← The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
How to Make Your Product Positioning Impossible to Ignore with April Dunford (Founder, Ambient Strategy)
00:55:31
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Email, in my humble opinion, is still the greatest marketing channel of all time. It's the only way you can truly own your audience today. But when it comes to building those emails. Well, if you've ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know just how painful that can be. I won't name names, but templates get too rigid. Editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever when it shouldn't. That's why we love Knack here at Exit 5. Knack is a no code email platform that makes it easy to create on brand high performance forming emails without the bottlenecks. If you're frustrated by clunky email builders, you need nac. If you're tired of hoping the email you sent looks good across all devices, just test it in NAC first. And if you're a big team that's making it hard to collaborate and get approvals on your email, you definitely need nac. The best part? Everything takes a fraction of the time. You can see Knack in action@knack.com exit5. That's knock.com exit5. Or just let them know you heard about Knack from exit5. That's us. You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.
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Hey, it's Dave.
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Quick note before we get into this episode. This is a recording from Drive 2025, our annual event here at Exit 5. This was recorded live in Burlington, Vermont at Hula as part of our event and we'd love to have you at next year's event. We're bringing it back to Vermont Stow, Vermont. You can go to exit5.comdrive to get more information, put your name on the wait list and maybe make it to next year's event. But we're bringing the audio recordings from these sessions to you live. Well recorded on the podcast because we thought it'd be a fun wait to show you the stuff we talk about at DRIVE and give you a sense of what it was like if you didn't get to be there. And if you were there, then you get to now relisten and maybe take notes again. So this is one of the sessions from drive. Go and check it out, get tickets, put your name on the wait list for next year. Exit5.com Drive all right, here we go.
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Super excited. Look, this next speaker is someone that I have virtually. You don't know this and have to blow up your head Virtually learned a whole lot from over the years and she's an expert in the if you can Just stay in the room for a minute. We got time. Unless you really got to poop your pants, just stay in here because after this, we're free all night and I want to have everybody in here and then we're done. We're hanging out. So our next speaker is the world's foremost authority on product positioning, where, which I could make the argument is the most important topic to running a business. We had a long conversation about this at dinner the other night. Every time I've had her on my podcast, it becomes one of the most listened to episodes ever. I think I first had her on my podcast in maybe 20, and if I go sort by most popular episodes, it still is that. And every time I do something with her, people tell me, I bought her book. It was amazing. I wish I could hire her, but she's full. And as a consultant, she helps companies, makes complex products easy to understand and love. After a 25 year career as VP of Marketing, she has consulted with over 300 tech companies including Google, Epic Games, IBM, Postman and others. You've probably read her book, the bestselling book, obviously awesome, which delves into the art of positioning. And it's on my shelves all bookmarked and dog bearded. Helped Dan and I a lot when we were at Privy, actually. And she has a newly released book a couple of years ago called Sales Pitch, which reveals the secrets to crafting a winning sales narrative in the market. She's going to share her top lessons learned from working on positioning with 300 companies. Get your phones and notebooks ready. I'm super pumped to have her here. It's an honor. Please give it up for April Dunford.
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DJ kc. All I do is win, win, win, no matter what. Got money on my mind I can never get. Hi. If you gotta poop your pants, don't feel bad, just go and do it. I'm not gonna be offended at all.
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You know, I'm the last speaker, so when you're the last speaker, like you get to do what you want. So Vermont, right?
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So great. So great. This whole conference, like, what a vibe. It's so good. Let's have a little for exit pod.
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I've been having it. I've been having a cool time, except for this part. I'm a little bit nervous because I'm doing a brand. This is a brand new thing. Kind of came up with this idea a little while ago and I said, dave, I want to do brand new talk. And he's like, yeah, sure, okay. And I'm like, but it's going to suck.
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But so coming a little slack on this. But some of you know me, some of you don't. If you do know me, it's probably because of this book. So I spent, as Dave mentioned, 25 years, ish, as a repeat vice president of marketing at a series of venture backed startups. I think I did seven. And I made the switch to consulting about 10 years ago. Now when I was in house, kind of my jam was positioning. It sort of ended up being that very much so at the end. So at the end, if you hired me as the VP of marketing is because I kind of had this process of doing positioning. And so the founder would say, I think we have a positioning problem. And I could talk real smart about that. I say, oh, here's how we're going to solve it. I got this little thing, step one, step two. So when I decided to switch to consulting, I thought, well, positioning is the thing I'm going to focus on because I kind of know something about that. And I had positioned a dozen or so two dozen products when I was in house. And so then I came out and I spent a few years just kind of flailing around like I was trying to figure out how do I actually teach this as a consultant, how do I do it? Is there a methodology I could teach people that's sort of step one, step two, step three. And I worked with 70, 80 companies doing that. Now that's a lot because like as an in house marketer, you don't do positioning every day. Like that's not a thing you do all the time. That's why people kind of suck at it. It's not a thing you do all the time. And so I did seven, eight companies. I thought, I got it, I know how to do this, I know how to teach it. I've been there, I've done that, I've seen all the things. And so then I wrote this book and that was my attempt to teach other people how to do it. And it was the book I wish I had. When I was junior marketer and I was trying to figure out how to do positioning, I wrote this book 2019. I put it out 2020. You know, we got Covid. And sometimes people ask me this question, when should we shift our positioning? And I said, well, you shift the positioning when big things happen, right? And so the big thing could be you put out a new release and there's a lot of new stuff and that changes the value you can provide. So we got to shift our positioning or it's you have competitors and your competitors all of a sudden caught up with you and something big happened. Maybe they made an acquisition, maybe you made an acquisition, so we got a shift. Or the worst is when outside crap hits the fan. And often that's like all of a sudden we've got a recession. So people used to care a lot about making money. Now they care a lot about saving money because we're in a recession. Or a new regulation compliance stuff comes up, the government says, you have to do this now. And everybody's like, oh no, now they really care about that. That's priority now. Or something like Covid hits. So I was working with companies that were selling into the travel business. All of a sudden we don't have a travel business because we didn't travel at all for like two years. I worked with a company that did software for stadiums. Now the stadiums are all closed. Sorry.
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So all of a sudden it's 2020 and B2B companies en masse. All of a big positioning problem. Everybody's wrestling with their positioning. So I got really busy. And so I'm working with a lot of companies. So fast forward five years now, I've worked with like 300 companies. And that's a lot. And what I started to see after the book came out in 2019 is some of the stuff I learned after I wrote the book was actually really surprising. So I started to see this other set of patterns kind of pop out that for whatever reason, I didn't notice them in the first 80, but I noticed them after a while. So I thought it would be fun to do a talk about five of those things. I'm going to kind of randomly select five of these things. Hopefully one of these things kind of resonates with you. So we're going to do that. So here's the first one. The truth matters. Now, you're all a bunch of marketers, right? You're not dummies. We're not out there lying about stuff out in the market. Not on purpose. Nobody's going to say I'm a look in the mirror and say I'm a dirty rotten liar. Lie all the time. But you know what? I've worked with 300 companies. Almost all of them tell me their competitors are dirty rotten liars.
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They do. We're not doing it, but they're doing it. And not only that, a lot of the times what you've got is the marketers are very frustrated because they have a thing that's legitimately differentiating. It's Legitimately cool. But they're scared as heck to go out and message around it because the competitors go, yeah, us too. Now we do that too. So let me give you an example. So this was one, I worked with this company and they had a thing and it was for optimizing this process that had kind of five steps. And so the status quo thing, I love Jen's talk, by the way. Let's talk about status quo. We spent a lot of talk about status quo, me and my clients. But the status quo thing they were competing against was point of sale solutions. So most of these companies had one solution to do step one, another solution to do step two, another do step three, another step four, another to step five. And so this is really inefficient. It was driving everybody crazy. So customers are really mad at this. All they want to do is automate this thing and make it go away. And it's really hard to do because you got five point solutions. So we're doing the positioning on this. So step one, what's the alternative? Well, status quo thing is these five point solutions. But they said, you know, it's really hard alternative. We've got, we got a competitor that has all five. So you can buy one thing from them. It's actually five things, but you could buy it from one vendor. And I like, okay, that's the competition. So what have you got that they don't have? And they said, well, we're the only one where it's a platform. It's all one thing. We actually just extended the platform to do all five things. And I'm like, okay, that's cool. So then I'm like, well, what's the value of having it as a platform instead of five things? And they said, well, you know, it's a common data layer. Like, dude, that's not value. Like, so what? You got a common data. It's all like, so what? They're like, well, so if something happens in step one, we already know it in step five. So you actually need that in order to do automation. I'm like, oh, that's really cool. And so they're like, so we have a thing that it used to take people four weeks to get it done and now they can do it in four hours, you know, a day. Like way more efficient, save all kinds of money. Okay, that's great. Sounds good. Marketing guys sitting there like this, look, we can't say that. And I said, why not? And he goes, do it. Bring up the competitor's website and the competitor's website says we make that thing more efficient, you know, and they're like, we can't say that because they say that and it's the exact same thing. And I said, yeah, but when they say it, it's not true. And when you say it is true. And then the product guys. Well, it's kind of true. When they say it, it's kind of true. They've got some APIs and you can make them do it, you can make it happen, but it's going to take an army of consultants. It's going to take you six months. So when they say that all the things connect with all the things and they call it a platform, it is. You can make it work. No one does it. Not zero of their customers have done it. Pain in the head. No, no one's going to do it. But yes, it's actually true. You can make it happen, but nobody does. And I'm like, oh, so what we have is actually the situation where your competitor has given you a hand grenade. All we got to do is pull. So what do we do? So step one, really tight on the differentiated value. Really tight. When they were talking about differentiated value, they weren't like they were just talking about features. So they were saying, we have a platform and they're just expecting that the customer knows the value of the platform. So instead we were talking about automating the end to end process and shaving four weeks off this thing. Right. Which the other guys. Yeah, they can automate the end to end process with a lot of professional services and all the other stuff, but they can't shave four weeks off of it. So, okay, that's step number one, really tight on the thing. Step number two, we're going to teach the customer how to identify the lie.
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So what do we do? We have a whole bunch of content that talks about how do we automate this process. What happens if we were to do that? You've got five things right now and they've all got APIs. Couldn't we just write some custom code? So then we talk about how bad that is. Let's think about that. That's bad. And then we would say, and we built a buyer's guide and a bunch of things. How do you actually know if this is. And then we taught the salespeople because we always got into these deals and we're gonna bake off against the other guys. So the salespeople, the beginning of their sales pitch was, okay, we wanna make this process really efficient, right? Yes. Customer's like yes, we would like to just automate it and have it go away. Okay, number one, why aren't we automating it right now? We're not automating it right now. Cause it's five different things, and they don't talk to each other. There's five different logins. And so, you know, it's a pain in the ass. They're like, oh, okay, that's good. Then we're like, look, we work with a lot of companies just like you, and we see they're either doing it like that. Now, listen, there's some companies out there will tell you that they have a platform, and they'll tell you that you can automate all these things, but you should ask some questions. So you should ask this question. Will it take professional services to make that happen? And how much does that cost? Ask that. Here's a good question. Next time you're meeting with one of those vendors, ask them this. How many logins are there? Is it one or is it five? It's a fun question to ask. You should ask them that. And so then we say, okay, but we're the only ones that actually have this. And then we talk about the value. We talk about whatever. And so they started bringing this up in sales meetings. They started messaging around marketing. And they win every time. They win every time. And the sales guy had this call with him afterwards, and the VP Sales, like, this old dude, he's really crusty. He's one of these, like, old sales guys. Been in there, done that, got the scars, man. And he never smiles. And we're having this Zoom call, and this company had a slogan, and it was called. The slogan was Driving Customer Delight. It was like the. I don't know, mission statement or something. Driving Customer Delight. So he shows up on the Zoom call. He's got one of the Zoom backgrounds, and over his head it says, driving Customer Delight. And he says, God.
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And I said, how's it going with the new sales pitch? And he says, you know what customers love? I said, what, John? What do the customers love? They love calling vendors on their bullshit. Says they go, I tell them the thing. I'm like, hey, ask your other vendors how many logins? And they come back and they are delighted. They're laughing. They're like, we asked about many logins, and they said five. And we said, they're eliminated from the sales process.
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He's like. He's doing the invitation of the customer. He's like, I'm going to win it this quarter. They win what to Drive customer delight prize from the company. Anyways, so if you have. So this is the thing. It's remarkable to me how often it comes up that we're shying away from saying the thing that we do that is actually really differentiated. We really valuable, but we got this fear. What do the other guys do? Say that. It's like, well, if they say that, let them have it. Okay, second one, your best differentiators are baffling to buyers, even the really technical ones. And this Diane, yesterday she had the messaging talk. Yes, where are you? Hello? She mentioned this yesterday and I was like, oh goody, I'm going to talk about this too. So here's the thing. We sometimes have this thing and you'll see it, especially when companies are selling really, really technical audiences, you'll sometimes have this thing that they'll say, customers are going to come and they're really technical and they've got a checklist of features. And they're going to come and they want to know, do we meet the checklist of features? And so we got to tell them features. And yeah, we can do value, but then we sound like everybody else. And so, you know, we got to just do the feature. But here's the problem. Your best thing, the thing that makes you special and unique is something that other people don't have. So nobody knows why it's important. Customers don't know it. So I'll give you an example. I work with this company and they used to do the feature checklist thing. And one of the things on their feature checklist was think we're the only people on the planet to have fuzzy logic algorithm. Nobody knows what a fuzzy logic algorithm is. We're the only guys that do it. And we're a 12 person company, nobody knows us, nobody knows what fuzzy logic is. And so customers would come. We're selling a data warehouse and they had all these other features on the checklist that we didn't have. And you know why we didn't have it? Because we didn't need it. Because we had a fuzzy logic algorithm. Nobody knows that. So they come in there like, have you got roll up function? No, actually we don't. Do we have a cube function? No, we were eliminated. That's stupid, right? So we had to teach people why a fuzzy logic algorithm worked. It is not our job in marketing and sales to be order takers. That's not what we're here for. We're not here to just take the order. We'll come in, check the box. We're Taking the order, like our best stuff. We actually have to teach the customers why it's important, because even if they're really technical, they don't know what that is. So in my thinking, just my super, super simplified, dumb, dumb thinking on this is, it kind of works like this. I got a feature, and then I got pure, pure marketing, Marketing textbook value. Now here's the problem. Pure, pure marketing textbook value. If we're B2B, we're all the same because we only have two points of value. We're either helping you make money or we're helping you save money. That's it. That's all we got. So if I just put on the website, we're going to help you make money. Everybody's going to be, yeah, us too. We're going to help you save money. Yeah, us too. Us too. Now, the insurance people were here and they'd say, what about risk? I'm like, okay, there's three. But fine, it's mainly just you. And so here's how this works with a feature. So if I tell you my phone has 3,000 megapixels, you know what that means? Because you've been taught and you know that 3,000 megapixels is better than 20. And you know why? You know, because you zoom in and the pictures are going to be really sharp and all that kind of stuff. So if I'm Apple and I'm running an ad, I can just say 3,000 megapixels. And you're like, well, that's good. Why? Because you've been taught. Now if I roll it back 15 years or 20 years or whenever it was that people didn't have digital phones, you couldn't say that. You couldn't say 200 megapixels or a megawatt, what is it? And you had to say, oh, this is why. And so in that case where everybody knows the feature and they know what it is, you can just state the feature. Everybody knows how to translate the feature to value. We all know why it's important. But if you've got a fuzzy logic algorithm or whatever the heck your thing is that makes you special and different, everyone's going to look at you and say, I don't know. Now, here's where it gets really tricky. I can't go all the way to pure value because they sound like everybody else, too. So what I actually got to find is a sweet spot in the middle, which was a little tricky. So what happens is it's like, okay, I got a fuzzy logic algorithm, so What? So I can do a really fast query on a mountain of data without using roll up and cube function. So what? Well, so if a customer calls in and has a question, I can answer it while they're on the phone instead of having to call them back in two days. Ah, now the customer knows how to translate that to value. So I'm looking for this sweet spot point where I maintain my differentiation. So I don't sound like everybody else, but I'm going far enough for the customer to do the leap to make money, save money. That's why this is actually really, really hard. And so a lot of times what you'll get is everyone will say, well, we're just going to talk about the feature. It's a cop out. It's a cop out. It's lazy. We actually have to do this. This is really hard and it sucks, but we have no choice. We really want to be differentiated. We really want to answer the question, not why pick us, but why pick us over the other ways we could solve the problem? You got to nail this, which is differentiated value. Okay, that's number two. Number three, overthinking your market categories, like, actually will kill you. And so this concept of creating a market category, it's less popular now, but a few years ago, people went really nuts on this. And there was this thinking around that there was no way to win a market unless you were the category leader. And so only the category leader is making any money and everybody else is not making any money is simply not true. In fact, I was getting at so much, I was like, is it true? Maybe it is true. Maybe all the companies I worked at that were just working in a sub segment of a really, really big market and made hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe we were all just weirdos. So I went and I did analysis and at the time, I looked at all the companies, tech companies that went public on the nasdaq. So, you know, they're not necessarily big, but big enough to go public. All those companies, how many of those companies had invented a new market category and were playing in this new market category at the time they went public? And 92% were not. So 92% were playing an existing market category and the other 8% had new categories. So it's not like we never do this. Sometimes we do do this. But 92% were playing an existing category, and those were companies like Snowflake, a data warehouse for the cloud. We know what data warehousing is. That's an existing market category for the cloud. Didn't stop them from being the fastest growing tech company ever in the history of the land. Now, if you look what they're doing now, now they're creating market category because they absolutely dominate cloud data warehousing. Now they're trying to create the market category that's different. Right? So sometimes what we have is we don't like the market category we're in because it feels really crowded and we're like, dang, how are we going to win? Cause there's all these big companies. So let me give you an example. This company I worked with and they were in the sales enablement space and so we did this workshop. So we started with, again, if you didn't exist, what would the customer do? So status quo was throw a bunch of stuff on a shared drive, free, easy, whatever. But once the company gets a little bit bigger, really hard to manage, really hard to tell if people are using the right stuff, whatever. Just training material for your salespeople. And then their competitors beyond that were terrifying. So seismic. Who had raised almost a billion high spot, 600 million, they'd raised big tin can. 400 million, they had raised mindsicle, 300 million. They raised little company I'm working with had raised $1 million. What bootstrappers, basically friends and family round. And they're competing with that now. You might look at that and say, well, that's pretty scary. Maybe we don't want to be in that market. But we didn't start with the market category. We're trying to get to differentiated value. Then we're going to make a decision about market category. So we back it up. Who are you competing against? You competing with shared drive or you're competing with these scary dudes? Second, what do we got that they don't have differentiated capability? So the answer in this case was they were the only sales enablement platform built on top of Salesforce. That's the feature. So then you're the customer and you're like, so what? Well, means again, common data platform. So what does that mean? It means you can tie your sales enablement data to your actually sales performance data to answer a question which is like, did the sales enablement work? Did it improve time to first deal? Did it improve time for the salesperson to make quota? That's actually crunchy value. That's actually big deal value. So we got there and it's like, that sounds really compelling. And I'm selling to the head of sales enablement. Like that sounds like something the head of sales enablement cares a lot about. And then we were like, okay, who are we selling to? We're selling to technology companies that hire a lot of salespeople. They're growing really fast. So they have a need to get a lot of salespeople ramped up really quickly. They have the. Have the problem in space or whatever. And we are a really small company, but we've got a good objection handling thing in that if someone says, well, you're really small and it sounds kind of risky. Our big customer was Salesforce.
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All right, it's that time of year. Everybody's scrambling to wrap it up, justify budgets, get those plans in last minute and quietly hope that the numbers are going to hold going into 2026. But here's the uncomfortable change truth. Most marketing teams still don't actually know what's driving real results and what's just taking credit. There's a difference. And you can't make smart calls for next year if you're just guessing about what's working, what's not, and where to put your next dollar. Paramark has built something to fix that. It's their free incrementality calculator. And it takes two minutes. And it's going to give you a simple reality check on one question. If you stopped a campaign with the results, stop still happen. Anyway, I can think of a few ideas in my head right now that I would like to run this through. Maybe branded. Branded search would be one of them anyway. That's incrementality and it's how the best marketers are cutting waste, tightening budgets and figuring out which programs actually deserve to make it into next year. You'll get a quick read on whether you're ready for incrementality testing and how much money you could be saving right now. So go and check it out.
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A
Completely free.
- [26:11]
D
Free, free tool from Paramark. It's Paramark.com calculator. That's Paramark.com calculator.
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C
So everybody was using Salesforce. It was kind of like we might look risky but Salesforce didn't, you know, so we, we got a good proof point on that. So then we got to the market category and we're like, should we pick another market category? And in the end, you know, me and the founder were talking about it and we're like, well, the founder says, look, I actually think we have such big value. We can beat these guys anytime we're up against them. We just want to get invited to the party. So how are we going to get invited to the party if we don't Call ourselves sales enablement. And so in the end we're sales enablement. Their tagline was sales enablement that drives results. If you go on their website is like 300% improvement and time to first deal and all this other stuff. But it turned out being in the crowded market category wasn't a problem at all. In fact, it actually helped that company. So they started growing really quickly because there's a really crunchy differentiated value. You can imagine they're sitting across from the head of sales enablement. This is how the salespeople pitch it. Sit across to the head of sales name and hey, sales enablement. How to sales name it? Sales name is really important, right? And they're like, yeah, idiot, that's my job. Okay. Yeah. So it's really. Why is it really important? Because every day your reps are not making quota cost money. It's a nice little calculation to show you how much money you know it takes an extra week texting everyone. Yeah. And look, so what are you going to do to solve the problem? Well, you can put all this stuff on the drive that doesn't scale very much or you could use any of these guys. But when your boss comes to you and asks, did the sales enablement program work? How do you answer that question? Do you want to answer that question? If you do, we're the only way. It's super compelling. So they go up against any of these people, they win every time. They just got to get in. So anyways, revenue goes like this. They got acquired by Salesforce. Imagine that. They didn't have to share any money with the VCs. Everybody's like 30 years old and they're sitting on a beach drinking out a coconut. Anyway, so here we are. So here we are. So lesson number four, this is more for a multi product company. But if you're a multi product company, you need a clear go to market strategy before you can tackle positioning. So lots of companies will call me and they got multiple products and they say, hey April, we want to do positioning. I'm like, great. And then so they're describing we got the company with all these products. And I'm like, good, so what are we positioning? And you can see they've kind of never thought about that before. So if you have multiple products, there's actually a bunch of big decisions that have to happen before you can tackle positioning. So it looks a bit like this if you're a single product company. I have one product, the company positioning and the product positioning kind of the same. Like think About Slack before they got acquired by Salesforce. Slack the product, slack the company, same positioning, it's all one thing. Aren't separate things. Now sometimes you might have a founder that says, look man, I did have a founder that tell me this once said, look, I know we only have one thing but we want to be the Dyson Labs of that thing. So we're going to have a thousand things. We did one now, but once this one successful, we're going to have another one, another one, another. You know how hard it is make one thing successful. Like 98% of startups fail. All that stuff. I'm like, how about we just be the vacuum cleaner company and if we ever get the hair dryer thing coming in number two, we'll worry about that later, right? So it is fine. This should all be one thing. But when you have multiple products, if you sell those multiple products to the same kind of customers, you might have company positioning as an umbrella and then product one positioning, product two positioning, product three positioning. Like when I worked at IBM we had company positioning. Why do you want to work with IBM? We have hardware, software services. Here's how you want to work with us. And then we had software group positioning and then we had database division positioning and then I had my actual product positioning underneath that. It was just one beautiful cascading thing. Now that sounds fine, but a lot of times we don't actually have that even when we have multiple products because sometimes what we have is we have a lead product and then we have follow on products. So let's take Salesforce as an example, but not Salesforce today let's run Salesforce. Like I don't know before they bought Slack, if you looked at Salesforce's homepage, the only thing they talked about was sales cloud. Where the world's number one CRM. If you looked at all their advertising, where the world's number one CRM, they had lots of other products. They had marketing cloud, they had service cloud, but their lead product was sales cloud because it was easy to sell. They had double the market share of all the other CRMs combined. So they weren't trying to make this difficult and try to sell you the whole thing. Try to say, hey, we have a menu of three things. Which would you like? They say forget about everything else, just buy the CRM, man. Like let's not make this complicated. Just buy the CRM that's the lead product. Now once they got you with lead product, everything else is positioned as cross sell or an add on because it's easier. So maybe they don't have the world's greatest marketing automation. They don't. But I don't have to make the case for it to be the world's greatest marketing automation. I'm the world's greatest now all I got to do is position that thing as the world's greatest marketing automation for companies that have Salesforce CRM, even though it ain't always that either. But, you know, but we could at least attempt to position it that way. So you got to make that decision. And if you look at the company positioning for Salesforce in that era, the company physician was really all around the CRM. They weren't trying to be everything to everybody. It was just really all around the CRM. Now, sometimes that's not the way you want to do it. Like sometimes you've got a whole bunch of things and you've bundled that together into something you're calling a platform or a suite. And I'm trying to sell you a whole bundle of stuff together. Again, that's a different go to market strategy. It's a little bit like what Salesforce is trying to do right now. They have this thing called Customer360. Does anybody understand it? Nobody. Then it's way harder positioning, right? It's hard. It's like, what is that thing? And I got a genie and a thing and he's in the middle, he's waving a magic wand and all that stuff is coming together. I don't know how it comes together. But it's harder, right? It's harder than just saying, I'm just going to sell you the CRM. They can sell you all this stuff either. But the problem is as well, I don't know, maybe you just got slack and now I want to. Now I don't know. There's so many products, it's hard. They should call me.
- [32:32]
Going on the Internet. So here you are. My point is, here you are, you're the marketing person and maybe somebody's telling you, oh, we get you figure this positioning thing out. Like, if you haven't answered these questions, then you can't go do that. We got to answer those questions first. Like, do we have a wedge product and everything's an add on? Is this thing actually. We call it a platform? Is it actually a platform? Do we want to sell it like a platform or is it individual things and with individuals, like, we got to answer these questions first. And the CEO is going to have an opinion about that and the CEOs going to have an opinion about that you can't make that decision on your own. So these things are really important to get right before you tackle positioning. Like, what are we positioning? Let's figure that out first. And I got. I got the last thing. And then we're going to go to questions. So last one is a great story with weak positioning. This is counterintuitive, but really great story built on weak positioning actually advantages your competition. It really sucks. This is actually really disappointing and awful when it happens. But there's so many examples of it in tech where, you know, and it's a lot of category creators end up having this happen, right? Like, you come up with this great idea, you have this really compelling story that says, look, the world has never had one of these before, and now we're going to have one of these, and it's going to be amazing. And that story becomes so inspiring and so awesome, and everybody rushes to you and you have this fleeting moment of super joy and then a thousand million billion competitors come up and go, me too. And the story wasn't anything specific to you. The story applies to them just as much as it applies to anybody else. And so there's lots of examples of this. Like, you know, one of the ones that I was really surprised at, like, if you're really old, you might remember this, but only if you're really old. Like, in the early days of the Internet, IBM coined the term E business. And then they had this big campaign about E business. And even now, if you google it, ChatGPT will tell you it was a really successful campaign. They're wrong.
- [34:35]
So it was a successful campaign for IBM, but the problem was it was such a good story and it was so true. And it was like, the Internet changes everything. And they were the first people to grasp that. And they came out with this big story about we're going to do business in a completely different way because there's an Internet man. And they came out, and then five years later, you never associated E business with IBM. Really? Really. If you want to do E Commerce, recall IBM. Nah. And so internal to IBM, because I was working at IBM, shortly after that, they considered that a big failure because they had created the story, but there was nothing in the story that really advantaged them. And so it became a great story in the market for everybody and not just them. So if we're going to take the time to build a really great narrative, we got to build a great narrative that is only good for us. And the other guys can't tell that story. So I'll give you an example. So I've done a lot of database startups, but my first ever company I ever worked at, we were selling a database. And somebody had told us that in the pitch we had to start with a problem. So we're like, okay, what's the problem that a database solves? Storing a lot of data, you know. So we had this slide that was like, here's the problem. Data's going up, it's going up, it's going up, up, up. You know what you need database. And then we would just show you a whole bunch of features, whole bunch of features, until you said uncle and paid us some money. And so that's how it worked. And so any database could solve that problem. You know, we were like, oh, and sometimes people have been taught this, that instead of the problem, what you should do is change in the world. But it's the same thing. You know what's changing, man? We're storing a lot of data more and more every year. So we need a database. You know, we're telling this story, but in no way did it set us apart in the way we defined the change in the world and the way we define the problem. And so our differentiation certainly didn't come out in the way we phrased that. Later I got this job at IBM and was also selling a database. And this is a terrible time to be selling databases. Databases at this point are completely commodity, right? All the databases in the land are exactly the same. Like if you were doing a feature function checklist of US versus Oracle, there's 9,000 checkbox on there, the same. There might be two little checkboxes that are different, like they're the same. And so how do we tell a story that makes us sound really different when the products are like 99% overlapping? Here's how we did it. So again, start with your positioning. Who are we against Oracle? What have we got that they don't have? Well, the thing we actually had was kind of a little bit of a different philosophy that resulted in a few different features. So Oracle was trying to sell you the whole stack, the database plus the application. They very closed system. But the idea was it was cheaper, you didn't have to do integration. So their thing was, we're going to sell you the whole thing. A big closed box. One vendor, everything just works well together out of the box. IBM, we didn't sell applications, so we sold you a database that was going to play nice with whatever else you had. And so because that was our philosophy, we were really into openness. We were really into open standards. We had great APIs, we sat on all the standards bodies. We were really about open system, open, open, open. Like we couldn't say it enough. We're all open. So that's the differentiator, better APIs, open standards, all that stuff. What's the value of that? So what, what's the value of that? Well, the value of that is this data plays really nice with all the stuff you have now and all the stuff you're going to have in the future too. Now we were selling the bigger companies than Oracle was at the time when I was there. And so Oracle was selling the companies that didn't care that much maybe about innovation, but did care a lot about is it going to be lower, total cost of ownership or whatever. We were selling a big, big companies that were very worried about vendor lock in. And so we built this story, the first setup of a sales call with an IBM salesperson. We didn't show the stupid thing with the data is growing, that's dumb. So we would come in and we'd say, yeah, yeah, you got a lot of data. We know data scrolling like this. Now you know those guys know it, they're the database administrator. They're all sitting there like, no shit, Sherlock. Yeah, we all got a lot of data. Yeah, yeah, it is going like this. Why, why are we sorting all this data? Why? Well, we work with all the companies, let me tell you why. Because we're going to do stuff with it. We're going to do machine learning with it, we're going to do AI with it. It's actually not data, It's a strategic business asset. We're going to predictive analytics on it. We're going to predict the future with this data because we've had seven years of it and now we can look at it and we can look for patterns and we can do all this stuff. It's amazing. Now what exactly are we and what exactly are you going to do with it? Nobody knows because we can't predict the future. But we know we're going to do stuff with it. Do we know what the toolkit is we're going to do it with? No. So if you're building a strategic business asset, you're saving all this data, you spend all this money and you save all the data. Do you know what's the only thing that matters? Openness. You gotta be able to get at it and use it. Do I want to put in a box that's all closed? No. So I Took my tiny little differentiator, made it the only thing that mattered. This is what we're trying to do in a good story. So that story really works because Oracle can't tell it. In fact, nobody can tell it except us. Anyways, that's an end, man. There's five random things here. They are teacher prospects. To tell the truth, the value of your best differentiators aren't obvious. Don't overthink. Your market categories actually will kill you. Go to market strategy first, positioning second. And you might have to get your CEO on board with that. And a really great story is not just a great story. It's a great story only you can tell. And that's it. I'm going to take questions. But before I take the questions, little announcement. Oh, you get it first. I've actually not announced this at all to anybody, mainly because I'm so lazy. I don't even do social media anymore. It's so bad.
- [40:43]
B
So she said the other day, I don't. I haven't done marketing like a year.
- [40:47]
C
True. It's true. Yeah. So it's funny because this QR code will take you to sign up to my newsletter, which I haven't sent out a newsletter in like six months. I don't know. But. But I. I'm going back to this book because there's a bunch of stuff that I know now that I didn't know then. In 2019, I'm going back to this book and I'm going to add some of this stuff. The other thing I'm going to do is a lot of people, and you might be one of these people. A lot of people read this book. And then they sent me an email and they said on page 136, you said this thing. And I'm like, no, I said that. But he didn't mean that. What he meant was this other thing read my mind. And so I'm going to fix that too. And so I'm doing a updated and expanded. Obviously, awesome is coming in February and I will send out a notice to my email list. You know, once a year I do that and I'll do that before this thing comes out. So if you want to be reminded, and don't worry, I'm not going to fill up your inbox.
- [41:50]
B
Yeah, take a picture of that.
- [41:51]
A
Get on.
- [41:51]
B
April says, I'll give you a minute to do that.
- [41:53]
C
I might start. Right.
- [41:54]
B
We'll save your applause for the end. Let's do questions for April. Yeah.
- [41:56]
C
No, no. You want the applause now?
- [41:59]
B
No, it's like, all right, both.
- [42:01]
C
You could do both.
- [42:04]
B
I'm always torn when to do it because, like, I feel like sometimes you wait, like, you do a big one early and then Q and A, and it's less. I want the one big one says. And then you're like, yeah, we'll get you two.
- [42:12]
C
We'll get you two. And you can ask me a question about anything. It doesn't have to be the five things. Hey, April.
- [42:18]
E
So I've always been a huge advocate for positioning. And kind of the problem I've run into is heavy in advertising. Working with clients, getting their subject matter experts, the executives and people to be. To lean in and just be more involved in that process. It always seems like it's getting pushed, pushed off. Like, just do your job. Just run the ads. And I don't understand. I feel like a crazy person when I ask, like, what makes you different and better? And it's like.
- [42:45]
C
And they can't really answer the question.
- [42:47]
E
So I know this is hard, and it takes time and it's intensive.
- [42:52]
C
Yeah.
- [42:52]
E
And my question would be, like, what would you recommend as, like, an approach to get those individuals more bought into the value positioning?
- [43:02]
C
So it's hard for you if you're on the advertising side. You're really focused on marketing. What I found is nobody gives a shit about positioning until it impacts sales. So if I got hired as the vice president of marketing, I would go in and hang out with sales for the first couple of weeks, and then I would listen for where things are going off the rails in sales. So bad positioning on a sales call looks like this right. Prospect gets on. We got a whole pitch. Whatever salesperson is talking about their stuff, and the customer is making this face, like. And then you get to, like, slide number four or something. And they're like, wait, what, dude? Back up, back up. Go back to the beginning. You're. What are you again? So there's this kind of like, we don't even know what it is. And we don't get to second call with those customers if we don't get the light to come on. Right. So we lose them to no decision. All the stuff we were talking about before, like, now's not a good time or whatever. But it's a lot of times, it's just we already know what the heck this thing is. I couldn't even figure out how to put you in a bucket. Like, second thing in a sales call, you'll get is like, oh, I get what you are. You're just like, Salesforce. And then we're like, oh, dude, let's go back to the beginning. No, we're not Salesforce. You know, so they get what we are, but they're comparing us the wrong way. Or they'll say, I get what you do. I just don't get why we would pay for that. So they don't get the value of it. And so if I see that in sales, then I can take the vice president of sales and go for lunch and say, I'm hearing this and it's killing us in pipeline. Like, are you hearing that? And nine times out of 10, if it's actually a problem, the VP sales is, oh, yeah, it's terrible. Oh, my God. Like, it takes us three calls before the light goes on or whatever, Whatever. And I'm like, okay, dude, this is a positioning problem. Here's what positioning is. They don't know. Tails doesn't know anything about positioning. So here's what it is. Here's how we're going to fix it. Blah, blah, blah. And he's like, great, we could fix that. That'd be great. Then I go to the CEO and I say, we're getting killed over in sales. He says, I don't know. What does John in sales say about that? I'm like, I don't know either, man. Let's call him. But I already got John. I got John in my pocket. Then he calls John and John says. John says, yeah, I've been thinking about this for a while. Think it's positioning. And then we go do the positioning thing. But I could never convince the CEO if it was just a little marketing thing. Now I'm in B2B, mainly in enterprise software. So sales is king in those companies. And so I had to convince them that there was massive sales loss happening because our positioning was smooshy. So we have to fix it. And I'll tell you, like, some companies are going to have a positioning problem, and you just can't talk them into that. And you are never going to be able to do great marketing on top of weak positioning. You got to walk from those clients.
- [45:43]
F
So you mentioned nobody gives a shit about sales or nobody gives shit about you work back to positioning from a sales problem.
- [45:51]
C
Yeah, but. But the root cause of the sales problem is repositioning. If it's like, sometimes we have a sales problem where, you know there's all kinds of other sales problems. Sometimes you get salesperson just a jerk and you're like, we should fire that person. That would be a good way to fix that, you know, so not all sales problems, but if you hear those things like we don't get what you are, we don't know who to compare you to. We don't get the value. We. Those are positioning things. And so if I hear that, then I convince sales to be on board to do the repositioning, then I can get the CEO.
- [46:18]
F
But sorry, that's the reason Dave didn't invite them this. Cause some of them are jerks. Your number point, number four is to get the go to market strategy solved before the positioning. So if the CEO says something's wrong with sales, we realize it's a positioning problem. And then I have to go back and convince them, okay, actually we need to solve this go to market strategy problem. And they go, well, I don't want to solve that now I want you to do the positioning. You want to write a book about that for us?
- [46:43]
When it comes to solving the go to market strategy problem, do you have advice?
- [46:46]
C
Well, so here's my advice on the go to market strategy problem. Most of the time it hasn't been tackled because no one's asked the question. Like most of the time if you just sit down and say like, it seems to me like sometimes you'll see in the sales data, right? It seems to me like everyone buys this first and then they buy the other things. Is there some reason why we're not just having this as the lead product and everything's cross sell upsell? Most of the time CEOs not really thought about that and they're like, yeah, so you know, bringing it up sometimes actually solves the problem. Or there's this thing of like, okay, we got company positioning, we got product positioning. How are we actually going to manage between those two things? We have to solve this first or that first. Like, dude, we're going to do positioning, that's great. But there's more than one thing to position here and a lot of times they haven't thought about that, especially CEOs at a venture backed company because the only pitches they're doing are pitching to investors and that's a totally different pitch. And it's about the whole thing and the big all singing, all dancing thing we're going to be in 10 years. It has nothing to do with the reality of where we're at in the ground right now. So a lot of these things they haven't thought about because they don't know a lot about positioning. Haven't really thought about it. So good smart marketer just show up and ask a dumb question. Like, hey, maybe it's a dumb question, but kind of seems like. And it helps if you give them an example. So I've had lots of CEOs where I give the salesforce example and then they're like, oh shit, that's actually exactly us. But they kind of got to hear an example before light comes on. And they do it. But I'm going to have a chapter on this in the new book. Not a whole book, but you know. Hi. So my company doesn't have a sales team, but we're a multi product enterprise software company. So is it all product line growth? It's all zero touch. I'm sorry, you sell through the channel or is it all zero touch sales? How do you sell? It's all through word of mouth, through our existing customers. But they just come on and sign up. They don't talk to a salesperson. No. Yeah, so they just sign up. So when we're having these conversations with our CEO, where do we even look if we can't look at a sales. Well, here's. And this is why I don't work with companies like you.
- [48:56]
But here's the reality of my process is this process was designed with the assumption that I have a human being that talks to a customer when they're in the purchase process. So they know. Your salespeople know. Who are they getting compared to? They know not perfect, but they know a little bit about how customers make a decision. If you're a pure product like Grove zero touch sales model, that information exists but you're going to have to do customer research to go get it. And so you got to do that first. And so because I don't do customer research and I don't want to do customer research, companies like you call me, I say, I got a friend of mine who does customer research. You should call her.
- [49:38]
Georgiana. Loudish. Very good. But yeah, so. And it's just because I don't do that work. I don't specialize in that. So I only do the ones that have sales teams. But it's the reality of it. The reality of it. Even the first step, which is if you didn't exist, what would a customer do? You don't know. You are just guessing. And there'll be lots of theories about it internally, but everybody's opinion counts the same and nobody cares about marketing's opinion. Right? So the CEO has an opinion, sales whoever product has an opinion. But you don't know unless you actually go and get the data and then that kind of customer research is actually hard to do, and you need to be careful how you do it, because what people want to do is they want to do the customer research, where you go in and you say, what do you love about our product? And they'll tell you a bunch of things, but that is not necessarily and often not the reason they picked you over the alternatives. Like, they'll say, you know what I love? I love you. Easy you. I love your customer support. Oh, my God. I call them. They're amazing. They call me right back. But they had no exposure to your customer support before they actually signed up and everything else. So what made them sign up? And so what you have to do looks more like a jobs to be done interview. You want to say, take me back. Take me back to what were you doing before? What made you wake up in the morning and decided you couldn't keep doing it that way? Like, did jobs? People call it the struggling moment. What was the struggling moment? Then you had that struggling moment, and then what did you do? How'd you make a short list? What were your criteria for making a short list? How did we end up on the short list? How'd you find out about us? How'd you find out about the other guys? You know all this stuff. And then, okay, then it's like, okay, you picked us. Why'd you pick us? And here's a really good question to ask. Why not the other guys? Because often you won the deal because the other guys messed up. Other guys didn't have some other thing. And so you didn't actually win it. They lost it, and then you won. But it's good to know. And then you ask them the question, okay, you went through all of that. You bought us. Was there anything surprising, positive or negative? Which means if it's a negative surprise, it means something in our positioning set you up to make you think that we could do this thing. And then you got into it and whoops. If it's a positive surprise, then it's something we should pull into the positioning because, you know, they should have known about it beforehand. We shouldn't be living the good stuff till after they purchased. But that research is going to have to get done. My stuff assumes that I can do. The cheat code for doing that research is product interacts with customers, Marketing team interacts with customers. Sales interacts with customers. We know a lot about what customers do. That information is not equally distributed amongst the teams. But if I can get the teams together and have product marketing sales CEO all sitting in the same room. I can run them through this process and we can get there. But if I don't have a sales team, all bets are off. I got to go do customer research. I don't want to do that. So call my friend Georgia. Yeah.
- [52:32]
B
All right, let's do a warm one. Give it up for April.
- [52:40]
A
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year.
- [53:39]
D
Go check it out.
- [53:39]
A
Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community.
- [53:46]
C
Foreign.
- [53:52]
B
This episode is brought to you by.
- [53:54]
A
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