00:00:00
Bryan Whittington
We are recording. You're, if you have any political future interest, just keep that in there.

00:00:07
April Dunford
All right. Put out of it.

00:00:10
Bryan Whittington
Here we go. It's just like, it looks like Dunford, right? Yeah. Dunford. Dunford. Okay. So, Hey everybody, Bryan Whittington and, I'm swooning over here over the fact that we have April Dunford on the line with us today, from just wrote obviously awesome. She has founder of ambient strategy. I fell in love with the book. I was so excited. I reached out and said, Hey, thanks for this. You wouldn't want to come on my podcast, which you achieved was crazy enough to agree. All of that to say, welcome April.

00:00:43
April Dunford
Thank you. It's good to be here. I'm happy to be here.

00:00:47
Bryan Whittington
I'm super pleased that you are here. If you haven't read it yet, check it out, obviously. Awesome. It's a real, how to guide on positioning and that might not be the most exciting thought in your mind of up positioning, right? So I'd rather do messaging or as well. Whenever I read this, I was like, Holy cow, I didn't realize all of this went into this. One of the first questions that we always ask April is, yeah, you wrote the book, so what, why should we listen to you?

00:01:18
April Dunford
Why should we listen to you on it? maybe we shouldn't, we should just leave it at that. No, here's what I think you should this to me. I, what, I think this is a really good question. My background is I spent 25 years as a repeat vice president of marketing at a series of successful startups. I think I did seven. Wow. So those startups got acquired. Through acquisition, I worked at a bunch of bigger companies where I ran marketing teams and product teams and across all seven of those, I repositioned in launched 16 products into market. That's my background of doing positioning as a practicing vice president of marketing. Since leaving that and going to be a consultant I've worked with about 150 different startups on their positioning. I've done an awful lot of positioning. The common theme across all of that is I've always worked in tech.

00:02:21
April Dunford
The vast majority of those companies are tech companies and almost all of them are B to B. I don't really do consumer stuff. So, if you want a position toothpaste or something, I may not be your gal, but if you've got a B2B tech product, I feel pretty good that I know what I'm doing in that little box. You've been there a time or two. Yeah.

00:02:45
Bryan Whittington
Got it. Well, and I'm reluctant to say this or ask this question of you because you'll likely get it a bazillion times. He wrote a rod right. In their book that, people are always asking me about it. Sorry for asking you this first one, but, positioning versus messaging because w talk to us about that, the difference between what is, why positioning even over messaging.

00:03:08
Speaker 2
Yeah. It is very much positioning and messaging. It confused all the time. In fact, in fact, the other one that it gets confused with is branding. People will say, Oh, I know who positioning is. It's brand positioning. And I'm like, there's branding, there's positioning. Those two things are actually completely separate concepts in my opinion, same thing with messaging. If you tell me April, I've got this amazing tech product, please go and create me some messaging. I go, okay, well, first I got a bunch of questions for you. Who's the product for, and what is the value of this product? And you have competitors. How do you beat those competitors? And what exactly is the market that you intend to win with this product? I can't do messaging until I answer those questions. Positioning is how we get to the answer for all of those questions.

00:03:57
Speaker 2
There's all this stuff that we do in marketing and sales and positioning is the foundation of that. It is the input, almost everything we downstream, but positioning has to come first.

00:04:08
Bryan Whittington
Well let's especially startups, especially as really smart founders. I can sell this to anyone. This is really good. There is no competition. We hear all of this craziness all the time. Right. How do you deal with that? How do you get them to unpack this? Because they want to, I've seen that they typically want to skip that and go right to the sales or right. To the marketing and, right. To exit. There's a lot of work that goes in front of that. How do you deal with that founder? That's like that don't worry about it.

00:04:39
Speaker 2
Yeah. So, so the first thing to think about, and, when we're building stuff and we work inside startups and we get really into our own stuff, and sometimes it's hard to kind of step back and say, all right, let's think about this from a customer's perspective. I've got a product I'm trying to sell it to somebody. I'm the customer. I'm trying to buy something in my purchase journey. Now, this thing that I'm trying to buy, solves a problem, and what? I have the problem today, and I'm solving the problem today, doing something, it might be something stupid. Maybe I'm doing it with an Excel spreadsheet, or maybe I've hired an intern to do it. Or maybe I have a bunch of manual process. Maybe I'm using my ERP system, which was never designed to solve that problem. But I've been getting by with that. It's okay.

00:05:29
Speaker 2
I wake up one morning and what, Joey, the intern made a big mistake and everything's terrible. I'm like, what? I got to stop doing it like this. I got to go look for something else. What I do, I go on the internet, I Google it up. I, I'm like, I need to find software that does this. And somehow I assemble a short list. If it's B2B, right, I've got two or three things that I'm looking. And one of those things is yours. Who do I gotta beat? Well, first I gotta beat the status quo. I gotta beat Joey the intern. I gotta be an Excel spreadsheet because if I don't, then the customer would just stay doing what they do. We know that we lose on average, 30%, 40% of our deals to do nothing. If we don't consider that a competitor, we're not doing it.

00:06:18
Speaker 2
Right. So that's the first thing. We gotta beat that. Even if I beat that and convince the customer that they've got to do something, I'm not the only game in town, they've got other things on their list. Now you might not think those things are direct competition to you, but if a customer puts it on a list, you gotta beat them too.

00:06:37
Bryan Whittington
That's a curious statement, because especially since we're so deep in the weeds, we're so you can't see the forest for the trees, as they say, right, that cliche now, how do you get that founder to realize that because they truly believe that they have the better mouse trap and there is no competition.

00:06:55
Speaker 2
Well, and they probably, and in many times they do, right. They do have a better mouse trap for a certain kind of customer, not for everybody. Generally the way we start a positioning exercise is, again, this idea of not who are not, who is my competitor, it's, who's my competitive alternative. There's lots of ways to solve a problem. You can solve a problem with lots of things that don't compete with you, right? But in the minds of customers, it's an alternative way of solving the problem. So, I can do my invoices by just be, doing that with a word document or Excel spreadsheet. There's that the other thing is that, there's other things out there that are clearly not as good as your product, I give you that, right. For certain kinds of customers, but it doesn't mean that a customer knows that yet when they go to talk to you.

00:07:46
Speaker 2
Your job in a sales situation is to help a customer make sense of look, there's different approaches to solving this problem. Here's what they are. Here's the negatives of each of those. If you look at that, there's a gap and we are the only people that can fill that gap. That's why you want to buy our stuff. If you can tell that story that I don't think you're really thinking about this from a customer's perspective and you're likely to lose deals.

00:08:14
Bryan Whittington
Two things off of that one is it is critically important to look at this from a buyer's journey perspective. If you cannot put yourself in the shoes of your buyer, now you're messing up already. Two, one thing that you also said is, Hey, be transparent about this. Bring up the alternatives in front of them and hash it out right there. I mean, I hear some people going, that's crazy. April, why in the world would I do that?

00:08:41
Speaker 2
Well, I'm a big fan of that. It doesn't mean that you necessarily have to name your competitors because you don't always have to. Generally, if you, here's the thing to think about in B2B, in tech, if we're selling to a business buyer, I'm trying to sell technology to a business buyer, the vast majority of the time, in fact, something like 93% of the time, we are selling to a person that has never purchased a solution like that before. Interesting. So think about that. You've never. You, so your boss woke up and went to you and said, dude, find me some CRM. We got to buy some CRM here and you're going Frick. I never purchased CRM before. I don't w what's a good CRM, what's a bad CRM. I don't know nothing about CRM. What do I do? I get on the Google, right? So, and I look and where do I end up on G2 crowd or software advice, or, maybe I pull some Gartner reports, God knows.

00:09:40
Speaker 2
And, and there's a thousand CRMs. There's 1000 CRMs out there, right? I don't know which one of them is good. I don't know how to make purchase criteria. I have no idea. Somehow I end up making some kind of a short list. I'm talking to vendors and what I actually want. And the research bears this out. If the research shows that what customers want, especially early on in a purchase cycle from their salespeople, is they want a sales person to help them make sense of the market. That, that is very different from saying, they want you to make sense of them to make sense of your product. I want to make sense of the approaches. You know, there's a thousand CRM. Why should you even be on my list? am I paying attention to the right things? And so one of the things that we can do that is essentially super helpful to buyers is to say, look, there are different ways to do this.

00:10:41
Speaker 2
There are different approaches to this problem, and let's talk about it. There's approach a and the pluses and minuses are like this bridge approach, B pluses and minuses, like this approach C and I don't have to necessarily name a company. I could name a list of companies if I want to do and say, but look, they don't approach one is, do it manually. Approach two is use a mid-market solution. Here's an exhibit examples of those approach. Three is use a vertically in a vertical industry solution. And here's some examples of those. I talk about the pluses and minuses. The important part is if in that exploration, I should be able to say, look, here's how the market maps out, man. Look, there's a gap for customers like you. There's a great big hole. None of those things satisfied this set of requirements that customers like you have, and that's us, we plug that hole right there.

00:11:33
Speaker 2
If you can do that, then what you've done is not only successfully positioned your own solution, you positioned everybody else's well, like what you're doing is you're giving the customer a way to think about the whole market so they can feel confident that one they're taking the right approach. Once they've selected that approach to, you're a very good option to do it that way.

00:11:57
Bryan Whittington
So interesting. This points out that spot, that opening that gap, that should be where you niche out, that's where you attack the market. Cause they always say there's riches in the niches. So.

00:12:11
Speaker 2
People say initials, but I mean, that could be billions and billions of revenue in there. Right? Right. Like that could be billions of revenue in there. Like if I'm, if we stay on the topic of CRM, for example, right? Like not everybody out there wants a CRM that does absolutely everything, but it comes with a really hefty price tag, right. That Salesforce, they do billions of revenue. If you want everything and you've got the money to do it where you want number one, we're number one. Right. There is a lot of market around them of companies that would never choose Salesforce use is simply overkill, too complex, too expensive. There's a lot of other different reasons why you wouldn't do it. It doesn't have anything special for particular industries. There's lots of niches around that are also very big. What you do have to do is define where is the space that you win.

00:13:14
Speaker 2
That can be very big that space, for a lot of startups. What you really want to do is define here's the space where I win right now. It's not necessarily the space where you're going to win next year or 10 years from now. If I'm trying to sell stuff right now, I gotta be able to define the pocket right now that says, here's where I win right now. How do we,

00:13:38
Bryan Whittington
This is going to be a really tactical question. How do we find the space where we win? Is this your five plus one? Is that exercise or something different?

00:13:46
Speaker 2
Yeah. So it kind of works like that. Again, if I say, look, I got a product and it's in the market right now. First I can look at it and I can say, all right, who do I compete with? Well, I compete with the status quo. It looks like this. I compete with the other things that end up on the short list. That's the, this is who I got to beat. You say, okay, what have I got that? The alternatives don't have feature function, capability wise. What am I got? I can feel a whiteboard full of this. Generally, when I'm working with clients, we do fill a whiteboard full of these things. What I can do is I can take those features and I can map those features to value. I got all these differentiated features that only I have my buy alternatives. Don't have it.

00:14:28
Speaker 2
What for customers, what does the customer get out of that? And that gets me to differentiated value. I can take a step back and say, all right, I got a thing and I'm selling it to small businesses and almost any small business wants this, but what, if these are my three points of differentiated value, not everybody cares about that. Right. But some folks care a lot. If you could answer the question, what are the characteristics of a company that makes them care a lot about my differentiated value, that's who your best fit customers are. That's the spot where you win.

00:15:06
Bryan Whittington
Okay. Some people would say, well, I would find that out in a messaging exercise, but really what you're suggesting. That's all part of, that's the positioning exercise that you,

00:15:15
Speaker 2
I mean, it's not just messaging right now. I've got to be able to express that to people. I mean, at the end of the day, like I don't get to just make this up. I don't, I don't like hopes and dreams. Don't get me to the place where I win. Right. I got to actually look at where is my product, uniquely qualified to meet the needs of a set group of customers. The only way I can look at that is I'd say, well, the, here are the other alternatives. Here's the stuff I've got that they don't have. Here's the value I provide that it doesn't come from anywhere else. We don't make this up. That's where it comes from. We say, okay, well, if this is what I can uniquely provide, who cares about that? Who cares a lot about that? And these are the people where I, if I can figure that out, and these are the accounts where I should win every single time, because only I can do this stuff.

00:16:13
Speaker 2
Now, how do you,

00:16:14
Bryan Whittington
How do you figure that out? Especially on a new product launch? Is it, do we do lean startup? The customer interviews, is it middle volt, mental via minimal viable product. Get feedback from there. I mean, walk us through, is it that easy or not? I don't want to say that easy, but that's straightforward.

00:16:33
Speaker 2
Here's the thing. If it's a brand new product and I'm like, I'm trying to do this for a product and I haven't even got a product yet. I'm, I'm going to launch it. It's not out in the market yet. What I actually have at that phase is a positioning thesis, right? I don't know if it's true or not. I just got a thesis. If I'm doing lean startup, for example, I go out and I'm doing my interviews with potential prospects. Based on all those customer discovery interviews, I come back and I say, okay, here's my positioning thesis. My thesis is here's who I compete with. Here's how I'm different. This is the value I can provide that no one else can provide. Therefore, these are the kinds of customers that are going to love me. This is the market I'm going to win. That's my thesis.

00:17:17
Speaker 2
Now. Here's what happens. Right. I throw it out in the market, whether it's minimum viable product or whatever, I put something out in the market and I get feedback on it. Generally what I'm trying to do again, if I'm following lean startup, I'm trying to validate all the assumptions that went into my thesis are, do I actually see these competitors and accounts? Is that really who I compete with? Or is there something else in there I didn't think of, are my differentiated things actually differentiated or are there other things in there that I wasn't even thinking about? does.

00:17:50
April Dunford
My value resonate with these kinds of customers? The way I assume that it would, or is there some other kind of customer I didn't even consider has found my stuff and loves my stuff and is pulling me in a completely different direction. In the early phases, when you've just launched a new thing, what you're trying to do is validate your positioning thesis. Generally in my experience, haven't been to gal has launched a lot of products. We're wrong, we're wrong, and all kinds of stuff, because customers do jet. We would never predict in the middle. What happens is after we've gotten our first wave of customers, then what we've got is we're starting to see the patterns in, who loves our stuff. That's a very good that is a very good point to then revisit the positioning and tighten it up because your thesis was probably wrong.

00:18:45
April Dunford
Got it. Okay. A lot of folks come to me and they're, their product hasn't launched yet. They're like, well, wait, April, we want to hire you to come and like, tighten up our positioning. I'm like, look, you got a thesis. It's as good as you can make it with customer discovery, but trust me, it's going to change. You actually want to leave the positioning loose because you don't know where it's going to get pulled. The example that I, this is a terrible analogy, but it's only one I got. I, so I use it all the time. It's like you designed a fishing net and you think it's for tuna, it's a tune efficient net. I could launch the thing and say, world's greatest Junis fishing net. We go fishing with it for tuna and maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't, but that's my thesis. Or I could launch it with kind of loose positioning and say, what, that's my thesis, but I'm not really sure how this is going to work out.

00:19:39
April Dunford
I'm going to launch it as net. It's two, it's a fishing net for big fish, all kinds of big fish. Throw that sucker out in the ocean and then let's see what we pull up. We get as a whole bunch of grouper. We say, what? That's not a tune fishing net. It's a group or fishing net who knew. I can take my positioning around that and just go sell the hell out of the group of fish.

00:20:05
Bryan Whittington
Now, how, okay. Were talking about, well, a couple of things, but w whenever we're looking at, like, we use CRM, so that's a software. One might call it super commoditized. Can we take some, super commoditized? Not,

00:20:23
April Dunford
But, okay.

00:20:25
Bryan Whittington
There's set, there's thousands of them out there, right?

00:20:28
April Dunford
Her company, I ran marketing for a division of a company that was the CRM before Salesforce existed. My division did 800 million revenue company did 2 billion revenue. They don't even exist today. Got it. At the time we thought were untouchable at the time we thought were totally commodity too turned out. We weren't.

00:20:52
Bryan Whittington
Okay. Which brings up that point, right? So, whenever we have a ton of competition, then it really gets to a positioning statement on or positioning of how do we differentiate ourselves? Is that right? Because I liked your example and I can't remember it right off the top of mine.

00:21:11
April Dunford
Right? There's, every market is crowded.

00:21:14
Bryan Whittington
And it's noisier and noisier. There's so much out there. It's so hard to stand out. One thing that I liked about yours is it a muffin? Is it a cake? Is it a, what did you call it? A, was that, a paleo snack? Is that really, what we have to do is what, even if it's super cool, and I won't say commodity again, but even if it's commoditized, even there's a ton of competition out there, it's really getting that, Hey, it's really a paleo snack kind of thing.

00:21:46
April Dunford
Here's the thing like if you're in the market and you're selling some stuff, people are picking you for a reason, right. There are underserved parts of existing markets all over the place, right? Like, and I just illustrated it with Salesforce. Like what three person sales team, pick Salesforce,

00:22:09
Bryan Whittington
The ones that don't know any alternatives.

00:22:12
April Dunford
Right, right. There's an awful lot of market to go around and a lawful lot of places that even where you have a super dominant leader in the market, there are an awful lot of un-served segments all around that. That's not even talking about emerging markets, right. So, we have new categories of software emerging all the time, where there isn't a dominated dominant player yet, and that's just kind of a dog fight. There's all kinds of people in there trying to redefine where the boundaries are and trying to redefine what's where, so just because our market is crowded, it doesn't mean there's a lot. There, isn't a lot of opportunity that we can uniquely go after and uniquely win. That's the thing to think about is, and I, I talk about this a lot with the companies that I work for is look, your positioning is going to change as the company grows and evolves.

00:23:06
April Dunford
So, if I think about in a very practical way, right? If all you got to do this year is 20 deals. What you should really be thinking about is what is the easiest way for me to do 20 deals, not what is the biggest market I could go after. This isn't about raising venture capital. That's where you tell those stories. If I'm just trying to like, do 20 deals, then why wouldn't I define this tightly defined? Here's a spot where we never lose. Here's a spot where we win every deal and just run rate at that, get to 20 deals. After I've got the 20 deals, I can say, well, I don't know, can I get another 20 in that little patch? Or do I have to widen things out then I worried about how I'm going to widen it up.

00:23:51
Bryan Whittington
Well, let's play advocate against that. Right. Well, I don't want to do that because then I'll saturate the market. I have to win the whole entire thing. That seems too risky.

00:23:59
April Dunford
When a market,

00:24:01
Bryan Whittington
Well, there's only 20 though. So we'll keep role playing this. There's only 20 though.

00:24:05
April Dunford
What do you mean? There's only 20. I couldn't, so I can't win all 20. Yeah. You know, I won't win all 20. That's how it works. Like you have, the market has to be big enough to meet your revenue goal. If your revenue goal is I got to do 20 deals, well then there, I hope there's a thousand prospects in that market. Otherwise I don't know how you're going to do 20 deals. Right. You do have to do that math right. That, we all got funnels and conversion rates and funnels, not everybody's ready to buy today. Th there shouldn't be a few thousand in that market, at least, but chances are, you're going to define the market in a way. You're going to look at that and you're going to gosh, there's 20,000 companies in there. All I got to do is 20 deals. I can do this, but then you get to the end of it.

00:24:53
April Dunford
You want to say, is that big enough? I'll give you an example. I worked for a company and were enterprise CRM. This is why I know so much about CRM, enterprise CRM. This was when Salesforce only sold the little bitty little companies. Everybody forgets this. Remember when they had the free three seat version,

00:25:12
Bryan Whittington
Right? Yes.

00:25:15
April Dunford
You had to pay for additional seats after that, because they were going after micro SMB that's who used Salesforce. I was working at a company that was selling enterprise CRM. Our big competitor at the time was Siebel 2 billion revenue, 8,000 employees, giant, publicly traded, fastest company to a billion revenue ever in the history of Silicon Valley, blah. So we're positioned exactly against them. They're enterprise CRM, we're enterprise CRM, and we can sell nothing. Like, cause every time we go in, we're this little tiny company in Canada, we don't have any real differentiators. In fact, their products way better than ours, where ours has only been around for a year. We got this little feature that differentiates us and they can't copy it because it's right in our data model. We could model relationships in a slightly different way than they did problem was, is we didn't know who cared about that.

00:26:06
April Dunford
We showed it in deals and every time we showed it, people are like, Hey, that looks kind of cool. What do you use it for? And we're like, anything you want, no. Right. So, but eventually what happened was we sold a deal to an investment bank and it turns out our way of modeling relationships was like crack for investment bankers. Like investment bankers went crazy for this thing. They're like, Oh my gosh, I got to have that. We ended up repositioning ourselves as CRM for investment banks. Now, does that sound really nichey? Yeah, it does. Right. We had to go and sell that to the board like P so we've got a board, we've got a bunch of people who've invested.

00:26:44
Speaker 2
In us. They're like, no way, man, that market's way to school. How many investment banks are there on the planet? Yeah. Right. Were, at the time were doing 2 million revenue. The way we sold them is we said, look, we're going to be able to raise our prices because we're specialized. Secondly, we're not going to do investment banking forever. We're going to be CRM for investment banks. Once we know, we think we're dominating investment banking, that's going to give us a way to get to retail banking because a lot of these investment banks have a retail bank, right. We're going to go to the retail bank. We're going to be CRM for banking. Once we've got retail banking, that gives us a way to get into insurance because a lot of the retail banks do insurance too. That's going to give us away. We're going to be CRM for financial services.

00:27:29
Speaker 2
Let me tell you that is a massive market. Once we get there, then we're going to take on Siebel, head to head. We're going to, we're going to blow them out and then we'll go back to be an enterprise CRM cause we're going to dominate the world. Do what happened in that? We just in the investment banking piece, we never actually made it out of investment banking. We went from 2 million to 80 million revenue in a little over a year. Wow. And everyone's like, Ooh, that's too small. That is too nichey. And it just wasn't. That company ended up getting acquired for $1.3 billion. Everyone's like, Oh, you don't want to make your market's so small. It's like, it's actually the opposite. The tighter you can get it. The more like the reason we grew so fast is because Siebel couldn't touch us in that space because we had killer feature.

00:28:18
Speaker 2
They didn't have. Yeah. Every deal we got into it was Oscar vs Siebel. And we're like easy fight. We can beat them here. Can't beat them anywhere else. Can't touch them anywhere else. But in a year easy fight.

00:28:29
Bryan Whittington
It's really knowing who you are, knowing what you're good at and being comfortable with that and just really ramping it up. You've really lived out a crossing the chasm. If you remember that old book, that's true.

00:28:40
Speaker 2
W land your beach. We, we're such big fans of crossing the chasm when I was doing that startup, wait, that is how we sold the board on it. We drew the bowling pin strategy. Like, he has that thing and crossing the chasm bowling pin strategy. We literally drew the pins on the whiteboard and said, look, our lead pins, investment banking. Once we knocked that over, we get retail bank. Once we knocked that over, then we get insurance and blah. We drew the pins on the board from Jeffrey Moore.

00:29:07
Bryan Whittington
I love it. Okay. Now, so you gave us that now, can you touch on about the five plus one process and by the way, grab the book obviously. Awesome. Yeah.

00:29:19
Speaker 2
I have it on my shelf right here so that I can do this.

00:29:23
Bryan Whittington
Oh, let's see. I have to watch it on YouTube. She's doing that.

00:29:27
Speaker 2
No, that's a visual gag that doesn't translate to the podcast or you got to see it on YouTube. Come on.

00:29:36
Bryan Whittington
Within that. She talks about the five plus one. It's a great book, but then you also have a number of different resources and I love the PDFs at waterfall positioning or whatever that one is. Let's hit that five plus one place, if you will. Can you walk us through what is the five plus one?

00:29:51
Speaker 2
Oh, so in the book, I describe a process for doing positioning. The process for doing positioning has 10 steps. There are five component pieces of positioning and we work our way through them. There's a bonus one, which is the plus one, but the five component pieces of positioning, are essentially these it is competitive alternatives or what would your customers do if you didn't exist? Second one is unique features or capabilities. What do you got that the competitors don't have? Third one is differentiated value. So you got these capabilities. What for customers? So what is the value that you can uniquely provide to customers? The fourth piece is, well, who are those customers? It's not for everybody. How do we define who's our best fit customer in there? And then the fifth one is market category. Are you email or are you chat? What is the market that you intend to win? the bonus pieces is how we loop in a relevant trend, which you don't have to do at all.

00:30:54
Speaker 2
If you can, sometimes it's very cool to do. In the book, I describe a bit about that. The, so the book itself kind of outlines the process for, how do I assemble a team to actually do this positioning work? And then when we go to do the work, how do I move through those five pieces? And then what do I do when I've gotten the five pieces? What do I do to then go make that be real in my messaging or in my sales pitch and all the rest of it.

00:31:25
Bryan Whittington
I have my sense of which one for me is the most difficult. All of the people that you've worked with from the alternatives to the unique offerings, to the differentiating values, how do we show that value to defining best fit customer, to categorization of those? Which one would you say is the most difficult for people to do?

00:31:50
Speaker 2
Hands down? It's the value piece. Okay. People don't think that's going to be the hard one. The second, most difficult one is competitive alternatives. Hilariously. Everyone thinks that's the easy step. Everyone gets it wrong. That's.

00:32:04
Bryan Whittington
Really interesting because I was one of those ones.

00:32:06
Speaker 2
Say it's market category, right? You'd be like, that's the hard one, right?

00:32:09
Bryan Whittington
That's exactly it. No, no.

00:32:12
Speaker 2
I hope everyone's obsessed with market category, but once you figure out what your differentiated value is, market category is not that hard. It's figuring out it's because everyone wants to go directly to category without really deeply understanding their differentiated value in itself is actually a really hard concept, even for marketers to understand. Most people, if you talk about the difference between features and benefits and value, but that is actually really hard conceptually to understand, even for marketers. I got a room full of people that includes sales product to CEO, the founder, that whoever runs customer success, we're trying to say, well, these are our features. Why do they matter? Like that translation between features to value is actually really hard. Like in the workshops I do, we will spend maybe six, seven hours on across the whole five pieces. Like before we start working on a sales narrative, we might spend three of those on value.

00:33:12
Bryan Whittington
Now maybe I'm over simplifying it, but value isn't it that we identify what the problem is. What's that dollar and cents impact. That's going to give us if this problem is solved, what that problem, which problem?

00:33:30
Speaker 2
No. Have lots of problems, which problem this is where people get into a corner in this stuff, is they do things like that. They'll say, let's just start with the problem products. I was lots of problems. How do you define which problem?

00:33:44
Bryan Whittington
Oh, okay. So forgive me. Whenever I'm looking at a problem, I'm taking it and tell me if I'm wrong here. So I love this. You're beating me up.

00:33:51
Speaker 2
I don't know I'm being, ya know, but I hate starting with the problem thing. It's going to get you in trouble. I can frame the problem that my product solves in a thousand ways. How do you know the right one?

00:34:06
Bryan Whittington
Do you, do you frame it from the product or the problem that your product solves or do you prime it from the position of what the problem is that your ideal customer has? Cause that's.

00:34:17
Speaker 2
My ideal customer has a multitude of problems. Some of them I solve and some of them, I don't. All right. Here's, so here's what I'm actually trying to get at is what is the problem that is very important to that customer that I uniquely can solve? How do I figure out that it is the inverse of my differentiated value? How do I get to differentiated value? Well, differentiated value by definition comes from my differentiated features. Where, where do my differentiated features come from? Well, I must be differentiating them from something, right? That's my competitive alternatives. That's why we start at competitive alternatives. I got to know what would the customer do with my stuff? So forget about problems. What would the customer do? If my stuff didn't exist, here's what they would do. One of these products. What have I got that these things don't have just my differentiated things.

00:35:12
Speaker 2
Now, what is the value that those differentiating things provides? That's my differentiated value. Alright. If that's my differentiated value, what's the problem that I can uniquely solve. It is the problem. That is the inverse of this value.

00:35:28
Bryan Whittington
It's literally that easy. You're killing me. So what you're really saying is.

00:35:32
Speaker 2
It's a very different way of thinking about it half the time I'll go in and I'll give you an example. I.

00:35:38
April Dunford
Work with a company this week, right? E-commerce their e-commerce for grocery stores. What's the problem they solve well, selling your groceries online, right? No way, man. They're they, what if all you want to do is sell groceries online Instacart. Yeah. That's what you buy Instacart. They do that way better than these guys, so what's the value that these guys provide. The value is they allow you to stand up your own e-commerce site easily, quickly, reliably, and do it in a way that preserves your margins and the loyalty of your customers with you. So what's the problem that they solve. The problem they solve is allowing you to bring your business into the digital age, by selling online. To do that by one, preserving your margin and to not becoming overly dependent on a company that is likely to compete with you in the future. That's the problem they solve.

00:36:51
April Dunford
Now. That's nothing like the guy selling groceries online. No, if all you want to do to sell groceries online, you just do Instacart, but what's the problem with Instacart? Well, the problem with Instacart is one. They're going to compete with you. Two, they're going to charge you big fees and they're going to compete with you for brand co-op dollars. It's actually very hard for a grocery store to sell with Instacart and make any profit at all. Yeah, well, so this is why people get into trouble with this thing. If they just put up a website and say, sell your groceries online, they lose that battle. They lose it every time they'll lose it to Instacart.

00:37:30
Bryan Whittington
So, and again, I just it's, it makes such logical sense. It seems too simple. I mean, really it's being honest with yourself of what people are really doing and in lieu of using Euro you, and it's not just your competitors. That's a real thing that I took from your book is really getting deep down and being honest about those alternatives. From those alternatives, it's making a list. Well, instead of that alternative, here's why we're better. From that, here's why we're better help me with the, how we take that to the differentiated value. It the cost savings, time savings? Is it that we're getting down to the root?

00:38:09
April Dunford
Well, so here's what we give to, right? So we say, okay, like, let's take my grocery store. E-commerce people as an example, right? So what are the alternatives? The alternatives are you just put it on Instacart and don't have your own.com or whatever. Cause you don't have an it department, man, that sucks. Put it on Instacart. That's option one, actually option one is do nothing, right? Like in the grocery store, don't do anything. Option two is go and do it on Instacart. Option three is, well, I'm going to have to build my own site to do this stuff. There's three or four competitors in there, but those competitors kind of fall into two camps. One is they're kind of these cookie cutter mid-market solutions. You can't do a lot of things like you can't sell prepared food. You can't sell like all the really high margin things you want to sell in a grocery store.

00:38:58
April Dunford
You can't sell them. You can't configure them to do that. Or there is another enterprise e-commerce thing out there, but those guys are kind of, it's a risky proposition to work with them. Cause they outsource all of their support. They outsource the implementation. You can go with them, but it's kind of risky. If something goes wrong, you've got seven different vendors there and you're going to have to figure out who you're going to blame. Right? So that's their competitive landscape, right? So then you say, well, what do they got that the alternatives don't have? Well, first of all, you get to keep all your customer data, not pay a bunch of fees. If I'm comparing it and Instacart not pay a bunch of fees and work with people who aren't trying to put me in a business. That's one, right? Number two, if I look versus the little guys, well, I can have the site look, whoever I want preserve my brand identity, sell all these really hard margin things.

00:39:52
April Dunford
Right. If I look versus the other one, I, I got a company that does their own professional services. They've done a dozen other great, big grocery store chains. So they know what they're doing. You've got a very high likelihood that the project is going to get deployed successfully. Those are the differentiator. All right. What's the value of that? Well, the value of that is, 0.1 I've got, I'm going to buy from a company that is invested in my success, right? So not trying to compete with me, not trying to steal my data, not trying to compete with me with co-op dollars, all this stuff too. I got a system that's super flexible, unlike the little guys, right? Super flexible, fixing to whatever I've got right now. I can get it deployed really fast and easy. But, but at the same time, do prepared food, do all these other things.

00:40:47
April Dunford
Big margin preserve my profitability, preserve my customer loyalty. The last one is kind of a, it's almost more objection handling than value, but it's like my likelihood of doing a special project with these folks is high because I am a brand or a technology stack that people trust. So I'm a trusted provider. I'm not the first grocery store to do this. I'm going to do it with a team. That's going to be with me all the way through. We're going to get this thing done successfully. That's the differentiated value. That's why people pick by guys versus anybody else versus Instacart versus any other e-commerce for grocery store thing.

00:41:25
Bryan Whittington
Yeah. I see what I was doing wrong. I was taking the negative, we de-risk we right. I was taking that negative and try and put business in dollars and cents, but you're legitimately saying, here's why you would want to do it. Here's the upside. Here's the value. So I was got it. I don't know how I missed that one, but yeah.

00:41:43
April Dunford
Yeah. So this is why he picked us. The next question is, well, I could sell to any grocery store. What grocery store cares a lot about this? Well, you kind of have to understand and we can help educate you, but you kind of have to understand that Instacart's a risk to your business. You have to understand the economics of working with Instacart, that it's hard to be profitable. They're actually their best fit customer is someone that's already working with Instacart and realizes what the heck is going.

00:42:15
Bryan Whittington
On. Right.

00:42:17
April Dunford
Doesn't necessarily want to fully divest from Instacart. They might still want to be on that marketplace, but they're worried about the long-term implications of that. They're like, what? We can't just do Instacart. We actually need to stand up our own thing.

00:42:31
Bryan Whittington
Yeah. So, even if I'm brand new in an industry, by me doing this research, I forced myself into this research. I'm going to get really knowledgeable, especially because I'm such a, a limited market. I can learn a ton about that market. Be very insightful, have strategic conversations with these folks. Now I'm a, a trusted advisor. There you go. I'm that trusted advisor.

00:42:57
April Dunford
Say, look like, look, you want to sell stuff online. Right. We get it. But you're a little bit worried. What, in 2020, were all having a panic COVID was happening and you wanted to get that business online and you went with Instacart, we get it. Right. Now what we see in the market is people are getting worried about being too reliant on Instacart as they're all in one digital solution, right? You've got choices,

00:43:27
Bryan Whittington
You got your freedom.

00:43:29
April Dunford
Right. And here's the problem with that. Instacart has a thing for grocery stores. It's called powered by Instacart as bad. And, and does that actually solve your problem? No, you're just getting even further in bed with Instacart. So that's a problem. What are you going to do? What you got to build your own thing. Okay. Well, if you've got to build your own thing, you got choices. You can go to the mid-market solution. Here's why you don't want to do them. Or you could go with the other thing, but you gotta be careful there. Like, and so that's how I ended up telling the story is, look, there's a gap. What we don't have is a good choice for a grocery store that wants to get online, but wants to get online with something they're sure is going to be successful with a trusted partner that can do all the specialized grocery store things they need.

00:44:14
April Dunford
And that's my gut. That just nobody else out there that does it. If you want that, then you get, then you gotta come with me. That's the spot where we win.

00:44:20
Bryan Whittington
Yeah. The beauty is what you're doing here is one we're helping that person problem solve. Again, back to that trusted advisor, but two, I always say this, if it's a no, if it's a nano, I want a K N O w right away. If they go, but that's not a big deal. All right. Well, that's going to be less expensive. Why don't you do that? I think.

00:44:39
Speaker 2
If you don't think it's a big deal to put all your eggs in this cart, back basket, go nuts.

00:44:44
Bryan Whittington
Yeah. Good, good luck. Hate doesn't sound like it can help you I'll see you in six months. You end that you have a good relationship. You say, it might want to consider that, but Hey, we'll be here whenever you come around,

00:44:55
Speaker 2
We'll be here. Right. We can try to convince you and show you a bit of the evidence, but that's all I can do. Right. And they, and they do. Right. And their sales process. They'll show some of the evidence that, yeah, they're going down this path, but if you don't. Really what we're trying to do in the sales narrative piece of this, like once we have the positioning, we can then say, okay, here's our definition of the problem. Here are the different approaches to the problem. The way we look at it, our point of view on the market is that there is a gap here and we are designed to fill that gap. Yeah.

00:45:32
Bryan Whittington
Well, it seems super easy. You said you have roughly 176 times that you've done this, something like that. All right. After 176 times, we'll figure it out. Son of a gun.

00:45:46
Speaker 2
Yeah. A bunch of times.

00:45:48
Bryan Whittington
All right. I, so I want to be cognizant of your time. I could talk to you all day. This has been a blast. I really appreciate it. Let's rapid fire, these next couple of things. So, looking at your clients or even some of the work that you've done, what has been some of the biggest challenges or mistakes that you've made that you're willing to share with us? So we can not have that same pain and the same scars that you've earned?

00:46:10
Speaker 2
Yeah. Some of the biggest challenges. Again, I think there's this idea of, one is in the early days of the product, when you're just launching it, you don't want to get too tight on the positioning. Like, like there's only so much you can do. In customer discovery calls, you actually want to keep it loose. Wait until you start seeing the patterns, tighten it up. Second thing is that, good positioning generally does not happen by accident. Like at some point you're going to have to take a step back and you need to get the whole team together and you need to get everybody in agreement and alignment on here's what we compete with. Here's how we're different. This is why we win. This is who went with. If we're all in agreement on alignment on that, we're going to do fine. If we're not, it's going to be really hard to grow.

00:46:58
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00:46:59
Bryan Whittington
So much there. I had so many notes here, April that I wanted to hit that so much more deeply, but son of a gun, all right, time is our enemy here. So a best business hack. I shared that with you before, and you got pretty passionate about this. Best business hack around with our talent management, hiring people, sales, development, or scaling, and you jumped all over.

00:47:23
Speaker 2
Well, this thing about scaling. So, because essentially this is my, back in the, when I was a vice president of marketing, that's why you hired me. Right. I came in, when you were a couple of million revenue, you hired me to be the brand new vice president of marketing. My job was to put the foot on the gas on lead generation. So we could scale. And you know, the key to that. This comes back to, an idea, but, product market fit. If you follow venture capitalists, they'll talk about, well, we'll achieve product market fit. We don't know how that is. We don't know how to define it. It's a nebulous thing, but what, when you got it, we have product market fit and that's when we're going to scale. They'd hire me and say, we have product market fit April at scale. I'd be like, okay, who's our competition and how are we different? And what's the value that we provide that no one else does.

00:48:15
Speaker 2
Exactly what is the definition of customers where we win. If we can't answer that, then I can't do good marketing programs. If I can't do good marketing programs, we're not going to scale. Yeah. Simple as that. We have to absolutely nail that positioning. There is no way that you can scale really fast and not have that super tightly locked down. Often the minute we get that super tightly locked down, that's when we unlock the growth. It's like my example of the company that, where we thought were CRM for everybody, it turned out were CRM for investment banks. We had been sitting at a million revenue for three, four years. The minute we locked down that positioning and defined. Here's the spot where we win every time. That's what gave us the ramp. That's what got us from two to 80 in a year.

00:49:04
Bryan Whittington
Yeah. I love that. I was not expecting you to say that I was expecting you to say, well, if you don't have the systems and the processes that the way to protect your brand,

00:49:13
Speaker 2
All that stuff too.

00:49:15
Bryan Whittington
So I love that. So. Good. Good. Yeah, yeah. That too. All right. Other than obviously awesome by the book already, what other books, podcasts, resources that we, that you might suggest that we check out so we can be as smart as you,

00:49:34
Speaker 2
Well, what, it's funny, a lot of the books that I've read that I did, I let have a bunch of older books that I keep coming back to because I think they're so good. And, that I think everyone should read and I'm kind of surprised that people don't and they probably don't cause they're kind of old now, but they're still really good. Like earlier, you and I were talking about Jeffrey, Moore's crossing the chasm and bowling pin strategy. Like it's amazing how much I come back to that book. The one that I come back to a lot, when we're talking about sales narrative and how you construct a good sales story is the challenger sale. Okay. The companion book to that, the challenger customer, I come back to that one a lot when I'm talking to companies about personas and what do we do when we've got a complex deal and there's multiple stakeholders in the deal and how do we figure out how to have our positioning work across those multiple ones, those two books, challenger sale, and challenger customer like anybody selling to B2B should read those in their hefty books.

00:50:38
Speaker 2
Yeah. They're based on a really solid foundation of, empirical research. I, I come back to those two books probably more than anything else on my bookshelf. Okay. That's awesome stuff. Except for maybe the original positioning book, which I actually have sitting on my desk at all times called positioning the battle for your mind by these guys, reason trout. And they invented the concept of positioning. This is still a great book. It was written in the eighties. We can believe that I still recommend people read it. It's really good. What it doesn't do is tell you how to do it. That's the gap that my book is trying to fill.

00:51:13
Bryan Whittington
I, and I love the fact that yours just really lays it out there. So, Hey, future trends that we should worry about. What do you, what do you watch and anticipating.

00:51:24
Speaker 2
Well, so here's what I think, we've spent the last 10 years, really obsessed with tactics, like on the marketing side, in particular, we've been all about growth hacking and tactical shit. What I am seeing right now is the pendulum swinging back to, strategy and fundamentals. Like how do we make sure we've got really solid underpinning before we get jumped into tactics? So I'm kind of excited about that because I sit on that side of the fence and I think this is actually very good for marketing in general.

00:52:04
Bryan Whittington
Good. All right. We're at times son of a gun. April who should reach out to you, how should they do it and why in the world should they reach out to you?

00:52:12
Speaker 2
Well, I don't know why you want to reach out to me, but if you want to read it later, if you're B2B tech company and you might need some positioning help, you could reach out to me, I guess. The book's a good place to start, and you can buy that anywhere books are sold, including audio books. You can listen to me for three and a half hours talking to your year. My website's April dunford.com and I don't really do much on social except Twitter, where I'm at April Dunford and occasionally tweet, cat videos and things. So yeah, you can follow me there. Are you in clubhouse yet? I'm working, I'm really working at avoiding clubhouse. I'm going to get dragged in there eventually, but for now, no,

00:52:50
Bryan Whittington
No clubhouse. And you haven't accepted my LinkedIn request. So she's not on LinkedIn,

00:52:55
Speaker 2
I'm on LinkedIn and I'm, but I get thousands of requests a day. Every once in a while, like about once a month, I'll go in there and accept them all as well. I'll get to you.

00:53:04
Bryan Whittington
I'll look forward to it. So everyone check out obviously awesome. April Dunford, this is more fun than I was anticipating. I knew it was going to be fun to begin with. So I've had a blast. Thanks so much for this. Get after it, don't just take this knowledge, do something with it. Knowledge for knowledge, sake is pointless. Let's get after it, and make things happen. Thanks everyone. See ya.