0 1 conversation be versus I love though, versus the positioning 1 0 1 conversation. But in tech we have all these weird examples where y you know, the job isn’t exactly that.

Even if I think of my own website, and I’ve done some thinking about this, the majority of the folks that hit my website. Are all come to my website because they’ve read my book. They find out the book about the book, not on my website. They find out about the book, either word of mouth from other people that have read the book or other companies I’ve worked with or whatever.

Or they’ve seen me at a conference, but they don’t see me at a conference and go to my website. I don’t think that ever happens. I think they see me at a conference and they go, Hmm, that sounds interesting. I should buy that book. Mm-hmm. And then they read the book and then they don’t come to my website until they’re in a jam.

So they, right, they read the book and then they’re like, oh, we are in a jam. We should call that lady. And they don’t call just me, they call lots of other people too, but I get on the list, right? Because they read the book, whatever, and then they get to the website and then they talk. And so it’s my job doing a good job of that.

I don’t know, I don’t know. I, you know, I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it, but, but, but maybe I should spend more time worrying about it,

Park: to tell you the truth, or not worrying about it, but just paying, you know, maybe attention to it. And my question for you, April, is you work with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of companies, how often when you get a new engagement, you go and you look at their website to learn more about ’em.

And it’s unclear, it’s not concise. It speaks from the brand’s perspective, not the customer’s problem perspective. And you see that there are, because you’re a storyteller as well, you know, with your second book with sales pitch, um, that they’re just not sharing a good, clear, compelling story.

April: Well, so one thing.

I’ve learned from working with B2B Tech companies in particular is this isn’t like selling toothpaste. Like generally the companies I work with are, you know, selling hundreds of millions of dollars of a very specialized thing to a very specialized audience. And that audience isn’t me, like, I’m not a typical buyer.

And so generally I’m not in a great position to look at the website. So one, I need to understand the whole go to market motion to understand what the job of the website is. And then two, I need to understand like, well, who are the competitors and how are they trying to differentiate from the competitors?

And then who are the buyers and what do those buyers consider to be valuable or not valuable? What do those buyers understand or don’t understand? So for example, if I’m selling to a very technical CIO at a bank, I can use a bunch of technical terminology that I wouldn’t use if I was selling to the director of sales at, you know, a retail company.

And so just looking at the website, because I, I see this a lot with like inexperienced folks that are in marketing. They’ll say, oh my God, look at that website. It’s so terrible. It’s got all this jargon in it. You know, it’s, you should be writing so that your grandmother understands it. And I’m like, I don’t know.

If I’m not selling to grandmother’s, do I really have to be writing it so my grandmother understands it? So when companies call me, a lot of times they’ll ask me, they’ll say, what do you think of the website? And I’ll say, I don’t know enough. Yet. Mm-hmm. To evaluate your website. ’cause the, in order to really evaluate it, what I’d need to understand is, you know, one, what’s the job of the website?

And then two, who do you compete with? How do you, you know, what do you got that’s different? What is your differentiated value? Who’s the, the buyer, the champion in a deal to make one of these deals happen? And what do those people care about? And once you have all of that, then you can back up and look at the website and say, okay, no, this isn’t working.

Or Yeah, you know, this is actually kind of getting at it, but we could probably improve it. Um, so yeah. So I try not to, in the workshops side do, what we do is we assemble a cross-functional team and we work through this process. And I generally come in with a little bit of an inkling of where I think the positioning is, is weak and where I think it’s strong.

But I am very often surprised. I’m very often surprised that when we get to the value step of this, very often there’s information that comes out from folks on the team that you wouldn’t know unless you were in the trenches with this product, selling it every day to the kinds of customers they’re selling to.

And so I try to keep a kind of, you know, open mind about it as we’re working through the workshop, because I don’t think I’m qualified to go in and say, your positioning needs to look like this. I need to suck the deep expertise outta the team that has been working on it. And you know, if you have a sales team, I’ve got salespeople that have been in lockstep with a customer everywhere along a purchase process.

So they know a lot. They know what status quo is that they’re coming off. They know how they made the shortlist, why they made the shortlist. If they get chosen, they know why they get chosen. If they don’t, they know why they didn’t get chosen. Product management on the other end knows a lot about differentiation.

They know who the other customer, who the other products are in the market and what the differentiators are. And you know, we do it this way, but those guys do it this way, or we have this feature and those guys don’t have that feature. Marketing understands a lot about how to get a prospect’s attention in the research phase of a purchase process when a customer’s just trying to figure out what do they need to know, what do they not need to know what’s going on?

And then you’ve got the founder, CEO, which you know, usually has this kind of depth of understanding of, you know, the whole reason we built this thing in the first place, man was ’cause of this. And they’ve worked with a ton of customers, maybe not recently, but you know, they have a real point of view on this too.

So I gotta get all those people in the room, suck all that information outta them, and then I gotta have a process that allows us to build this positioning that kind of keeps everybody’s sort of opinions out of it, and we’re sticking to the facts of the situation.

Park: Mm-hmm.

April: So that’s kind of how I work with this stuff.

Park: No, I love it. And that works with big and small enterprises alike, right? So sometimes you’re in there working with big, vast sales teams and marketing teams, and I imagine other times you’re with a five person, quote unquote startup trying to help them get there.

April: Yeah. Most of the companies I work with now are, um, bigger.

Like when I started, I did a lot of small, small companies, but one of the things we have in, in, in tech products is that, you know, it. We start with a, we build a product with a positioning thesis, whether we’re conscious of it or not, right? So we built this product to be, you know, this thing in the market against these other products and this is how we thought it was gonna win.

And then we launch it. The first wave of customers in a B2B Tech product is really all about validating your thesis. Like, were you, right? Mm-hmm. Like, you know, we thought little quick serve restaurants, were gonna love our stuff. But then when we launched it, it turned out, you know, family style, sit down restaurants like our stuff more.

And so we felt more market pull there. So we’re gonna go explore that. Well, do we have the right product for that? And how would it work? And can we, can we reach those people? Can we do it at scale? How big is that market? Can we actually make our sales target if we just focused on that? All this stuff has gotta happen.

And so. In the early days of a tech company, again, it’s not like toothpaste, right? Where you just launch it and it either wins in the market or it doesn’t. And if it’s a failure, it’s a big old flop, right? In tech, we often adjust the positioning a lot in the early days of a product because we’re like, oh, well, you know, we were basically right, but you know, but it turned out this little thing we didn’t consider.

And so now we gotta, we gotta change for that. So I don’t think it, it, companies like that have a brand new thing in the market and haven’t been through that first wave of customers where you can really learn who loves our stuff and why. I think it’s too early to bring in a consultant and pay money to try to tighten up a thing that is probably gonna change in two weeks when you close two more deals and you learn something else.

Mm-hmm. And so most of the, so I generally disqualified little guys now, like if I don’t think they have enough traction in the market. Like, I’m like, look, like you don’t wanna pay someone to build a thesis. Like what you want is you, you, you just wanna go close 10 more deals. And then the positioning will either be obvious or it won’t, but you’ll at least be starting to see the patterns.

And if you can’t figure it out, come back to me. So most of the companies that I work with are in market. They’ve got a little bit of traction, like, and, and generally, you know, if they’re coming to me, it’s, it’s at a minimum, it’s a few million revenue. Um, and then, and then I would say right now I’m working more with companies that are like a hundred million, 200 million, 300 million revenue, sometimes really, really big, you know, a, a division inside a really, really big company like an IBM or a Google.

And, and the pro, the, the positioning problems are slightly different. They’re not trying to figure out the initial positioning at that point. They’ve got positioning that worked up to a point. But now we have new competitors in the market. Maybe we’ve come out with something that’s really new and different and we’re gonna have to adjust the positioning to account for that.

Maybe we’ve done an acquisition, maybe we’re thinking about doing an IPO and we wanna tell this maybe kind of bigger story. Like, so, you know, at a lot of times what I’ve got is a really big company. They’ve acquired three or four little things and smooshed them together into a business unit and said, okay, salespeople go sell this.

And the salespeople are like, I don’t know how these three things come together, man. Like, you tell me what that story should be. They all look different to me. Um, so we’re usually working on problems like that.

Park: Can a startup in doing their beta testing, uh, providing they have a large enough cohort in that beta test, get a good sense of their positioning for their product.

They think it’s one thing going into the beta, but then their customers are saying, no, actually it does that, that’s good. But I really like it for this.

April: Well, you gotta be a little bit careful, um, that you don’t start building a custom product for one customer. You know, that’s called, you know. Custom development, we don’t wanna do that.

So we’re trying to build a product that’s, you know, that we can sell to a whole market. So you’re right, we need to get enough signal and we might get some feedback. The customer will say, well, I would’ve bought that and if, if it had had X, Y, Z. But then you find out, well, they’re weird, you know, and they want X, Y, Z ’cause they’re weird, but there’s this whole other part of the market that doesn’t care about X, Y, Z, and we could sell to them all day.

So that’s what you’re trying to do, like you’re looking to validate this thesis. So if the thesis says. Well, the, the value is this, therefore these kind of customers should be really easy to close because, and then you get out there and you find like they’re actually hard to close. Like, you know, they’re like, well, I don’t know.

I don’t really get it and I don’t know. Why wouldn’t I just do it this other way? Whatever. Then you’re just not feeling the pole. Then you’re gonna have to go fish in other ponds and see, well, okay, you know, maybe that, maybe that value wasn’t as valuable as we thought it was, or maybe that customer was type of customer wasn’t as easy as we thought it was.

It’s not usually in the early stages of a product, we’ll get a lot of nos. Right. And we often don’t get truthful answers about the No. So it, it, so I think it’s a mistake to take the nose too. The feedback you get on the nose too. Seriously. Right? Because the customer will say, well, I didn’t pick you because you were too small and it was too risky.

But what they, you know, but it turned out they weren’t never really considered you, you know, they just put you on the list. ’cause you know, purchasing told them they had to look at three products and you were easy to them. Right? So they had already made up their mind, or they’ll say, oh, the thing was too expensive.

We didn’t have the budget. Or, you know, or, you know, they’ll give you all kinds of reasons. But the no, the reason is not always the truth. You know, because they didn’t buy from you. They got no skin in this game. You come and say, well, why didn’t you buy? They’ll just tell you whatever to get you off the phone.

Park: Mm-hmm.

April: Flip side of this, if you’re looking at the yeses, like if we have a brand new product in a brand new market. Yes. It’s like a miracle. Yes. It’s like, oh my gosh, somebody wants to buy our thing. This is a precious, precious miracle, and we should understand everything about that. Like how did we make it on the short list versus all these other established competitors?

Why on earth did they put us on the short list and then they evaluated us and they picked us? What the heck happened there? And we should understand all about that. And is there something about that customer that made them a really good fit for our product? And can we go out and find other customers like that?

Mm-hmm. So in the early days, I think we’re really looking for what we call win analysis as opposed to loss analysis, which, you know. We’re gonna lose 90%.

Park: Yeah.

April: Just, it’s a brand new product. It’s amazing. Anyone buys it. So it, so I think we find out a lot more from the ones that where we’re winning that we come in and we say, okay, what?

You know, we’ll work there. Yeah.

Park: Why, why’d you like it?

April: Why? Like, take me back. Like what were you doing before and what made you wake up in the morning and decided you had to do something different? And then how the heck did we make it on the shortlist? And who else made it on the shortlist? Why’d you pick us?

And then here’s a good question to ask. Why not the other guys? Because sometimes the other guys stepped in it and that’s why you won. It’s not so much that you won, the other guys lost it. Mm-hmm.

Park: Because

April: they couldn’t do something or they did something wrong. And all of this stuff is really, is really important to understand when you’re thinking about in the early days of a product, like where are we gonna focus?

What’s the best target market for us? What should we be building in the product to strengthen that? To strengthen our position in that beachhead market. That’s what we’re trying to figure out.

Park: Yeah. At the top of the show, you had mentioned that very first, uh, product that was failing and you had a hundred users and you were reaching out to talk to them.

What, in your experience, what number of users early on, how many do you have to get before you can really get good intel of what’s working and what’s not?

April: Yeah, this is a great question in my opinion. So first of all, it’s often not users that we wanna talk to. What we wanna talk to is a buyer, but in B2B Tech, you know, a typical B2B Tech purchase.

It doesn’t get made by a single person. It’s a, it’s like a group. And if we look at the research on this, a typical B2B enterprise software deal, that group is anywhere from, from five to a dozen people big. So we’ve got this, you know, 12 people who impact this deal. And so let’s say for example, I’m selling something to the sales team, um, you know, to make the sales team more effective, well.

I’ve got the champion of the deal is usually the person that got assigned to go figure this out. So you, you know, maybe you have the vice president of sales that wakes up and says, you know what? I hate, I hate this CRM, let’s get rid of this stupid thing, John. You go figure it out. And John’s like, ah, crap.

Okay. And, and so John is now the champion of this deal. He has been tasked with doing the research, making a short list, figuring it out. His boss, the VP sales, that’s what we call the economic buyer. That person’s gonna write the check and ultimately, you know, this, this champion has gotta go to the economic buyer and convince them.

But, you know, but the, it’s the champion of the deal is gonna decide whether or not you get on the short list. The champion of the deal is then once they’ve made a short list and figured out who they wanna look at. They gotta run around and convince everybody else. So probably because they’re not it, but this thing is it they, they probably have to go over to it and say, Hey, I’m thinking about buying this CRM and it is gonna go, well, does it meet our security things?

And does it integrate with our ERP and does it do whatever? And if it doesn’t do these things, I’m gonna say no. Right? And then they gotta go talk. They then maybe they gotta go talk to users. And the sales team is like, we don’t like it. It’s too hard to use. No. Right? And maybe they gotta go to purchasing.

And purchasing says, well, did you do your homework? And does it meet the whatever? And did you negotiate whatever? Because otherwise we’re gonna say no. So think about it this way. I got this champion person, and my positioning really, really has to resonate for them because if it doesn’t resonate for them, I don’t even get to talk to anybody else.

And so I gotta, so when I’m doing this workshop and I’m thinking about this positioning, it’s gonna really resonate for this champion person. And then our job in marketing and sales is to arm that person to handle the objections of everybody else. Now coming back to your, so this is my little preamble, coming back to your question, like, how, okay, so how many, how many deals you gotta do before you know, like, you know how many customers you gotta talk to before you know you’ve talked to enough.

Well, sometimes we are selling a thing that’s like a thousand bucks and. This deal isn’t very complicated. You know, there’s a, there’s an economic buyer, there’s a champion, maybe they talk to one other person. It it, we get this deal done in a month and with maybe two sales calls. Well, if that’s true, there’s probably a lot of variability in the customers.

And so I’m gonna have to talk to more customers because they’re all kind of different. Whereas if I’m selling a thing that costs $5 million and it takes me a year and a half to close, I’m not gonna have that many customers. But that’s okay. ’cause I’m making $5 million on every single one. And those customers tend to all sort of look the same.

’cause that’s just the way that stuff works out. So companies will often come to me and they’ll say, well, I don’t know, April, do we, do you think we’ve done enough deals for you to actually tighten up the positioning and let’s go And, and they’ll say, how many deals should we do? And I’m usually asked them, how big’s the deal?

How long does it take? Do the customers seem uniform? Like if they’re all the same and you can see that repeatability, then I probably don’t need that many because they all kind of look the same and they all behave the same way and they all have the same sense of value. Um, but if I’m doing a whole bunch of little deals and they all also of look this different, like, you know, they’re in different industries and it’s different buyers and different personas and everything looks different and I can’t see the patterns, then I think that’s gonna be very hard to position and the company maybe needs to do more until they start seeing these patterns pop up.

So I’ve done, I’ve had companies call me and they’ve got 500, 600 customers and I don’t think they have it because the customers all look wildly different. Yeah. But I’ve had other company, I worked with a company once that called me and they said, well, we only have three customers, um, and so maybe we don’t have enough.

And, and I said, well, how. How long does it take you to close a deal? And they said, 18 months. And I was like, wow, that’s a long time. And they said, yeah, they’re pretty big deals though. And I said, well, what’s your revenue? And they only had three customers and their revenue was 35 million. Not bad. So it also meant that they had about a dozen deals in the pipeline because you know, it takes you 18 months to do a deal.

And those deals were far enough along that we know a lot about those companies. So it wasn’t really three, it was really three plus a dozen. And in that case it was like, and they all look exactly the same. They were all big call centers. All big call centers, kind of using it for the exact same use case, all the thing.

I was like, yeah, okay, that sounds like enough. Yeah, we could go do that.

Park: Yeah, because in our beta we’ve put about 70 brands through it, and they are across different industries. It could be agencies, it can be solopreneurs, it can be, you know, nonprofits are going through it, whatever. Mm-hmm. And we are getting, you know, a lot of great feedback, but we are definitely seeing trending in Yeah.

What they value, even though they’re in a lot of different industries.

April: Right. Well, what, and what you might find is that, and we think about this a lot in tech, right? What we might find is, oh, these folks over here love me this way and these folks over here love me this way. There’s some commonality in that.

So sometimes you’re selling something that’s horizontal. Like I spent a lot of time selling databases. This is a fundamentally horizontal technology. It doesn’t matter if you’re in banking or retail or whatever. You know, you’re using a database in a kind of fundamentally the same way. But that said, um, we generally.

Worry a lot about segmenting the market out so that we can focus on, in the short term, on the folks that are the easiest to sell to.

Park: Right.

April: So, you know, for example, I, you know, I worked on this database and this database was particularly good at a particular kind of query with a particular kind of data.

And our original assumption was anybody that had a lot of data would want this thing because it did these queries on this giant amount of data really, really fast. But what we found was, um, if it was machine generated data and you needed the answer to that query to do customer service, ’cause a customer was calling in and wanted the answer to it, those folks that was a hair on fire problem and it was really easy to sell to them if it was like a bank.

And there’s some weird query that they only run once a month and yeah, it takes a long time to run it. We have to run it over the weekend, but. Who cares. We only do it one, you know? And so they had the problem. It just wasn’t a hair on fire problem. And so they were harder to sell to. We sold a couple of them.

Um, but we spent our marketing and sales efforts on these ones that were like, oh my gosh, if you could, you know, if you could solve this problem, we’d serve our customers way better. It would save us a lot of hassle, we’d make a lot more money, we’d have way happy customers. You know, in other words, it’s immediate benefit.

So sometimes when you have this thing, it’s worthwhile to lean back and say, you know, is there a segment of this market? We know lots of people love us in lots of different ways, but is there a segment of this market that goes, whoa, that, that’s awesome. And can we peel them off and just focus on them and we’ll get to the rest of the market later.

Um, but we’ll focus on these folks first because they’re, I spend less marketing dollars getting them in the door. I spend less sales effort getting them closed. They’re, they really get the value. So they don’t ask for a discount. Like they close really fast. They renew, they tell their friends about us.

Like, this is what you want your pipeline to look like in the early days.

Park: Well, isn’t that it? I mean, repeat business and word of mouth marketing. They love you and they love, which the problems you’re solving for them, they’re gonna share that with their world.

April: Yeah. Yeah.

Park: Well, April, this has been absolutely a masterclass on positioning.

Thank you. Thank you so much. And if you like, I will send you back again the, uh, genie report on your brand. And I wasn’t surprised that it nailed it because your copy is very, very good. But it’s an outlier. It’s, you know, yeah. Good. You position yourself very well.

April: Happy gonna be an outlier on that one.

Park: Absolutely. Where can people learn more about you?

April: It’s april dunford.com Man. Come in and, uh, look at my, uh, glorious positioning.

Park: Absolutely. Well, April, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

April: Alright, well thanks so much for having me.