The Exchanges

Q What are the most interesting mistakes you've seen people make when it comes to positioning?

A So many things. The first mistake is not thinking about it at all, and just assuming that there's only one position we could possibly take. Most products, we could position them in a dozen different markets, and if we really step back and forgot about the history and where we came from and looked at it with our fresh eyes, We might see something really different. So we need to think about this in the way customer thinks about it. So not thinking about positioning at all is the first mistake. The second mistake is, as we talked about before, treating it as a little marketing exercise. We're just going to put some new words on the homepage and that's it. We're done. But sales has no idea how to pitch it. Product doesn't really understand it. It doesn't actually represent the truth of Of our product at all. It's just nice, pretty words. This is not repositioning. This isn't going to move the dial on anything. Um, and then lately what I've seen is, um, companies that love the idea of category creation are, are attempting to create a category when they obviously fit In an existing market category, and it's kind of wishful thinking that this is a new category. So they'll say, no, no, no, we don't have any competition. This is a brand new thing. Nobody works like this. And the result is the customer's like, but wait, aren't you just a CRM? Why are you using all these other words? I'm …

AI assessment note: “The first mistake is not thinking about it at all”

Q And who does that really well in your opinion?

A I have a bunch of clients that I've worked with, but one that I think is doing an amazing job of this for a really technical, complicated product Is a company I worked with in San Francisco called Postman. Postman does essentially a platform for developing APIs. This is a new concept. Nobody had this idea of a platform for APIs before Postman came up with it. They do an amazing job, I think, of talking about why APIs are important So important that you actually don't want a set of disjointed tools across your organization to work on them. Why that's important. They've coined a concept called an API first world, and then they've done an amazing job of storytelling around that. So if you go on their website on their homepage and you scroll down about halfway, they have a graphic novel called the API first world. And it's a graphic novel designed for technical people to understand this story of what's an API? Why is it important? Why do we really want to have high quality APIs? Why is that important for your business? And why do we need a platform to enable that? So I think they do an incredible job of that. And they do it in a thousand different ways. Like if you see the CEO do a conference talk, he's actually not talking about the product. As much as he is talking about the market and this concept and why we need to think about APIs differently. But if you are aligned with his p…

AI assessment note: “one that I think is doing an amazing job of this... is a company... called Postman.”

Q And when things are going well, everybody is a winner and everybody's responsible for success. But the minute you have a problem, everybody starts pointing the finger at everybody else. How do you determine when that's a positioning problem versus a larger problem?

A It's interesting because, you know, I do this as work as a consultant, and sometimes companies will call me, and they think they have a positioning problem, and then I have a conversation with them, and I'm like, I don't actually think that's a positioning problem, because there's lots of reasons businesses aren't successful, and positioning is just one of them. So typically, so sometimes companies will come to me, and they'll say, you know what, every company we talk to loves us. If we can get them in a meeting, We close all that business. That tells me the positioning's good. You're just not getting enough meetings. You're just doing a terrible job at lead generation. You should go fix that. You just need to get more at bats. Uh, sometimes what you have is a sales execution problem. Like there's something in the way you're executing in sales that isn't working. So my test is often like, so first of all, do you have good, happy customers that stick with you and love you and are referenceable and whatever? Most of the companies that come to me and say, yes, yes, we have that. Okay. Do you have confusion at the beginning of your sales process where they come in and they just don't get it? That gap between what a customer knows and what a prospect knows, we can close that gap with good positioning.

AI assessment note: “So my test is often like... That gap between what a customer knows and what a prospect knows”

Q But that's a good, that's a good, um, sort of segue into my next question, which is, How has the digital transformation over the last 25, 30 years changed positioning?

A I think the fundamentals of positioning haven't changed at all, is, is my opinion. If you read the original book on positioning, it was called Positioning the Battle for Your Mind by these guys Ries and Trout. They came up with the concept. They published a book in 1982, and if you read that book, the first chapter talks about why do we have to worry about positioning? Why is positioning important? And they talked about how it's important because Previous to that, in any given market category, there were only a handful of products. So consumers just made a choice between the two or three choices that they had, but it wasn't all that important for companies to really differentiate between those choices. But in 1982, oh my gosh, we have so many choices now. Positioning is really important because the customer has thousands of choices, hundreds of choices. Now, if we look at the difference between 1982 to now? That has just exploded. Like, I think it's much more important now to really establish that position. It's much harder now to stand out in a world where We're exposed to millions of advertising messages a day. Like, think about digital stuff. I am constantly bombarded with messages from companies. I cannot avoid it. It's millions a day compared to 1982. So in order for customers to really stick out, sorry, in order for companies to really stand out in a market that is so cro…

AI assessment note: “I think the fundamentals of positioning haven't changed at all, is, is my opinion.”

Q What's the difference between B to B positioning and B to C, like business to business positioning versus business to consumer positioning?

A There's a lot of things that are different. Kind of, if we think about the core of good positioning, the core of good positioning is thinking about what your differentiated value is, meaning the value you can deliver for a customer that no one else can, and then great positioning puts that in a context that a customer can understand it. If we think about value in B to B, it's very different than value in consumer products. Value can be all kinds of things in consumer products. I, you know, I might buy shoes because I just like the color green, man, or I'm buying consumer things because I think it makes me look rich, or it's going to get me a date, or there's a lot of different things that are valuable in consumer. In business to business, it's very different. In business to business, typically, there isn't one person buying. Typically, there's a A group of people. The average B to B deal, there's five to 11 stakeholders in the deal. So if I'm buying accounting software, my boss comes to me and says, hey, I don't like the accounting software we have right now. You go buy us some. That's terrifying. My neck is on the line. If I make a bad choice here, I look bad in front of my boss, the end users don't like it, maybe the software screws up, I get passed over from a Promotion. I might actually get fired. So there's stakes in a B to B purchase decision. The way we think about value…

AI assessment note: “If we think about value in B to B, it's very different than value”

Q Would you say the biggest mistake then that you see, especially with software products, is competing and positioning in too big of a market?

A That's one of the things. I think a lot of times if you look at the positioning that the company has, the biggest mistake is not deliberately positioning. I think a lot of companies start looking at their product in isolation almost. Like there are no competitors. You see it a lot in the way companies do sales pitches. Like they'll walk in and they'll give this sales pitch. They'll, they'll talk about the product with this great feature, that great feature, this great feature. It's amazing. You should buy us. But the buyer on the other side of that conversation, they're terrified of making a bad choice, and they're sitting there going, well, that's all great, but I just had three other sales calls with your competitors. Some of that stuff sounds the same. And so we walk into these situations as vendors in general, thinking that the answer, the question we're trying to answer is, why pick us? But the real question we have to answer is, Why pick us over the other guys? And I think most companies don't really wrestle with that. They don't sit down, put themselves in the shoes of a buyer, recognize how hard it is to make a purchase decision, and think, like, how do we position versus everybody else?

AI assessment note: “That's one of the things. I think... the biggest mistake is not deliberately positioning.”

Q What role does storytelling play in all of this?

A Storytelling is one of these things marketers think a lot about storytelling and obsess a lot about storytelling, particularly on the consumer side. Business to business marketers like to think about storytelling. I don't think a lot of B to B companies are doing an amazing job at storytelling. What's really funny about that is we go over to sales. Sales doesn't care about storytelling. They never talk about storytelling. And yet they're the ones that actually are face to face with a customer. And if anyone should be telling a story, maybe it's your sales team. Most of the storytelling stuff that you see, or at least what I learned as a marketer going through, if you go to marketing school and learn storytelling, a lot of what you'll see is this hero's journey structure for storytelling, which, um, is very common in entertainment. It's the way most movies are written. A lot of stories are written with this hero's journey. So in B to B storytelling, we think about the hero as the customer. So the customer has a problem, they embark on this quest, they meet a guide, that's us, we're the guide, and we give them a plan, and we help them be successful and avoid defeat, so we have this hero's journey. The problem with that storytelling arc is there's kind of no competitor in there, and if we think about what a buyer is actually trying to figure out is, why pick you over the other guy…

AI assessment note: “we start with positioning... And then we want to build a story around that.”

Q just a marketing exercise capable of totally transforming a product's trajectory. April illustrates this with the example of labeling a muffin a muffin and not a cake, demonstrating how effective positioning can shift perceptions and drive sales. If you're interested in getting more sales, loyal customers, and bigger promotions, this episode is for you. It's time to listen and learn. I want to start with the basics. What is positioning?

A It's interesting. I, so I'm a positioning expert, and when I started out as a consultant being a positioning expert, the worst part about that is nobody really knows what positioning is. They think they do. So people will say, positioning, that's just like messaging, isn't it? And I'm like, actually, no, it's not quite that. Or they'll say, positioning is like a tagline. We're coming up with a tagline. And I'm like, oh gosh, no, there's a lot of things that we do that aren't tagline related. My Personal pet peeve is when people talk about brand positioning. That drives me nuts. There is positioning and there's branding. Those two things are actually really separate. So most of the things that we confuse with positioning are actually things we do with positioning once we're done with it, but positioning is an input. So if you think about it this way, if everything we do in marketing and sales is the house, positioning is the foundation upon which the house is built. So my definition of positioning goes like this. Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering something, some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. Now that's a bit of a mouthful. A lot of the folks that I work with are not marketing people. They're CEOs of tech companies, so they don't have a background in this stuff. So I think the best way to think about it is …

AI assessment note: “Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering something”

Q That's fascinating. Can you tell me about a time when repositioning a product failed, and what happened?

A Yeah. So I worked at a company where we were building a thing. The original conception of this thing was that it was a database, but it was a really fancy database that could do a certain kind of query really, really, really fast. It was originally developed for a bank, and there were a set of queries that the bank did that were so difficult To process. That they would run them on Friday, and the query took all weekend to get the answer back. So you're asking the data this question, and it took three days to get the answer back. So these folks, couple super genius database guys, came up with this database to fix that problem, and it could run that query in seconds. So it's amazing technology. Fantastic. They got patents on it. Nobody's seen a database like this before. Really, really innovative. So the original conception of this thing was that it was a database. I joined as the head of marketing, and we were having a terrible time selling. The positioning was terrible. Nobody wanted a new database. There's an absolute giant in that market. They're called Oracle. Everybody's standard on Oracle. Everybody gets certified on Oracle. Companies don't want to have multiple database solutions to do something. So we would come in and say, we've got this nifty new database, and the customers would say, Well, that's, you know, we're Oracle shop, like we're not married to Oracle. We don't…

AI assessment note: “We eventually repositioned it as a data warehouse... The problem was when”

Q So if you're a startup, you have limited resources, and how do you go about identifying those pain points then to better position your product?

A I mean, the, the idea behind the famous book on this is, uh, Eric Ries, the lean startup. And the, the way the lean startup describes this is you should be out doing something called customer discovery. So before you write anything, you should be out interviewing customers or potential customers and validating the assumptions that you have about this market. Is this a thing that people would pay for? How many, how much would you pay for it? Are there a big enough group of people that have this pain to solve it? And in a perfect world, that's what we would all be doing. But often products just don't happen that way. Like often products, you know, like this, this particular company, they had built it custom. They had done the deal with the bank in such a way that they owned the IP. It seemed like a good idea. They had a bunch of assumptions baked in there. They never tested those assumptions until later, but it was good enough to go raise money. They just went and raised some money and up. Okay. Now we're going, we're doing a thing. So I don't think A lot of startups do enough customer discovery at the beginning to make sure that they've got a thing that people really want. The second thing is that even if you do do customer discovery, it's really hard. It's really difficult. Customers will sometimes tell you things that aren't true, um, or they'll say, yes, yes, we would buy tha…

AI assessment note: “before you write anything, you should be out interviewing customers or potential customers”

Q How do you go about evaluating product positioning? Hmm.

A This is an interesting question. People want me to look at their website and tell me whether or not their positioning is good. And in B to B, that is almost impossible. Almost impossible. So you have this thing, it serves a market. I am not the buyer for that thing. So I could look at your website and say, I don't, I don't have a clue what this is all about, but the thing you sell is for airplane mechanics. It's fine if I don't have a clue about that. It needs to resonate with airplane mechanics. So you can't tell just using, you know, what I would call the grandmother test, you know, would your grandmother understand this? Well, unless you're selling to grandmothers, it doesn't matter if the grandmother understands it. So some people will say, well, we need to dumb this down and we need to have it so that anybody understands it. I super disagree with that in B to B. If I'm selling a specialized thing to specialized buyers, it just needs to resonate with them. It's okay if it doesn't resonate with your grandmother. What it does mean is if we're trying to assess the positioning, What really matters is when we are, when we have a brand new prospect that comes in that doesn't really know too much about us, how long does it take us before it clicks? And they're like, oh, I get it. Oh, I get why you're different. Oh, I get why that's good. Oh, I get why. In my career, so I used to b…

AI assessment note: “What really matters is... when we have a brand new prospect... how long does it take”

Q And when things are going well, everybody is a winner and everybody's responsible for success. But the minute you have a problem, everybody starts pointing the finger at everybody else. How do you determine when that's a positioning problem versus a larger problem?

A It's interesting because, you know, I do this as work as a consultant, and sometimes companies will call me, and they think they have a positioning problem, and then I have a conversation with them, and I'm like, I don't actually think that's a positioning problem, because there's lots of reasons businesses aren't successful, and positioning is just one of them. So typically, so sometimes companies will come to me, and they'll say, you know what, every company we talk to loves us. If we can get them in a meeting, We close all that business. That tells me the positioning's good. You're just not getting enough meetings. You're just doing a terrible job at lead generation. You should go fix that. You just need to get more at bats. Uh, sometimes what you have is a sales execution problem. Like there's something in the way you're executing in sales that isn't working. So my test is often like, so first of all, do you have good, happy customers that stick with you and love you and are referenceable and whatever? Most of the companies that come to me and say, yes, yes, we have that. Okay. Do you have confusion at the beginning of your sales process where they come in and they just don't get it? That gap between what a customer knows and what a prospect knows, we can close that gap with good positioning.

AI assessment note: “That gap between what a customer knows and what a prospect knows”

Q And this is marketing expert April Dunford. Who's in charge of positioning at a company?

A Good question. This has traditionally been seen as a marketing function, um, and even more specifically in tech companies, we often say this is a product marketing function, but I don't believe that. I think that's not the right way to think about it. If we really think about what we're doing in positioning is we're getting really tight on Who's our competitor? How are we different? What is the value we can provide to them, to the customer, and who exactly are those customers? If we made a change in that, that would be a big change in the business. If I think about, again, my CRM example, if we switch from being general purpose enterprise CRM to CRM for investment banks, that's a, that's a whole different company.

AI assessment note: “traditionally been seen as a marketing function... but I don't believe that”

Q How do you do that? I was like, why wouldn't that be effective? I don't know. Right. This has been a fascinating conversation. We always end with sort of the same question, which is what is success for you in life?

A Oh, so I feel like I, so I spent my whole career being a vice president of marketing. I did that for 25, 30 years, and the thing about being a vice president of marketing, it's a really hard job. You have to know a lot about a lot of things. Marketers talk about being T-shaped. You have to know, you have to be this deep on so many things, and then usually you have one thing that you're really deep on. For most of my career, I was a T-shaped marketer, and the thing I was really deep on Was positioning. Now I'm a consultant, and I just get to do that thing that I love, and so that has been such satisfying work. It's been so satisfying to work with companies, wrestle this thing that is really thorny, really hard, and when it clicks, it feels like magic. It feels like magic. Good positioning, when you look at it afterwards, people will say, Well, of course that's what they are. Of course that's what they do. And you're like, actually, that was really hard for us to get there, and if you had asked us two years ago, we had no idea what that is, and now it's this, and it seems obvious, but it wasn't obvious. That is very satisfying work to do. So I just feel that is success for me when we get to the end of these, these projects, and everybody in the room is like, this is so much easier to sell. This is so much easier for customers to understand. I had a client come to me two weeks ago…

AI assessment note: “So I just feel that is success for me when we get to the end”