April Dunford's Recent LinkedIn Posts

I'm breaking my LinkedIn hiatus to speak at this! B2B Positioning Jujitsu: Turn Competitor Strengths into Your Advantage. It's on April 28 - that's MONDAY. Join us!!!

I'm speaking at Turing X SYSTM Growth Summit in London November 6th. I was SUPPOSED to speak there last year. That plan was derailed by a horrible family tragedy. These folks were gracious, kind, and understanding about my need to bow out at the absolute last minute and will now forever be on my "very good people" list (yeah I'm looking at you Brian Corcoran and Matt Lerner). May all of you out there have the good fortune to work with such awesome folks. The whole conference is gonna be great! I'm covering some new stuff in my talk about some of the more advanced things I've learned over the past 10 years working with an absolute boat-load of tech companies on their positioning. Join us! I can even hook you up with a sweet 15% discount code - APRIL15 Link in the comments.

The key to great marketing and sales is knowing what a customer already understands and what you need to teach them. If I am selling a deeply technical product to a deeply technical buyer I might assume they understand the value of everything my product does. The reality is that they likely understand the things that all your competitors do - the capabilities that are common for the category. The parts they don't yet understand are the things that makes your product uniquely valuable. Our job is to help a customer understand what those differences are and why they are important. We need to teach them why to pick us over the other options. There are a million capabilities your product needs to solve a customer's problem, but only a very few that will win you the deal. We need to teach buyers why our unique strengths matter for their business - we can't assume they already understand something that they can only get from us.

You don't want to start any positioning work before making a key set of decisions 1️⃣ Is now the right time? Do we have enough customer experience to understand how prospects make decisions? Have we worked with enough customers to know - at least at a high level - what makes a good-fit customer different from a bad-fit customer? If the answer is no, we might want to develop a positioning thesis and tighten our positioning after we have closed more business. 2️⃣ Are we clear who this positioning is for? Positioning for customers is not the same as positioning for investors or employees. If we start working on positioning and half the team thinks we are building a sales pitch, the other half thinks we are building an investor pitch, very bad things will happen. 3️⃣ What exactly are we positioning? Are we positioning the company, a product, or a group of products? The answer to this question might require deeper thinking about your go-to-market strategy. Getting a clear answer to this question will save you from having to debate this point mid-way through your positioning work. 4️⃣ Which persona are you positioning for? Teams outside the sales team may not understand what a deal champion is and may be overly focused on positioning for other personas. When we talk about "value," we need to be clear about who perceives it. If you don't make these decisions up front, I can guarantee you will regret it. I've seen many teams rush into positioning work, only to stop midway to debate these points and backtrack to redo work they have already started. (I'm covering this topic in more detail in the newsletter and the podcast this week - links in comments)

I'm guesting on Lenny's newsletter today! I'm diving into a set of tricky positioning roadblocks and how to get around them. In my mind, there is a set of obvious positioning roadblocks (the team doesn't agree on the positioning, the sales team won't adopt it, the positioning is overly broad), then there are the more challenging positioning roadblocks: ⛔ Disagreement about what to position AGAINST - a specific misalignment across the team around what a prospect compares us to in a deal, becoming overly focused on hypothetical competitors, and becoming distracted by noisy competitors that do not show up on short lists. ⛔ PESSIMISTIC product thinking - attempting to differentiate against an overly long list of theoretical competitors, defining best-fit customers too broadly, dismissing sales team insight about why customers buy, and becoming overly focused on fixing problems rather than fortifying differentiation. ⛔ The DIFFERENTIATED VALUE is POORLY DEFINED - overly focused on features prospects don't understand, overly vague or undifferentiated value propositions, too many themes, confusing value with objection handling ⛔ The company isn't in agreement on WHAT they are positioning - are we positioning a product, the company, or a set of products? Do we sell a lead product and then position the others as cross-sell or up-sell opportunities? Do any of those sound familiar? Get the solutions over on Lenny's newsletter here - https://lnkd.in/gabnxcRK This is a long, deep article - I hope you enjoy it.

Today, an exec says to me, "Must be easy to have a newsletter that's all guest posts." I hope Lenny Rachitsky doesn't mind, but I told him this story: Early last December, Lenny reached out to me about something, and I pitched him on an idea for a guest post. We went back and forth on ideas and settled on something. I spent a week over the holiday break writing a big, messy 8,000-word essay on positioning stuff and lobbed it back at him. Lenny does a first deep pass on it, and we go back and forth for a week or so. Next, he loops in one of his editors, who did a structural edit (publishers do this with books - this edit makes sure the structure works and it flows for readers). Her feedback was great, and I spent another couple of weeks rewriting it to incorporate it. The editor, Lenny, and I then go back and forth for about a month or so - adding and removing sections, messing with titles, and rewriting the confusing bits (aside - there are many confusing bits 😂). Lenny thought a graphic might help, so a graphics person was pulled in, and we messed around with that for a couple of weeks. We are now in late February and ready for a proper copy edit. A copy editor was added to our group, and we had a few iterations on the wording before we reached a final version. We spent another week or so messing around with titles and subtitles, and then it's ready to go. Three months start to finish - that's how you make it look "easy." Lenny's got a great podcast out today talking about how he grew the newsletter to 1.2 million subscribers - it's worth a listen. The finished product here - https://lnkd.in/gabnxcRK Lenny's podcast on how he grew the newsletter here - https://lnkd.in/gRSiKW_k

You're a talented marketer working for an absolute tyrant - here's my advice!! Quit. Today if you can. Make a plan to move on if you can't. You don't need to work on improving your tyrant-management skills. Respect your talent and work ethic and your perfectly valid feelings and get the heck outta there.

I have wanted to write about value vs. objection handling for a while because it's a complicated positioning concept. Often, we have capabilities that clients love and prospects ask about, but they don't win us any deals. We will clearly lose deals without them, but they are rarely the reason customers choose us. These are things like: ➡️ Great support ➡️ A modular architecture that allows customers to start small and add functionality when they are ready ➡️ A professional services team that can help companies do deployment and integration ➡️ Training to help new users onboard rapidly ➡️ Support for industry standards like SOC2 or HIPPAA ➡️ Pre-built integrations with other systems It's important to tell the difference. True differentiated value needs to be core to our positioning. We will build our story and our pitch around it. Objections must be handled, but we don't need to put them at the center of our messaging, story, and sales pitch. We can address them when and where we need to. Sometimes, we need to do it early (because we won't make the shortlist otherwise), or we can do it later when other stakeholders raise them. The exception to this is when an incumbent vendor has messed up so badly (like when a legacy provider becomes a buggy mess and offers incredibly incompetent support) that prospects will actively search for a vendor without that problem. But even then, you will often need other value to get a prospect to take the leap. There's a lot of nuance to this stuff, in my opinion, and we have to be careful that we understand the buyer's motivations. Link to the full newsletter article in the comments.

Positioning Jujitsu - Positioning is as much about positioning your competitors as it is about carving out your own space in the market. In this week's newsletter, I'm talking about "Positioning Jujitsu" and how to turn your competitor's greatest strength into a weakness. Most products have a strength in one market that can be perceived as a weakness in another. Some examples: ✴️ The "market leader" has the advantage of being the low-risk choice and a product that appeals to a wide range of users and use cases. On the other hand, market-leading products often can't meet the specialized needs of specific niche markets and can be very slow to innovate. ✴️ "Platforms" have an advantage over point solutions by being easier to buy and adopt. They also generally provide value derived from sharing data across the piece parts of the platform. At the same time, platforms usually have an underdeveloped piece of the platform where a point tool can provide something better. Some larger buyers might prefer to buy point solutions to avoid the risk of vendor lock-in. A point tool can also often be quicker to implement and represent a lower-risk project for some buyers. ✴️ A free or very low-cost product has obvious value for a customer's budget and generally makes it easy for users to adopt without suffering through a drawn-out enterprise purchase process. At the same time, enterprise buyers might happily pay more for a product with better support and services. Higher-priced solutions can often meet the oversight requirements of managers and executives in a way that their more user-oriented low-cost peers do not. Link to the full newsletter article in the comments.

I'm reading "The Framemaking Sale," and it's great. The authors (Brent Adamson & Karl Schmidt) make a great point contrasting how vendors THINK they inspire confidence in a buyer vs. what buyers need. Example claims vendors make to inspire buyer confidence: ⏺️ "Trusted by 80% of the Fortune 500" ⏺️ "The industry leader" ⏺️ "Trusted by [insert logo here]" Versus the questions customers are trying to answer to get more confidence in a purchase: ⏺️ "How confident are we that WE have thoroughly explored the alternatives?" ⏺️ "How confident are we that WE can implement the chosen solution?" ⏺️ "How confident are we that WE have made the best choice for our company?" Buyer confidence isn't about customer confidence in us as a vendor. It's about a buyer's own confidence in their ability to make a good decision. We win not by selling harder, but by helping customers figure out how to buy confidently.

I'm doing a free AMA with the folks from Business of Software this week (June 12). Come ask me hard questions about positioning, sales pitches, writing books, kayaking, half marathon training, Canadian cottage construction or whatever else you want to yak about.

Most companies position in a way that forces prospects to do a LOT of work that they shouldn't have to do. Too much positioning is purely focused on what a company does well - full stop. But B2B buyers are never operating in a vacuum - they are always making a comparison. They want to know how you stack up against what they are doing today and against what they could be doing. Simply listing all the great things you do leaves the buyer to do all the real hard work - figuring out what makes you unique, figuring out whether your offering was designed for companies like them. Great positioning takes care of this for prospects. It paints a clear picture of what you offer that prospects won't get with any other alternative AND why it matters for their business. (Aside - here's a random selfie of me heading out on my bonkers Q1 of back-to-back positioning workshops - San Francisco X2, Phoenix, London, New York X3 and Austin - see you soon!)

New simplified Chinese translation of Obviously Awesome - hot off the press! (aside - little book announcement coming on Thursday - can you guess what it is?)

Last chance for the 99 cent book sale!! Prices go back to normal tonight. P.S. People like a good book sale - both books are topping the charts this weekend! 👀 P.P.S. The sale is worldwide on Amazon but sometimes the price change doesn't propagate out properly to smaller markets - sorry about that!

I've worked with Bruno Aziza at both Google and IBM. He's got a good post this week on his Substack outlining learnings from working with me and my stuff (link in the comments). I love his point about Positioning being mischaracterized as a marketing exercise. I like to think of the components of positioning as inputs to: ## Marketing - messaging for sure, but also segmentation and campaign strategy ## Sales - in particular sales enablement, and account targeting. ## Go to Market strategy - which of course includes elements of the two above points, but also the longer-term strategy around how our segments and value might change over time.

Next Wednesday I'm doing a positioning deep dive with a small group in London as part of Turing x SYSTM (my keynote talk is the following day). I'm going to share how some of the fastest growing companies in the world are navigating the big market shifts happening right now. Bring your gnarliest positioning challenges and we can dig in. Registration link in the comments.

ANNOUNCEMENT - The new edition of Obviously Awesome is officially available! Woop Dee Doodley Doo!! New in the updated and expanded edition: ⭐ An expanded pre-work section that includes key decisions a team should make before beginning a positioning exercise. ⭐ A new section covering positioning for multi-product companies ⭐ Expanded content for several of the steps in the positioning process - most notably the Differentiated Value step. ⭐ There is an expanded section at the end covering what happens after a positioning exercise, including testing and translating the positioning for the sales team. ⭐ I have restructured the steps. We now have five components and five steps, instead of five components and 10 steps. You're welcome, numbers people. ⭐ For the first time, there is a hardcover edition (for folks that and just too enthusiastic for paperbacks!) IMPORTANT things to note! 👀 There are copies of the old book floating around. To ensure you have the new book, look for the yellow sticker on the cover that says "UPDATED AND EXPANDED." 🎙️ If you order the new AUDIOBOOK from Audible, it might give you an error that says you have already purchased this book. Ignore it and download anyway. If you see the yellow sticker on the cover, you have the new one. 🗺️ On Amazon, the new book is NOT available in all formats in every country. For example, in India, you can buy the new book in ebook and audiobook formats, but not the hardcover (well, you can, but it will cost a fortune because it's coming from the USA) or the paperback. I have a local publisher there, and it will take a while for my new book to go through their process. 🏬 The book is available from ANY book seller - ask for it, and they can order it for you. 💢 If you just ordered the old paperback book and you're all like, "Aw nuts, April, I just ordered the old one waaaahhhhh!" Return it to Amazon and re-order the new one - problem solved! Special shout-out to my newsletter reader Steph T, who called their personal contacts at Amazon and got my book listing fixed after WEEKS of support shenanigans. Excellent humans exist in the world!!!

ANNOUNCEMENT - The new updated and expanded Obviously Awesome is coming!!! 🎉 🎉 I've been sitting on this one for a while, so I'm SUPER EXCITED to get this out into the world!! Almost 7 years ago, I published Obviously Awesome, my attempt at describing the process I use to position B2B tech products and companies. I didn't expect many people to read it. I was wrong. Since then, more than 100,000 people have bought the book, and countless companies have used the process. A few hundred did that with me directly, and many, many more of you worked through the process on your own using the book. I've learned a LOT over the past 7 years, and I decided it was time to bring those learnings back to the book. The new edition is coming in FEBRUARY (don't ask me for a specific date - it's Amazon's world, we're just living in it). Here's what's new: 📙 5 STEPS (not 10) - In the first edition, I describe 5 components of positioning and a 10-step process for doing it. Some of you really hated that the number of steps in the process wasn’t equal to the number of components. The first few steps were pre-work, and the final steps are work that follows the exercise. I have repositioned those steps (see what I did there), and we now have 5 components and 5 steps. 📙 The PRE-WORK section has been expanded to include key decisions a team should make before beginning a positioning exercise. This is based on my work with clients, and I think it will greatly improve any team’s chances of success when following this process. 📙 I have included sections that are more relevant to MULTIPRODUCT companies grappling with how to position their products in a company with multiple offerings. 📙 Some steps in the process have been significantly expanded—particularly the Differentiated Value step. Most teams told me they got stuck there. I hope this new, improved section helps to clarify the concept. 📙 The final section, What Happens AFTER a Positioning Exercise, has been greatly expanded. This new section reflects my current thinking on how best to create a sales pitch to test positioning and then turn that positioning into messaging. 📙 For the first time, there will be a HARDCOVER edition. Most of you won't care, but I have seen some seriously well-loved (but also beat-up and scraggly) paperbacks at conferences, and I decided some of you need a copy that’s a little more durable! 🎙️ To go with the book, I'm reviving the Positioning PODCAST and will release a new series of episodes that dive into the book's new material. ✍ The same goes for the NEWSLETTER (always the best way to follow my stuff). A new podcast episode and newsletter article drop TOMORROW - links in the comments.

Can you use my positioning methodology to get yourself a date? I had a fun conversation with Brent Adamson and Shari Levitin on the Selling Isn't Everything podcast, where we talked about a bunch of things like: ♥️ Can you use my book, Obviously Awesome, to position yourself for romance (spoiler - I don't think it's a great idea, but hey, your mileage may vary!) ♥️ "Fractional CMO" is not great positioning (I mean, it's fine in the short term, but let's be honest, marketers can do better) ♥️ Why it's important to think about value and best-fit customers as a matching set ♥️ Why the "insight" step in a sales pitch is so hard to get right, but also critically important. This was a fun one! Episode link in the comments

The SURPRISE FEBRUARY BOOK SALE is on!! Both Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch ebooks are only $0.99 on Amazon until Sunday. Buy one for your teammates or your boss, or one for your dog, who is very intelligent and likes a good business book! I haven't had a book sale in two years, so now's your chance. I will throw some links in the comments.

The manufacturer of the ladder truck used in the Louvre heist is running an ad that says, "When you have to move fast." Proof of value comes in many forms 🙂

This post is for folks in New Zealand!! On 12 August, I’ll be the keynote speaker at PowerUp 25 – a one-day event hosted by the team at Smartly - built to help Kiwi businesses grow smarter, faster, and stay ahead. I will be yakking about positioning (shocker, I know!) and how companies can stand out in crowded markets. 10 people get FREE tickets on me (I will throw a link to the registration and a sweet discount code in the comments). See you there!

The Positioning Podcast is BACK! This week, I'm yakking about how to handle competitors who lie and why we should see it as an opportunity to educate prospects so they can make better choices. Episode links in the comments.

What do you do when a competitor says they do the same thing you do but aren't telling the whole truth? Should we let the dirty liars win? First - make sure the team doesn't believe your competitors when they are stretching the truth. You wouldn't believe the number of times I hear marketing teams complain, "We can't talk about that because our competitors say that too!!!" This is a cop-out. Do you think Salesforce would stop saying they were the number 1 CRM because other companies lied and said they were? Of course not. Instead, you should see your competitor's lies as a massive opportunity for you to do the right thing for customers - because there is nothing that a prospect hates more than being lied to. 1️⃣ Keep your focus on the value (particularly when they can't deliver the expected value because of the way the feature was implemented) For example, I worked with a company that delivered a platform to manage a complex business process. Their main competitor started to lie and say that they, too, delivered a "platform" when they had a set of completely separate tools. My company switched to emphasizing the value of a real platform - shared data across the parts lets managers analyze and improve the process and set up automation that cuts the time to complete the process in half. The lying competitor couldn't deliver on any of that, regardless of how much they threw the "platform" word around. 2️⃣ Teach customers the difference between the real truth and the stretched truth (and why it matters for their business). For example - Another company I worked with delivered data for a process in real-time, where totally accurate data was critical for the process. The competitor started to claim that they too, could deliver real-time data. It turned out that while it was technically possible, the integration effort required to make it work meant that no customer actually could afford to do it. My company started to teach customers to ask about the details of exactly how real-time data was supported in the product, and unsurprisingly, the competitor stopped talking about it in their marketing. 3️⃣ Bring the receipts - and teach your prospects to ask for them I worked with a company that was by far the largest vendor in the space. A smaller competitor started claiming that they were "The number 1 provider!" My company responded by getting very specific about the number of successful deployments they had and started gently pointing out in sales calls that some other vendors in the space were "bad at math." They also pointed to the number of case studies, reviews, analyst mentions, and other proof points proving that the competitor was lying about their market traction. The competitor quickly backed down from their claim. The newsletter this week dives deep into this. Link to the full article in the comments.

I'm doing an AMA with the folks from Business of Software. I'm going to cover some of the new stuff from the second edition of Obviously Awesome. Join us!