BoS Online AMA on Positioning: April Dunford

Transcript

Mark Littlewood: Hello. I’m Mark from Business of Software, but you’re not here to see me. You’re here to see our very special friend, April Dunford, Queen of positioning. April is here and is ready to talk and take questions and all of those exciting things.

I would love to start, just to get people into the swing of using zoom and putting in a message. Some people have come here and said, Oh, something I really want to ask April. I’d love to do what I call a Zoom storm. And a Zoom storm is you get ready to type something into chat, and then I say, 123, go, and then everybody presses enter. And the reason that we do that is we’ll get a sense of some of the questions that we want to cover. And it also lets you interact and lets you meet few other people.

The other thing that’s really worth doing, I’ve found in sessions like this, and the thing about BoS is that we hate broadcast. This is a designed to be a conversation and an interaction. We may even put you in breakout rooms to talk to each other. Don’t be afraid you’re not talking to people in real life. If you’re a technology you can talk to me that might be a mute one there.

So has everybody come up with something that they’d like to learn? Get ready to put it into the chat, and then I’m going to go 1-2-3, go.

Question 1: AI and why it’s ruining everything for everyone?

April Dunford: I think this first one that came up, this idea that everybody’s saying that they’re AI powered. So how do you stand out when everything’s AI powered? I mean, we could talk about that one, that comes up a lot in but I don’t know up to you. I’m happy to…

Mark Littlewood: Anybody have massive issues with that?

April Dunford: Maybe we can start there. So when I was talking about this, before we got started, there’s a lot of the work that I’m doing right now is with either pure play AI companies that are trying to figure out how to position in the market, or it’s companies that have new AI stuff. So they basically have new capabilities that they’ve unlocked with AI. And so a lot of these companies are wrestling with how do we actually position that stuff in the market? And there’s a handful of things to consider. So one is, the vast majority of companies are using AI in some form or another right now, like I haven’t talked to a company in the last four or five months that isn’t using AI for something, or at least saying they are, even if they’re in the early days of messing around with it.

So I think we have to assume that all technology businesses are going to take advantage of some flavor of AI, either a little bit of it or a lot of it, or whatever. And I don’t think that saying you’re taking advantage of AI is differentiating at all. I think everybody does that. And so what really matters is what are you doing with it, and how does that provide value to customers?

So really, what matters is the so what? So we used AI, and now we can do this thing, and we couldn’t do it before. So what? What is the value to the customer’s business? How’s that going to help a customer make money? How’s that going to help a customer save money?

Now, unfortunately, there’s an exception to this rule, which is where everybody gets really screwed up. So the exception to this rule is that right now, in the weird environment we have, if you are selling into businesses, particularly bigger businesses, some of these bigger businesses have their own AI initiatives. And some of them have kind of dedicated a pool of money for AI stuff.

So if you come along and say, Hey, I’ve got accounting software, and I’m trying to sell you this new accounting software, and, oh, by the way, we take advantage of, we can help you do this, that and the other thing. And how we do that is with AI. Like, in some cases, you may have to really emphasize the fact that you’re using AI for that, otherwise they can’t get the budget out of this AI budget bucket.

And so I would say, in general, the fact that you’re using AI underneath. Customer actually doesn’t care. Again, what they care about is, how is this going to help me? But occasionally you will get a customer that’s like, if it’s not AI, we can’t buy it, because all the money comes out of this thing, and it has to contribute to the AI Initiative, or whatever.

We also have this third bucket, which is there are some companies, particularly in regulated industries. So where you’ve got financial services, in some cases healthcare, in some cases government, where they’re really worried about AI, they’re worried about privacy stuff, they’re worried about security stuff, they’re worried about they’re worried about data governance and all this other stuff.

And so you come in with this thing, and if you’re over emphasizing the AI part of it, sometimes what you run the risk that people are a bit like, well, we can’t actually do that in here. And if it’s AI, it’s going to have to go through this whole other process to make sure it meets our compliance requirements. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So we’re in a really messy time at this particular junction, and I think what we’ll see is, if we come back together here next year, a lot of that stuff is going to settle down. Like there will just be an assumption that every tech product has AI and it’s using it for some something and again, from a customer’s point of view, all the customer cares about is what’s in it. For me, what is the end result of that? What is the value that you can unlock with that AI? But like I say it, every client that I work with is a special case. I’ve had some where we really dialed up the AI stuff, because in their case, the customers had this special budget for AI stuff, so they really had to come in looking like an AI thing, otherwise they couldn’t get the deal done.

I’ve had others where, they’re using AI but they’re being very careful about how they talk about how they talk about it, because they don’t want to scare clients, because they’re selling to regulated industries, and I’ve had others where there’s the AI is in there, they talk about it on like a fifth meeting, where they’re getting down into the technical specs of stuff.

But otherwise, the customer doesn’t care whether you’re using AI or not. They just care about, what can you get done for my business? Yeah, so we’re in a weird, the awkward, teenage phase of AI right now.

Mark Littlewood: What? Teenage or toddler? I think we’ll look back and go, Yeah, that was the toddler stage.

April Dunford: I mean, we went through this. We’ve been through this kind of a thing before in terms of customer adoption. Like in the early days of cloud, it was really differentiated to come out and say, oh, we’re cloud native, or we’re born on the cloud, or we’re cloud first, and all this stuff. And now it’s like everybody’s on the cloud. It’s not differentiating at all.

Mark Littlewood: Most Interesting, okay, great question, because I think our audience will be split between these two things, products and services.

Question 2: How to do positioning for physical or software products vs services or experiences?

Melissa: So I’ve read, Obviously Awesome, and I actually recommend it to a lot of people for a lot of things, a lot of the time. It’s great. And when I was reading it, I was thinking about, like, a bunch of different ways I could apply it.

So I’m a consultant, coach, advisor. I was thinking about how I apply it to my services. I’m on the side, I’m starting a food Co-Op. So thinking about how to position the food Co-Op. And so I guess I think a lot of the things in your book are applicable to like, whatever it is that you want people to engage with. And I’m wondering how you think about like positioning for typical like products, physical products, software products, versus like services or experiences?

April Dunford: Yeah, this is a great question.

So the first thing that I tell everybody that asked me a question like that is that it might work for other things besides B2B software, but it wasn’t built for that. And so, your mileage may vary, like maybe it works in your situation, maybe it doesn’t, but I will say I have worked with a bunch of services businesses, and then, I applied my own stuff to my own consulting business. And so, I know how that worked out.

So with services businesses, the big difference is when we have a product, we can say, okay, who’s the competition? And then what have we got that they don’t have in terms of capabilities of the product or capabilities of the company, and then we can translate those capabilities into value. And say, the reason you want to pick us is because we can deliver this value that no one else can in services businesses. So the first, the main kind of services business I’ve worked with is folks doing custom software development.

So if you’re folks doing customer custom software development, it’s easy to say, if we didn’t exist, what would the customer do? Would they build it in house? Or they’d hire another custom software development house, or maybe there’s some package software they could make work, open source stuff or something. But then you get to the step where you say, What have I got that the other guys don’t have? And it’s not as cut and dry as it is. You know, when we’re talking about features in the product, right? We either have the feature, we don’t have the feature, and that’s it.

But, so you go to these, you have your custom dev shop, what do they got that the other people don’t have? Is a harder question to answer, and it requires you to be really honest with yourself. So, the first guys I worked with, the main thing they did were really big, complicated, online retail experiences, that was kind of their specialty, but they did all kinds of other stuff too. So, it was really hard to get the team to agree.

Like I said, if somebody just wanted a little mobile app done, that’s not you, they wouldn’t pick you. And they’re like, yes, they would. Oh, absolutely.

Melissa: I think it’s the same problem with products, though, right? Which is, I’ve worked with companies where they’re like, We do everything, and then they don’t actually do everything, and then they’re all split up and working on different things that don’t align.

And I’ve been thinking about that for like service provider, which is, I could do a whole bunch of different things, right? I could do anything like whatever. But the question is, like, what, what differentiates my services? And I think with with this, how do you narrow yourself enough to have a specialty without cutting out all the other things?

April Dunford: Well, I mean, this is the dance of this. And part of it is, is to kind of acknowledge that there is competition out there, and look at the competition and say, Well, you know, in the case of, like, my example, with mobile app development, like there are companies out there that absolutely specialize in mobile app development, and that’s if that’s all you wanted to do, why on earth would they pick these good they wouldn’t. No customer would.

So, whereas there were all these other things that they had that were very specialized that no one else had. And so you got to kind of think about, well, what have you got in terms of experience, in terms of stuff that you’ve done, in terms of even intellectual property, like processes that you use, or frameworks that you’ve developed, or things like that.

So if I take myself as an example, when I started consulting, I had been a Vice President of Marketing for 25 years. I’d come out, and I can do anything a vice president of marketing does. I’ve been doing that for 25 years, and so I was just basically taking my victim where I found them, you know, like people would come up to me, and mainly they were just trying to hire me as the VP. And I’d say, Well, no, you, I don’t do that anymore.

And they’d say, Okay, well, what can you do? And I’m like, well, pretty much anything the VP would do. And then they’re like, so you’re just a part time VP, and then that’s terrible positioning, because anyone could be a part time VP, and now I’m competing with everybody I price matched against the salary that a VP marketing makes. Like, why wouldn’t you just hire a VP for God’s sakes, if that’s what you really want, like, why pick me over the other guys? There’s no reason.

Whereas, when I started digging down into well, what have I got? I kept circling around this positioning stuff. It was a thing that I had done a lot of in my career. I had this little process that I had developed for myself to use for myself. It was a thing that people struggled with, and I thought, okay, maybe I could build a specialization around that. But at the beginning, it was not clear at all to me. Is that big enough business for me to build a pipeline and have that go like I had to work on that for a couple of years to sort of test the waters to see, is there demand there? And if I can get known for that thing, could I fill a pipeline with it? Now I think, my gosh, it’s so obvious. There’s unlimited. Like, I mean, there could be 1000 mes, and we would all be busy. Like, there’s so much demand.

But when I started it, there was nobody doing positioning consulting, and it just didn’t seem like a thing that anyone could do. So sometimes it’s really hard. And so I think you have to look at like how hard is it to build a pipeline, how hard is it to land a deal? What am I going to have to charge for these things in order to hit my revenue goal? And there’s a bunch of moving parts to that, that are in services business, it’s not easy.

Melissa Appel: Yeah, I think all of those things you said are applicable to product businesses as well, right? You have to figure out what thing that you can offer that other people can’t, you may be creating a whole new market, right?

April Dunford: Well, here’s the difference. The difference is, like the work that I do, the positioning that I do, is really about taking the thing that you have in the market today versus the competitors that are that exist today, and how do we maximize the sales we can do given all of that? It is not product strategy which is more like what you’re getting at, where do we want to be, and if we’re going to build something new, can we build that or not?

And that’s, in my mind, that’s a separate question in a product company. If you’re in market and you’re selling stuff, I come in and we’re like, what’s the number this year? How are we going to make the number this year? You know, maybe next year. But we’re not thinking too far out beyond that, because that’s more of a gazing into the crystal ball to figure out where’s the market going. How am I going to differentiate, not just against the competitors right now, but where the competitors are going to be in a year?

Melissa Appel: So positioning something that already exists versus positioning something that you’re still working on launching…

April Dunford: Yeah, whether which is really what you’re doing. If it’s something you haven’t launched yet, what you’re really doing is you’re coming up with the positioning thesis. It’s a thesis, that’s all it is.

So you’re going to try to gather as much information you can to see, to build that thesis. But you don’t actually know if you got it right or not, until you go to launch and then you see, well, let’s see, man, did it all work out the way we thought it was gonna like.

We think these are going to be our competitors. We think this is what’s going to make us different. We think this will be the value. We think this is who’s going to love us. But, and so I’ve been involved in lots of product launches where we had a thesis. We talked to prospective customers. We did all the homework. We looked, crunched all the numbers, we did all the thing. We built the thing, we launched it. And then customers just do wacky shit, like so I never launched one where the thesis was perfect, right? And so then you have to adjust.

I had lots where the thesis was not bad, but it turned out there was this other market that we hadn’t considered at all, and we had incredible pull over there. And then it was like, Oh, well, we never really thought about selling those guys.

Let’s see now that we’ve got some signal over there, like, we didn’t even think to interview these kind of people right? We’re building the thesis, yeah, so. But then we get this market. Now we’ve got market data that says, oh, there’s some interest over here. And then it’s like, okay, well, let’s see if we can’t do something there.

Melissa: Sort of like you launch something and then you get a whole bunch of people asking for something unexpected, but they’re all asking for the same unexpected thing. You’re like, Huh? Maybe there’s something there.

April Dunford: Yeah, or sometimes what you’ll get is you’ll assume, because you know a lot about the market, you’ll assume, well a customer that’s looking at us would also look at these two things, and then you launch it and you’re like, No, they’re actually comparing you to something you didn’t even consider. And you’re like, Whoa, I didn’t expect customers to act like that.

So a lot of times, you’ll get that the comparison is different, and that really impacts your positioning. Or you’ll get, you did a decent job thinking of what the target customer was, but there’s this other target customer that you’re getting this signal that they really love it. And then now you got to go back to the drawing board and think about that.

And then, like you say the lots of times you’re like, oh, people are really going to love this feature because it does XYZ for them, but then you get into it and it turns out, oh, it’s not that simple as you thought. Well, they do want that, but there’s this other constraint that nobody really talked about, but once you get in there, they can’t actually do it. And so there’s that…

Melissa: A good why you can’t just launch it and forget it..

April Dunford: Exactly like thisis the reason we want to do early customer experience right, to try to get some of that signal before we go nuts and do the big launch and say, here it is world, and then the world goes what we don’t want that.

Melissa: I feel like, if you’re surprised at what happens after you launch it, you didn’t do enough research.

April Dunford: I mean, like, I think there’s a lot of customers that are weird, like they don’t behave in rational ways and we can research stuff, but I’ve had one, like, I was at IBM once, and we had so much data. We had absolute mountains of data. Like we had researched the absolute crap out of this thing that we launched.

But we launched it, and there was a handful of things that really did surprise us, like it just didn’t come up anywhere. And I don’t know how we would ever got there.

Melissa: Like it’s gonna be something surprising, but if ,you know, if everything’s surprising.

April Dunford: Oh, gosh, if everything’s surprising, then yeah, then you didn’t take the time to build the thesis. You’re just building something, and you’re like, we’ll just throw it out there…

Melissa: And see lots of spaghetti at the wall. That’s right, that’s right.

April Dunford: And they’ll be like, what we thought it was so genius..

Question 3: Can you tell whether a company has good positioning by talking to the people that’s working in it?

Mark Littlewood: Can you tell whether a company has good positioning by talking to the people that working in it? I If you speak to someone say, hey, what do you do? Is there a tell for a good positioned company, versus a go at nodding, sage me so he’s rather than listening to music.

April Dunford: Yeah, it’s a good question, because a lot of times people will send me a link to their homepage, and they’ll say, hey is the position good? And I always give them this big speech about, you know, I can’t tell, like, especially because a lot of stuff I work on, it’s B2B, right?

And so in B2B, if you’re selling a really specialized thing to really specialized set of buyers, like, I’m not the buyer, and so I can’t tell. I might look at the website and say, this makes no sense, What is this shit?

And yet the buyer might look at it because they’ve got their own things that they understand and stuff they’re looking for. A buyer might look at it and think it looks great. I do think that really tight positioning tends to try to position around very few things, and a lot of weak positioning is attempting to position a laundry list of a dozen things. And you can sort of see that.

So sometimes you’ll go on people’s websites, or people send me their stuff, and they’ll say we help you do this really fast, and then we help you do this, and we help you do this, and we help you do this. And there’s this long list of like, eight things, and that’s really hard for a customer to hold in their head. And so most really good positioning is a lot tighter than that. It’s it’s one or two things, maximum three things. They’re trying to say, Look, you want to pick us, because we were the only company that can give you this and this, and so a lot of tight positioning looks like that.

But you can have very tight positioning. That’s just two things, but they aren’t the right two things. And that’s shit. Just because it’s tight doesn’t mean it’s resonating with the customer, but if it’s loose, loose is always bad. If I’ve got seven or eight things I’m trying to message, I think that’s always going to be really hard. But even if you have one or two, it doesn’t guarantee that your positioning is good, because it has to be the right one or two things. It has that value has to really resonate with your buyers.

So it’s hard. Like, so in the work I do, we get a cross functional team together and and usually I have the company send me all their stuff. So I prep beforehand. So I look at the web page, I read all their competitive assessment, I look at their marketing and sales materials. I look at their sales pitch. I look all the stuff they use to train sales people, all this stuff. And then we get in and do a workshop. And very often stuff comes out that I am completely surprised about, that I’m like, wait what that sounds like a really big deal thing, and that doesn’t actually come out anywhere in your stuff.

So I don’t know. I think it’s hard to tell without getting into the details of like, who are the competitors, and what do you do that they don’t and therefore, what’s the value you want to highlight? And then, who are your best fit customers? What do they know and don’t know? And so what can we lean on? Like, what’s valuable to them and what isn’t? And then how do we get really tight on that, and position around that? It’s really hard to tell in B to B from the outside. We can’t judge it like toothpaste, right?

Like, we can’t look at it and say, Well, if your grandmother doesn’t understand it, then you know it’s no good. Well, what if I’m not selling to grandmothers? What if I’m selling to astronauts? Like, I don’t want to talk to astronauts like I talk to grandmothers.

Mark Littlewood: So limited market astronauts?

April Dunford: Yeah. I mean, what I have done, I have done stuff with people that are literally selling to aerospace engineers. And you wouldn’t talk to aerospace engineers the way you talk to your grandmother.

Mark Littlewood: But he would know, but it would be assuming a lot of people kind of revert to something absurdly technical or features driven. I mean, one thing I’ve noticed is that when I ask someone, what that company does, when they go we’ve developed some insert esoteric technology that does this and that still no idea how you’re helping people.

April Dunford: I do think that, if you’re overly focused on features, and there’s no, we need to be focused on value for the customer, not the features.

The features are just how we get that value done, right? So we need to focus on value and not features.

But at the same time, you know you could use technical terms to describe that value, and if those technical terms are very well understood in your industry, I’m talking to people in healthcare, and I can talk about HIPAA, and everybody knows what HIPAA is, and everybody knows what the HIPAA requirements are, and it would be stupid for me to dumb that down, like HIPAA is dumbed down already. If you’re in healthcare.

You know what I mean, like, so it’s, it’s there. You can rely on some like, it’s so it’s not so much that, you know, we shouldn’t be getting into the technical features, especially at a high level elevator style pitch.

We shouldn’t be, you know, digging down into the deep technology. But at the same time, if everybody knows what a rag protocol is and and that’s easy for them, then I can talk about, you know, what we do with rag protocols. You know, if everybody knows what you know clustered architecture is, I can say, Well, we do this for a clustered architecture, because they know what a clustered architecture is.

So it’s that stuff. So, you know, it’s that, it’s that if we don’t understand the level of of knowledge that the the key buyer has, it’s hard for us to it’s hard for us to know at what level we can talk about stuff.

Mark Littlewood: No, great. Marvin, marvelous. Marvin mctor. How was your position? What’s your positioning at the moment? He’s coming.

Marvin: Yeah, so the first of all, nice to meet you, April. We’ve I’ve read, obviously awesome two and listen to your podcast before as well. And really liked your interactions and conversations with Gia from forget the funnel. Oh, great, both your podcast. Well, we’ve actually worked with Gia as well. Yeah, she’s awesome. They helped us with some of our jobs to be done, research and some of our go to market approach, our and out of where we are at we’re in.

Our company exists basically to help organizations put on great events, typically larger conferences, festivals and events, and we do that through our event management platform. And we’ve tried to position that as for what we do anyway, a basically a schedule first event management platform that people can get out in days as opposed to months without, you know, the enterprise or price tags that they’re typically associated with that we now, we’re, we’re trying to, like, take that, but we’re typically, you know, in A B to B scenario as well. And we’re, excuse me, we’re generally dealing with customer champions that. Yeah, sure, they have budget concerns or considerations, but they’re more, you know, they’re more focused on, like, does it do what I needed to do right questions, as opposed to the financial aspect of things, which, you know, sometimes they have the budget for it, but usually it’s like they have to go, they have to go get the budget for it. Yeah.

So our positioning in the space that we’re in, like the market leader in the space, is a company called Cvent, which we come up against them from time to time, but typically the person we’re trying to position against is another company in the space which their their name is Hoover and like, again, we take different approaches to things.

The other thing that’s a little bit different about us, from a go to market standpoint, is that we’re product led, so we have a free trial of our product that people can use and experience and interact with. We’re hoping to transition that to a premium kind of approach, and that’s different than, you know, others in the space, which are all sales led, right?

Like, we gotta go talk to somebody about it. But our positioning with the sort of schedule first is, again, it’s that’s like the general sort of framework and kind of how we think about things a lot of times. But whether or not that resonates with the customer, they’re really usually more concerned about the job to be done, of being like, producing their workload, a lot of the work that they have to do.

April Dunford: Right. What’s the value of schedule first? Like, when you say schedule first, what does that mean?

Marvin: Yeah, so generally speaking, when I’m talking about schedule first is when you have an event coming up like you typically, at least when our customers get started with us like they typically know, like who they’re actually planning on having and when they’re planning on having a talk.

And what we do is we basically help them to organize and construct that and manage around that. And usually, if you have that, those pieces of information, you can kind of work forwards and backwards on everything that you need. So hey, I know we had an event coming up on August 1 three months before that, we better start. We better start doing, you know, step one, two and three in place. And that’s, that’s the way we try to approach things.

April Dunford: So, it really is, like, your like, your answer to this, to this problem they have, which is, this is a lot of work, and, oh my God, how I, you know, how am I going to get this done in the time frame I have your answer to that is, or your point of view on that is, hey, like, instead of doing it, whatever way you’re doing it, if you took a schedule first approach that actually streamlines the whole process.

And so your ability to be able to tell that story, I think, is is the thing that’s going to set the light bulb off on these folks, because you need to connect the dots between here’s my problem, and you’re saying schedule first. But I don’t really know what that means, or maybe they do, but you need to connect the dots for them and say, look like you do it like this, and it is not scheduled first. It is like and because you’re doing it this way, you’re doing a lot of rework.

You’re going back and forth. I don’t, I’m making this up. You’re you’re doing whatever, right? But if you did this this schedule first way, look at how this, you know, improves your life. And so, you know, if we were really doing this thing properly, we’d do it this way. So we built a tool that allows you to do that. And what it does is, instead of, you know, this mess thing taking two months, we can now get this done in two weeks, because we’ve now started like, Yeah, I’m picturing the story like that, but I don’t know, I don’t know anything about your stuff. Just made all that up. But, but yeah, there.

Marvin: I guess the thing that I’m, I’m struggling with, and I think you and Gia have talked about it before too, is that we know the jobs to be done that were identified in our customer research, part of this process, which is really only specifically with our ICP and while we’re talking about it as like a scheduled first approach, like what they tell us in the way that, you know, we sort of thought about this from their their perspective, is they are usually transitioning from like something like a Google Sites builder and spreadsheets or Google Forms, and they’re transitioning from that to, you know, our more comprehensive and integrated solution, Right?

It’s more aligned towards what they do. And from an alternatives perspective, like, while we definitely have some people that are looking at, you know, some of these other platforms, like, the real alternative is, like a tool. It’s not really made for the job. Like, I’m struggling a bit with how to start with that. I guess that’s making sense. Like, we know the jobs to be done, which is, they want to they want it to look professional and, you know, look really well done and put together.

They want it to, excuse me, they want it to also, like, reduce the amount of work that goes into it. And I’m specifically talking about the champion. But the direct comparison is not really, like, the actual alternative is not these other platforms, right? Like that, other customers are, sorry, other options, usually when they come up.

April Dunford: Oh, I see. So the real alternative is just muck around with this stuff on a spreadsheet.

Marvin: Yeah, muck around with it on a spreadsheet, and then, like, ultimately find website and something static, you know, down the line.

April Dunford: Yeah? Like, again, I think like this, like, when you think about it, like you’re going to have to make the case for these folks. Like, you know, here’s all the waste that happens when you’re mucking around on the spreadsheet, and here’s what your life could be like, if you were over here, not walking around a spreadsheet side of the house and, you know, and and again, I think you can like, I like, I think there’s a kernel of interesting this in this schedule.

First thing that gives you an opportunity to maybe educate folks on how the work should get done, to make it easier on them, and, you know, and that would also tick the other box of, you know, having the thing be beautiful and whatever, and look really professional and all the rest of it.

April Dunford: But if it was me, I would, you know, I would work through the process to do the positioning. I would start with, you know, I’d list the other comparables, but I’d really narrow in on this spreadsheets, do it by hand kind of thing, and see if I couldn’t build the narrative around that, and say, Well, you know, what have we got? We’ve got all these pre built things.

We got all this stuff that you’re not going to have to do manually anymore, like, what’s the and then what’s the ultimate value of that? And then how do I back that into a story? Okay, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s answering the question for you, but just a bit like…

Marvin: It definitely is answering the question in terms of, like, how to think about it from a storytelling perspective. And again, I’m, I’m trying to go from jobs to be done, you know, content context to the positioning context. But the basically combining those two two frameworks are kind of step one to step two type situation.

April Dunford: Yeah, yeah. Like that. It’s not a, in my in my opinion, it’s not kind of a direct one to one comparison.

And so, you know, a lot of you know, a lot of the job stuff, I think is going to help you building the product moving forward, and I think it’s going to help you think about what’s valuable to your customer and what isn’t. But it’s the job is not necessarily a good starting point for positioning. Right starting point for positioning is, well, if you didn’t exist, what would they do? Well, they’d be doing this. And then, so what have you got that they don’t have? And then how does that translate to value that maps to their jobs?

They can’t actually start with jobs. I kind of back into it. I mean, in a lot of ways, the competitive alternatives kind of encapsulate the jobs in some way, but, but we can’t sort of start with jobs and then try to figure out how to position that, in my opinion. I mean, there’s lots of ways to do this stuff, but in my opinion, that’s not how.

Because, like, if I take the, if I take the classic jobs to be done, milkshake example, you know, you know, the milkshake example, so I take the classic jobs to be done milkshake example. And so in the milkshake example, it was, you know, the job was boredom relief. You know, I want to have the milkshake, and it’s going to relieve my boredom, but it’s got to have some calories, and it’s going to fill me up, and then it’s not going to be a mess and all that stuff and and, you know, the AHA in that study was that the milkshake was not competing against cola. The milkshake, was competing against a donut. And had I run the positioning thing and said, How are we better than a donut, I would get to very different value.

And I would, you know, and the value would be related to boredom relief and not making a mess and filling you up on a long drive and that kind of stuff. But the starting point was competitive alternatives. If you didn’t exist, what would the customer do? They buy an Egg McMuffin? What have you got that they don’t have? Well, we’re not going to make a big mess and last longer and whatever.

What’s the value of that? So that’s how, that’s how the two things intersect, in my mind. Like that’s what they really learned. It. That’s what they really learned in that experiment was that they were thinking about competitors all wrong.

Mark Littlewood: Wow. There’s plenty to think about there. For Marvin, I saw you signed up for BoS USA Today, he thought of going into summer. That’s awesome.

Marvin: I’m assuming you’re talking about me registering for the business to software conference coming up, right? Please.

Mark Littlewood  I gotta move on. There’s a sort of segue into sales, because it’s not just positioning that. And there’s a really nice one here is, is Laurie? Where is it? Laurie alcula, yes, yes. Hello. Hello, question. Share it.

Laurie: Hey. Okay, hi, April, so nice to meet you. Didn’t know it’s gonna be on camera today, but I’ve read both of your books and listen to all of your podcasts and read every article that you about you and, oh, I’m not stalking but the reason I say that is because I am kind of on the same path that you were.

I used to be a product marketing and I’ve done content marketing for the past 10 years. I also used to be a salesperson, all in tech, and so right now, I’m trying to pull that all together into a consulting business and to help B to B tech companies with positioning, with messaging and sales story. And so I’m using your frameworks. I’ve used different frameworks in the past when this is project that I’m working on now is the first one I’m used your frameworks for the positioning and for the sales story.

And it’s it’s great. It is awesome. It’s working out very well, awesome. So my one of the big challenges that I have I’m working with a company who is that they’re an established company, they’re not a startup. So I remember your warning about Consider yourself warned that this framework is not for established companies, but we did so for positioning. We did a cross functional team with direct the customer…

April Dunford: You’re working with is an established company, or they are not?

Laurie: They are. They are, oh yeah, I work with established companies. That’s fine, okay.

Yeah, they’re, they’re a big they’re a big one. And what they’re doing is they have existing products, but they’ve brought two of their groups together, and so they want to position both of those groups as one umbrella, yeah. And so it’s a big change. It’s a big change.

And so we’ve we brought to, I brought together this cross functional group. So we have the director of sales, we have customer success and the Director of Product Marketing for this portfolio. And so it was a pretty good group that that we brought together, went through the positioning exercise, got a lot of good feedback, but I could tell that the sales director was just not, not on board with um, just not very interested, I guess, in the whole process. And so we did the Yeah, and we of…

April Dunford: Not interested or disagreeing with where it was going?

Laurie: aloof, let’s say no. Okay, well, here’s, here’s. The thing is, they copyright.

Their sales organization had just gone through a big reorg, so he probably had lots of things on her his mind, but due to this, because it was they brought their sales organizations from these different parts together, and so everybody’s kind of struggling with process and things like that, but they really wanted to tell their story. They need to get their positioning together for that kind of umbrella portfolio.

So, so we’re, we’re kind of at the back end of the positioning portion. We’ve got, we’ve gotten agreement, not full approval yet. We’re kind of almost there, but I’ve been working in the meantime on the sales story.

So, you know, translating that positioning into the sales story, and we’re pretty far into it, and we come to find out that the sales director made this comment like, you know, we don’t need a deck. What do we need a deck for? And his his attitude, and I think maybe one or two of the sales people, because I talked to them individually, the sales people individually to to find out all of these different things. Just like you said, get the sales tax.

April Dunford: But they’re like, wild, can we just have a conversation with the customer they want, and then we’ll give them a specialized thing about whatever? Yeah, oh, yeah. I hear this a lot…

Laurie: Yeah. And he he’s, he said, Well, it’s all about relationships. And he said, Okay, I understand that. But what happens when you get a new rep in and they come in and they don’t have these relationships? How are they going to speak?

So my, my big question here is, like, we’re trying to get this, this person, on board so that his team can his team seems to be on board, because they have been giving a lot of input. They participated in the workshops and but he we’re just, we got to get him So any thoughts you can get me?

April Dunford: So a handful, a handful of things. So there are sales people like marketing people and product people and developers come in all flavors and and there are, you know, there are some sales people that are very process oriented, and, you know, really concerned about, about making sure that we are moving through a process in a very repeatable way.

And then there are sales executives that are that are kind of like, Look, man, this is my magic personality thing here. And don’t mess with that. That’s how we’re gonna and that’s…

Mark Littlewood: they’re on commission. Yeah.

April Dunford: So, so there’s a handful of things. So one, I think you did the right thing about pointing to the fact that you know, not having a structured way to have a first conversation if you’re a brand new rep is really dangerous. Like, how’s a brand new rep gonna go in there and do this magic?

I’m just going to feel everything out and essentially do a custom pitch every single time a new rep is never going to be able to do that. The second thing that I think is is is helpful to emphasize, like, I assume these folks are selling something that it takes multiple meetings to get the deal done.

So, where the reps get really you know, where a sales executive who’s never had a pitch deck, or doesn’t really believe in pitch decks. It doesn’t really get they’re often worried about what’s happening in meeting 34567, and all I’m talking about is meeting one, yeah, because that’s where we get the big pipeline drop off, right? So we so it is.

I have a qualified deal, like a lightly qualified deal, I am doing a first substantive call with a prospect who doesn’t know too much about us. That means we have not done full discovery. We might have done a little we have not defined a project yet they don’t know that much about us. We would be crazy to go into that meeting and not try to give them a good story about what we do.

Like it before like because, and the reason we want to do that is because I can go in there and be therapist and say, Tell me your problems and tell me all your things, and then I’m going to show you what we can do for that. But we are not in the business of custom software. Here we have a package solution it only does certain things and that customer knows nothing about it.

So if we come in and say, look like you know, this is how we look at the space, this is how we see it, and we have built a solution that does these things and delivers this value, and this is where we really shine. Often, what happens is, the customer says, Oh, well, we’ve got something going on that fits here and here and here and here.

And that would never have happened if we don’t actually take a little bit of control of this conversation and come in and say, This is what we’re all about. The flip side is, is what we’re doing is, is classic relationship selling, which works really it. That’s the way we used to all sell software 30 years ago, when everything is custom, and there are still these guys floating around that think that that’s what they’re selling. Is custom software.

They come in and they say, Tell me your problems and what’s going on. And the customer will say, we’ll have a big problem here. And then they try to take your product that was built to not do that, or to only do these other things, and then try to, you know, make that square peg fit in the round hole. And so anyways, so, so most of the time when I get a lot of pushback from a from a rep like that, I’ll say, look like we’re in the first call. We’re not this is only place this deck is going to get used to send the first call. It is not going to get used once we’ve defined a project and we’re starting to work on that, then everything is going to be custom.

Everything that happens in the next call, in the next call, and the next call is going to be specifically oriented around either defining the project, or once we had the project defined, this is what we’re going to do. But we need a way to put our best foot forward, to come in and say, This is who we are, and kind of establish why you should pick us versus the other guys.

Yeah, if we miss our opportunity to do that, then we leave the door open for our competitors to go do that better than us, and we just look like the guy, like you’re leaving it to the customer to kind of figure out, well, what do you guys do again? Or whatever we do whatever you want. Like, that’s right.

So, yeah, you know so. And the reality is, every mature sales organization that does this, well, has a first call pitch deck. Everybody does.

And so, yeah, there’ll be some guys out there that’ll be like, well, we don’t know pitch deck, but I mean, state of the art right now is we have first call pitch deck, because otherwise, again, you got a brand new rep.

How’s brand new rep gonna go in and basically monkey around with essentially, what you’re asking them to do is a custom pitch every single time based on the issues they get from a customer like and they keep saying very mature sales person could do.

Mark Littlewood: And my gut feel on that is that a lot of sales people don’t want to customize, sorry, a deck, because they want to customize whatever deck they’re gonna use because they think they’re better at it. Usually, yeah…

April Dunford: Yeah, But you know what, though, like, when I and you might find this too, like, when I encounter this kind of pushback, it’s usually because they think that they’re going to be forced to use this deck in every single meeting.

You know, like, which is insanity, like, what we’re talking about is this situation a very first call. The customer comes in and says, All right, what are you all about? Let’s hear it. And instead, we say, Yeah, we’re not going to tell you that. You tell me something instead. And I think most, most sales folks when they get their heads around that, and usually what you have, when you do have push push back is like you say, the executive says, no, no, no, we should be making this very custom, whatever and and we have to assure them that yes, we will pitch 23456, those will be extremely custom.

But pitch one, we haven’t even done discovery yet, so yeah, how would we like? We got to say something, and what we should be doing is putting our best foot forward and telling this great story about what we could do that opens the customer’s mind to maybe more than what they initially called us for if we’re doing this well, usually the reps love it, it.

But sometimes you’ll get an executive that’s like, no, no, no, but you know, the reps love it, because the reps don’t know what to do in those early calls. It’s hard, I will say it’s very hard, to get a pitch moving if you don’t have full buy in from the sales executive you got, you got to figure out how to get it, because otherwise the thing will be dead.

You can, you can do all this work thing and throw it over and, you know, like it takes a lot of work to roll a pitch out, and if the exec isn’t into it, it ain’t gonna work. So you’re gonna have to figure out a way to convince the exec that it’s worth doing. And then if you know, if it’s not, then give up on it and work on other things.

Mark Littlewood: You have to find a way of making it happen. At the top. I just shared a link, which is fascinating, because they went from 25 people 17 customers, took on a lot of kind of jobs and took a lot of this stuff. Bob master worked with them, and April, you were going to do some positioning for them, but you said they had that positioning sorted.

April Dunford: Who is this? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They actually, they’re a funny one, because they brought me in to do this positioning thing. And we got through day one and I was like, you don’t actually need this. Then we didn’t end up doing the thing. But I love those guys.

I’ve done a I’ve had lots of conversations with them,

Mark Littlewood: Definitely, definitely worth looking at. Does that answer the question or hasn’t solved the problem?

April Dunford: I mean, it does not. This is not like, this is like, this is hard work. This way they pay you the big bucks.

Laurie: Yeah, well, I think your your suggestion, though, about telling them it’s only the first you know, you can customize later on, I think that’s going to do it, because their thing is, his big pushback is, we do consultative selling. We don’t need a deck. And I’m like, I realized that. And, you know, trying to, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna try that. I think that that went but…

April Dunford: We still need a way to answer the question. So what do you all do? Yeah, right, like, and we should have a good, tight set of value props to talk about around that, like with every rep in the organization, somebody says, What do you do? Should be able to say, we’re, you know, tell the story a little bit, but, you know, and again, it’s, it’s mainly in the first call.

Because if you look at your pipeline, that’s where we we make this, this where the deals win or lose, right? That first call the customer is trying to decide, should we bother trying to define a project with these people? Should we bother trying to go to the next thing?

Then, usually we have incredible, like, incredible drop off there, like, we usually lose more than 50% most companies, like, 70% of the deals don’t make it past that call. Yeah.

And so, you know, how do we make sure that we’re really doing a good job of, like, This is who we are. This is why you want to work with us. This is what we’re amazing at, you know?

And then we have a conversation about where things intersect, like, we’re doing that at the same time, but if it’s just a one way flow of information, where the customer is just coming here and we’re not telling them about us, like, what? Why do we need sales people?

Laurie: Yeah, because that, that therapy session. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your help. Okay, well, good luck. Good luck with it.

Mark Littlewood: We’ve got so much stuff kind of coming in on the chat and the questions I’ve slightly lost thread plot over in the chat. Doesn’t take much.

Who wants to ask a question? You can just speak. We try not to be like highly regulated here. It’s more of a conversation than a lecture. Leo, floor has the floor.

Leo: Thank you so much. Sincerely appreciate it. Long time listener, first time caller, kind of situation. Great.

April, I also went to Waterloo. I also live in Toronto, so have been following…

April Dunford: Fellow water losers!

Leo: and and my background is technical as a product manager, but currently I’m the director of technology for a clinic, and we have a very interesting problem in This clinic.

We April knows this because she’s from Ontario. Government pays for our health care. Our product is a service. We provide survivorship services to people living with or after cancer.

So there are certain parts of your health care that are paid for by the Government. And then we get to a conversation where we’ve done all of the assessment with the patient, we know the things that will help them address their fatigue, and then we have a conversation about how to help you get to that. And then there are some things that we have to present that to kind of just expect that, oh, how come the government doesn’t pay for this?

And the story is pretty long, right? We’re, we’re advocating, we’re collecting the data to basically make the case that, you know, it’ll be, it’ll cost less, it’ll cost the government less in the long run, if you address this now, versus it becoming a disability. So there’s, you know, I’ve gone through all the frameworks I’ve got. I’m down to the objections, right? And that’s where I am in your sales pitch canvas. Yeah, yeah. Why isn’t this fully covered by OHIP? And that’s kind of my that’s where I’m, you know, stuck, right? And,

well, what’s the what’s the answer?

Speaker 8  

The answer is, we’re trying, right? And we know that this is a huge problem. We know that people kind of feel like they fall off a cliff once they’ve once their cancer is in remission, you’re just kind of like, okay, well, you know what? Good luck with that, right? And, and what we know from from any cancer survivor is there’s always something that, Oh,

Speaker 1  

I see that. So there’s some skepticism about if this was really necessary, then the government would be paying for it. But the fact that, yeah, okay, all right. So, yeah, so you’re good, yeah. So, so that sounds like one like, See, the thing about the objection step in a good sales pitch is it’s, it’s, we don’t handle all objections, because sometimes there’s an objection we don’t have a good answer for it. And so, you know, we’re going to handle it if it comes up to the best of our ability, but we don’t actually want to bring it up ourselves, because we don’t have because we don’t have a great answer for it. But we have other kinds of objections that they it’s the elephant in the room, man, it’s always going to come up and and, you know, we know what the answer is, so we might as well address it before the people leave. And this sounds like one of those. It’s the elephant in the room thing, like, so, if this was so important, and so I think, you know, I don’t know, because I don’t know your business and stuff, but it, but should you address it? Yes, and I and I think you just address it with the the truth, right? Which is, we know that this works. We have data that knows that, that that proves that this works. It is a journey to getting this covered with the government, and we are on that journey. But in the meantime, you’re going to have to pay

Speaker 1  

and it’s up to you. But I think what the real objection you’re addressing here is, does this is this thing necessary? Does it work? And so you should keep your eye on that, right? Like, yeah, and you need to hit them with the facts and the statistics and this, all the stuff, the research you have that backs up that this is going to improve your outcome. But you know, but why would you know? And you could just say that, like, if this is so great for outcomes, why isn’t the government paying and and your answer is, they will eventually, but we just it’s the government. Man, stuff goes slow. Like, so I, you know, but I think addressing it is a good idea. But again, I would address it as the elephant in the room and the and I would run right at it like I wouldn’t, because, you know everyone’s thinking it.

Mark Littlewood  

Thank you so much. You’re welcome. So bad at time keeping I’m sorry we’re sort of slightly past the hour, but we’re okay to hang on a little bit. April.

Oh yeah, I thought we had two hours for some reason.

Oh, wow. Well,

Speaker 1  

I don’t know why. I don’t know why I thought that. Well, actually, I do have this

Mark Littlewood  

on my I think we’ve, we’ve sort of scheduled it to half past this hour. Yeah, yeah. We got time, yeah. We’ve got, we’ve got plenty of questions I like. So Leo, thank you for that. Who else is going to come up with a question and talk on screen? I’m gently encouraging you to interact rather than think of this as a YouTube video. I’ve got a question.

Speaker 9  

Go for grab. Does anybody else? Thank you, big fan. April, I have Oh, great.

Speaker 1  

I got mine. Can I tell you a secret? I’m going to tell you a secret that only the people on this call know, because I haven’t announced it. I I’m doing a second edition of this one. Yeah, so I’m, I’m, I’m doing a rewrite, and it’s, it’s going to include a lot of stuff, because it came out in 2019 it’s going to include a lot of the stuff I’ve learned since then, because I’ve worked with like, 200 300 companies since then, and address a bunch of stuff that that I know people get confused about that. I didn’t spend enough time in the book. So there’s a new version of that book going to come probably, but the book process is long, man, is it? It’ll probably be early next year, but it’s going to be good.

Speaker 9  

Anyways, awesome. Look, I’m looking forward to it. And April I’ve seen, of course, it’s like everybody else here. I’ve read you books, and I continue to follow you. I actually do come from, like, a product management background, just like Leo. And one thing I’m noticing, and this is the first part, which is something, is whether you see the same thing, is positioning. Still seems like something that people are not fully aware of as like a concept especially, I would think about it from like a product and engineering side of the org, and I’m part of that as well, which is why I got interested. And the second part of this is because of AI. It’s just things as people are just can build stuff so easily and put things out, and they can build like, like a feature tomorrow, and they can build hundreds of features in a week. And I actually see way more value in like, really thinking through so what? As you say, and then working backwards, I struggle with that process because I’m not conditioned to think like that, at least like with my upbringing, engineering, background, product background, and so on and so forth. So I’m looking for advice. Is this what’s what you see? And then I’m curious how you work with such people, like show them the value of at least the positioning exercise, and even if they do a fantastic job in running through your workshop, like even before that, the skepticism that they come with. And so that’s like a two part question,

Speaker 1  

yeah. So, you know, I see a weird slice of the universe, right? Because if they were super skeptical, they’re not calling me because I’m the positioning lady. So everybody that comes to me, and most of my business these days, comes inbound. They come to me because they have had an aha moment at some point where they’re like, oh, positioning. That’s what sucks over here, and we need to fix that. And then they go, who’s going to help us fix that? And then they find me. So you know a few things. So one is when I started doing this work, which was 2017 2016 is when I started consulting. Nobody knew what positioning was like, if you think is bad now, 2016 nobody, in fact, a lot of people considered it kind of a solved problem. Like, you know, all, all marketers, like, like, it was weird, like there was this idea that, you know, people kind of simultaneously didn’t know what positioning was, but thought it was some old thing that we didn’t have to worry about anymore, or something. And so it was very hard in the early days of me doing consulting, because they’re just there was a real lack of understanding about what positioning is. And so in my own consulting business, I had to, I did a lot of public speaking, and I did a lot of blogging, and I did all and and all my stuff was not teaching people how to do positioning. It was teaching them that positioning was a thing that maybe they should think about. And so it was me trying to, like, essentially, shine a light on the problem and say, Hey, have you ever noticed this, this and this happening at your company? Maybe that’s because your positioning sucks. And so a lot of my early stuff looked like that. Now, if we fast forward to now, again, I see the slice of life that understands the positioning to certain extent, because, you know, they’re coming to me, so they’ve done their homework. And a lot of those people, a lot of the folks that do come to me, you know, if I trace back their journey, they didn’t know what positioning was, and then they found out about it somewhere. And a lot of times it’s they went to a conference and they heard me speak, or they were listening to somebody talk on a podcast, and positioning came up. Or they were, you know, there’s a lot of people talking about positioning now, so then they’re like, oh, positionings, what’s that? And then how to add a how are we going to solve it? So what I found in the companies, like in the early days when I was doing consulting, I had to convince people that positioning was a thing, and then, you know, and then convince them that they should hire me to help them try and fix it. I

Mark Littlewood  

remember when you launched the book, we organized, we did some events in the UK, and we did, like, an afternoon workshop, and I spoke to the marketing director of arm said, Come along. It’s like, now positioning, it’s done, and I’m like, come on, trust me. And he sort of did it as a personal favor, okay, come along. Sort of usually steer me wrong. He walked out of that workshop gray faced, yeah, okay, now I’ve got start again, right? People, just assume positioning that has happened. Yeah, marketing is about action and execution, and that’s right,

Speaker 1  

yeah, yeah. People think that positioning just, it just happened. It just, you know, it is what it is, and we can’t change it. And so there’s no job here. And so anyway, so, you know, so a lot of the So, so I don’t think you can just kind of show up and, you know, change that it, you know, I think people have to be exposed to it in lots of places. And so they, you know, they they listen to me talk, or they hear somebody talk on a podcast, or they, you know, it hits them in a few different places, and then they’re like, maybe I should find out more about this thing. And then, you know, they end up with one of my books, or whatever they read about something, and then they end up with me. So I do think that, you know, COVID changed a lot. I’ll tell you that when we went into COVID, a lot of companies you know had businesses that were working just fine, and then COVID hit, and then there was emergent emergency repositioning required. And so my stuff really blew up during COVID, because a lot of people you know had kind of gotten away with, okay, positioning, but then this big event happened, and now they’ve got to reposition. And everybody was like, what is that? I don’t even know how to do that. You know, what do we do now? And so positioning became kind of a hot topic in 2020 because everybody was having to do it. Now we’re kind of back to where we were before, where, you know, positioning is just not a thing you do every day in your company, right? Like we don’t, you know. And a lot of times, you know, when we start businesses, a lot of times the positioning is kind of obvious, and so companies can just kind of fall into this good positioning, because there’s an obvious need for the product, there’s an there’s obvious value that they can deliver. It’s not that hard to figure out the positioning and everything just kind of works. And then what happens is, you know, you fast forward three, four years, and something’s happened. There’s new competitors, there’s new stuff happening. Or, you know, COVID hits, something happens, and now you’ve got to do an adjustment, and then the company’s like, Oh my God, how do we do that? Because we didn’t do anything in the first place. We just kind of fell into it because the positioning was easy. So I don’t know how to answer your question, like, I, you know, this is kind of my life’s work here, at least for the last 10 years, is to kind of, you know, be the person that’s on stage going, Hey, here’s the thing you should think about, or being the person that’s writing the blog post about that, or being the person that shows up on the podcast that says, here’s the thing you should think about, and then, you know, having the books if you want to go figure it out, you can go do it for yourself. And so, you know, if you’re trying to convince people, I always just say, well, you can just point them at my stuff, and then they can decide for themselves whether they think it’s important or not. But I don’t know

Speaker 9  

tremendously useful, because I feel like I’m the second and the third wave. The second and the third selected bunch of audiences. That’s not like marketing or sales first, but it was engineering first. And I am coming into this mode of Oh shit, this is way more important than what I thought it was. Yeah, and getting, I feel like there’s a lot more people like that, so it’s very exciting. Yeah, I’ll give you back the floor.

Speaker 10  

So April, I wanted to say Good day, and I read your book about two years ago, thanks to Mark Littlewood, who exposed me to all good things around jobs to be done, and I’ve been building whiteboard stories for 15 years. And one of the things I started doing about all 10 years ago was putting a positioning matrix into the whiteboard story. Then I read your book in a positioning match position, it just drops straight into the whiteboard story. So I’ve integrated both your positioning canvas and your conversational storyboard into my whiteboard development process now, and it’s a really solid process, and I’ve built an agent that actually helps me crank those things out really fast. And I just want to say, freaking awesome. Absolutely works. I did. I’ve got we, I used this at a project in Romania last year with the IT services company that were getting beaten up by offshore it, and they’re nearshore. And I interviewed their customers. I did switch interviews with their customers, and their customers all loved them, and they were doing the highest risk, highest reward work for the companies, yet they were fighting in the wrong end of the spectrum against it on time and materials. So built the positioning interviewed six of their customers. They all loved them, helped them reposition the company, and that company went from selling nothing new for the two years before I worked with them, they’d sold no new accounts, and then since the since the whiteboard story activation session, they’ve opened seven union accounts. So they’ve grown to install base by 35% and the CEO was the Entrepreneur of the Year in Ian. Why just this year? Oh, great. Remembers the name. So really good case study. This stuff really works sales people, or in this case, consulting engine engineers. These are all engineers. They’re doing it. They, you know, bit of skills work along with the whiteboard storytelling, and they just change their outcomes in every meeting, and it’s a wonderful thing. So thank you. It’s really, really good stuff. That’s awesome. Yeah,

thanks. That’s cool.

Mark Littlewood  

Anyone got something nice to say about April? Yeah, we all talk behind you Pat. We’re gonna, we’re carrying on. But before we do, I would love to draw your attention to this, which is nothing to do with April’s conversation. This is our events coming up. We have a whole series of ama like this that are online. We’ve got one next week on pricing. We have one with Jeff Shah pansky, who was the CEO of staff exchange. Next week. We’ve got stuff on pricing, people all sorts of very cool things. So go and fill your boots over there. I’m conscious that the idea behind these things, apart from giving people an opportunity to meet a few other people, albeit online, is to help you make progress. Is there anybody in the group at the moment who came with a question that they don’t feel they’ve made progress on? And I would stress you generally can’t solve everything. So Marvin, I hope you’ve made progress. You may not have the full answers, but is there anybody that wants to ask a question?

Hasn’t before brandy? Hello.

How are you?

Mark Littlewood  

I’m very well. How lovely

Speaker 11  

to see you. Yeah, good to see you again in April. Nice, nice to meet you. I’m filling up the Amazon cart. So full disclosure, have a lot to read in the coming days and weeks. I recently reunited with some folks I worked at before, at a startup and back in the startup world again, and it’s a wild and fun ride. And so I dropped a question in the chat earlier, and I saw, I believe it was maybe Elizabeth had a maybe something along the same lines, but we are literally building the plane as we’re flying it. And so from a positioning and messaging standpoint, in this place of creating everything from scratch and again, as we’re kind of building the product. And so trying to figure out, and some of this may be covered in your books, I apologize, but trying to figure out how to test what we are hopefully going to be pushing out into the world next week, but how to kind of test some of that positioning and messaging and what’s sticking and what’s not. And one of the challenges too is we’re kind of creating a new category or a new space, and we don’t have someone to from a competitive standpoint, to compare ourselves to, and say this is how we’re different. And so

what are the customers doing, like,

if like, what are they doing today?

Speaker 1  

Are they, you know, doing it with manual processes and stuff? Is that what you’re replacing? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 11  

So that that’s certainly a chunk of it. Spreadsheets is another kind of four letter word, but it’s all about how we can help build compoundable, composable trust. And so where GitHub is, where code is built and stored in there the repositories, what we’re building is a place that we can build trust. And so we’ve got different markets that have been identified, but we’re trying to hone in with some early conversations to see where’s the push versus the pull, to make sure that we’re in the same we’re heading in the right direction. But yeah, so lots of unravel. Yeah,

Speaker 1  

so this is good, and it is kind of relates back to this conversation we were having earlier about having a positioning thesis, like, like, I think a good exercise at at the stage you’re at is to kind of lean back and say, okay, like, if we didn’t exist, what would the customer do? Oh, they’d be doing it manually. They’d be doing other spreadsheets, whatever. So what have we got that’s different? And then, and then, what’s the value of that? Like, at the end of the day, like, how are we helping these customers make money or save money? Like, like, what is the actual value of that? And then it’s good to write down your assumptions, you know. And so you’re some you’re you’re assuming that you’re competing in spreadsheet and stuff. This is how we’re different. This is the value. And we’re assuming that these kind of folks are going to love us. And you’ve said, you’ve already identified some, you know, some groups that would be good people to go after. And then, therefore, this is the market we’re going to go in. And then the testing of this is, you know, so now, so now I got to pitch these people and so in these conversations you’re listening to see, does it validate all your assumptions? So if you’re talking to somebody that you sits in this bucket of we think they should love it, and they should love it because it’s going to do this for them. Is that actually true when you have a conversation with them, like, are they excited about that, or are they getting excited about other things? Or maybe they’re not excited about that, but they’re, you know, like, you know, or maybe it’s these kind of people we thought would be really excited, but it turns out these other people are way more excited. And so this would be an easier bunch to go after, like in the world I come from, the best way to test this stuff is we put it in a pitch, and then we go out and we have conversations with customers, and then we see, do they react the way we thought they were going to react, or are they doing something weird, saying, Oh, well, we don’t actually find that valuable. Oh, shoot, we assumed that you would. So what’s going on? So you’re in what I would call the sort of early customer experience phase, where what you’re trying to do is validate the thesis. Like, you know, is this going the way we thought it would go? And what you’ll get is you’ll get really smart about it, like, you’ll find out, ah, like, you’ll start getting a finer grain on what you know. So you’ll be like, ah, like, it turns out, you know, these kind of customers love us the best, and they love us the best because they tick these boxes, and anybody who ticks these boxes is a really good fit for us. So then you can start thinking about, well, how do I do marketing and sales campaigns to go after people that look like that? And so how can I identify them? How can I bring them in at scale, that kind of stuff, but you can’t get there until you do this early customer work where you go through and you can get really fine on it and say, All right, we can put a real box around these are going to be the easiest people to sell to.

Mark Littlewood  

Awesome. Thank you. Contact. Randy was at precision lender, which was q2 and then left, and that was run by Carl Ryden, who I think you certainly met at Bos. But anyway, Kalief, I think you have a question.

Oh, hey, Kalief.

Speaker 1  

Oh, yeah, we can’t hear you though. Yeah, I know he’s curiously quiet because he’s not on mute. No, he’s not but, but for some reason, we can’t hear you. Oh, just it’s, it’s like you got the wrong microphone on. I can hear you from a microphone across the room or something. Do

Mark Littlewood  

Oh, speak again. Color. You’re not actually speaking, so we can’t tell whether we can hear, yeah, if

you talk, oh, but no, we got you now,

that’s the problem. He’s not talking awesome.

Speaker 12  

So yeah. So been advising startups and tech tech companies a lot to follow, positioning stuff, what you have been doing, and now I’m coaching one startup, and we follow the process. And we got into interesting situation that the unique stuff, what we do is operational efficiency. Manage measuring for manufacturing companies, how much of your machines are utilized. And basically, we measure the stoppages and the reasons why machine is not working, and you can increase the efficiency like 20 to 30% and we came up with, like a kicker, but you can, you can find the hidden capacity at one extra day per week, but we give you one extra day of production per week, but, but the trouble is that their unique stuff is only in implementation that the competitor can do everything. What they can do like all this analysis and all this stuff is the same. And the only uniqueness is that, in their case, they can install it faster the integration are like in a week instead of several months or so so far. And problem is that when they try to do like cold calls and the first pitch, then this installation thing, nobody cares, it becomes like later that I don’t have like, unique, unique point of view or unique something to give to the customer, and so we are kind of kind of lost. Okay, I can try to

customers right now. How many? Yeah, they have about,

Speaker 12  

like, 160 160 customers. But they The problem is that they don’t see any clear pattern also. But there I

Speaker 1  

talked with 60 customers, is a lot of customers like I, you know, 160 like, my suspicion is there’s something there that they don’t know. They that they’re going to have to go back and talk to their customers to find it out, because 160 customers have made the decision to pick them over the other guys. There’s something there. So and so I would, what I would be interested in is I would go back to anybody recent that they’ve closed, and I would have, I would have the purchase conversation, like, find the champion, the person that actually was in charge of the deal. And I would say, Take me back. What were you doing before? What made you decide you had to do something different? So what was the, you know, the jobs people call this the struggling moment, right? What was the thing that made you wake up in the morning and say, We can’t keep doing it like this. And then who did you look at? You know, who? Who did you make a short list? And if so, who is on the short list? And then you picked us. Why did you pick us? And importantly, why not the other guys and and it and see what comes out there. Because my guess is you’re going to learn something that you did know. Because, like, 100 customers is a lot of customers. And it could be one of these things that everybody inside, you know, there’s something there that everybody inside the company is like, yeah, yeah, yeah. That doesn’t matter, you know, whatever. But that’s actually the thing for customers. But we but inside, it’s getting discounted or ignored or whatever, or it’s some weird thing that you just don’t nothing about. I did this with a company once where, you know, we had 500 customers. And same thing, everybody was like, we don’t do anything that the other guys don’t do. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, Well, we have 500 customers. Like, they’re picking us for a reason. So we did these interviews, and we did 10 companies, and they all told us the same thing, and it was, it was super surprising. So we were selling this thing for system analysts that were managing software, software development projects inside a company that not a software company, like they’re building their own custom software and and in every case, when we walk through that situation, like, what were you doing before? And what happened? The what happened that made them look for a solution was they were all using JIRA, or one of these regular project management tools, but then they all of a sudden, had multiple locations that they had to deal with. So they either did an acquisition or they had started outsourcing some work. And we had a set of features that were not really built for that, but we had a set of features that made it really easy to manage this if you had remote teams. And that was, that was the selection criteria every time, and nobody knew. So then we did. So then we, you know, we did this big positioning thing. We just heard it over and over again. It was like, What the heck? So, you know, in the sales people didn’t know. The sales people were just having this conversation about feature, function, every little thing. But these customers were really, actually looking for that. And so once we did the repositioning around that, everything changed. We got giant bump in revenue because we now started talking about the thing that customers actually liked, but it, but it was a shock to the people inside the company. To my guess, there’s something like that in there. I would, I would go back to customers and interview them. There’s something happening, and the team doesn’t know for some reason. Yeah,

Speaker 12  

very good point, which is, like, actually, I have tried to push them to do it themselves, but there is a some unknown hesitance by the sales guys of doing it, so I guess I had to do it myself, like going to the customers and asking, going through the Well, I wouldn’t, I

Speaker 1  

specifically would not have the sales people do it, because why? Well, so it’s funny, you say that, because in that company where we didn’t know what was going on, we had very problematic sales team, and later on, all the sales executives got fired because they were problematic, but at that point, at that point, they were still around, and they one, they didn’t care about the outcome. Like two, they had no idea how to do those interviews. Okay? They would just call the customer and say, Why do you love us? And the customer would say, Oh, we love us. We love us. We love you because your support is great. That’s it. That’s not at all the same conversation. And so we had to take it over in marketing, because we could do those conversations. And a salesperson is not used to having a discovery type conversation like that with a customer like they just won’t know how to do it. So you need to have someone from Mark. I think marketing would be a good choice. Have marketing come in and say, hey, you know, just, we’re doing some stuff here internally, and I just want to talk to you about your process purchasing our stuff. You know, can you give me 20 minutes and then do this whole take me back? What were you doing before? What did that look like? What was the straw that broke the camel’s back and made you want to look at something different, and then when you did, How’d you make that short list? Why us? Why not the other guys? And you’ll learn a whole bunch of stuff there, but sales is terrible at that, I know, and they’re not motivated to do it, right? They’re just that’s never going to get

Speaker 12  

they don’t get paid for it, yeah, but I know I have found some, some guys who sales guys who are super good at Discovery schools, but they are very rare. So

Speaker 1  

this is a little bit like discovery after the fact, right? Like this. And so the way sales person does, yeah, is really different. This is a bit yeah. I call it more like a job, more like a jobs to be done interview, than anything else, really, right?

Speaker 12  

I call it usually in deep discovery, because people get it confused with like traditional sales discovery, which is like pattern matching. Does this? Is it a good fit or bad fit customer? I have one more question, a quick one that is probably out of your knowledge base, but they still ask it how to how to turn the sales pitch into a cold call script that in cold call like the value,

Speaker 1  

so I so there’s you can’t, is you can’t, you can’t and you shouldn’t. So okay, here’s the thing, cold call script is different, like cold call script is you are looking for the hook, just a hook, so all you got to do is make that customer an offer that makes it worth it for them to give you half an hour. And that hook is, usually, is not your whole big positioning story. Like your hook is like, Hey, man, we did a really cool thing with your competitor. And if you give me 20 minutes, I’ll tell you how we did it, right. Or, or the hook is, you know, you know, we noticed you had a breach last week, and we’re going to make sure you’re not having a breach again. Or it could be anything, and, but it’s you’ve got five minutes, you know, and it’s, and it’s usually, you know, you’re doing email and outbound calling, but, but all you’re trying to do is hook them, because no one wants a sales pitch, nobody, even if, even if people are in the market looking for stuff, they don’t want to say yes to outreach. So this is really hard to do. And so it has to be this kind of fair exchange of value. And so you got to be able to come in and say, If you give me 20 minutes, I’m going to teach you something that’s valuable for you, but you’re going to have to listen to my pitch too. But it’s not the same as the you know what you’re learning in this book here, which is, once we’ve got them hooked, and now we’re doing them substantive first sales call. That’s what this pitch is all about. But,

Speaker 12  

okay, you got to think about tough to be connected. Okay,

Speaker 1  

it’s, you know, it shouldn’t be disconnected, yeah, but it’s not like I’m taking that sales pitch and turning it into outbound call script. No, no. Something different. Thank you. You’re welcome.

Mark Littlewood  

70 inbound cold calls a day, and no one’s actually come up with anything compelling. I

can give you some examples, but

Speaker 3  

we’re no, I’ve just come to interrupt you. Okay, yeah, no, I bet yeah, no,

Mark Littlewood  

Gavin, are you still there? Because I know you’ve been itching to ask your question, and it was good, and I think we’ll make this probably the last one. Gavin,

Speaker 1  

Oh, we lost him. We went over time and we lost him. Oh, Brad, tell him to email me. I

Mark Littlewood  

will. I will. Elizabeth, glad to me.

Speaker 13  

Hello, really quickly. I don’t know how relevant this is for the group on the call, but I’ll ask it anyways. Testing the thesis, how might you approach that if it’s a product led business and you don’t have the benefit of the conversation.

Speaker 1  

So I’ve seen this with lots of companies and and you’re just going to have to talk to customers. I know the whole thing is product LED. Oh my god, we’re not supposed to talk to anybody, but you’re going to have to figure out how to communicate with those people. Okay? And you’re either going to survey them, or you’re going to, you’re going to figure out how to do stuff in the product that opens up a line of communication. Or you’re going to call them up and you’re going to say, hey, I want to talk to you about otherwise. I mean, you’re just, you’re flying blind.

Speaker 13  

Yeah, I approached the positioning exercise, bringing voice of customer into it, did all the things, followed all the steps, wrote all the messaging, and then I thought, holy shit, should I? Is there a litmus test that I should have run this up again before introducing it to the

Speaker 1  

market? Yeah, like a lot of a lot of companies I know are, you know, like, even though you don’t normally have a sales team, you are in the early days of trying to test this stuff before you let it all go autopilot, with nobody talking to anybody is you’re forcing customers to talk to you at different stages of it to make sure that it’s working. Okay?

Thank you. Yeah, you’re welcome,

Mark Littlewood  

right? Anyone that has not made any progress on anything. Last Chance, what I’m going to call that a giant success. Everybody’s progressed. Great. April, thank you. I’m going to do a couple of adverts, but they won’t be bad. They’ll just be plugging our stuff. We’ve done some resource pages. So we’ve started been chopping up some of our stuff from or ARRI has been primarily responsible for it, so we’ve taken a bunch of boss talks and all sorts of things and turned them into little this is an introduction to jobs to be done. As you say, use jobs to get on in HR. We’re doing a load more, please go and download one free. So even Dave Collins will pay. We’d love to know what’s good about them. And anything that you’d like to cover, I think sales, pitching and all sorts of this stuff is is sort of high on the list of things through. If there’s a topic you’d like us to cover, please let us know. Take a look at the events and come and hang out for some of the other events. I’d like to do some little case studies, so do a bit of organizing beforehand. So if you have an interest in pricing, for example, when you’re prepared to put yourself out there and be discussed in public, please let us know, or any of the other things, Harry, what should I have said that I haven’t?

Speaker 2  

No, I think you said about the resources the event, oh, and also, April’s talks in our library. We have a lot of them. She’s been here from for a long time. So go watch the not long. But there’s,

oh, it has been a long time.

Yeah, a lot of good content as well. So don’t miss it.

Mark Littlewood  

I think, I think what you meant says it’s extraordinary that you April looks so young and fresh. That’s

it. Look at how fresh I look possible

Mark Littlewood  

the concept of being around for more than 10 years, but that’s very cool. Thank you very, very much. Firstly, to everybody that came, and I hope that you’ve made progress. April, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Speaker 1  

Yeah, so you know, if you want to learn more about this stuff, like, obviously the books are a good place to start, but I do. I’ve done a lot of writing about this stuff, so I have a sub stack like everybody else. So you could look that up there. There’s a podcast. It’s called positioning with April Dunford. You could go down to positioning rabbit hole there. And then my website is April dunford.com and you’ll see links to all that stuff there. So, yeah,

Mark Littlewood  

perfect. And then finally, actually, not finally, second, finally. Thank you, Ari, this is your first ama hangout. We well one team member down, and Ari hasn’t done this before, so I think she did a really top job of keeping people letting them in and all of that stuff. See, it’s it’s exciting, it’s not it’s not bad. And most importantly, April, thank you.

Speaker 1  

Okay, thanks. This was great. Thanks everybody for showing up,

Mark Littlewood  

being such an inspiration to people. Can’t wait for your next edition, and hopefully we’ll get you to come to Europe and talk about it next year. That’d be great. Cambridge is nice in the spring. Thank you very much. Everybody. Anybody got any questions? Please get in touch with me, with Ari, with April, and we will see you soon at the next one. Oh, ARRI, I know what we forgot. Our prices rise tomorrow for BoS, USA, so please wait until Saturday to register your tickets. That’s all, and we can make more money. Fabulous. Thank you so much, everybody.

Okay, thanks everybody. Thanks Mark for having me.

Thank you.

Oh, Brandy,

Mark Littlewood  

that helpful. Caleb, are you in

Mark Littlewood  

who’s gone? Everyone’s this is the point where we start saying, Oh, that load of people were really horrible. What awful? Because all we now have in the in the room, note takers. I want

Speaker 2  

to be in other AI, we chatting like nothing, very

Mark Littlewood  

important message, important takeaway for abishant, he has to stand on his head tomorrow morning. Rajashi Josh is doing. What’s his action? What their action?

Speaker 2  

Can I just leave them like, remove them? Yeah,

Mark Littlewood  

we can. But I I just like them to have a little message, sitting on sitting on them notes when they’re finished, yeah, we can.

Speaker 2  

No. No, no, no, I did. What am I doing?

Mark Littlewood  

we’ll just stop here. Yeah, okay. And now let’s just jump back on another call together.

Okie dokie.

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