#309: How to Make Your Product Positioning Impossible to Ignore with April Dunford (Founder, Ambient Strategy)

#309 Product Positioning | This episode is from a Drive 2025 (our annual Exit Five event) session with  April Dunford (Founder, Ambient Strategy). April pulls from working with 300+ tech companies to unpack the real patterns behind winning positioning from calling out competitors’ nonsense to teaching buyers what actually matters, avoiding category-creation traps, and fixing the sales messes that weak positioning creates. It’s sharp, funny, brutally honest, and basically a crash course in how to make your product unmistakably different in a market full of noise.

PS. Want to join us at Drive 2026?

Head over to exitfive.com/drive to join the waitlist for Drive 2026 and be the first to know when tickets go on sale.

Timestamps

• (00:00) - – Why Positioning Breaks
  
• (03:20) - – Teaching Buyers to Spot Competitor BS
  
• (06:48) - – Turning Differentiators into Real Value
  
• (10:26) - – The Trap of Overthinking Categories
  
• (14:13) - – Choosing Your Go-To-Market Before Your Positioning
  
• (18:50) - – Building a Story Only You Can Tell
  
• (23:18) - – When Great Storytelling Backfires
  
• (28:53) - – Positioning Multi-Product Companies
  
• (32:34) - – When and Why to Reposition
  
• (36:22) - – Bringing It All Together in Sales
  

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Dave Gerhardt [0:00:00]: You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.

Dave Gerhardt [0:00:03]: Hey, it's Dave. Quick note before we get into this episode.

Dave Gerhardt [0:00:19]: This is a recording from Drive 2025, our annual event.

Dave Gerhardt [0:00:23]: Here at Exit Five.

Dave Gerhardt [0:00:25]: This was recorded live in Burlington Vermont at Hula as part of our event.

Dave Gerhardt [0:00:29]: And we'd love to have you at next year's event.

Dave Gerhardt [0:00:31]: We're bringing it back to Vermont Stove, Vermont.

Dave Gerhardt [0:00:34]: You can go to exitfive.com/drive to get more information, put your name on the waitlist list and maybe make it to next year's event.

Dave Gerhardt [0:00:41]: But we're bringing the audio recordings from these sessions to you live, well, recorded on the podcast because we thought it'd be a fun way to show you the stuff we talk about a drive and give you a sense of what it was like.

Dave Gerhardt [0:00:53]: If you didn't get to be there, And if you were there, then you get to now, re listen and maybe take notes again.

Dave Gerhardt [0:00:58]: So this is one of the sessions from Drive.

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:00]: Go and check it out.

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:01]: Get tickets, Put your name in the waitlist list for next year Exit Five dot com slash drive.

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:07]: Alright.

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:07]: Here we go.

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:07]: Super excited.

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:08]: Look, this next speaker is someone that I have virtually...

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:12]: You don't know this and not to blow up your head.

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:15]: Virtually learned a whole lot from over the years, and she's an expert in the...

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:20]: If you can, just stay in the room for a minute.

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:22]: We got time unless you really gotta put your pants, Just stay in here.

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:24]: Because after this, we're free all night, and I wanna have everybody in here, and then we're done we're hanging out.

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:29]: So our next speaker is the world's foremost most authority on product positioning where which I could make an argument is the most important topic to running a business.

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:37]: We had a long conversation about this at dinner the other night?

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:40]: Every time I've had her on my podcast, it becomes one of the most listened to episodes ever, I think I first had her around my podcast in maybe twenty twenty.

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:47]: And if I go sort by most popular episodes that still is that.

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:50]: And every time I do something where people tell me I bought her book.

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:54]: It was amazing, I wish I could hire her, but she's full.

Dave Gerhardt [0:01:56]: And as a consultant, she helps companies makes complex products easy to understand and love.

Dave Gerhardt [0:02:02]: After a twenty five year career as VP marketing.

Dave Gerhardt [0:02:04]: She is consulted with over three hundred tech companies including Google, Epic Games, IBM, Postman and others. You've probably read her book.

Dave Gerhardt [0:02:11]: The best bestselling book obviously awesome which delve into the art of positioning, and it's on my shelves, All bookmark and dog deere, helped Dan and I a lot when we were at P actually, and she has a newly released book a couple years ago called sales pitch, which reveals the secrets to crafting a winning sales narrative in the market.

Dave Gerhardt [0:02:26]: She's gonna share her top lessons learned from working on positioning with three hundred companies, get your phones and Notebooks ready.

Dave Gerhardt [0:02:32]: I'm super pumped to have her here.

Dave Gerhardt [0:02:34]: It's an honor.

Dave Gerhardt [0:02:35]: Please give it up for April Dunford.

April Dunford [0:02:50]: If you gotta poop your pants, don't feel bad.

April Dunford [0:02:52]: Just go and do it.

April Dunford [0:02:54]: I'm not gonna be offended at all.

April Dunford [0:02:56]: Yeah.

April Dunford [0:02:58]: I'm the loud speaker when you're loud speaker, like you get to do what you want.

April Dunford [0:03:01]: So Vermont.

April Dunford [0:03:03]: Right?

April Dunford [0:03:03]: So great.

April Dunford [0:03:06]: So great.

April Dunford [0:03:07]: This whole conference, like, what a vibe?

April Dunford [0:03:09]: It's so good.

April Dunford [0:03:11]: Let's have a little for five.

April Dunford [0:03:13]: I'm gonna I wanna I'm gonna in a cool time.

April Dunford [0:03:19]: Except for this part, I'm a little bit nervous because do a brand...

April Dunford [0:03:22]: This brand new thing.

April Dunford [0:03:23]: Kinda came up with this idea a little while ago, and I said, And do brand new talk talking.

April Dunford [0:03:29]: And he's like, yes you're okay.

April Dunford [0:03:30]: And I'm like, but it's gonna sucks.

April Dunford [0:03:31]: But so becoming a little slack on this, but some of you know me, somebody you don't...

April Dunford [0:03:38]: If you do know me it's probably because of this book.

April Dunford [0:03:39]: So I spent, as Dave mentioned twenty five years-ish as a repeat vice president of marketing got a series of startups, And they added seven.

April Dunford [0:03:49]: And I made the switch to consulting about ten years ago.

April Dunford [0:03:54]: Now when I was in house, kinda of my jam was positioning.

April Dunford [0:03:58]: It it sorta of ended up being that very much so at the end.

April Dunford [0:04:01]: So at the end, if you hired me as the Vp marketing is because I kinda had this process of, doing positioning, and so the founder would say, I think we have a positioning problem, and I could talk real smart about that.

April Dunford [0:04:12]: I say, this here's is how we're gonna solve it.

April Dunford [0:04:14]: I got this little thing step one step two So when I decided to switch to consulting, I thought well positioning the thing I'm gonna focus on because I kinda know something about that.

April Dunford [0:04:22]: And I had positioned a dozen or so Two dozen products.

April Dunford [0:04:26]: When I was in house.

April Dunford [0:04:27]: And so then I came out, And I spent a few years just kinda fl around.

April Dunford [0:04:31]: Like I was trying to figure out how do I actually teach this as a consultant.

April Dunford [0:04:35]: How do I do it?

April Dunford [0:04:36]: Is there a methodology I could teach people it's sort of step one step two step three.

April Dunford [0:04:40]: And I worked with seventy, eighty companies doing that.

April Dunford [0:04:44]: Now That's a lot because, like, as an in house marketer, you don't do positioning every day.

April Dunford [0:04:48]: Like, that's of thing you do all the time.

April Dunford [0:04:50]: That's where people kinda suck at it.

April Dunford [0:04:51]: It's not a thing you do all the topic.

April Dunford [0:04:53]: And so I did seventy company that I thought I got it.

April Dunford [0:04:56]: I know how to do this.

April Dunford [0:04:57]: I know how to teach it.

April Dunford [0:04:58]: I've been there.

April Dunford [0:04:59]: I've done that.

April Dunford [0:04:59]: I've seen all the things.

April Dunford [0:05:01]: And so then I wrote this book, and that was my attempt to teach other people how to do it, and it was the book I wish I had.

April Dunford [0:05:07]: When I was junior marketer and I was trying to figure out how to positioning I wrote this book.

April Dunford [0:05:11]: Twenty nineteen.

April Dunford [0:05:12]: I put it out.

April Dunford [0:05:13]: Twenty twenty, you know, we got Covid.

April Dunford [0:05:16]: And sometimes people ask me this question when should we shift our positioning?

April Dunford [0:05:20]: And I said, well you shift a position positioning when big things happen?

April Dunford [0:05:23]: Right?

April Dunford [0:05:24]: And so the big thing could be you put out a new release and there's a lot of new stuff, and that changes the value you can provide.

April Dunford [0:05:31]: So we have to shift our positioning.

April Dunford [0:05:32]: Or it's...

April Dunford [0:05:34]: You have competitors, and your competitors all of a sudden caught up with you.

April Dunford [0:05:39]: And there's something big happened, maybe they made an acquisition.

April Dunford [0:05:42]: Maybe you made an acquisition so we gotta ship or, the worst is when outside crap hits the fan.

April Dunford [0:05:49]: And often that's, like, All of a sudden, we've got a recession.

April Dunford [0:05:53]: So people used to care a lot about making money Now they care a lot about saving money because we're in a recession or a new regulation compliance stuff comes up.

April Dunford [0:06:02]: The government says you have to do this now and everybody's like, oh, no.

April Dunford [0:06:04]: Now they really care about that, that's priority now.

April Dunford [0:06:06]: Or something like Covid hits.

April Dunford [0:06:09]: So I was working with companies that were selling into the travel business.

April Dunford [0:06:13]: And I was like, we don't have a travel business because we didn't travel at all for, like, two years.

April Dunford [0:06:17]: I worked as a company that did software for stadiums.

April Dunford [0:06:21]: Now, the stadiums are all closed.

April Dunford [0:06:24]: Sorry.

April Dunford [0:06:24]: So all of a sudden is twenty twenty, and b to b companies on masse.

April Dunford [0:06:30]: All of the big positioning problem.

April Dunford [0:06:32]: Everybody's wrestling with their position.

April Dunford [0:06:33]: So Am really busy.

April Dunford [0:06:34]: And so I'm working with a lot of companies.

April Dunford [0:06:36]: So fast forward five years, now I've we're, like, three hundred companies, and that's a lot.

April Dunford [0:06:42]: And what I started to see after the book came out in twenty nineteen is some of this stuff I learned after I wrote the book.

April Dunford [0:06:51]: Was actually really surprising.

April Dunford [0:06:53]: So I started to see this other set of patterns kinda of pop out that for whatever reason, I didn't notice them in the first eighty, but I noticed them after a while.

April Dunford [0:07:02]: So I thought it would be fun to do a talk about five of those things We're gonna have randomly select five of these things.

April Dunford [0:07:08]: Hopefully, one of these things kinda resonates with you, so we're gonna do that.

April Dunford [0:07:12]: So here's the first one to truth matters.

April Dunford [0:07:15]: Now, ear all bunch of marketers.

April Dunford [0:07:19]: Right you're not dummy.

April Dunford [0:07:20]: We're not out there lying about stuff.

April Dunford [0:07:23]: I would the market and on purpose.

April Dunford [0:07:24]: Nobody's gonna say I'm a look at the mirror and say a dirty rotten liar lie all time.

April Dunford [0:07:28]: But you know what?

April Dunford [0:07:30]: I've worked at three hundred companies almost all of them tell me their competitors are dirty rotten liars.

April Dunford [0:07:36]: They do.

April Dunford [0:07:40]: We're not doing it, but they're doing it.

April Dunford [0:07:42]: And not only that, a lot of times what you got is The marketers are very frustrated because they have a thing legitimately differentiated.

April Dunford [0:07:50]: It's legitimately cool, but they're scared as hectic to go message around it because the competitors go out us to Now we do that too.

April Dunford [0:07:59]: So let me give you an examples.

April Dunford [0:08:01]: So this was one, I work with this company, and they had a thing, and it was for optimizing this process that had kind of five steps.

April Dunford [0:08:09]: And so the status quo thing, I loved and talk by the way.

April Dunford [0:08:13]: Let's was just talk about status quo.

April Dunford [0:08:14]: We spent a lot of talk about with status quo me and my clients.

April Dunford [0:08:16]: But the status quo thing they were competing against was point of sale solutions.

April Dunford [0:08:21]: So most of these companies had one solution to do step one, another solution to do step two.

April Dunford [0:08:27]: Another do step three.

April Dunford [0:08:28]: Another to do step four another do step five.

April Dunford [0:08:29]: And so this is really inefficient and was driving everybody crazy.

April Dunford [0:08:33]: So customers really mad at this.

April Dunford [0:08:35]: All I wanna do is automate this thing, and make it go away and just really hard to dude You got five point solutions?

April Dunford [0:08:41]: So we're doing the positioning on this.

April Dunford [0:08:43]: So step one.

April Dunford [0:08:43]: What's the alternative?

April Dunford [0:08:45]: Well, status quo thing is these five point solutions.

April Dunford [0:08:48]: But they said, you know it's really hard alternative we've got.

April Dunford [0:08:50]: We got a competitor that has all five.

April Dunford [0:08:54]: So you can buy one thing from them.

April Dunford [0:08:59]: It's actually five things, but we can buy it from one vendor.

April Dunford [0:09:01]: And I'm like, okay.

April Dunford [0:09:03]: That's the competition.

April Dunford [0:09:04]: So what have you got?

April Dunford [0:09:05]: That they don't have, and they said, well, we're the only one where it's a platform.

April Dunford [0:09:09]: It's all one thing.

April Dunford [0:09:11]: We actually just extended the platform to do all five things.

April Dunford [0:09:14]: And I'm like, okay.

April Dunford [0:09:17]: That's cool.

April Dunford [0:09:17]: So then I'm my, like, well, what's the value of having it as a platform instead of five things and they said, well, you know, it's a common.

April Dunford [0:09:24]: Like, dude that's not valued like, so what?

April Dunford [0:09:28]: So you gotta common?

April Dunford [0:09:29]: It's, like so what?

April Dunford [0:09:30]: Now like, well, so, if something happens in step one, we already know it in step five.

April Dunford [0:09:35]: So you actually need that in order to do automation.

April Dunford [0:09:37]: I'm like, oh, that's really cool.

April Dunford [0:09:38]: And so they're like, we have a thing that it used to take people four weeks to get it done.

April Dunford [0:09:42]: And now they can do it in four hours, you know, a day, like, way more efficient, save all kinds of money.

April Dunford [0:09:48]: Okay.

April Dunford [0:09:48]: That's great.

April Dunford [0:09:49]: Sounds good.

April Dunford [0:09:49]: Marketing guys sitting there like this.

April Dunford [0:09:51]: Let's say look.

April Dunford [0:09:53]: We can't say that.

April Dunford [0:09:56]: And I said why not?

April Dunford [0:09:57]: And he goes do it.

April Dunford [0:09:58]: Bring up the Competitor's websites.

April Dunford [0:10:00]: And the Competitor's website says, we make that thing more efficient, you know, and they're like, we can't say that because they say that, and it's the exact same thing.

April Dunford [0:10:09]: And I said, yeah.

April Dunford [0:10:10]: But when they say it, it's not true And when you say it is true.

April Dunford [0:10:15]: And then the product guys well, it's kinda true when they say it.

April Dunford [0:10:20]: It's kinda true.

April Dunford [0:10:21]: They've got some Apis and you can make them do it, you can make it happen.

April Dunford [0:10:25]: But it's gonna take an army of consultants.

April Dunford [0:10:28]: Is gonna take you six months.

April Dunford [0:10:29]: So when they saying that all the things connect with all the things and they call it a platform.

April Dunford [0:10:33]: It is.

April Dunford [0:10:35]: You can make it work.

April Dunford [0:10:36]: No one does it.

April Dunford [0:10:37]: Not zero of their customers have done it.

April Dunford [0:10:38]: Paying it yet.

April Dunford [0:10:39]: No.

April Dunford [0:10:39]: No one's gonna do it.

April Dunford [0:10:41]: But yes.

April Dunford [0:10:42]: It's actually true.

April Dunford [0:10:43]: You can make it happen, but nobody does.

April Dunford [0:10:45]: And I'm like, oh.

April Dunford [0:10:47]: So what we have is actually the situation where your competitor has given you a hangar grenade.

April Dunford [0:10:53]: All we gotta do polka.

April Dunford [0:10:55]: So what did we do?

April Dunford [0:10:57]: So step one.

April Dunford [0:10:58]: Really tight on the differentiated value really tight.

April Dunford [0:11:01]: When they were talking about differentiated value, they weren't, like, they were just talking about features.

April Dunford [0:11:05]: So they were saying we have a platform, and they're just expecting that the customer knows the value of the platform.

April Dunford [0:11:11]: So instead, we were talking about automating the end to end process and shaving four weeks off this thing.

April Dunford [0:11:17]: Right?

April Dunford [0:11:18]: Which the other guys, yeah.

April Dunford [0:11:19]: They can automate the end enterprise the bottom.

April Dunford [0:11:22]: Professional services, and all the other stuff.

April Dunford [0:11:23]: But they can't shave four weeks off a bit.

April Dunford [0:11:26]: So, okay.

April Dunford [0:11:26]: That's step number one.

April Dunford [0:11:27]: Really tight on the thing.

April Dunford [0:11:29]: Step number two, we're gonna teach the customer how to identify the lie So we...

April Dunford [0:11:37]: What do we do?

April Dunford [0:11:38]: We have a whole bunch of content that talks about, how do we automate this process?

April Dunford [0:11:42]: What happens if we were to do that?

April Dunford [0:11:45]: You've got five things right now.

April Dunford [0:11:46]: And they've all got Apis?

April Dunford [0:11:48]: Couldn't we just write some custom code So then we talk about how bad That is.

April Dunford [0:11:52]: Let's think about that.

April Dunford [0:11:53]: That's bad.

April Dunford [0:11:54]: And then we would say when we built a buyer's guide and a bunch of things.

April Dunford [0:11:58]: How do you actually know if this is, and then we talked to salespeople because we always got into these deals we're gonna bake off against the other guys?

April Dunford [0:12:05]: So the sales, the beginning of their sales pitch was, okay.

April Dunford [0:12:10]: We wanna make this process really efficient.

April Dunford [0:12:12]: Right?

April Dunford [0:12:12]: Yes.

April Dunford [0:12:13]: Customers like, yes.

April Dunford [0:12:14]: We would like to just automate it and have it go away.

April Dunford [0:12:16]: Okay.

April Dunford [0:12:17]: Number one, why aren't we automating it right now.

April Dunford [0:12:20]: We're not automating right now because there's five different things and they don't talk to each other there's five different logins and something, you know, it's paying the ass.

April Dunford [0:12:27]: They're like, oh, okay.

April Dunford [0:12:28]: That's good.

April Dunford [0:12:28]: And we're like, look, we work a lot of companies just like you, and we see they're either doing it like that.

April Dunford [0:12:34]: Now listen, There's some companies out there will tell you that they have a platform, and they'll tell you that you can automate all these things.

April Dunford [0:12:45]: But you should ask some questions.

April Dunford [0:12:46]: So you should ask this question Will it take professional services to make that happen and how much does that cost?

April Dunford [0:12:52]: Ask that.

April Dunford [0:12:53]: Here's a good question.

April Dunford [0:12:55]: Next time you're meeting with one of those vendors ask them this.

April Dunford [0:12:57]: How many logins are there?

April Dunford [0:12:59]: Is it one?

April Dunford [0:13:00]: R five.

April Dunford [0:13:01]: It's a fun question to ask.

April Dunford [0:13:03]: You should ask them that?

April Dunford [0:13:04]: And so then we say, okay.

April Dunford [0:13:05]: But we're are the only ones that actually have this, know we talk about the value we talk about whatever.

April Dunford [0:13:09]: And so they started bringing this up in sales meetings.

April Dunford [0:13:12]: They started messaging around marketing and then win every time.

April Dunford [0:13:15]: And win every time.

April Dunford [0:13:17]: And his sales guy had this call with him afterwards.

April Dunford [0:13:21]: And the Vp sales like this old dude.

April Dunford [0:13:23]: He's really crusty.

April Dunford [0:13:24]: He's one of that he's, like, old sales guys been in there.

April Dunford [0:13:28]: Done that.

April Dunford [0:13:28]: Got the scars man, and he never smiles And we're having this Zoom call, and this company had a slogan and it was called this slogan was driving customer delight.

April Dunford [0:13:39]: We like the...

April Dunford [0:13:40]: I don't know, mission statement or something driving customer delight.

April Dunford [0:13:43]: So he shows up on the Zoom call.

April Dunford [0:13:44]: He's got one of the Zoom backgrounds and it over his head.

April Dunford [0:13:46]: It says driving customer delight needs to die.

April Dunford [0:13:48]: And I said, how's it going with the new sales pitch.

April Dunford [0:13:52]: He says, you know what customers love?

April Dunford [0:13:56]: I said, what, John.

April Dunford [0:13:58]: What are the customers love?

April Dunford [0:13:59]: They'll have called vendors on their bullshit.

April Dunford [0:14:02]: Says, they go.

April Dunford [0:14:05]: I told them to thing.

April Dunford [0:14:06]: I'm like, hey.

April Dunford [0:14:06]: Ask your other vendors, how many logins and they come back and they are delighted.

April Dunford [0:14:11]: They're laughing happened and they're like, well, you asked the about any logins and they said.

April Dunford [0:14:15]: Five and we said you're eliminated from the sale process.

April Dunford [0:14:18]: He's like, is you the invitation of the customer and he's like, I'm gonna win it this quarter.

April Dunford [0:14:24]: Then when what to drive customer delight prize from the company anyways.

April Dunford [0:14:30]: So if you have...

April Dunford [0:14:32]: So this is a thing.

April Dunford [0:14:33]: It is remarkable to me how often it comes up.

April Dunford [0:14:36]: They were shy away from saying the thing that we do.

April Dunford [0:14:39]: Is actually really differentiated.

April Dunford [0:14:40]: Really valuable, well, we got this fear.

April Dunford [0:14:42]: What are the other guys you say that?

April Dunford [0:14:44]: It's like, both if they say that, let them have it.

April Dunford [0:14:48]: Okay.

April Dunford [0:14:49]: Second one.

April Dunford [0:14:50]: Your best differentiator are baffling to buyers.

April Dunford [0:14:54]: Even the really technical ones.

April Dunford [0:14:56]: And this, Diane yesterday.

April Dunford [0:14:59]: She...

April Dunford [0:14:59]: The messaging talk.

April Dunford [0:15:00]: Yesterday.

April Dunford [0:15:00]: Where are you?

April Dunford [0:15:01]: Hello.

April Dunford [0:15:01]: She mentioned this yesterday and I was like, oh, goody.

April Dunford [0:15:04]: I'm gonna talk about this too.

April Dunford [0:15:05]: So here's the thing.

April Dunford [0:15:08]: We sometimes have this thing, and you'll see it, especially when companies are selling a really, really technical audiences, you'll sometimes have this thing that they'll say, customers are gonna to come are really technical, and they've got a checklist of features.

April Dunford [0:15:21]: And they're gonna come and they wanna know.

April Dunford [0:15:23]: Do we meet the checklist of features.

April Dunford [0:15:24]: And so we gotta tell them features, and, yeah, we could do value, but then we sound like everybody else.

April Dunford [0:15:30]: And so, you know, we gotta just do the feature.

April Dunford [0:15:32]: But here's the problem.

April Dunford [0:15:33]: Your best thing.

April Dunford [0:15:35]: The thing that makes you special and unique is something that other people don't have.

April Dunford [0:15:41]: So nobody knows why it's important.

April Dunford [0:15:43]: Customers don't know it.

April Dunford [0:15:45]: So I'll give you an example.

April Dunford [0:15:46]: Where with this company in They used to do the feature checklist thing.

April Dunford [0:15:50]: And one of the things on their feature checklist was think we were the only people on the planet they have fuzzy logic algorithm.

April Dunford [0:15:55]: Nobody knows what footage logic algorithm algorithms with you all the guys to do it.

April Dunford [0:15:59]: I we're a twelve person company.

April Dunford [0:16:00]: Nobody knows us.

April Dunford [0:16:01]: Nobody knows what fuzzy logic is.

April Dunford [0:16:03]: And so customers would come.

April Dunford [0:16:05]: We're selling a data warehouse, And they had all these other features on the checklist that we didn't have.

April Dunford [0:16:10]: And you know why we didn't have it because we didn't need it because we had a fuzzy logic algorithm.

April Dunford [0:16:14]: Nobody knows that.

April Dunford [0:16:15]: So they come of in and there, like, have you got roll up function.

April Dunford [0:16:18]: No.

April Dunford [0:16:18]: I so we don't.

April Dunford [0:16:19]: Do we have a cute function?

April Dunford [0:16:20]: No.

April Dunford [0:16:20]: We eliminated?

April Dunford [0:16:21]: That's stupid.

April Dunford [0:16:22]: Right?

April Dunford [0:16:23]: So we had to teach people.

April Dunford [0:16:25]: Why if fuzzy logic algorithm worked.

April Dunford [0:16:27]: Like, it is not our job.

April Dunford [0:16:30]: In marketing and sales to be order takers.

April Dunford [0:16:34]: That's not what we're here for.

April Dunford [0:16:36]: Ryan here just take the order.

April Dunford [0:16:38]: We'll tell me and check the box Never taking the order.

April Dunford [0:16:40]: Like our best stuff, we actually have to teach the customers why it's important.

April Dunford [0:16:45]: Because even if they're really technical, they don't know what that is.

April Dunford [0:16:49]: So in my thinking, just my super super simplified dumb dumb thinking on this is it kinda works like this.

April Dunford [0:16:57]: I got a feature And then I got pure pure marketing value to marketing textbook value.

April Dunford [0:17:03]: Now here's a problem.

April Dunford [0:17:05]: Pure pure marketing textbook value.

April Dunford [0:17:08]: If for b to b, we're all the same.

April Dunford [0:17:11]: Because we only have two points of value.

April Dunford [0:17:14]: Either helping to make money or we're helping you save money.

April Dunford [0:17:16]: That's it.

April Dunford [0:17:17]: That's all we got.

April Dunford [0:17:18]: So if I just put on the website, we're gonna help you make money.

April Dunford [0:17:21]: Everybody the.

April Dunford [0:17:21]: Yeah.

April Dunford [0:17:22]: That's too.

April Dunford [0:17:22]: We're have to save money.

April Dunford [0:17:23]: Yes.

April Dunford [0:17:24]: That's too.

April Dunford [0:17:24]: That's too.

April Dunford [0:17:25]: Now insurance people were here and they'd say, what about risk.

April Dunford [0:17:28]: I'm like, okay.

April Dunford [0:17:28]: There's three.

April Dunford [0:17:29]: But fine.

April Dunford [0:17:30]: It's mainly just two.

April Dunford [0:17:31]: And so here's how this works with a feature.

April Dunford [0:17:34]: So if I tell you my phone has three thousand megapixels.

April Dunford [0:17:39]: You know what that means because you've been taught.

April Dunford [0:17:43]: And you know that three thousand megapixels is better than twenty.

April Dunford [0:17:46]: And you know why, You know because you zoom in and the pictures are gonna be really sharp and all that kind of stuff.

April Dunford [0:17:51]: So if I'm apple and I'm running an ad, I can just say three thousand megapixels and you're like, well, that's good.

April Dunford [0:17:57]: Why?

April Dunford [0:17:57]: Because you've been taught.

April Dunford [0:17:58]: Now if I rule it back fifteen years or twenty years or whatever it was, the people didn't have digital phones, You couldn't say that.

April Dunford [0:18:05]: You couldn't say two hundred megapixel there mega what?

April Dunford [0:18:07]: What is it?

April Dunford [0:18:08]: And you had to say, oh, this is why.

April Dunford [0:18:09]: And so in that case where everybody knows the feature and they know what it is.

April Dunford [0:18:14]: You can just state the feature.

April Dunford [0:18:15]: Everybody knows how to translate the feature to value.

April Dunford [0:18:18]: We all know why it's important.

April Dunford [0:18:19]: But if you look got fuzzy logic algorithm or whatever the heck you're thing is that makes you special and different.

April Dunford [0:18:25]: Everyone's gonna look at you and say, I don't know.

April Dunford [0:18:27]: Now here's where gets really tricky.

April Dunford [0:18:30]: I can't go all the way to pure value because they sound like everybody else too.

April Dunford [0:18:33]: So what I actually gotta find is this sweet spot in the middle, which...

April Dunford [0:18:37]: It was a little tricky.

April Dunford [0:18:38]: So what happens is it's like, okay.

April Dunford [0:18:40]: I got a fuzzy logic algorithm.

April Dunford [0:18:41]: So what?

April Dunford [0:18:42]: So I could do a really fast query on a mountain of data because I would using roll up in cube function.

April Dunford [0:18:48]: So what?

April Dunford [0:18:49]: Well, so if a customer calls in and has a question, I can answer it while they're on the phone instead of having to call them back in two days.

April Dunford [0:18:55]: A, now the customer knows how to translate that to value.

April Dunford [0:18:58]: So I'm looking for this sweet spot point.

April Dunford [0:19:01]: Where I maintain my differentiation.

April Dunford [0:19:04]: So I don't sound like everybody else, but I'm going far enough for the customer to do the leap to make money save money.

April Dunford [0:19:12]: That's why it this is actually really, really hard.

April Dunford [0:19:14]: And so a lot of times we don't get is everyone say, well, we're just gonna talk about the feature.

April Dunford [0:19:18]: It's a cop out.

April Dunford [0:19:19]: It's a cop out It's lazy.

April Dunford [0:19:20]: We actually have to do this.

April Dunford [0:19:22]: This is really hard and it sucks.

April Dunford [0:19:24]: But we have no choice.

April Dunford [0:19:27]: We really wanna be differentiated.

April Dunford [0:19:28]: We really wanna answer the question, not why pick us, but why pick us over the other ways we could solve the problem.

April Dunford [0:19:35]: You gotta nail this.

April Dunford [0:19:36]: Which is differentiated value.

April Dunford [0:19:38]: Great number two.

April Dunford [0:19:39]: Number three, overthinking your market categories is, like, actually will kill you.

April Dunford [0:19:44]: And so this concept of creating a market category, it's less popular now, but a few years ago, people went really nuts on this.

April Dunford [0:19:54]: And there was this thinking around that there was no way to win a market unless you were the category leader.

April Dunford [0:20:03]: And so only the category leader is making any money, and everybody else is not making any money, is simply not true.

April Dunford [0:20:09]: In fact, I was getting at so much, I was like, is it true?

April Dunford [0:20:12]: Maybe it is true.

April Dunford [0:20:14]: Maybe all the companies I worked at that were just working in a sub segment of a really, really big market and made hundreds of millions of dollars.

April Dunford [0:20:20]: Maybe we were all just weirdo.

April Dunford [0:20:21]: So I went, and I did an analysis.

April Dunford [0:20:25]: And at the time, I looked at all the companies tech companies that went public on the Nasdaq.

April Dunford [0:20:30]: So, you know, they're not necessarily big but big enough to go public.

April Dunford [0:20:33]: All those companies how many of those companies had invented a new market category and we're playing in this new market category.

April Dunford [0:20:42]: At the time they went public and ninety two percent were not.

April Dunford [0:20:49]: So ninety two percent.

April Dunford [0:20:51]: We're playing an existing market category.

April Dunford [0:20:52]: And the thirty eighty percent had new categories, so it's not like we never do this, sometimes when you do this.

April Dunford [0:20:56]: But ninety two percent we're playing existing yet.

April Dunford [0:20:59]: And those were companies like snowflake, a data warehouse for the cloud.

April Dunford [0:21:04]: We know what data warehousing is.

April Dunford [0:21:07]: That's an existing market category for the cloud didn't stop them from being the fastest growing tech company ever in history of the land.

April Dunford [0:21:13]: Now if you look what they're doing now.

April Dunford [0:21:15]: Now they're creating market category because they absolutely dominate.

April Dunford [0:21:17]: Cloud data warehousing.

April Dunford [0:21:19]: Now they're trying to create the market category.

April Dunford [0:21:21]: That's different.

April Dunford [0:21:22]: Right?

April Dunford [0:21:22]: So sometimes what we have is we don't like the market category where we're in because it feels really crowded and we're like dang how are we gonna win because there's all these big companies.

April Dunford [0:21:33]: So let me give you an example.

April Dunford [0:21:34]: This company I worked with and they were in the sales enable space.

April Dunford [0:21:39]: And so we did his workshop, so we started with again, if you didn't exist, what would the customer do?

April Dunford [0:21:45]: So status quo was throw a bunch of stuff on a shared drive, free easy, whatever.

April Dunford [0:21:52]: But once the company gets a little bit bigger, really hard to manage, really hard to tell if people are using the right stuff, whatever.

April Dunford [0:21:57]: This is training material for your salespeople people.

April Dunford [0:22:00]: And then their competitors beyond that were terrifying.

April Dunford [0:22:06]: So seismic who had raised almost a billion high spot, six hundred million they've raised, pigs in can, four hundred million day raised, mine signals three hundred million they raised.

April Dunford [0:22:17]: Little company I'm working with had raised one million dollars.

April Dunford [0:22:19]: What?

April Dunford [0:22:20]: Bootstrap, basically, friends and family round, and they're competing with that.

April Dunford [0:22:26]: Now you might look at that and say, that's pretty scary.

April Dunford [0:22:29]: Maybe we don't wanna be in that market.

April Dunford [0:22:31]: But we start with the market category.

April Dunford [0:22:35]: We're trying to get to differentiated value, then we're gonna make a decision about market category.

April Dunford [0:22:39]: So back it up.

April Dunford [0:22:40]: Where you're competing against your competing share drive or you're competing with these gary dudes, Second, what do we got that they don't have?

April Dunford [0:22:47]: Differentiated capability.

April Dunford [0:22:48]: So the answer in this case was it were the only sales name on platform built on top of Salesforce.

April Dunford [0:22:55]: That's the feature.

April Dunford [0:22:57]: So then they're the customer and you're like, so what?

April Dunford [0:23:00]: Well, means, again, common data platform.

April Dunford [0:23:03]: So what does that mean?

April Dunford [0:23:04]: It means you can tie your sales enable data to your actually sales performance data to answer a question, which is like, did the sales enable work?

April Dunford [0:23:16]: Did it improve time to first deal?

April Dunford [0:23:18]: Did it improve time for the salesperson to make quota.

April Dunford [0:23:21]: That's actually crunchy value.

April Dunford [0:23:23]: It's like a big deal value.

April Dunford [0:23:25]: So we got there and it's like, that sounds really compelling.

April Dunford [0:23:29]: And I'm selling to the head of sales enable.

April Dunford [0:23:31]: Like, that sounds like something the head of sales name but cares a lot about.

April Dunford [0:23:34]: And then we were like, okay, Who are we selling to?

April Dunford [0:23:36]: We're selling technology companies?

April Dunford [0:23:38]: That hire a lot of sales.

April Dunford [0:23:39]: They're growing really fast.

April Dunford [0:23:40]: So they have a need to get a lot of sales ramped up really quickly.

April Dunford [0:23:43]: They have to have the problem in speeds or whatever.

April Dunford [0:23:46]: And we are a really small company, but we've got a good objection handling thing and that if someone says, we're you're really small.

April Dunford [0:23:53]: It sounds a risky, our big customer was Salesforce.

April Dunford [0:23:56]: And so everybody was using Salesforce was kinda like, we might look risky, but Salesforce didn't, you know, So we we got a good proof point on that.

April Dunford [0:24:03]: So then we got to the market category, but we're like, should we pick another market category.

April Dunford [0:24:08]: And in the end, you know, me and the founder we're talking about it and we're like, well, the founder says, look, I actually think we have such big value.

April Dunford [0:24:16]: We can beat these guys anytime we're up against them.

April Dunford [0:24:19]: We just wanna get invited to Party.

April Dunford [0:24:21]: So how are you gonna you get invited to the party if we don't call our sales sales enable.

April Dunford [0:24:26]: And so in the end, where sales enable, their tagline was sales enable to drives results.

April Dunford [0:24:31]: If you on their website is, like, three hundred percent improvement and time to first deal and all this other stuff, But it turned out being in the crowded market category wasn't a problem at all.

April Dunford [0:24:42]: In fact, it actually helped that company.

April Dunford [0:24:44]: So they started growing really quickly because it's really crunchy differentiated value.

April Dunford [0:24:49]: You can imagine.

April Dunford [0:24:50]: They're sitting across in the head of sales enabled.

April Dunford [0:24:52]: And this how the salespeople people pitch it.

April Dunford [0:24:53]: Sit across in the head of sales name, hey, sales name, head of sales name it.

April Dunford [0:24:57]: So Is really important.

April Dunford [0:24:58]: Right And they're like, yeah, Idiot.

April Dunford [0:24:59]: That's my job.

April Dunford [0:24:59]: Okay.

April Dunford [0:25:00]: Yeah.

April Dunford [0:25:00]: So it's was really...

April Dunford [0:25:01]: Why is it really important?

April Dunford [0:25:02]: Because every day your reps not making quote cost money.

April Dunford [0:25:04]: It's a nice little cow to show you how much money If, you know, it takes the extra week text in month.

April Dunford [0:25:09]: Hey.

April Dunford [0:25:10]: Yeah.

April Dunford [0:25:10]: And look, so what are you gonna do to solve the problem?

April Dunford [0:25:12]: You pro of stuff on the drive.

April Dunford [0:25:13]: That doesn't scale very much.

April Dunford [0:25:15]: Or you could use any of these guys, but When your boss comes to and asks, did the sales enable program work, how do you answer that question?

April Dunford [0:25:24]: Do you wanna answer that question?

April Dunford [0:25:26]: If you do we're the only way?

April Dunford [0:25:28]: It's super compelling.

April Dunford [0:25:30]: So they go up and against to any of these people they win every time?

April Dunford [0:25:33]: They just gotta get in?

April Dunford [0:25:34]: So, anyways, revenue goes like this, they got acquired by Salesforce.

April Dunford [0:25:37]: Imagine that.

April Dunford [0:25:38]: They didn't not have to share any money with the Vcs.

April Dunford [0:25:41]: Everybody's like, thirty years old, and they're sitting on a beach drinking out the coconut.

April Dunford [0:25:46]: Anyway, so here we are.

April Dunford [0:25:48]: So here we are.

April Dunford [0:25:49]: So lesson number four, this is more for a multi product company.

April Dunford [0:25:52]: But if you're a multi product company, you need a clear go to market strategy before you can tackle positioning.

April Dunford [0:25:58]: So I lots of companies will call me and they got multiple products and they say, hey, we wanna do position.

April Dunford [0:26:03]: Like, great.

April Dunford [0:26:04]: And then so they're describing.

April Dunford [0:26:05]: We got the company with all these products.

April Dunford [0:26:07]: And I'm like, good.

April Dunford [0:26:08]: So what are we positioning?

April Dunford [0:26:09]: Hey you can see that kinda of never thought of about that before.

April Dunford [0:26:12]: So if you have multiple products, there's actually a bunch of big decisions that have to happen before you can tackle positioning.

April Dunford [0:26:19]: So it looks a bit like this.

April Dunford [0:26:21]: If you're a single product company, I have one product, the company positioning and the product positioning kinda of the same.

April Dunford [0:26:29]: Like, think about Slack before they got acquired by Salesforce, Slack the product, slack the company same position is all one thing.

April Dunford [0:26:35]: Or separate things.

April Dunford [0:26:36]: Now sometimes, you might have a founder that says, Look, man.

April Dunford [0:26:40]: I did have founder tell me this one.

April Dunford [0:26:41]: Say, look, I know we only have one thing.

April Dunford [0:26:44]: We wanna be the dyson labs of that thing.

April Dunford [0:26:47]: So we're gonna have a thousand things.

April Dunford [0:26:49]: We didn't want now, but once this one successful.

April Dunford [0:26:51]: We're gonna have another one another one Another new how hard it is.

April Dunford [0:26:54]: Make one thing successful, like, ninety eight percent of startups by.

April Dunford [0:26:57]: All that stuff.

April Dunford [0:26:58]: I'm like, how about we just be the vacuum cleaner company.

April Dunford [0:27:01]: And if we ever get hair dryer thing come in a number two.

April Dunford [0:27:04]: We'll worry about that leader.

April Dunford [0:27:06]: Right?

April Dunford [0:27:07]: So it is fine.

April Dunford [0:27:08]: This should all be one thing.

April Dunford [0:27:09]: But when you have multiple products, if you sell those multiple products to the same kind of customers, you might have company positioning as an umbrella, and then product one positioning product two positioning product three positioning?

April Dunford [0:27:21]: Like, when I worked at Ibm, we had company positioning, why do wanna work with Ibm?

April Dunford [0:27:25]: We have hardware offered services.

April Dunford [0:27:27]: Here's how you wanna work with us?

April Dunford [0:27:29]: And then we had software group positioning, and then we had database division positioning, and then I had my actual product positioning underneath that, it was just one beautiful cascading thing.

April Dunford [0:27:38]: Now, that sounds fine.

April Dunford [0:27:40]: But a lot of times we don't actually have that even when we have multiple products.

April Dunford [0:27:44]: Because sometimes what we have is we have a lead product, and then we have follow on products.

April Dunford [0:27:49]: So let's take Salesforce as an example, but not Salesforce today, Let's run Salesforce like, I don't know.

April Dunford [0:27:56]: Before they bought Slack.

April Dunford [0:27:57]: If you looked at Salesforce homepage, the only thing they talked about was Sales cloud.

April Dunford [0:28:02]: When the world's number one Crm.

April Dunford [0:28:04]: If you looked at all their advertising with the world's number one Crm, they had lot of other products, they had marketing cloud, they had service Cloud.

April Dunford [0:28:11]: But their lead product was Sales club because it was easy to sell.

April Dunford [0:28:15]: They had doubled the market share of all the other Crm combined.

April Dunford [0:28:20]: So they were trying to make this difficult and try to sell you the whole thing or trying to say, hey, we have a menu of three things, which would you like, they see say forget about everything else, just buy the Crm man.

April Dunford [0:28:30]: Like, let's not make this complicated.

April Dunford [0:28:31]: Just buy the Crm.

April Dunford [0:28:33]: That's the lead product.

April Dunford [0:28:34]: Now once they got you with lead product.

April Dunford [0:28:36]: Everything else his positioned as cross sell or an add on because it's easier.

April Dunford [0:28:41]: So maybe they don't have the world's greatest marketing automation, and don't.

April Dunford [0:28:48]: But I don't have to make the case for it to be the world's greatest marketing automation.

April Dunford [0:28:53]: I'm the world's greatest now.

April Dunford [0:28:54]: All I'm gotta do is position that thing as the world's greatest marketing automation for companies that have Salesforce Crm.

April Dunford [0:29:01]: Even though ain't all it's bad either.

April Dunford [0:29:03]: But, you know, but we can at least the attempt to position it that way.

April Dunford [0:29:06]: So you gotta make that decision.

April Dunford [0:29:08]: And if you look at the company positioning for Salesforce in that era, The company position was really all around Crm, they weren't trying to be everything that everybody it was really all around the Crm.

April Dunford [0:29:17]: Now, sometimes, That's not the way you wanna do it.

April Dunford [0:29:21]: Like sometimes, you've got a whole bunch of things, and you've bundled that together into something you're calling a platform or a suite.

April Dunford [0:29:29]: And I'm trying to sell you a whole bundle of stuff together.

April Dunford [0:29:32]: Again, that's a different go to market strategy.

April Dunford [0:29:35]: A little bit like, what Salesforce is trying to do right now.

April Dunford [0:29:38]: They have this thing called customer three sixty.

April Dunford [0:29:40]: Does anybody understand it?

April Dunford [0:29:42]: Nobody.

April Dunford [0:29:44]: Did this way harder positioning.

April Dunford [0:29:46]: Right?

April Dunford [0:29:46]: It's hard.

April Dunford [0:29:46]: It's like, what is that thing and I got a Genie and a thing, And he's in the middle He's waving match one and all that I stuff with somebody together.

April Dunford [0:29:53]: I don't know how it comes together.

April Dunford [0:29:55]: But it's harder.

April Dunford [0:29:56]: Right?

April Dunford [0:29:56]: It's harder than just saying.

April Dunford [0:29:57]: I'm just gonna sell you the Crm Gonna sell all there's stuff either.

April Dunford [0:30:00]: But the problem is, well.

April Dunford [0:30:01]: I don't know.

April Dunford [0:30:02]: Maybe you just got Slack.

April Dunford [0:30:02]: And now I wanna now.

April Dunford [0:30:03]: I don't.

April Dunford [0:30:04]: I don't know.

April Dunford [0:30:04]: There's so many products is hard.

April Dunford [0:30:05]: They should call me.

April Dunford [0:30:07]: This guy is going on the internet.

April Dunford [0:30:11]: So here you are.

April Dunford [0:30:13]: My point is here he you are, You're the marketing person, and maybe somebody's who's telling you oh, we get...

April Dunford [0:30:19]: You figure this positioning thing out.

April Dunford [0:30:20]: Like, if you haven't answer these questions, then you can't go do that?

April Dunford [0:30:25]: We gotta answer those questions first?

April Dunford [0:30:26]: Like, do we got a wedge product and everything's an add on?

April Dunford [0:30:30]: Is this thing Actually we call it a platform?

April Dunford [0:30:32]: Is it actually a platform?

April Dunford [0:30:33]: Do we wanna sell it like a platform?

April Dunford [0:30:34]: Resident it individual things and where the individuals is like, we gotta answer these questions first and Ceo's is gonna have an opinion about that.

April Dunford [0:30:40]: Had sales gonna have opinion about that.

April Dunford [0:30:42]: You can't make that decision on your own.

April Dunford [0:30:43]: So these things are really important to get right before you tackle positioning?

April Dunford [0:30:48]: Like, what are we positioning Let's figure that out first.

April Dunford [0:30:51]: And I got it.

April Dunford [0:30:52]: I got the last thing.

April Dunford [0:30:53]: And then we're gonna good questions.

April Dunford [0:30:54]: So last one is, a great story with weak positioning.

April Dunford [0:30:57]: This is counterintuitive, but really great story built on weak positioning.

April Dunford [0:31:02]: Actually advantages your competition.

April Dunford [0:31:06]: It really sucks.

April Dunford [0:31:07]: This is actually really disappointing and awful when it happens, but there's so many examples of it in tech.

April Dunford [0:31:15]: Where, you know, and it's a lot of category creators end up having this happened.

April Dunford [0:31:21]: Right?

April Dunford [0:31:21]: But, like, you come up with this great idea.

April Dunford [0:31:23]: You have this really compelling story That says, look, the world has never had one of these before, And now we're gonna have one of these, and it's gonna be amazing and that story becomes so inspiring and so awesome, and everybody rushes to you and you have this fleeting moment of super joy and then a thousand million billion competitors come up and go meet you.

April Dunford [0:31:44]: And the story wasn't anything specific to you.

April Dunford [0:31:47]: The story applies to them just as much as it applies to anybody else.

April Dunford [0:31:50]: And so there's lots of examples of this, like, You know, one of the ones that I was really surprised at, like, if you're really old, you might remember this, but only if you're really old.

April Dunford [0:31:59]: Like, in the early days of the internet, Ibm coined the term e business.

April Dunford [0:32:04]: And then they had this big campaign about e business.

April Dunford [0:32:07]: And even now if you Google it, Chad Will tell you it was really successful campaign there wrong.

April Dunford [0:32:12]: So it was a successful campaign for Ibm, but the problem was it was such a good story, and it was so true and it was, like, the Internet changes everything, and they were the first people to grasp that, and they came out with this big story about we gonna do business in completely different way because there's an internet man and they came out, and then five years later, you've never associated e business with Ibm really.

April Dunford [0:32:36]: Really.

April Dunford [0:32:37]: If you wanna do e commerce, recall Ibm?

April Dunford [0:32:40]: Nah.

April Dunford [0:32:40]: And so internal to Ibm because I working at Ibm shortly after that.

April Dunford [0:32:45]: Like, they considered that a big failure because they had created a story but there was nothing in the story that really advantage them, and so it became a great story in the market for everybody, and not just them.

April Dunford [0:32:58]: So if we're gonna take the time to build a really great narrative.

April Dunford [0:33:02]: We gotta build a great narrative that is only good for us.

April Dunford [0:33:06]: And the other guys can't tell that story.

April Dunford [0:33:08]: So I'll give you an example.

April Dunford [0:33:11]: So I've done a lot of database startups, but my first ever company I ever worked at.

April Dunford [0:33:16]: We were selling a database.

April Dunford [0:33:18]: And somebody had told us that in the pitch, we had to start with the problem?

April Dunford [0:33:23]: So we're like, okay.

April Dunford [0:33:25]: What's the problem that a database solves?

April Dunford [0:33:28]: Warrant a lot of data.

April Dunford [0:33:30]: You know?

April Dunford [0:33:31]: So So we have this slide that was like, here's the problem.

April Dunford [0:33:34]: Data's is going up.

April Dunford [0:33:36]: It's going up.

April Dunford [0:33:37]: Is going up don't what you need?

April Dunford [0:33:39]: Database.

April Dunford [0:33:40]: And then we would just show you a whole bunch of features.

April Dunford [0:33:43]: Whole bunch of features.

April Dunford [0:33:44]: Until you said Uncle kong and pay us some money.

April Dunford [0:33:47]: And so that's our work.

April Dunford [0:33:49]: And so any database could solve that problem.

April Dunford [0:33:51]: You know, we were like, oh, and sometimes people have been taught this that instead of the problem, what you should do is change in the world.

April Dunford [0:33:58]: But it's the same thing.

April Dunford [0:34:00]: You know, it's changing a man?

April Dunford [0:34:02]: Well sure A lot it is.

April Dunford [0:34:03]: More and more every year.

April Dunford [0:34:06]: Don't we need a database.

April Dunford [0:34:08]: You know, we're telling this story, but in no way that it set us apart in the way we define the change in the world and the way we define problem.

April Dunford [0:34:14]: And so our differentiation certainly didn't come out in the way we phrase that.

April Dunford [0:34:19]: Later, I got this job at Ibm, and was also selling a database.

April Dunford [0:34:24]: And this is a terrible time to we selling database.

April Dunford [0:34:26]: The databases at this point are completely commodity.

April Dunford [0:34:29]: Right?

April Dunford [0:34:30]: All the databases in the land are exactly the same.

April Dunford [0:34:34]: Like, if you were doing a feature function checklist of us versus Oracle, there's nine thousand check on there they're are the same.

April Dunford [0:34:41]: There might be two little check boxes that are different.

April Dunford [0:34:43]: Like, they're the same.

April Dunford [0:34:44]: And so how do we tell a story that makes us sound really different when the products are like, ninety nine percent overlapping?

April Dunford [0:34:51]: Here's how we did it.

April Dunford [0:34:53]: So again, start with your positioning?

April Dunford [0:34:55]: Who are you against Oracle.

April Dunford [0:34:56]: What are we got that they don't have?

April Dunford [0:34:58]: Well The thing we actually had was kind of a little bit of a different philosophy that resulted in a few different features.

April Dunford [0:35:06]: So Oracle was trying to sell you the whole stack.

April Dunford [0:35:09]: The database plus the application, They very closed system, but the idea was it was cheaper.

April Dunford [0:35:15]: You didn't have to do integration.

April Dunford [0:35:16]: So their thing was we're gonna say you the whole thing a big closed box, one vendor.

April Dunford [0:35:21]: Everything just works well together out of the box.

April Dunford [0:35:23]: Ibm, we didn't sell applications.

April Dunford [0:35:26]: So we sold you a database that was gonna play nice with whatever else you had.

April Dunford [0:35:31]: And so because that was our philosophy, we were really in into openness.

April Dunford [0:35:36]: We really into open standards.

April Dunford [0:35:37]: We had great Apis We sat on all the standards bodies.

April Dunford [0:35:41]: We're really about open system open open open.

April Dunford [0:35:43]: Like, we couldn't say it enough.

April Dunford [0:35:44]: We're all open.

April Dunford [0:35:45]: So that's the differentiator.

April Dunford [0:35:47]: Better Apis, open standards, all that stuff?

April Dunford [0:35:49]: Do.

April Dunford [0:35:50]: What's the value of that?

April Dunford [0:35:52]: So what?

April Dunford [0:35:52]: What's the value of that?

April Dunford [0:35:54]: Well the value of that is this data plays really nice with all the stuff you have now, and all the stuff you're gonna have in the future too.

April Dunford [0:36:03]: Now, we were selling the bigger companies than Oracle was at the time when I was there.

April Dunford [0:36:08]: And so Oracle was selling the companies didn't care that much maybe about innovation, but didn't care a lot about is it's gonna be lower total cost of ownership or whatever.

April Dunford [0:36:15]: We were selling the big big companies that were very worried about vendor lock in.

April Dunford [0:36:19]: And so we built this story the first setup up of a sales call was an Ibm salesperson, we didn't show the stupid thing with the data is growing.

April Dunford [0:36:29]: That's done.

April Dunford [0:36:30]: So we would come in and we'd say.

April Dunford [0:36:32]: Yeah.

April Dunford [0:36:32]: Yeah.

April Dunford [0:36:33]: You got a lot of data.

April Dunford [0:36:33]: We know data's is growing like this.

April Dunford [0:36:35]: None of the You know, those guys know what They're the database ministry.

April Dunford [0:36:38]: They're all sitting there like, no shit sherlock.

April Dunford [0:36:40]: Yeah.

April Dunford [0:36:40]: We All got a lot of data.

April Dunford [0:36:41]: Yeah.

April Dunford [0:36:42]: Yeah.

April Dunford [0:36:42]: You just grown like this.

April Dunford [0:36:43]: Why?

April Dunford [0:36:43]: Why don't we sort all this data.

April Dunford [0:36:45]: Why?

April Dunford [0:36:46]: When we work with a lot of companies.

April Dunford [0:36:48]: Let me tell you why?

April Dunford [0:36:49]: Because we're gonna do stuff with it?

April Dunford [0:36:50]: We're gonna do machine learning with it.

April Dunford [0:36:52]: We're gonna do Ai with it.

April Dunford [0:36:53]: It's actually not data.

April Dunford [0:36:54]: It's a strategic business asset.

April Dunford [0:36:56]: We're gonna new predictive analytics on it.

April Dunford [0:36:58]: We're gonna predict the future with this data because we've had seven years of fit.

April Dunford [0:37:02]: And now we can look at it and we can look for patterns and we can do all this stuff.

April Dunford [0:37:05]: Amazing.

April Dunford [0:37:06]: Now what exactly are we what exactly are you gonna do with it?

April Dunford [0:37:10]: No.

April Dunford [0:37:11]: He knows because we can't predict the future.

April Dunford [0:37:13]: But we know we're gonna do stuff with it.

April Dunford [0:37:15]: Do we know what the toolkit is we're gonna do it with?

April Dunford [0:37:17]: No.

April Dunford [0:37:17]: So if you're building a strategic business asset saving all those data?

April Dunford [0:37:21]: Just spend all those money?

April Dunford [0:37:22]: And you save all the data?

April Dunford [0:37:22]: Do you know the only thing that matters?

April Dunford [0:37:25]: Openness.

April Dunford [0:37:27]: You gotta be able to get at it and use it.

April Dunford [0:37:29]: Do I wanna put in a box that's all closed?

April Dunford [0:37:31]: No.

April Dunford [0:37:31]: So I took my tiny little differentiator?

April Dunford [0:37:34]: Made it the only thing that matter.

April Dunford [0:37:36]: This is what we're trying to do in a good story.

April Dunford [0:37:39]: So that story really works.

April Dunford [0:37:40]: Because Oracle can't tell it.

April Dunford [0:37:42]: In fact, nobody can tell it, except us.

April Dunford [0:37:44]: I always, that's a and man.

April Dunford [0:37:46]: There's five random things, so they are Teacher prospects that tell the truth, the value of your best differentiator aren't obvious.

April Dunford [0:37:53]: Don't think your market categories actually will kill you.

April Dunford [0:37:56]: Go to market strategy first positioning second, and you might have to get your Ceo on board with that.

April Dunford [0:38:01]: And a really great story is not just a great story.

April Dunford [0:38:05]: It's a great story only you can tell, and that's it.

April Dunford [0:38:09]: I'm gonna take questions, but before I teach the questions.

April Dunford [0:38:12]: I've no knows.

April Dunford [0:38:13]: Oh, you get it first I've actually not announced this at all to anybody mainly because I...

April Dunford [0:38:18]: I'm so lazy.

April Dunford [0:38:19]: I don't want to do social media anymore.

April Dunford [0:38:20]: It's so bad.

April Dunford [0:38:21]: So

Dave Gerhardt [0:38:23]: She said the other, I don't...

Dave Gerhardt [0:38:23]: I haven't done marketing like a year.

Dave Gerhardt [0:38:25]: True.

April Dunford [0:38:27]: It's true.

April Dunford [0:38:27]: Yep.

April Dunford [0:38:28]: So it's funny because this Qr code will take you to sign up to my newsletter, which I have sent out a newsletter in like, six months.

April Dunford [0:38:34]: I don't...

April Dunford [0:38:35]: But but I...

April Dunford [0:38:37]: I'm going back to this book because there's a bunch of stuff that I know now that I didn't know That in twenty nineteen.

April Dunford [0:38:43]: I'm going back at this book and I'm gonna add some of this stuff.

April Dunford [0:38:46]: The other thing I'm gonna do is a lot of people and you might be one of these people.

April Dunford [0:38:49]: A lot of people read this book, and then they send me an email and they said, on page one hundred and thirty six, You said this thing and I'm like, no said that, but he didn't mean that.

April Dunford [0:39:01]: What he meant was his other thing leave on mine.

April Dunford [0:39:03]: And so I'm gonna about fix that too.

April Dunford [0:39:07]: And so I'm doing a updated and expanded.

April Dunford [0:39:11]: Obviously, awesome is coming in February, and I will send out a notice to my email lists, you know, once a year I do that.

April Dunford [0:39:22]: And I'll do that before this thing comes out.

April Dunford [0:39:24]: If you wanna be reminded, don't worry.

April Dunford [0:39:26]: I'm not gonna fill up your inbox.

Dave Gerhardt [0:39:29]: Do you take a picture of that.

Dave Gerhardt [0:39:29]: Get on April So I'll give you a minute to do that.

Dave Gerhardt [0:39:31]: Get.

April Dunford [0:39:32]: My.

April Dunford [0:39:32]: Right.

Dave Gerhardt [0:39:33]: Save your applause for the end.

Dave Gerhardt [0:39:34]: Let's do questions for April.

Dave Gerhardt [0:39:35]: Yeah.

April Dunford [0:39:35]: No.

April Dunford [0:39:35]: Definitely not.

Dave Gerhardt [0:39:37]: No.

Dave Gerhardt [0:39:37]: You want to reply now.

Dave Gerhardt [0:39:38]: No.

Dave Gerhardt [0:39:38]: It's like, five.

Dave Gerhardt [0:39:39]: We can do both.

Dave Gerhardt [0:39:41]: Now I'm always torn when to do it because, like, I feel like sometimes you wait...

Dave Gerhardt [0:39:45]: Like, you do a big one early and then q and a and it's last night I want the one big one says And

April Dunford [0:39:49]: they're you're, like one one.

Dave Gerhardt [0:39:50]: Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [0:39:50]: We'll get you two.

Dave Gerhardt [0:39:51]: We'll get you two.

April Dunford [0:39:52]: And you can ask me a question about anything.

April Dunford [0:39:54]: Does I have to be a five payments.

Audience 1 [0:39:56]: Hey, April.

Audience 1 [0:39:56]: So I've always been a huge advocate for positioning and kinda of the problem I've run into is out heavy in advertising.

Audience 1 [0:40:04]: Yeah.

Audience 1 [0:40:04]: Working with clients getting their subject matter experts, the executives and people to be to lean in, and just...

Audience 1 [0:40:12]: It'd be more involved in that process.

Audience 1 [0:40:14]: It also sounds like it's getting pushed off, like, just do your job, just run the ads And I don't understand.

Audience 1 [0:40:20]: I feel a crazy person when I ask.

Audience 1 [0:40:22]: Like, what makes you different and better and?

Audience 1 [0:40:24]: It's like...

April Dunford [0:40:24]: And they can't really answer the questions so different better.

Audience 1 [0:40:27]: I know this is hard, and it takes time and it's intensive.

Audience 1 [0:40:30]: Yeah.

Audience 1 [0:40:31]: And my question would be, like, what would you recommend is, like, an approach to get those individuals more bought into the value positioning.

April Dunford [0:40:41]: So it's hard for you if you're on the advertising side you're really focused on marketing.

April Dunford [0:40:44]: But what I've found is nobody gives a shit about positioning.

April Dunford [0:40:48]: Until it impacts sales.

April Dunford [0:40:50]: So if I got hired as the vice president marketing, I would go in and hang out with sales for the first couple weeks, and then I would listen for where things are going off the rails in sales.

April Dunford [0:41:02]: So bad positioning on a sales call looks like this.

April Dunford [0:41:05]: Right?

April Dunford [0:41:06]: Prospect gets on we got a whole pitch, whatever salesperson is talking about their stuff, and the customer making his face.

April Dunford [0:41:13]: Like...

April Dunford [0:41:14]: And then you get to, like, slide number four or something in they're, like, Wait, what, dude, Back up.

April Dunford [0:41:19]: Back go back at beginning.

April Dunford [0:41:21]: You're...

April Dunford [0:41:22]: What are you?

April Dunford [0:41:22]: Again?

April Dunford [0:41:23]: So there's this kind of, like, we don't even know what it is.

April Dunford [0:41:25]: And we don't get to a second call with those customers if we don't get the light that come on.

April Dunford [0:41:29]: Right?

April Dunford [0:41:29]: We lose them to no decision.

April Dunford [0:41:31]: All the stuff were talking about before, like Is on a good time or whatever, but it's...

April Dunford [0:41:34]: A lot of times it's just where I know what the heck this thing is.

April Dunford [0:41:37]: I couldn't even figure out how to put you in a bucket.

April Dunford [0:41:39]: Like, second thing in a sales call you'll get is, like, oh, I get what you are.

April Dunford [0:41:43]: You just like Salesforce and that we're, like, dude no, let's go back to the beginning.

April Dunford [0:41:46]: No we're not Salesforce.

April Dunford [0:41:47]: You know, So, to get what we are but to comparing us the wrong way or they'll say, I get what you do, I just don't get why we would pay for that.

April Dunford [0:41:53]: So they don't get the value of it.

April Dunford [0:41:55]: And so if I see that in sales, Then I can take the vice president of sales and go for lunch and say.

April Dunford [0:42:01]: I'm here and this.

April Dunford [0:42:03]: That's killing us in pipeline.

April Dunford [0:42:05]: Like, are you here and laugh?

April Dunford [0:42:07]: And nine times ten.

April Dunford [0:42:09]: If it's actually a problem.

April Dunford [0:42:09]: The Vp sales is, oh, yeah.

April Dunford [0:42:11]: It's terrible Oh my god.

April Dunford [0:42:12]: Like, it takes us three calls for the like goes on or whatever whatever.

April Dunford [0:42:15]: And I'm like, okay, dude.

April Dunford [0:42:16]: This is a positioning problem.

April Dunford [0:42:17]: Here's what positioning is.

April Dunford [0:42:19]: They don't know.

April Dunford [0:42:20]: Tails doesn't annoying anything about positioning.

April Dunford [0:42:22]: So, here's what it is.

April Dunford [0:42:23]: Here's how we're gonna fix it, blah blah.

April Dunford [0:42:25]: And he's like, great.

April Dunford [0:42:26]: And we could fix that.

April Dunford [0:42:27]: That'd be great.

April Dunford [0:42:27]: Then I go to the Ceo, and I, we're getting killed over in sales.

Audience 2 [0:42:32]: And he said

April Dunford [0:42:32]: says, I don't know what does John and sales say about that.

April Dunford [0:42:34]: I'm like, I don't know item man.

April Dunford [0:42:35]: Let's call them him.

April Dunford [0:42:36]: I already got John.

April Dunford [0:42:37]: I get John on I'm my talk.

April Dunford [0:42:38]: Then it calls John and John says, John says, yeah.

April Dunford [0:42:41]: Been think about this for a while.

April Dunford [0:42:42]: Think it's positioning and then we go do the positioning thing, but I could never convince the Ceo if it was just a little marketing thing.

April Dunford [0:42:51]: Now I'm in b to b mainly an enterprise software.

April Dunford [0:42:54]: So sales is king in those companies.

April Dunford [0:42:57]: And so I had to convince them that there was massive sales loss happening because our decision was.

April Dunford [0:43:06]: So we have to fix it.

April Dunford [0:43:08]: And I'll tell you, like, some companies are gonna have a positioning problem and you just can't talk them into that, and you are never gonna be able to do great marketing on top of weak positioning.

April Dunford [0:43:19]: You gotta walk from those clients.

Audience 2 [0:43:22]: So you mentioned...

Audience 2 [0:43:22]: Nobody gives a shit of a sales or nobody predictions about you work back to positioning from a sales problem.

April Dunford [0:43:30]: Yeah.

April Dunford [0:43:30]: But but the root cause of the sales problems repositioning if it's...

April Dunford [0:43:34]: Like, sometimes we have sales problem where You know, there's all kinds of other sales problems.

April Dunford [0:43:38]: Sometimes like if you get salesperson, it's just a jerk.

April Dunford [0:43:40]: And you're like, we just fire that person, that would be a good way to fix that.

April Dunford [0:43:43]: You know, So not all sales problems.

April Dunford [0:43:45]: But if you hear those things, like, we don't get what you are...

April Dunford [0:43:48]: We don't know who to compare you to...

April Dunford [0:43:50]: We don't get the value Those are positioning things.

April Dunford [0:43:52]: And so if I hear that, then I convince sales to be on board do the repositioning, then I can get see.

April Dunford [0:43:57]: Sorry.

Audience 2 [0:43:58]: That's the reason dave didn't invite them, because some of the jerks.

Audience 2 [0:44:00]: And your number, point number four is to get that go to market strategy solved before the positioning.

Audience 2 [0:44:05]: So if the Ceo says something's wrong with sales.

Audience 2 [0:44:08]: We realize it's a positioning problem.

Audience 2 [0:44:10]: Right.

Audience 2 [0:44:10]: And then I have to go back and convince them.

Audience 2 [0:44:12]: Okay.

Audience 2 [0:44:12]: Actually, we need to solve this go to market strategy problem.

Audience 2 [0:44:15]: Right.

Audience 2 [0:44:16]: And they go...

Audience 2 [0:44:16]: Well, I don't wanna solve that now.

Audience 2 [0:44:17]: I want you to do the positioning.

Audience 2 [0:44:19]: Wanna write a book about that for us.

Audience 2 [0:44:20]: When it comes to solving the go to market strategy problem, David advice.

April Dunford [0:44:25]: Well, so here's my advice on the go to market strategy problem.

April Dunford [0:44:28]: Most of the time, it hasn't been tackled because no one's asked the question.

April Dunford [0:44:31]: Like most of the time if you just sit down and say, Like, it seems to me, like, sometimes you'll see in the sales data.

April Dunford [0:44:39]: Right?

April Dunford [0:44:39]: It seems to me, like, everyone buys this first, and then they buy the other things.

April Dunford [0:44:44]: Is there some reason why we're not just having this as lead product and everything's cross sell up.

April Dunford [0:44:49]: Upsell.

April Dunford [0:44:49]: Most the time Ceos honor thought about that.

April Dunford [0:44:51]: And they're like, yeah So, you know, bringing it up, sometimes actually solves the problem or there's this thing Of, like, okay.

April Dunford [0:45:00]: We got company position me up product positioning how we asking gonna manage between those two things We have solved this first or that first, like, dude we're gonna be positioning.

April Dunford [0:45:07]: That's great, but there's more one thing to position here.

April Dunford [0:45:09]: And a lot of times they thought about that, especially Ceos that are venture backed company because the only pitches they're doing our pitch pitching new investors.

April Dunford [0:45:18]: And that's a totally different pitch, and it's about the whole thing and the big all singing all dancing thing.

April Dunford [0:45:23]: We're gonna be in ten years, and has nothing to do with the reality of where we're on in the ground right now.

April Dunford [0:45:28]: So a lot of these things they haven't thought about because I don't know a lot about positioning.

April Dunford [0:45:32]: Haven't really thought about it.

April Dunford [0:45:33]: So good part marker just show up an nasa dumb question like, hey, maybe this is dumb question, but kinda seems like, and it helps if you give them an example.

April Dunford [0:45:41]: So I've had lots of Ceos where I give the Salesforce example, and then they're like, oh, shit.

April Dunford [0:45:47]: That's actually exactly us.

April Dunford [0:45:49]: But they kinda gotta hear an example before light comes on and they do it.

April Dunford [0:45:54]: But I'm gonna have a chapter on this in the new book.

April Dunford [0:45:57]: Not a whole book, but, you know, Hi.

April Dunford [0:45:59]: So my company doesn't have a sales team, but we're a multi product enterprise software company.

April Dunford [0:46:05]: U.

April Dunford [0:46:06]: So is it all product line growth?

April Dunford [0:46:08]: It's all zero touch?

April Dunford [0:46:09]: I'm sorry.

April Dunford [0:46:10]: You sell through channel?

April Dunford [0:46:11]: Or is it all zero touch sales signing sale?

April Dunford [0:46:13]: It's all through word mouse through our existing customer.

April Dunford [0:46:16]: But they just come on and Yeah sign up.

April Dunford [0:46:18]: They don't talk to Salesperson.

April Dunford [0:46:19]: Not.

April Dunford [0:46:20]: So they just sign up.

April Dunford [0:46:21]: So when we're having these conversations with our Ceo, where do we even look?

April Dunford [0:46:25]: If we can't look at of sales all Well years...

April Dunford [0:46:28]: And this is why I don't work with companies like you.

April Dunford [0:46:30]: But here's the reality of my process is this process was designed with the assumption I have a human being that talks to a customer when they're in the purchase process.

April Dunford [0:46:47]: So they know your salespeople know who are they getting compared to.

April Dunford [0:46:52]: They know not perfect, but they know a little bit about how customers make a decision.

April Dunford [0:46:57]: If you're pure product like grows zero touch sales model, that information exists, but you're gonna have to do customer research to go get it.

April Dunford [0:47:05]: And so you gotta do that first.

April Dunford [0:47:07]: And so because I don't do customer research, and I don't wanna do customer research.

April Dunford [0:47:10]: Companies like you call me.

April Dunford [0:47:12]: I see, I got a friend of mine this customer research.

April Dunford [0:47:14]: You should call her.

April Dunford [0:47:15]: Georgian Gia Allowed Very good.

April Dunford [0:47:19]: But...

April Dunford [0:47:19]: Yeah.

April Dunford [0:47:19]: So he...

April Dunford [0:47:20]: And it's just because I don't do that work.

April Dunford [0:47:22]: I don't specialize in that.

April Dunford [0:47:23]: So I only do the ones that have sales teams.

April Dunford [0:47:24]: But it's the reality of it.

April Dunford [0:47:25]: Reality of it even the first step, which is if you didn't exist, what would a customer do?

April Dunford [0:47:30]: You don't know.

April Dunford [0:47:31]: You're just guessing.

April Dunford [0:47:33]: And there'll we lots of theories about it internally, but everybody's opinion counts the same, and nobody cares about marketing opinion.

April Dunford [0:47:39]: Right?

April Dunford [0:47:39]: So the Ceo has an opinion sale...

April Dunford [0:47:41]: You, whoever, product has an opinion, but you don't know unless you actually go and get the data.

April Dunford [0:47:47]: And then that kind of customer research is actually hard to do.

April Dunford [0:47:51]: And you need to be careful how you do it?

April Dunford [0:47:54]: Because what people wanna do is they wanna do the customer research where you go in and you say, what do you live about our product?

April Dunford [0:48:02]: And they'll tell you a bunch of things.

April Dunford [0:48:04]: But that is not necessarily and often, not the reason they picked you over the alternatives.

April Dunford [0:48:11]: Like they'll tell say you know what Love love you ease use.

April Dunford [0:48:13]: I love your customer support.

April Dunford [0:48:15]: Oh, my I god call them they're amazing They call me right back.

April Dunford [0:48:18]: But they had no exposure to your customers poor before they actually sign up and everything else.

April Dunford [0:48:22]: So what made them sign up.

April Dunford [0:48:23]: And so what you have to do looks more like a job to be done interview.

April Dunford [0:48:26]: You wanna say take me back.

April Dunford [0:48:27]: Take me back to what were you doing before?

April Dunford [0:48:30]: What made you wake up in the morning and decided you couldn't keep doing it that way?

April Dunford [0:48:34]: Like, what did jobs people call it the struggling moment?

April Dunford [0:48:36]: What was the struggling moment?

April Dunford [0:48:37]: Then you had that struggling moment and then what did you do?

April Dunford [0:48:41]: How'd did you make a shortlist list?

April Dunford [0:48:43]: What were your criteria for making a shortlist list?

April Dunford [0:48:45]: How did we end up on the shortlist list.

April Dunford [0:48:47]: How'd did you find out about us?

April Dunford [0:48:48]: How'd did you find out about the other guys?

April Dunford [0:48:50]: When you know all this stuff?

April Dunford [0:48:51]: And then okay.

April Dunford [0:48:52]: Then it's like, okay.

April Dunford [0:48:54]: You picked us?

April Dunford [0:48:55]: Why'd did you pick us?

April Dunford [0:48:56]: And here's a really good question as.

April Dunford [0:48:58]: Why not the other guys?

April Dunford [0:49:00]: Because often you won the deal because the other guys messed up.

April Dunford [0:49:02]: And other guys didn't have some other thing.

April Dunford [0:49:05]: And so you didn't actually win it.

April Dunford [0:49:06]: They lost it, and then you weren't.

April Dunford [0:49:07]: But if good to know.

April Dunford [0:49:08]: And then you asked them the question, okay, you went through all of that.

April Dunford [0:49:12]: You bought on.

April Dunford [0:49:13]: Was there anything surprising Positive or negative, which means if it's a negative surprise, it means something in are positioning set you up to make you think that we could do this thing and then you got into it and whoops, if it's a positive surprise, then it's something we you should pull into the positioning because, you know, they should known about it at Beforehand and we should be living the good stuff till after they've purchased.

April Dunford [0:49:34]: But that research is gonna have to get done.

April Dunford [0:49:37]: My stuff.

April Dunford [0:49:37]: Assumes that I can do the cheat code for doing that research is product interacts with customers, marketing team interacts with customers, sales interacts with customers.

April Dunford [0:49:48]: We know a lot about what customers do that information is not equally distributed amongst the teams, But if I can get the teams together and have product marketing sales Ceo all sitting in the same room, I can run them through this process and we can get there.

April Dunford [0:50:03]: But if I don't have a sales team a little bit wrong, I gotta go do customer research.

April Dunford [0:50:07]: I wanna do that.

April Dunford [0:50:08]: So call my friend joke here.

April Dunford [0:50:10]: And...

Dave Gerhardt [0:50:11]: Alright.

Dave Gerhardt [0:50:11]: Let's do a warm one.

Dave Gerhardt [0:50:12]: Give it up April.

Dave Gerhardt [0:50:19]: Hey.

Dave Gerhardt [0:50:19]: Thanks for listening to this podcast.

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