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It is a long, difficult thing to establish a position in the market, and it requires you to essentially say the same thing over and over and over again until you're really quite sick of it. And at the point where you're quite sick of it is exactly where it's starting to land. In marketing, we need to be kind of strict about making sure that we are saying the same thing over and over again. And it's that repetition that is going to help us groove a brand and stand for something out in the market. If we come out and the message is sloppy and it's different every time we do it, then it's going to be really hard for customers to really figure out, what do we stand for and what are we all about? Welcome to another edition of the Positioning show with me, your host, April Dunford. Hey, this is the last one. I've been running this little miniseries of positioning episodes specifically focused on the new edition of my book, obviously. Awesome. The second edition is coming February 2026. Maybe it's already out by the time you're listening to this. It probably is. What I thought would be cool would be to do a series of episodes specifically focused on what's changed between the first edition of the book and the second edition of the book, and why did it change? Like, how has my thinking changed that led me to want to change the stuff in the book? So we've gotten all the way through talking about the things you would do before you do a positioning exercise, the decisions you need make, the prep you need to do before. I did a few episodes highlighting specific parts of the positioning exercise. We did an episode focused on competitive alternatives, which I think is one that people really need to nail in order to get good positioning. We did one on differentiated value, of course, which I think is by far the most important component and the most important step in a positioning exercise. Last time we talked about market category and things related to market category, so I thought that would be a good one, too. And now we're getting into things that you do after a positioning exercise. So in the original, obviously awesome. I didn't spend too much time on stuff that I thought should happen after a positioning exercise, mainly because I didn't think I needed to. So other than making a recommendation around how I thought you should test positioning, I didn't go into too much depth about how you would do that, what structure that would take. I talk a little bit about how you might want to take the positioning, and obviously you're going to want to turn it into messaging and you might want to create a messaging document to do that. But I didn't really spend too much time on it because I thought these are previously solved problems. Like, the hard part is getting the positioning, what you do with it afterwards. I think a lot of that stuff just looks like regular marketing things that we do. So it's beyond the scope of the book to have to cover that stuff. And I think I was wrong. I think people needed a bit more than that at the end of the book. In particular, I think I could have spent more time talking about how to test positioning and going a little bit deeper into the best way to do that. So I thought, okay, let's tackle that in the new edition and we'll expand that section out and talk about that a bit more. So here's my thinking on it. So you do this positioning exercise, you get to good positioning, but you're really going to want to test it to see whether or not it lands with prospects. Now, if you're on the marketing side of things, the obvious way you would test positioning, or I think the way marketers just naturally want to test it, is they want to take the positioning, they want to translate it into messaging, they want to take that messaging, put it on a landing page of some sort and maybe a B test it against the current positioning. And that sounds good when you just say it. It sort of sounds logical and good. But this is a terrible way to test it, in my opinion, for lots of reasons. One is we're not just testing positioning anymore. Now we're testing that positioning translated into messaging and not messaging for everything. Specifically landing page messaging, which is usually what we're looking at, is homepage messaging. And I'm doing it in the context of a homepage. So now I'm testing homepage design and, you know, maybe I've got other things in there, like a tagline and some other things. Maybe I. And then how do I do that test? Maybe there's a call to action and I'm, you know, trying to record how many clicks there are or whatever. So. So I'm no longer just testing positioning anymore. I'm testing messaging, landing page design, a whole bunch of other stuff. So that's a problem. The second thing is that I don't know what kind of traffic is coming into this page. Unless I can control for that and say the only people that have landed on either one of these pages perfectly fit my definition of a best fit customer, then I don't really know whether the results mean anything. Like if, if the Traffic is all bad fit customers. And they, you know, and they don't do what I want them to do on this page. Is that a pass test or a failed test? Like, I actually don't care what happens to those people. The third thing is that, you know, it's just a thing that that kind of bugged me about a B testing pages and B2B in general, particularly if you're a smaller company, is you just don't actually have that much traffic to actually get to a test that's sort of significant. So a B testing on pages, I thought that was kind of a non starter. So I don't think that's a good way to test your positioning. A much better way to test it if you're B2B, which everybody I work with is B2B and everybody I work with has a sales team. So if we are B2B and we have a sales team, then a way better way to test your positioning, I think, is to take the positioning, translate it into a sales pitch, and do it in live customer conversations with a sales rep. Now, yeah, granted, I am doing a translation there. So it's not just pure positioning. Like, part of what I'm testing is the rep's ability to pitch. I'm testing the store story that this positioning sits in the middle of. But the neat thing about a live customer conversation is I get a lot of signal about what's working and isn't working. So assuming I can do a decent job of representing this positioning in a story, if I'm having a live conversation with a customer, I can tell where they're getting excited, I can tell where they're not getting excited. I can tell where they're getting confused. I can write down every question they ask, and those questions will sometimes tell me what's going on in their head head. The other thing that's great about doing it with a sales pitch is I can completely control for what customers I'm pitching to. So I can make sure the only people I'm looking for signal from are perfectly aligned with my definition of a best fit customer. And if I'm doing this as a smaller test with a sales rep, I can control for some things. Like, for example, if I pick my best sales rep, then I can kind of control for, you know, poor salesmanship, you know, because I've got my best rep doing it. The other thing is that in a sales pitch, if we say something one way and the customer doesn't get it, we'll try another way and we'll Say it a few different ways. So we take. We get a lot of signal in a conversation with a customer. And so I think that's a much better way to test positioning. That is what I always recommend. Like, when we get to the end of positioning, what we should do is, is we should get marketing and sales to sit down together, take that positioning, translate it into a sales pitch, and then take your one or two sales reps. And I would recommend like very small number, like one or two. Literally not six or 10, one or two. And make those reps your best reps. So I take one or two of my very best sales reps, I train them on this new pitch so that they're really comfortable with it and they're not doing a bad job pitching it. And then I have them pitch it to pre qualified prospects. So this is going to be exactly like a regular first substantive sales call with a prospect coming in, and then we see how it lands. Now there's a bunch of things to think about here. Now when, when we do this test. For example, when I was in house, like when I used to be a vice president of marketing in house, I would sit with the reps during all these pitches, and I would be there to essentially mind read the customer like I'm looking for. Where are they getting excited? Where are they getting confused? What questions are they asking? And every question they would ask, I would write it down and I would be really paying attention to how the customer is reacting to this pitch. And then at the end of every pitch, I would sit down with the rep and we would caucus and say, all right, what worked and what didn't in that pitch? And we would specifically try to tune. Like a lot of times there would be things like there would just be a word that prospect would have a reaction to. Like, they interpreted that word in a different way. We did. So we would like, get rid of that word. We can't say that word anymore. Or sometimes we would get an objection that we weren't expecting, and so we would tune the pitch to handle that objection. Sometimes we had graphics, like, you know, we'd have sort of architecture diagram or something like that. And that would get the customer totally confused because we did a bad job of it. And then we'd say, okay, look, we got to blow up this diagram and build a new one or something like that. And so we would just keep pitching and pitching and pitching and pitching until it felt like we had the kinks worked out of it. And what I would be waiting for is I would Be waiting for the moment where my best rep would turn to me and say, look, I think we've tested this out and, and tuned it as much as we can tune it, and this looks good. And importantly, my best rep says, and this is better than the old pitch. Your reps will have a real bias to the old pitch because they're comfortable with the old pitch. They know the old pitch. They've been doing it for years. Sometimes they tell a little joke on slide 2. The old pitch is great. You come with a new pitch. Nobody likes the new pitch at the beginning. So you got to give somebody a lot of time with the new pitch. And then if you, you know, if I could give a rep a lot of time with it, have them pitch a whole bunch of times, and eventually the rep says, you know what? I really like this pitch. I'm not going back to the old one. Now, you know, you got something. And at that point, we would call that a pass test. Now, in the first version of the book, I think I gave a little outline on how you might take the positioning and map it to a sales pitch. But. But it was literally like one paragraph. And I was kind of like, figure it out for yourself, people. I'm not here to teach you how to build a sales pitch. Two, three years later, after I had been doing these workshops, it started to become really apparent to me that people did not know how to build a good sales pitch. People weren't, in fact, weren't used to building a sales pitch with any kind of structure at all. So when I was saying, oh, just take your positioning and translate it into a sales pitch, that was actually a really hard thing for companies to do. So I had a sales pitch structure that I had been using for a bunch of years, and so that's what I would use in the workshops. If I was doing a workshop with you, I would say, okay, we've got the sales pitch done. Now we're going to translate it into the sales pitch. So once we got the positioning done, we would translate that into the sales pitch. My structure has essentially eight components. There's kind of a setup and a follow through. The setup in the pitch comes from what we understand about our differentiated value. Like, we look at our differentiated value and we kind of lean back and say, what does the customer need to understand in order to understand why our differentiated value is so important and how that stacks up to everybody else? So in my pitch structure, there's this little bit at the beginning, which is this context that the customer needs to get their head around that. So there's three steps to that. It's the insight. So here's our perspective on the problem and why we built things the way we built it. Essentially, there would be a step where we'd look at, well, here's all the other ways you could solve this, the problem, and the pluses and minuses of those different approaches. And then the third step is what we would call the perfect world, which is, look, if we understand the dimensions of the problem and we understand what works and doesn't work in the market, can we agree that a perfect solution would tick these boxes? This is often something you can do in 5, 10 minutes at the beginning of a pitch, just to kind of orient the customer to your way of thinking. And then we would switch to an introduction to the product or the company, depending on what we're positioning. That's where we would introduce our market category. We do this here it is at a high level. We would then spend the bulk of the pitch going through our differentiated value. And how we do that, either in slides or in a demo, we would wind up the pitch with the proof. We could do what we say we could do often a customer example. We may have a step to handle any unspoken objections. And then we would end the pitch with what we call the ask, which is whatever we want the customer to do next. So that's the structure I've been using forever. Because I think this is the best way to test positioning is to translate into a sales pitch and then test it. I think putting it in a structured sales pitch is really important. And again, two years after I wrote the initial book, I ended up writing a second book called Sales Pitch specifically to talk about that sales pitch structure, how to build a pitch to that structure in a way that your sales team can get excited about, but also in a way that would allow you to build a pitch that could test your positioning. So I'm not going to, you know, attempt to teach you all of that in the second edition of Obviously Awesome. But there is kind of a flavor of what that structure might look like in that book. Now that wasn't there before. And it's there to help you do that translation so that you can then do a test. And again, if you want to go really deep on that, because you want to build a pitch this way, and you don't really understand the really high level outline that I've given you, there's a whole other book on that called Sales Pitch that you could go and buy and read. And that Would really help you nail that sales pitch side of it. So we finished the positioning exercise. We've taken the positioning. We've translated into a sales pitch. We, we've done this little test with a couple of sales reps. We know that it lands once we've decided, yep, this pitch is good, and it lands. Now, I've got one or two sales reps that are really good at doing it, and I can use them to help roll the pitch out to the rest of the sales team so I can make the script look exactly the way my best sales rep does it. I can record that sales rep doing the pitch in the way they like to do it, which, you know, they'll be the most experienced person on the team that really knows how to do that. And I can use that rep to help train everybody else on the sales team. What's cool about that is now I. What I've got is salespeople training salespeople Instead of marketing people trying to convince sales that this is a good sales pitch and you should use it. That usually works way, way better. In fact, marketing trying to train salespeople, I mean, I'm not sure I've ever seen that work. Awesome. Sometimes it does. I shouldn't say that, but most of the time it doesn't. Sales training sales is a whole different thing. And then ideally, I've got that one salesperson is very excited about the pitch because they've gotten some deals cooking using that pitch. So they can come to the sales team with insight into the pitch and some proof that the pitch works. Like, hey, I've got this deal, and that deal, it's in the pipeline, came out of me using this pitch. You're crazy. If you don't use this pitch, you should go use this pitch structure. And that works to go. Now I've got. Now I've got the sales team all aligned and doing this pitch. Now, at this point, I think you're ready to go tackle messaging. Some people will want to do messaging before they do the testing with the sales pitch. But I don't recommend it because messaging is a pain and you don't want to create it twice. So I usually like to get the pitch testing done first before I tackle messaging. Now, there's lots of ways to write good messaging. And again, I feel like this is a bit of a previously solved problem. And the company has been writing messaging before I showed up or before they attempted to do this shift in positioning. And so what they got to do now is take that positioning and translate it into messaging. The only big advice I would give you on this is I don't believe that your messaging should be the homepage. Like, and I learned that the hard way. That's what everybody wants. So you finish the positioning and everyone says, let's go update the homepage. But what I like to do instead is, you know, build some kind of a messaging reference document. So I would call it a messaging document. And the messaging document is basically the boilerplate messaging that we would always use as a starting point. So we would look at, for example, the differentiated value that we defined in the positioning. We would get a copywriter to work on that. We would get them to write, this is the way we talk about these points of value. This is the way we talk about the key features underneath those points of value. You know, if we're doing things like a tagline, we'll say, this is the official tagline. This is, this is how we say it. This is what it looks like. And then I would usually just add anything that I wanted there to be a boilerplate reference on would go in this messaging document. So I would say, look, here's our 25 word description of the company, our 50 word description, our 250 word description. Here's the way we talk about these key features. If we had graphics and there were approved graphics, those would all go in there. If we had spokespeople and there was a bio of those spokespeople, those would go all in there. If we had quotes that we use from customers and they were approved, the approved quotes would go in there. And so I would just put anything like that that we thought we would use over and over again in marketing. We would get the copywriter to work on it, we would get it approved, we'd put it in this document, and then anything new we went to build would be purpose built for whatever we needed to do, but it would use that boilerplate stuff as a starting point. What you get if you don't get that is you go work on the home page, you put the messaging on the home page, and then what happens is, you know, somebody needs something else. So let's say we're going to a trade show and someone says, oh, we need a brochure for the trade show, or we need a banner for the trade show, or we want to, you know, put some stuff together for the trade show. So people will look at the homepage and then they'll build that stuff for the trade show and then, then they'll have this stuff and then, you know, Six months later, there might be another trade show, or someone might say, hey, we're going to spin up this campaign and we need some wording for that. And they'll say, oh, I really like that thing we did at the trade show. Let's go back to that thing. And then we'll write the campaign and we'll do the campaign. And then, you know, a couple months later, we're doing another campaign, and someone will say, oh, I really like that stuff we did in the last campaign. Let's use that as the starting point. And the next thing you know, it's a year later, and you've got messaging out there that doesn't look anything like the homepage anymore. And you've got this sort of six degrees of separation thing happening. Whereas if you put everything together into a messaging document, then nothing can get more than one degree off that particular messaging document. And it makes it easier to keep control over the messaging and ultimately the positioning that you're putting out in the market. It is a long, difficult thing to establish a position in the market, and it requires you to essentially say the same thing over and over and over again until you're really quite sick of it, to be honest. And at the point where you're quite sick of it is exactly where it's starting to land. So in marketing, we need to be kind of strict about making sure that we are saying the same thing over and over and over and over and over again. And it's that repetition over that is going to help us groove a brand and stand for something out in the market. If we come out and the message is sloppy and it's different every time we do it, then it's going to be really hard for customers to really figure out what do we stand for and what are we all about? Here's the last thing that I think I'd like to leave you with, and I maybe didn't talk about enough in the first edition of the book, but in the second edition, I put some stuff in here about this, which is, how do you know when your positioning needs to change? We've gone through this whole exercise. We have positioning, we built a pitch, we built messaging. And I've said several times before that, you know, we're not carving this into the rocks. Like, things change, the company changes, your competitors change, things are changing out in the market. It makes sense that our positioning would evolve over time. So how do we know when we have to come back and look at it again? In my opinion, there's. There's A handful of things to think about. The first one is if anything big happens in the market, you should back up and look at your positioning just to see if you need to do a change in positioning in reaction to that. So, for example, let's say you have a big competitor, that competitor does an acquisition, and it kind of closes the gap with you and that they catch up to you a little bit in terms of some capabilities. So you used to have capabilities that were differentiated. Now they've done this acquisition and maybe it's not as differentiated as it was before. You might want to get a sub committee together. Maybe not the full cross functional team that you had doing the positioning exercise, but maybe a handful of people and say, look, does this change? Like, does it change our differentiated capabilities? And therefore does it change the value that we can deliver? If it it doesn't, then we probably don't have to touch the positioning. If we think it does, then we may want to get the gang together, go back and re look at the positioning and see if it changes. If the positioning does change, then we got to change everything. It's not just the positioning. I got to update the sales pitch. I got to go back and I got to redo the messaging. If it doesn't. If we look at it and we check in, then nothing should change. The pitch shouldn't change, the messaging shouldn't change. Now we don't actually know like, how often that's going to happen. Like, like. I've worked at companies where we had the same positioning for decades. I've worked at other companies where, you know, we had to change the positioning every 18 months because there was so much stuff happening in the market. It's hard to really predict this stuff. One thing I will say is that you may want to have kind of an early warning system on this stuff just in case a competitor sneakily starts catching up to you. So when I was in house running marketing teams, I would have a positioning check in about once every six months and I would have a small team together. It would be me, head of sales, head of product, and the CEO. We would get together every six months. It was a standing meeting. We get everyone together and we'd say, okay, competitive landscape. Has anything changed? And so you want to hear from your salespeople, are they seeing something different in deals? Are there, Are we getting beat by a competitor that we didn't think was too important before, and now all of a sudden they seem to be important? And then we'd look at differentiated capabilities. Maybe we put a new release out, and that really changed our capabilities. So much so that the value has changed. Or like I said before, maybe I've got a competitor that's caught up to me. And what used to be differentiating is now not all that differentiating. So we might want to go back to the drawing board on that. So if this little subcommittee meeting that happens every six months, if we go through that and we say, nothing's changed, nothing changed. Nothing changed. Then when I say, great, see, in six months. But if we look at it and we say we're seeing a competitor we didn't used to see, or the gap between us and our competition has changed, therefore our differentiated value looks different, then we need to pause. We need to get the gang back together. We need to redo the positioning that's going to lead to a new sales pitch that's going to lead to new messaging. I would really, really, really resist the urge to mess with messaging or the pitch if the positioning hasn't changed. And this is a natural thing. Like, I used to run marketing teams and it's a natural thing that the marketing people will get sick of your messaging. They just will. I used to have this thing where every once in a while I go to the office and you pull up the homepage and you're like, wait, what? The tagline changed what happened here? And. And the team would be like, oh, we've been saying this same message forever. We've been doing it forever. And I'd say, my people, we've been doing it for four weeks. It's not forever. Just feels like that for you because you're so close to it. We should resist the urge to monkey with positioning that's working. If there's no need to change it, we should not change it and we should just leave it alone. Anyways, that's it for this episode. Hey, listen, if you folks have a question or something that you wish I would cover in these episodes that maybe I haven't touched on, or you read the book and you thought, hey, that's cool, but, you know, you didn't answer this one thing, drop me a line. I'm April@aprildenford.com and let me know and if there's any questions that I can answer and it sounds like these are interesting, then I may make a couple of episodes strictly to answer questions that I'm getting through the email. Thanks so much for joining me and I'll see you soon. I hope you.