Why You? How to Stand Out in a Crowded Market, with April Dunford

Career Sessions

In this episode of Career Sessions, host J.R. Lowry interviews positioning expert April Dunford to discuss how differentiation drives succes

Key takeaways

• Positioning must be a cross-functional effort involving product, sales, and leadership rather than just a marketing exercise.
• Effective B2B sales should move away from 'speeds and feeds' (feature checklists) toward high-level value themes like cost reduction or risk mitigation.

Main topics

• Product Positioning Strategy
• Career Differentiation

Notable quotes

Value never communicates automatically.

Conclusion

True differentiation comes from a deliberate choice of approach and a

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) One of the biggest frustrations that exists in business is watching what we would perceive as an objectively good product struggle against a competitor that's inferior. We've all seen it happen in a company we've worked for or a product we've bought or even in our own work. We assume, perhaps naively, that if something is genuinely better, people are going to recognize it. But that's often not how markets or even careers work. And my guest today, April Dunford, argues that success is much more than about building something valuable. It's also about helping people understand why it's valuable and why it's different. And that's the discipline of positioning. And few people have really shaped this field more than April. She's helped hundreds of technology companies sharpen their positioning, accelerate their growth, and tell a story that customers actually understand. She's the author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch. two books that have become essential reading for founders and marketers and sales leaders around the world. But in this conversation, we're also going to go beyond products and companies and talk a little bit about what positioning can teach us about our own careers, why talented people are sometimes overlooked despite doing great work, how AI is changing the way organizations and people need to differentiate themselves. So whether you're leading a business or building a product, we're simply trying to stand out in an increasingly crowded world. I think you're going to find plenty here to think about. I'm J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions. Here's my conversation with April. April, thanks for joining me today. Hey, Speaker 2 (1:25) it's great to be here. Speaker 1 (1:26) Glad to have you on the show as well. Let's start in an area that I know you have focused a lot on, and that is product positioning. A lot of people think of that as a marketing exercise. Positioning is one of the classic four Ps of marketing after all, but you would argue that it is much more fundamental than that. So tell us why so many of us have it wrong. Speaker 2 (1:45) So here's the thing. Positioning impacts marketing a lot, but it doesn't impact just marketing. It impacts products. It certainly impacts sales. And what I have found in my experience is if we treat positioning like a little exercise that belongs in the marketing department and only the marketing department works on it, then what I've found is that whatever positioning we come up with, sales doesn't like it, product doesn't like it, the CEO founder doesn't like it, and then there's always a big fight. And so because a shift in positioning really impacts all these other groups, it would make sense to me that we would need a cross-functional team to work on it. Part of the reason why we want a cross-functional team to work on it is because sales knows a lot about what's happening with customers, particularly early stages of deals where our positioning matters a lot. Product management knows something else. Founder knows something else. And so it's actually good to pull in that information that the other parts of the organization knows to actually develop your positioning. So let's say, for example, we were going to shift the positioning. I work at a company and it's a business intelligence tool. And we were going to shift the positioning and say, no, we're not a business intelligence tool. We're a data warehouse. Imagine me in the marketing department trying to make that decision. And I just show up and say the CEO and say, hey, by the way, we're not a business intelligence tool anymore. We're a data warehouse. Do you not think the CEO is going to have an opinion about that? Do you not think the sales team is going to have an opinion about that or product or anybody else? Like, obviously they would. And so we can't treat this as just a little marketing thing. Although even though it may be marketing's job to be the steward of positioning, once we have it locked down, it may be marketing that if we feel that the positioning is getting weak or off track or something, it may be marketing that puts their hand up and says, you know what? I think we got to pause game here for a second. and fix this. But the actual work of doing the positioning and then even the work of making it real out of the market is not just a marketing thing. Speaker 1 (3:43) You've worked with a ton of companies over the years on go-to-market topics. What are they getting wrong when it comes to talking about why their product is different? Speaker 2 (3:53) Oh, there's a bunch of things. I work specifically with technology companies. And even more specific than that, all the companies I work with are B2B. And the product is complicated enough that there is a salesperson involved somewhere in the sales process. Like there might be some product-led growth or zero touch part of the sales process, but there's a sales team gets involved somewhere to actually close the deal. If you look at those kinds of companies, there's a handful of things that are really common. So one is... We've got a fairly technical product that we're selling to sometimes a fairly technical audience or a fairly sophisticated audience that understands the product a little bit and what it can do. And there's a tendency for those companies to sell on what my old boss would call speeds and feeds, which is features. So you come in and say, we have this feature, that feature, this feature, that feature. And we're just going to tell you what all the features are. And you as the buyer are going to look at that set of features. understand what the features are, understand why those features are important or not important to your business and make a purchase decision based on that. Good positioning doesn't operate at that level. Like good positioning is really trying to answer the question, why should you pick our solution over anybody else's? And to answer that question succinctly, we really need to get at what is the value that these features can deliver for your business? how is this product going to help you make money? How is this product going to help you save money? How is this product going to reduce risk in the business? And the features are kind of just how we get that done. But in order to sell this stuff well, we really got to get up to that value level. A lot of tech companies... don't do a good job of getting it all the way up to that value level. Occasionally, you will see companies that do, but then the problem is, is they've just got too many points of value. So they've got like eight points of value or 10 points of value. They'll say, look, here's what we're going to do. We're going to save you time. We're going to save you money. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. We're going to, you know, everything with the kitchen sink. And then the customer is kind of left to figure out, well, hang on, there's a competitor and they do some of that. And there's another competitor that does this. And oh man, there's 10 things. I'm not sure I can remember all 10. So they're not getting tight enough on the bigger, higher picture of why pick us versus the other guys. And getting that down to one, two, maybe three value themes that a customer can really understand, okay, your approach looks like this and the value is this versus a competitor's approach, which looks like this and the value is something different. Speaker 1 (6:22) What's fascinating to me is This idea of selling the value or selling the solution, it's not a new idea. It certainly predates this modern rise of the technology company. And yet so many companies still want to go out and sell features. What Speaker 2 (6:36) you get sometimes is, and I mean, I get it, right? Like the sales team will come and say to me, value, yeah, yeah, that's good, April. But you don't understand. These customers are educated. They come and they have a checklist of features. And we have to show them that we meet this checklist of features. And that's a reasonable thing to say. But then I asked the question, where did the checklist of features come from? Well, they did their research and somehow in this research, they decided these are the features that they need to have. Now, if you look at what makes your product different and special, it's features and capabilities that the other guys don't have. So is your key secret sauce on the checklist? Probably not because they haven't talked to you yet. If it's there, great. Then you can tell them something. But if it isn't, it's your job to educate them. on what the checklist of features should be. And in order to do that, what I'm going to have to do is I'm going to have to tell you a story. I'm going to have to paint a picture where I say, look, traditionally, every other solution in the market looks like this. But when we founded our company, we looked at that and we decided that wasn't good enough. And we took a different approach to the problem. And that different approach means we have a different set of features. Why should you care? Because this different set of features can deliver this value that the other guys can't. And so I'm going to have to take you on that journey if I got a hope in heck of landing this deal. Now, if I'm the leader in the market, no problem. Their checklist of features probably looks like me because I'm the biggest one in the market where maybe we can get away with that to a certain extent. Until I got a hotshot little AI native startup thing nipping at my heels that comes in and does exactly what I told you right there. They come in and they say, you know what? Yeah, yeah. feature schmeichers. That's Speaker 1 (8:16) the Speaker 2 (8:16) old way of doing it. Let me talk to you about the new way of doing it. Different value, therefore different set of features. Throw that checklist out. So if we're doing a good job of selling this stuff, we got to be able to talk about the differentiated stuff that we do. And we can't just assume that a customer is going to understand that because our differentiated stuff, by definition, it's only we can do that. Speaker 1 (8:38) Certainly, you've got the influence of a procurement function, sometimes even a third-party consultant who's running the process, who comes with RFPs with thousands of questions on them, literally thousands of questions you have to answer, which is kind of the equivalent of the feature checklist. And it's easy to get distracted by all of that. And I would argue the consulting community has created a cottage industry for themselves just in running RFPs. It's hard when you've got that level of, oh, if we don't have an answer to this question, we're going to get knocked out of the process. You get so focused on the details. You get so stuck in the weeds that it's really hard to come up to the bigger picture level and sell the value or the overall solution or the overall differentiation. So I can't understand it. Speaker 2 (9:18) Especially if you're not the incumbent. If you're not the biggie in the industry, chances are if we're going RFP, the biggie in the industry, this is the first call they made. They probably built the RFP based on the conversation they had with the biggie in the industry. And so if you're not the biggie in the industry, then you got to decide, how are we going to change this conversation? Do we have an opportunity to change this conversation? And if we don't, maybe we're not going to respond to a lot of the RFPs that cross our desk because the fix is in, man. The RFP has been built with somebody else and we're just never going to run that thing. And same deal with consultants, right? I've worked in businesses where the consultants are really influential and really drove a lot of the purchase behavior. And that being the case, we had to go figure out how we were going to get a bunch of these consultants on our side before we went and started wasting our time trying to sell directly to customers. Because the customer is just going to ask a consultant and no consultants know anything about us and no consultants are sold on us. Well, now we got another constituent we got to focus our sales energy on. Speaker 1 (10:23) And that was certainly true in the world that I've been in over the last 20 years. It's not uncommon. If you're a leader in one of these companies, how can you tell whether you have a positioning problem or a product problem? Speaker 2 (10:34) This is just a good question. You know, back when I was in-house, so I spent 25 years as kind of a repeat vice president of marketing. And what I would look for. I was very worried about joining a company where the product was the problem because it's really hard to change product if you come in and you're vice president of marketing and the product is no good, then you Speaker 1 (10:55) don't want that Speaker 2 (10:55) job. Speaker 1 (10:56) So if Speaker 2 (10:57) I was doing