Featuring April Dunford, Luke Carthy and Andi Jarvis.
Obviously Awesome is a such an obviously awesome name for a book, we had to rob it for the podcast.
April is a world leading authority on positioning, the misunderstood marketing concept that can be the difference between winning and losing for your company.
Developing a systematic way of positioning technology products and companies has become her life’s work and she has had the privilege of working with more than 100 companies, allowing me to go even deeper and broaden my positioning expertise.
We talk about the concept of positioning, how to spot when it’s going wrong, understand how to do it right and throw in a few questions from social media in an enjoyable and insightful chat.
Episode 10 also features a T.O.P.T.I.P from Luke Carthy, an ecommerce consultant who has some great last minute tips for sorting out Black Friday and Christmas for your business.
As always, a big thanks to our sponsor, Moyee Coffee. I’m a big fan of the coffee and the work they’re doing to help farmers in Ethiopia and Kenya achieve a living income. Please check them out.
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Show Notes
April Dunford
https://twitter.com/aprildunford
April lives in Toronto, Canada – one of my favourite places – and has kids, a small dog, and a cabin in the woods. I get the feeling the cabin in the woods is her favourite place in the world!
The bulk of April’s work is with early and growth-stage startups. Companies where the stakes are high – and weak positioning can mean the difference between success or failure. She also work with large global companies, helping them develop deeper positioning expertise in their product and marketing teams.
Her book, Obviously Awesome, came highly recommended by Rand Fishkin on this podcast and captures my ideas about positioning and a methodology for doing it that any startup can follow.
It’s become a best-seller and popular among entrepreneurs, product, and marketing folk. April studied Engineering in University, and wasn’t meant to be in marketing or writing books, but it turns out she’s great at both of those.
April’s book recommendations were:
The Challenger Sale: How To Take Control of the Customer Conversation by Matthew Dixon
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Reis and Jack Trout
T.O.P.T.I.P from Luke Carthy
https://twitter.com/MrLukeCarthy
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukecarthy/
Luke is an ecommerce specialist who gets results. He’s a speaker, podcaster and dad and an all round great guy.
Andi Jarvis
If you have any questions or want to talk about anything that was discussed in the show, the best place to get me is on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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Make sure you subscribe to get the podcast every fortnight and if you enjoyed the show, please give it a 5* rating.
Podcast Transcript
This transcript has been done automagically using Happy Scribe and hasn’t been checked by a real person, so there may be some hilarious mistakes where the AI can’t work out our accents – I’m sure they’re trained on just the American accent.
[00:00:05.24] – Andi J
Eyup, and welcome to the Strategy Sessions. My name is Andi Jarvis. Thank you for coming along today’s episode 10. Ten episodes of this. Well, who would have thought we would have got this far? Me, actually, because I said we’d keep going for a year, but don’t worry about that. Just keep listening. Today, we have got the author of Obviously Awesome, April Dunford, joining us from just outside Toronto in Canada, talking about positioning, a fairly widely used marketing concept and one that is really hugely misunderstood. So if you stick with us, April is coming in. Just a couple of minutes time. We’ve got an interview about 40, 45 minutes with her where we ask questions from people on Twitter, talk about some of the concepts, when it goes wrong, how do you know it’s going wrong, how do you do it right. So please stick with us. That’s coming up. Before we do, we’ve got a top tip for you. But even before that, I just want to say thank you to Moyee Coffee, our sponsors. M-o-y-e-e coffee. They make what they call Fair Chain coffee, which involves leaving more of the money made from the coffee production in the country where the coffee is produced.
[00:01:12.00] – Andi J
So they use blockchain technology to connect drinkers with the growers. And they are just a brilliant company run by some great people. And they’ve got beautiful pink packaging and more importantly, fantastic coffee. So do check them out if you can. M-o-y-e-e coffee. Ie or. Co. Uk. Right. Now it’s time for our T-O-P-T-I-P. T-o-p-t-i-p. Each week you get a top tip from an expert in the marketing industry. They tell you something that is only 60 to 90 seconds long and you can pick up and take away and use it to improve your business. They have their own channel now. We’ve got 10 of them. In fact, we’ve got 11 actually, because we use two in one episode. They are all on YouTube and they have a playlist where you can watch them all back one at a time. I’ll be tweeting those links out, so do keep watching at Andi Jarvis on Twitter, Andi with an I, and you’ll see me tweeting it out. But first of all, let’s have a listen to the T-O-P-T-I-P.
[00:02:10.08] – Luke C
Hey, guys. So this is my top tip for Andi Jarvis and his awesome Strategy Sessions podcast. So we know that Black Friday is going to be a thing. We know that Christmas is on the way, whatever that means with COVID and everything else in the mix. But what we do know is that e-commerce is going nowhere over this quarter, whether that’s Black Friday or as I say, Christmas. So I want to leave you with one solid top tip to help you guys out, whether you are a client of an agency or whether you are in-house and you work on your own brand. But this is really, really important. You can campaign landing pages. So whether you have a landing page for Black Friday, you might have a landing page for Halloween or for Christmas or whatever is going to be on for fireworks, make sure you use the same URL every single year. So just to emphasise on that, what I keep seeing time and time again, and it pains me every time I see it, is companies will have example. Com/black-friday-2019. And then 2020, Black Friday will happen, and they’ll completely kill the page and then create a 2020 version.
[00:03:18.12] – Luke C
No, no, no, no, no, Because from an SEO perspective, what’s going to happen is over the years, and every time that campaign comes around every single year, that page is going to get more links, more attention, more noise, more social shares. You’re going to send it via email, and it’s going to collect more and more equity. So you’re going to rank more and more competitively every single year. Lastly, if you’re now thinking, Oh my God, I shouldn’t have done this, don’t worry, because what you can do in this situation is 301 redirect all of your old campaign pages to the new permanent without a date page in. So just to reiterate on my tip, use the same landing page for the same campaign every single year because it makes a massive difference. And from an SEO perspective, from a paid from my perspective, from email, for UX, for Christmas, finding your page, for bookmarks, for all sorts of reasons, it’s going to pay dividends in the long run. So that’s my top tip, Luke Cathy. And again, thanks again, Andi, for letting me put my top tip in your strategy sessions podcast. I’ll see you guys at some point in the future between now and Christmas, I guess.
[00:04:33.23] – Luke C
Take care.
[00:04:36.16] – Andi J
That’s up tip was by Luke Cathy, good friend of mine, e-commerce expert. You can find him at lukecarthy. Com. Cathy is C-A-R-T-H-Y. Lukecarthy. Com, expert in e-commerce, real background in it and can really help businesses. He’s also starting a new hair care brand, which is not for me, clearly, but it’s aimed at people with Afro hair. It’s a really underserved element of the market. If you If you don’t have Afro hair, you’re probably thinking, Wow, can it be that different? I remember the days when I used to have hair, and it can be a big problem. Hair brushes, products to use, softness, conditioners, it wasn’t the biggest problem for me because it was always short, except for the couple of times when I had Afro. Luckily, those pictures were before the days of camera phones, so you’ll never see it. But it is a big issue for lots of people. So please do check out Afrodrops as well, which is his new hair care brand, afrodrops. Com, and And you can help support that. It’s a startup business and a really important part serving a great segment. So do check that out. Now on to the main event.
[00:05:43.19] – Andi J
I met April Dunford at a conference, Learning Bound in Dublin last year. It feels like a lifetime ago, but probably a year ago, actually. And she was closing the show. She was the last speaker on, and she was coming to talk about positioning and obviously, awesome. So I remember Paul had come, particularly Paul, who makes Tito, the ticketing product, and Veto had come along just to watch April, and I thought, somebody’s come to a conference, brought a baby with them just to watch one speaker. I was like, this sounds like dedication. I’d heard of April. I think I’d maybe listened to on a podcast. I wasn’t quite ready for what we got. April is just phenomenal. I stood there side of stage watching. I was hosting the conference and I stood side of stage watching thinking, When I grow up, this is the conference speaker I want to She was fantastic. Brilliant, funny, entertaining, but an absolute expert on positioning, and she knew exactly what she was talking about. The book, obviously, awesome. It should be required reading. If you go to the reading list for the podcast, which is in the show notes, you will find a link to the book.
[00:06:47.02] – Andi J
Go and buy it, right? And then once you’ve bought it, read it, and once you’ve read it, give it to somebody else or buy them a copy, especially if you’re in B2B marketing. But there’s still a lot of lessons in this for everybody. It’s mainly I’m really aimed at products and SaaS products and things like that. But even as a consultant running a consultancy, I found so much of it really, really useful. So here we go. April. Right. I’m really excited about this one today. We have April Dunford, author of Obviously Awesome, and the woman you can see sitting right there, joining us from Canada. April, welcome.
[00:07:21.17] – April D
It’s good to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:07:23.19] – Andi J
And thank you for making me one of the first things you do in your morning. It’s mid-afternoon here in Northern Ireland. Early morning for I’m still drinking coffee.
[00:07:31.19] – April D
It’s early here.
[00:07:33.11] – Andi J
Great stuff. Well, look, let’s make best use of the time. So for people who don’t know April, she is a consultant, works a lot B2B and with SaaS companies, and talks about positioning. And if your first thing is, that’s great, what’s positioning? April.
[00:07:50.14] – April D
Yeah, positioning is a really misunderstood concept, which is surprising because it’s not a new concept. It’s a super old concept. It’s been around since the ’80s. But I think in marketing, we like to forget things. I don’t know. Positioning is often confused with messaging. Lately, I get this confusion between, well, what’s the difference between storytelling and positioning, or what’s the difference between branding and positioning? And in my opinion, positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. So that’s a mouthful, and that’s because positioning helps you define five distinct things. So it’s made up of who exactly is the competitive What is the alternative to what you do? So that could be status quo or it could be other products just like you. But what are the alternatives to what you do? What are your capabilities that are different than what the alternatives can offer? What is the value you can deliver to customers. By the way, who are those customers? So who exactly is a good fit for your offering? And then lastly, what’s your market category? What is the market that you intend to win?
[00:09:13.04] – April D
So positioning defines all that. It’s the underpinning of almost everything we do in marketing and sales. Before I build a campaign, I’m going to say, okay, well, who’s it for? And what are we trying to communicate? If I go to to build messaging, for example, I need to understand value. I need to understand differentiation. I need to understand who the messaging is for. So most of the things that positioning gets confused with are actually things So the things that you do with positioning. When positioning comes first and positioning is an input to things like messaging, brand, storytelling, campaigns, content, sales strategy, all that stuff, you got to have positioning sorted out first.
[00:10:00.00] – Andi J
And I think one of the things that came through for me from the book, which sales plug, if you haven’t got a copy, do get one easy reading and we’ll change your view on marketing, definitely worth doing, is that most companies do positioning by accident, but also I found it really interesting. It was a reflection of your career in that, in that you got into positioning by accident as well. Is that a fair assumption? I got into marketing by accident.
[00:10:28.02] – April D
I was I’m studying to be an engineer. I spent my university days programming in C++. But when I got this job at a startup and it was a product marketing job, it happened to be in the marketing department, but it required someone with some technical chops, which is how I got the job. And then the first product I worked on, we did a big repositioning and we had this product that, in essence, was a failure. And we had a theory about positioning, which was our theory was these people would like this product for this reason. And then we put it out in the market and we were wrong. They just didn’t… Those people did not like that product for that reason. But what I found in doing, I ended up doing a bunch of customer interviews because we were thinking about canon the product altogether. So I did a bunch of customer interviews at my And the boss made me do this because we were about to shut the thing off and he wanted to see, was everybody going to be mad when we end of life this product? And in the course of those interviews, what I found was we had a handful of really happy customers that didn’t map with our thesis, but loved the product.
[00:11:47.23] – April D
And so what we ended up doing was repositioning the product in a different market for a different use case with different users and a different value prop. And then the thing took off and was wildly successful. And so at that point, I thought, whoa, this positioning thing is actually really super powerful, but we tend to not do it deliberately. We tend to have this default positioning that was in our mind when we first invented the product But products aren’t static, markets aren’t static. And we’re often wrong in our thesis about who’s going to love our stuff and why. And so sometimes what we get is the thing is out in the market, we change it, the market changes changes. There are things happening that we never anticipated. And it turns out a product can be much better positioned in a completely different way if we were to back up and position it deliberately rather than what we have to be this because that’s what we set out to build.
[00:12:46.04] – Andi J
Is that down to a lack of research, do you think? And that gut feel approach to marketing. I think this, therefore, even if people did more research, would we still have a positioning problem?
[00:13:00.15] – April D
Yeah, a little bit, right? So at the beginning, again, at the beginning, when you build a product, all you got is whatever you learned in customer discovery, which isn’t perfect because you’re basically forming a thesis and you’re saying, I think these people are going to love it. Then I’ll go and interview a bunch of those people and say, hey, would you like a thing like this? And let me tell you about my thing. And so you try to validate that. But you’re not interviewing everybody. You’ve got a bit of a thesis and you’re like, okay, what’s going to be these people? Then you get it out in the world and people are weird, right? They do things that we don’t think they’re going to do. We couldn’t possibly understand everybody around. We couldn’t possibly understand everything that people might attempt to do with our product. And so often we’re wrong, and we didn’t get it right. And so even if we tried to do a very good a job of upfront customer discovery, we still might get it wrong. I will say that part of the reason why we’re bad at positioning, once it’s out in the market and we’ve got people using it, I think, do we do enough checking in with our customers to validate why exactly do these people love our stuff?
[00:14:23.01] – April D
Do we do enough of that customer research? No, I think for the most part, we don’t. But I also I think that a lot of people struggle with positioning because even though we understand what positioning is conceptually, I’ve never met a marketer that doesn’t use the word positioning. I mean, we all think we’re We’ve got positions in the market, but there isn’t really an accepted methodology for doing positioning beyond things like using a positioning statement, for example, that in my mind, maybe it’s a way to capture positioning, but it doesn’t actually give you a methodology to figure out, is this my best position? And we could position this in three or four different markets. Are we actually positioning it in the best one? So how do we do that? So my work has really been around that. How do we actually help marketers have a process or a methodology to look look at positioning that would help them get to the best possible position for their products? Because I think right now we’re not doing it a lot of times right now because we don’t actually know how to get it done.
[00:15:40.16] – Andi J
And I think I would echo that. So the statement, I think it’s slightly differently worded in the book, but the version of it I’d used previously, we called Two is that because. And it was just a table, two female customers over 30. Our product is the number one solution that changes their life because we’ve got more X, Ys and Zs than anybody else’s. And you fill it in and you go, we’ve done the positioning for this product, which is four people who have never used the product, sat in a room who are never going to use the products because we’re not the target market. But is it good or is it bad?
[00:16:17.07] – April D
How do you know?
[00:16:18.24] – Andi J
I mean, I would say it was probably terrible.
[00:16:23.17] – April D
So what you do is you write it down, but there’s no way to test for each Which thing that’s in the blank, how do you know you got the right one? Usually, there’s a blank that says market category. So that means are we email or chat or team collaboration? Well, just because you wrote something down there doesn’t mean you picked the best one. And so how do we actually make sure that if we’re positioning something as chatted, how do we know it’s not better positioned as email or as team collaboration? Because those things have a 99 % feature function overlap, but they are very different expectations in the market about what it should do, who my competitors are, what the price point is. All that stuff is very different between those three markets. So you might have something that sucks as email, but it’s great at chat. And the difference isn’t a lot of features. There’s some key features, but the difference is more just context setting. In that context, it looks like a winner in the other It looks like a loser.
[00:17:32.12] – Andi J
The book is effectively a playbook of how you go about doing positioning.
[00:17:38.11] – April D
It’s my attempt at doing that.
[00:17:40.00] – Andi J
Yeah, which is great, and it’s step by step, and you can go do it. So rather than giving that away for free, we’ll not walk through it step by step, but there’s a couple of bits that I want to dive into. You mentioned already about competitors, and I think we have the same worldview on competitors. Often in my world, people tell me the three or four competitors that they have based on either people who they see at trade shows or the stars over the road. And then I type their product or service into Google and then give them four other competitors. You say to people in e-commerce, Amazon is a competitor. Oh, no, it’s not. So they’re number one and two in the surf. So yes, they are. But your view on competition is really interesting as well in what all the people do and what do they do with the products. So do you want to tell us a little bit about that?
[00:18:27.19] – April D
Yeah. So I like Even the word competitor gets people down the wrong path sometimes. So I like to think of it as a competitive alternative. So if your product didn’t exist, what would people be doing? Because they had the problem before you showed up. So how are they solving the problem before? And so usually what I like to get companies thinking about is, so what status quo right now? So you have software to do invoicing, let’s say. So how are they, for your customers, are they doing invoicing right now? And you might say, well, they’re just doing it in word with an intern or an assistant. And okay, well, then that’s your competitor. So the thing you have to think about is, if you didn’t exist, what would they do? Which means What are they doing right now? And if they decided that what they’re doing right now was no good and they needed to go find an alternate solution, who else did they look at? So what I get a lot with startups is I’ll say, well, who do you compete with? And often they’ll give me a list of little companies I’ve never heard of.
[00:19:40.02] – April D
And generally, there are companies that are just like them. And they might be competition for investment dollars. They might be pitching the same VCs. But then when I say, well, do you actually see them in a deal? Do you lose deals to these? And they’ll say, oh, no, no. And then you’ll look and each of them has three customers. It’s like, well, no, we don’t lose deals to them. And I said, well, what do you lose deals to? Well, we lose deals to do nothing, which means status quo. So you’re losing to the spreadsheet, you’re losing to the intern, you’re losing to word. And so if that’s the case, then you’re positioning… You can ignore the three, four little companies that, yeah, maybe they’re in your space. Yeah, maybe they say they do what you do. But customers Customers don’t even know who they are. You can ignore them. If the majority of your folks, your real competition is status quo, then you got to make sure you beat status quo, which means why would I use your stuff over the intern? So a lot of times that will get you down a path of different positioning.
[00:20:49.01] – April D
Startups will come to me and say, well, it’s these little companies I compete with, and their stuff is terrible. It’s really hard to use, and it takes 15 clicks to do a thing. My thing takes one click. And they’ll say, so we’re easier to use, and that’s why you want to use us. And then I’ll say, okay, but, and then we’ll have this conversation about status quo, and I’ll say, okay, so you’re really competing with what? The intern and Excel The intern is really easy to use. Excel is super easy to use. If you’re an Excel power user, you can’t tell me your software is easier to use than Excel, no way. So that’s not your differentiator. Your differentiator is going to be something else, right? And A lot of times it’s things like the intern makes a lot of mistakes. Your software doesn’t ever make a mistake. The intern quits on you. Your software does not, as long as you should keep paying. So you need to really understand what the alternatives are from the point of view of a customer. And the customer that has to make a change in a decision, you’re an alternative to something else.
[00:21:51.18] – April D
So if you’re not straight on the alternative first, then your position is going to be all messed up downstream.
[00:21:57.20] – Andi J
Does that, though, if you’re competing against just the intern and the… And Excel and things like that, does that lead you to talk more about price rather than benefits? Because they know what this costs. Excel, we’ve already paid for. Does that take you down that route more often than not?
[00:22:18.04] – April D
Yeah. Surprisingly, it doesn’t. And usually it’s because part of your job in sales is to help customers understand the cost of doing what they’re doing today and the value of doing it in a different way. So, so price, you’re right. A lot of people, it’s There’s a status quo stuff that people are doing. They’re doing it because it’s free. It’s tools I already know, so it’s easy, and it feels cheap to do it. But then why would we use invoicing software rather than just having a template and a document and making every invoice individually. Well, because it’s a giant pain if you’re doing thousands of invoices, right? If you make a mistake, that costs you money. And so there’s all these other things around it. You got to make the case for why it’s worth the investment of dollars rather than use the free thing that you’ve got. Why is it worth the investment of dollars? And that’s cost savings, but it’s also the potential for increased revenue as well. And so you’re going to have to make the case for that. In B2B software, we are so often replacing Excel, and yet a lot of B2B software gets sold to replace Excel, and Excel is free.
[00:23:42.09] – Andi J
Yeah, and a great product as well. I know in the SEO The world people love Google Sheets and the Sheets versus Excel, but for most people, Excel does almost everything you ever need it to do.
[00:23:51.14] – April D
Great product. It’s killer. Well, or Sheets or whatever. I mean, pick your poison, but most people are using some version of a free tool at at the beginning, right? But then at some point, you outgrow that, or there’s limitations with that, or there’s a reason that you’re like, Oh, I got to do something different here. And that’s where there’s the opportunity to sell software.
[00:24:14.08] – Andi J
So once you’ve started working through your process, then you get towards the end. And the bit about choosing which market you’re going to operate in, I found that really interesting. And it also maybe took me as a point where I think a lot of people might go wrong in this. Are they going to be in an established market and try and corner a little bit of that? Are they going to try and create a completely new market? Do you want to explain what the different bits of that position are and errors you see people making and how to know which bit you’re picking?
[00:24:44.11] – April D
Yeah. So basically, in my mind, anyways, you’re either positioning in an established market and you’re stealing the concepts from that market to create context for your product, or you’re creating in the context. So you’re creating your own context, and then you’re positioning yourself in there. So if you are going to position yourself in an established market, you’re basically saying there are concepts and things that exist in the world that I can just say, I’m like that, but for these particular customers. So in that, you have two choices. You can either say, I’m going to position myself to win the entire market or just a slice of it. Now, if you’re positioning to win the entire market, that’s a bit like saying, I’m entering the cola market and I’m going to be cola for everybody and I’m going to out-coat, coke. And you’ll never win that. Even when I worked at IBM, we wouldn’t do that to enter into a market. It’s very hard to displace an established market leader if you’re a new entrant. Now, if you’re number two, that’s different. But if you’re a new entrant, it’s very hard to position that way, except where the market is established, but we don’t yet know who the leader of the market is.
[00:26:09.13] – April D
An example of this is a company that just got acquired, but a company here in Canada that was in the smart glasses market. And we know what the smart glasses market is about a little bit, because Google Glass came before and they established that market in our minds. So we get what smart glasses are. But if I were to say, who Who’s the leader in smart glasses? We don’t really know. So I can come in and say, I just raise a hundred million VC. I’m going to be the leader in smart glasses. And so maybe it’s going to be me. So if you want to play that game, you can. If the category exists, we don’t really know who the leader is. If you got big funding in the runway to do it, maybe it’s going to be you. So I think you have an opportunity. They just got acquired by Google, by the way. So that’s one way to do it. Not always the best way for startups, but if you’re heavily funded and you’re in an emerging market where there is an established category already in the minds of at least some customers, maybe you can do that.
[00:27:09.22] – April D
The more common way for startups is category exists, and you come in and say, Okay, someday I’m going to own the whole category, but right now I can’t. But there is a segment, a subsegment of this category that I can dominate. So I’m going to come in and I’m going to be CRM for lawyers. So Now, I’m not taking on Salesforce right out of the gate, but I’m taking on a subsegment where I’ve determined, you know what? These folks have special needs. They’re not getting it from Salesforce. And there’s a reason to buy specialised software in this area. I got some secret sauce that I can apply here. So I’m going to win this. And then once I win this, then I’m going to expand my market out and expand my market out until I’m number two, and then I’m going to take the leader on, and that’s how I’m going to do it. So that’s the most common way you see startups folks, at least in the early days, get traction. Most of the companies that we know and love today were not the people that created a category. They came in and dominated a subsegment and then eventually took over the whole category.
[00:28:16.05] – April D
The last style of positioning is this category creation, which is where you say, you know what? We don’t really have a good… There is no good existing category to put us in. If there was, we could use that, and that would make make everything easier. But instead, we’re going to have to create a category, make it mean something, and then position ourselves in there. And so it’s more work because you’ve got to invest in essentially selling the problem, because if people knew the problem existed, then there would be a category of solutions to solve it. So the fact that there isn’t a category there already means you got to evangelise the problem and say, you know what, the world needs gripple grommets. And you’re like, what the fritz is gripple grommet? And you’re like, let me tell you. This is what it is. And then I got to establish that. And then I got to position myself in there as the leader. Now, here’s the trick with this one. Two things. So one, it takes a while to establish the market. And unless you got a mountain of money, if you’ve got, if you’ve raised spectacular VC, then you can just go nuts on the marketing side.
[00:29:32.15] – April D
And we’re creating this market out of nothing. I’m blanking the world with my marketing and my message and content, and I’ve got 100 million bucks to blow on this.
[00:29:43.07] – Andi J
So now you’ve got it And the market’s been established.
[00:29:47.02] – April D
Now, the minute it’s emerged and established, what you’ll get is a thousand Me Too copycats. Because the market’s there now, it’s established. We don’t have markets with one competitor in it. It’s very easy for a new entrant to come in and say, yeah, we do what they do, too, because it’s just a story. So I can just copy the story, build my copycat product, and run right in there behind you. And if you don’t have any technological advantage that makes you particularly well suited to be the leader in that, maybe I can leapfrog you. So this is like, again, there’s a thousand examples of this in tech. There were a There were a thousand search engines before Google. There were a thousand social networks before Facebook. And the fast follower ended up winning the market by taking advantage of the hard work that the category creator already did and then leapfrogging them on technology, execution, marketing, sum vector, or a combination of those. So category creation is, it’s high risk. There’s potentially high reward. But even then, we have so few examples of particularly startups that started from the beginning as category creators and then went on to actually win the category.
[00:31:10.23] – April D
We have so few examples of that that anybody that attempts that, I think, would do it at their peril. Now, there’s more examples of companies that are big, and once they get 100 million revenue, 200 million revenue, well, then they create the category. That’s a whole different thing. When you’re great big, you can do a lot of stuff like that because you’ve got all kinds of money and customers our base to leverage and all that stuff. But for a startup trying to do category creation, there’s not a tonne of examples. I have one in my book, which is Eliqua, and I’ve got a neat interview with Mark Organ, who did exactly not really that, but his story is interesting, too, and you should read it. It was fraught with peril. They definitely had this problem of fast-follower copycats coming in right behind them. There were massive execution channels, execution challenges challenges in maintaining that lead, which they could easily have lost at any moment. But that’s my rant about category. Category creation is trendy right now, right? The Silicon Valley people like to talk about it. But a lot of folks that are doing category creation, in my mind, what they’re doing is a niche play.
[00:32:19.00] – April D
And they’re saying, well, there is no CRM for lawyers. We’re the first one, so that’s a new category. And I’m like, well, no, you’re borrowing the concept of CRM and you’re a niche thing in that. If you call that category creation, then okay, maybe.
[00:32:32.18] – Andi J
When I read that, I did think of… And the startups I’ve worked with are on a different scale to the ones you’ve worked with. But I think the thing the founders have in common is they like to think that everything they are doing is unique and damn, I’m going to say it, disruptive. So because they think they’re disrupting something, when they look at this, and I’ve never explained it in those ways, but when you look at it, they always want to tell you that because they are the first to do this in this particular way, they’ve created a category. And I always said, in your mind, you have, but in the mind of your customer, what do they think? But is that the problem? Do you think just startups, because they think they’re changing the world, they want to go into that category? There’s a bit of an ego thing behind it, maybe.
[00:33:13.17] – April D
Well, maybe That’s it. But here’s the thing. What we do need to do is we need to clearly establish this is where we win. And so however you want to think about that conceptually, if you say, look, this is my patch and I’m disrupting everything in this patch, and I call that a category. Okay, fine. Think of it that way. If that’s helpful, think of it that way. You do have to clearly establish, here’s where we’re different, here’s where we’re better, and here’s who cares about that. So in this patch, we always win. But, again, it’s much easier to come into a market and say, we’re We’re this for that, than to say, I’m a flu flummer. And you’re like, what’s a flu flummer? And you’re like, well, let me tell you. And then I got to give you this big story about what a flu flummer is, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s harder to sell like that, I think, in the early days. Again, when you get big, people always use Gainsight as an example of category doing a good job category creation. But Gainsight was in the survey market, which was an established category until they were over 2 million revenue, it wasn’t 200 million revenue.
[00:34:40.05] – April D
So sure, once I’m 200 million revenue and I pretty much own that category, then I can start expanding the boundaries of the category and start calling it customer engagement or whatever their new category is. And I have the money and the momentum to be able to invest in that. But to do it straight out of the gate, And again, there’s not a lot of examples of folks that have done it well. That’s usually what I come back to is I’m like, Name me six companies that have done it. People have a hard time naming six companies that have done it out of the gate startups.
[00:35:13.23] – Andi J
So I want to jump back a little bit because something else came to mind when you were talking about that. You talked about the products you worked on. You mentioned it in the book, and you mentioned it earlier here where it started off as something, you repositioned it, and it took off. But you were in a position where that was going to be closed down because it wasn’t working. Now, you’ve got a very stark choice. We’re going to the cleaners or we can change something. What about all those companies that are bumping along in the middle? They haven’t taken off, but they’re not about to close down. They’re doing okay. They’re maybe not hit the revenue projections that they wanted, but they’ve got a team. They’re going all right. They’re at revenue, they’re maybe profitable. They’ve taken a bit… When you look at that, does the risk to move that positioning suddenly press down as a fear for them? And if so, have you worked with anybody like that, or do you just get dragged in when there’s something going on?
[00:36:05.18] – April D
I would say the vast majority of the companies I work with are in that situation. It’s not that their positioning is bad. They It’s like, they’re making money, their revenue is good, it’s whatever. It’s that the growth is not going as fast as they think it could. And they’re like, you know what? We have all these customers that love us. Why is it taking us so long to close a deal? Or why is it so hard for us to generate leads? Or why is it so hard? Why is it… Why is it… Some customers, we close them really fast, but other ones we don’t. And so in those cases, I think what you actually need to do isn’t some big repositioning. We’re not email anymore, we’re chat. It’s more like a refinement on the positioning. And a lot of the companies I work with, that’s what it is. It’s just getting really tight on it. So the majority of the companies I work with are doing pretty good. But they could be doing better because they’re a little bit trying to be everything to everybody, and they’re not super clear on how do I What are the characteristics of a good fit prospect?
[00:37:19.21] – April D
And if I could get really clear on what the characteristics of a good fit prospect are, then I would close more business. I’d be more efficient at generating leads. I would run better campaigns because I know who I’m going after and have that really tightly defined. Same thing on the value side. Sometimes they’re just not super clear on the value. They’re talking about 15 points of value, but there’s really only two that people care about. And so if they got super clear on, here’s who we got to be, this is the value we deliver that’s really differentiating, and these are the people that care a lot, then all of a sudden you could get this great efficiency and increase in effectiveness of your marketing and sales programmes. If you got really tight on those definitions and you got your whole team aligned around that, there’s great power in that to be able to unlock a whole bunch of growth instead of saying, you know what, we keep trying to sell into accounts like this, and they always suck. Let’s just stop doing that. We’re trying to talk about… We’re trying to position against every single competitor.
[00:38:26.07] – April D
There’s really only one we got to beat. We just got to beat spreadsheets in that. That’s it, right? We’re trying to talk about the 19 million little esoteric features we’ve got, and this value, that value, every single value. But there’s really one thing that we stand for, and this is it. Getting that clarity on This is who we beat, this is why we win, these are the people that love our stuff, is the key to unlocking a bunch of growth, in my experience.
[00:38:54.24] – Andi J
And for people listening who aren’t in product or SaaS world, I read this book as a consultant, and that bit about the deals that you close really quickly versus the deals that take forever to close, and then your hassle and problems and things like that. And that really stuck a cord with me. And you just, oh, why? Yeah, I know this, but bang, it was just so clear.
[00:39:19.09] – April D
Just so clear. Not all customers are created equal, right? And this is particularly true when you’re selling to businesses. Most B2B companies that I to work with, if you sat down and you say, okay, we’re going to do a positioning exercise, but we’re going to try to figure out how to position your product so that you get a pipeline full of good fit customers. Now, in order to do that, we’re going to do this exercise and go through this process. But I want us first to take a minute and think about bad fit customers. And everybody laughs because everyone’s got bad fit customers. These are the deals Yeah, you close them. Yeah, you squeeze money out of them every month, but you wish you didn’t. They’re just like bad fit.
[00:40:08.23] – Andi J
You could put two zeros on the end of what they pay every month, and it still wouldn’t be worth it.
[00:40:12.23] – April D
It still wouldn’t be worth it. And they don’t really like you. They’re trying to use your product for something it was never intended to do. They’re pain in the ass. They’re calling your support people every day going, why isn’t your thing like this? And it’s like, you bought the wrong thing, man. And so we usually say, you know what, let’s take these bad fit people and put them aside. Because it will often pollute your thinking about your positioning because you’ll be like, oh, well, for those accounts, our competitor is this. It’s like, yeah, but do you want more of these accounts? Well, no. Okay, well, let’s not talk about them. Let’s just talk about the good fit ones. So when we’re thinking about competitive alternatives, I don’t want the competitive alternatives for everybody. I want the competitive alternatives. What would your fit people say they would do if you didn’t exist? And I don’t care what the bad fit people would say, because eventually those people are going to churn on you anyway. And we’ve all got those. I learned this lesson. I worked at a company where we sold big ticket enterprise stuff. And when I joined, we had six customers.
[00:41:19.21] – April D
We were doing about a million and a half, a little under two million revenue total. And one of those customers accounted for a million bucks of it. But the And the customer was all state insurance and they were bad fit customer. So what we sold them looked more like consulting than a product. And they treated us that way. So they treated us like a custom dev shop. Every month, they threatened to quit on us. Every month, they were like, build this thing or else we’re going to cancel. And we hated them because our other customers were way better fit. They just loved us. They closed really fast. They paid us every month. They didn’t pay us a million bucks. So we love this a big customer because it enabled us to survive in a period where maybe we wouldn’t have. But the minute we got big enough to fire them, we fired them because they weren’t a profitable customer for us. We had to do so much specific work for them. They were just a pain in the ass. So anyways, I think it’s important to think about that just because you close business with somebody doesn’t mean they’re a good fit customer.
[00:42:24.05] – April D
Yeah.
[00:42:24.16] – Andi J
No. Amen to that. Definitely. So there’s a couple of things I want to get to before we run out of time. And one of the things I want to talk about is when positioning goes wrong. Tell us the story about Bic and their pen for women.
[00:42:39.23] – April D
I don’t even remember talking about this one. Sometimes what you’ve got is people are trying to differentiate on something that no one cares about. There’s no value there. Sometimes I think the marketers get a little crazy with the… They’re having the story before you get ahead of the product. And so I see a lot of this in… Right now, people… Sometimes I’ll get folks come to me where they have attempted to do positioning by starting with a storytelling exercise, right? So they’ve got this great story. And then they’re like, we’ve got this great story, but it doesn’t work in the market. And I’m like, well, does your product actually execute on that story? What do customers So Big For Her is a bit like this. It’s like, do women have a different need in pens than men? And what about the product is different for women? Nothing. It’s just pink. Do we actually want a pink pen? Versus that doesn’t make any sense. And then the worst part was they try to charge more money for it, too, which was fascinating.
[00:43:53.15] – Andi J
If that works in the raises, in raises, that works, right? It’s the same thing, but we put it in a packaging and there you go.
[00:44:00.02] – April D
It’s twice a time. Sometimes I think in consumer products, I do think sometimes you can, particularly if you’ve got big budget or in the case of of tech or consumer products in tech, if you’ve raised a lot of money, I think sometimes you can establish a feeling about your product that isn’t necessarily tied to the product itself. It’s more about branding. I I think that’s a lot harder to do in B2B when it’s a considered purchase. I’m not buying shoes or makeup or gum. I’m buying software for my department, so I got to sell my boss on it. And if I make a bad choice, maybe I’m going to get fired or I’m at least going to get mocked in the lunchroom. And we do have requirements. What’s the requirement for lipstick? I mean, it’s just not that many. And so but whereas if I got invoicing software, I’m like, okay, I need it to handle multi-currency. There are features that matter. So I do think that sometimes in, especially people that come from consumer and they come over to B2B. Sometimes they have this this idea that we can spin this marketing pixie dust of a story.
[00:45:26.19] – April D
And then product Product doesn’t matter, essentially. And maybe this is because I have a product marketing background and the product absolutely does matter. The product and the story need to be developed together. And you need to have, again, clear differentiators, a clear space that you win, a clear definition of who cares about that stuff, and a story and a pitch that brings brings all that together that makes it clear for customers. You can’t just do this high concept thing where you’re just like, buy my thing because it’s pink or whatever.
[00:46:14.06] – Andi J
And then in the world of social media take the backlash from that as well. So, yeah, that’s right. I have a couple of quickfire questions. I asked on, speaking of social media, I asked on social if anybody had any questions for you, which weren’t free consultancy. So I’m not going to ask you, should I reposition my consultancy? We’ll move on from that. But I’m looking at the time, so I’m going to ask you for quickfire-ish answers to these questions, if you can go with them.
[00:46:40.01] – April D
Go as fast as I can.
[00:46:41.20] – Andi J
First one from, I think it’s Stefan Rapping, how do you validate your positioning? And then you followed up with positioning before or after product market fit, which I think you’ve just been covering, I suppose, in some aspects.
[00:46:54.13] – April D
Yeah. So here’s what I think. So first of all, how do you validate positioning? In my experience, and again, this is very B2B, in my experience, the best way to validate positioning is to build a pitch that embodies your position and test it with customers that meet your definition of a best fit customer. That’s how I always did it in all the companies I was in. I would get the positioning, I would build a sales pitch deck around that positioning, I would take my best sales rep, train that person on the pitch, and And then me and the sales rep would do the meetings together. The rep would pitch, and I would be looking for, are they getting confused? Do they get this? And asking questions, and listening for what the customer is talking about. Are they comparing us to the right competitors? Do they understand our value? Is there pushback on anything? And usually we’d end up tuning it a little bit. And the moment where I have a sales rep says, oh, I’m not going back to the old pitch. This pitch is way better than I know my position positioning is working, then I can go and work on messaging and stuff.
[00:48:03.20] – April D
So that’s the first one. How would you validate the positioning? Then there’s this before and after product-market fit. Oh, my God. I don’t even believe in product-market fit. I don’t believe that’s the thing. But let’s say you’re early stage and you’ve either just launched or you’re still in the thrash and around phase. We don’t really exactly know who loves our stuff and why. What you have at that stage is what I would call a positioning thesis. You have done your customer discovery and you’re like, my thesis is we compete against this. We’re different in this way. Our value is this. These people are going to care a lot about that and that’s where I’m going to win. That’s your thesis. In the early days, you’re probably wrong, at least part of it. And so you should treat it that way. And I would keep the positioning loose. I wouldn’t worry about tightening it up a lot. I would keep it loose because you’re going to learn stuff. And once you start seeing patterns in who loves my stuff and why, then you can tighten it up. So the analogy I use in the book is like, you built a fishing net, you think it’s a very good fishing net for tuna.
[00:49:16.03] – April D
That’s your thesis. But maybe it works for tuna and maybe it doesn’t. You don’t know until you actually get the fish out in the ocean and get the fishing net out in the ocean and you can see. So instead, what you could do is say, look, I made a fishing net and it’s good for big fish, all kinds of big fish. And then you get it out there in the market, get the fishermen, use it, see what they pull up. And maybe it turns out that, you know what? It turns out our net was really good for grouper. Like I said, it may Like, who knew? I didn’t know. I’m not a grouper, fisherman. But now I know. And then I can tighten the positioning up and say, this is the world’s greatest fishing net for grouper and tighten up the positioning then. So in the early days, don’t worry too much about getting it tight. Keep it loose. Later, once you want to tighten it up, you can tighten it up. How are you going to test it is you’re going to arm salespeople. You’re going to go out and you’re going to have a face to face conversation with prospects that meet your definition of a good fit, and you’re going to see how it works.
[00:50:13.09] – Andi J
Okay, good stuff. Right. Before we wrap, two questions. Firstly, what books do you recommend people read? You’re not allowed, unfortunately, to say, Obviously, Awesome, because I will get hit by YouTube for this just being an advertising section. I’ll say, Obviously, Awesome because it’s really amazing.
[00:50:29.15] – April D
Yeah. So I don’t know. There’s a couple of books that I like. Right now, I’m on a bit of a storytelling kick because I’m thinking a lot about how you use stories to enforce your positioning. And so a book that influenced me a lot there was Challenger’s Tale. And that book’s been out for a while now, maybe 10 years old or so. But it’s amazing to me how much I come back to that book If you’re in B2B and you’re selling things to businesses, I think Challenger’s Tale is a really interesting book. Everybody should read it. On the positioning side, the the original masterwork on positioning was by these guys, Riesentraut. It’s called Positioning the Battle for your Mind. It was written in 1982. It’s super, super old. But if you want to go to the original source material and understand what is positioning about, why is it important, particularly in noisy, crowded markets, then that book, I think, is a good primer on that. So there’s a couple of books to read.
[00:51:38.00] – Andi J
And last one, because I know we’re almost out of time. I had a stack of questions still to ask, but let’s just go with this one. What question did you think I was going to ask you that I haven’t. I don’t know.
[00:51:51.12] – April D
I’m not sure. I get asked a lot, how do you know if your positioning is bad? That’s That’s a question I get asked, and that’s a good question. And people, specifically, because marketers, we’re all pretty metrics oriented right now. So people say, what’s the metric I should track for positioning? I wish I had a good answer for that, and I don’t. Unfortunately, weak positioning kills you across the whole funnel. It kills you in the early part of the funnel in that people don’t really get what you do. So you don’t gather as many leads as you could because people are like, I don’t even know what this thing is. And then once you get a lead in your funnel, you lose more customers than you should because they get part way through the funnel and then the light comes on and they’re like, oh, that’s not… Wait, I thought you were this and you’re this. It’s, Crap, I don’t want you. And then they drop out. It kills you in churn because sometimes your salespeople are just good at their job. They get them sold. But then when the customer actually gets in there and gets using it, they’re like, this isn’t what I need.
[00:52:58.20] – April D
And then they churn out on you. And so there are some things that I think are obvious signs of weak positioning. If you have happy, happy customers that love your stuff, but early in conversations with customers, they have a really hard… With new prospects, new prospects have a really hard time figuring out what it is you do. That gap between what somebody using your product knows and understands versus what you’re communicating out in the market, that gap is usually a positioning gap. So if you have that and you feel that, then chances are it’s not a bad idea to go back and examine the positioning.
[00:53:40.04] – Andi J
Handily, that also answers the question that Ran Fishkin posed as well. So without asking it, I’ve ticked that one-off the list as well. Listen, April, thank you very much for your time. Hopefully, when the conference season comes back, if you are anywhere near an event that April is doing, I know you’re doing a lot virtually, but if you’re anywhere near and you get a chance to go and see her in person, do it’s worth the admission money because it’s brilliant to go and see. So thank you very much for your time, April. And good luck with your consultancy.
[00:54:07.21] – April D
Thanks. Well, thanks so much for having me.
[00:54:11.23] – Andi J
Right. Let’s pick the bones out of that. Where do we start? First of all, funnel issues. So the little bit she said there towards the end about people at the early stage of the funnel don’t necessarily get what you do, or people get halfway through the funnel and go, whoa, this isn’t what we’re after. Or worse, they buy because you’ve got good sales people or you do a good sales pitch, and they get out the other end and go, oh, this isn’t a product for us. Actually, when you think about it, a lot of businesses that I’ve worked with, maybe in your business as well, think of, yeah, how long does some people take to get down the funnel. And even when they get there, it’s just a difficult positioning problem. Go through and read the book, read how to do that positioning exercise and try it. Independent facilitation is always better for stuff like this. But if you can’t do it, do it in-house at least, because that will be a big bonus for you to try and improve that positioning issue. One of the other things to look for, really, really long sales cycle.
[00:55:08.19] – Andi J
When you’re positioning, getting the right customer for your product, you suddenly hit that. People just go, oh, yeah, we need that. And buy. Long sales. Some industries, especially high touch, big expensive products, big ticket software, stuff like that. It’s going to have a long sales cycle anyway, That’s just happened. But sometimes that you know if your sales cycle is usually 6, 8, 12 months, if you’re closing deals in 15, 20, that’s a problem. So it’s not necessarily the length of the sales cycle. It’s when it’s longer than normal. So that’s a big issue to look at. And just the bit that she said about when you start up, just having a positioning thesis. I thought it was really interesting, but not being too stuck to it and being ready to move. I think that’s an important bit, being nimble enough and being ready to move. But yeah, what did you take out of it? Please do let me know in the comments. You may be picking the podcast up on social media, answering the comments, you can send me a message. I’d love to hear what you think, what you thought of April’s interview, and if you’ve ever struggled with positioning and what you did to overcome that.
[00:56:17.16] – Andi J
Please do get in touch. Just last one, big thanks to Moye Coffee for being sponsors. And thank you to you all for tuning in and to Aaron Pablo, Inside Voice for the production, because they do such a wonderful job. Come back in two weeks time and we’ll have episode 11. And do subscribe, smash that like button, rate it five stars, do whatever it is that you need to do on your podcasting service on YouTube. And please do tune in again in two weeks time. Thanks for your time.