The Guide to SaaS Positioning – April Dunford

Todd Chambers
Todd Chambers here, hello!

Welcome to another episode of the Masters of SaaS podcast brought to you by Upraw Media. We interview the very best in SaaS, extract as much value as possible, and share all the learnings ready for you to implement. The episodes are mostly focused on growth, marketing, as well as founder stories and a bunch of other strategic tactical stuff.

In this episode, I speak with legendary positioning expert April Dunford. With a mere 25 years of experience bringing products to market, April held executive roles in a series of successful startups as CEO, CEO, VP marketing and VP of marketing and sales. Trust me, she knows her stuff. And today we're going to learn all about positioning in SaaS. We discuss what exactly is positioning anyway, what are the five components of awesome positioning, how do you tackle it, and in which order, the intersection of jobs to be done and positioning, when you should start positioning in SaaS, choosing the right market positioning concept products, message testing around positioning thesis, radical differentiation and a bunch of other stuff. This was truly an epic episode and must watch, if I may say so myself. Alright, let's do it!

April, welcome to the show.

April Dunford
It's so good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Todd Chambers
No, the pleasure is totally mine. Well, who is April Dunford, and you can take like the surface level path or you can take the philosophical way. Yeah, it's your choice.

April Dunford
Yeah, you know, I'll give you the view from a million feet. You know, I used to be a VP, Vice President of Marketing at a series of startups, I did that for like, 25 years. I think I did seven startups, six of those got acquired. So you know, through acquisition, you end up hanging out with the big companies for a bit. But a few years back, I made the jump to consulting, and now I am a positioning expert. And so what I do is I work with tech companies, I only do positioning work, I don't do anything else. I don't do copywriting or lead gen or anything else. I just do positioning work. Most of the companies I work with are, I would say, growth stage tech companies, SaaS for the most part. You know, the smaller ones are sort of like 1,000,002 million revenue, the bigger ones are like sort of pre IPO, I guess you would call it. Yeah. And we just do positioning work. That's it. That's my jam.

Todd Chambers
I was actually going to ask this towards the end. But how did you kind of transition to being kind of a VP of marketing to a consultant? How did that was a decision making behind that?

April Dunford
Yeah, there was a bunch of things, you know, I, so one thing was that, you know, I get the VP marketing role really early in my career, like for no good reason, like they just made me VP, I shouldn't have been VP, but I'm a VP really early. And then, you know, once you're VP, you don't look back. But I did that job kind of over and over. And, you know, after the last one, I was like, I think I've done this, like, I think I've done this job. And you know, I think companies have done it. Little companies. I've done it at companies that are really techie, I've done companies that are less techie, you know, and I've had big teams, I've had small teams, I've had big budgets of its small budgets, and I just couldn't get excited about going to do the next one. I was like, I think it's time for change to do something else, you know, so I spent some time thinking about what that something else might be. And in particular, I had spent the last few years of me being a VP, trying to teach positioning as a concept, because it's a really hard thing to do. Not a lot of people are very good at it. It's not taught, well, at all. It's not really taught at all, but it's not taught well. And so what I did decide to make the jump to consulting, I thought, well, here's the thing that, you know, I know a lot about, I've done a lot of positioning work in my job. So I know a lot about this thing. I have kind of a methodology that I've been using for the past 10 years, myself. And I think this would be a useful thing to go teach people because nobody knows how to do it. And so I thought, okay, that's that'll be the thing that I focus on. So there we are.

Todd Chambers
Well, thank you for that. Just for context, as well, we were introduced by one of our clients, Landbot, you've done some positioning work for them.

April Dunford
Yeah. Yeah. I love those guys.

Todd Chambers
Yeah, they're a great team. And they spoke very, very highly of you. So after I heard that, I was very keen to have you on the show. So this is an interesting question. How did you position yourself as a positioning consultant? Like, really random question, Did you have like, a bank of content and you were already kind of known in that space, are you like, okay, I want to become a positioning consultant, like kind of going to to eat my own dog food, like how was that?

April Dunford
Yeah. So you know, it does kind of work the same as positioning, tech product is not actually any different. Right. So I, you know, I think this is something that maybe consultants should spend more time on. So, you know, the first thing is you got to sit down and say, okay, like, "what's different about me? What have I got that other consultants don't have". And if I go out and look in the land, you know that there's, I'm not qualified to be a copywriter, I write lousy copy, I have an engineering degree, you don't want me to write your copy, right? So there's all these things that as a VP marketing, I had people on my team that would do but then it's kind of like, Well, why would you actually want to hire me? Like, what can I do that no one else can do. And so I centred on this positioning methodology is the thing like, I've got this, nobody else has this, you know, so I could position around that.

At the beginning, when I first started consulting, like, five, six years ago, positioning kind of wasn't a thing. Like, nobody was talking about positioning, like I had a hard time explaining even what I did, because I'd say I'm a positioning expert, everybody. Oh, it's great. Like, okay, Larry, let's back it up a little bit. So at the beginning, I used to talk about market strategy and go to market strategy. And you know, positioning is kind of step one on that. And so I spent a lot of time kind of speaking at conferences and writing stuff about, here's what positioning is, and here's why it's important. Not, you know, here's why you should hire me just kind of like, what it is. And here's why you should think about it once in a while. And then that just sort of gradually evolved into more and more people, I think, sort of understanding it.

I think there's an element of timing in there, too. Like in marketing, we tend to have these big pendulum swings, like we swing between being really obsessed with tactics to be really obsessed with strategy. And I think right when I started doing consulting, we were coming off a good 10 years of people being stupidly obsessed with tactics, like 10 years of like growth, hacking, and just tactical stuff. And I think people were ready for a swing back to thinking more about the bedrock strategy pieces. And so I think there was a little bit of good timing in there.

And then, a couple of years back, I wrote a book that kind of outlines the methodology. And that book got sort of popular again, I think there's a bit of timing element in that. And then I was doing a lot of public speaking. And so all those things sort of came together to now you know, people sort of know me as, like, the positioning lady.

Todd Chambers
You positioned as the positioning lady. And I'm definitely interested to hear more about kind of how that came about and how that process was. But obviously, I'm going to ask you now kind of obligatory question, which is, what is positioning? I think, yeah, it's pretty misunderstood. If you ask 100 different people probably get like 2530 different answers. So what is positioning?

April Dunford
Yeah, yeah. So the thing that people mainly confuse positioning with is messaging. So they think it's the same as messaging, which in my mind, it's not at all like, if you came to me and said, Hey, April, write messaging, I'd say, "okay, great. So who's it for?". And you'd have to know! And then I'd say, "well, what's it about?". And so "oh, I got a message about this product? Okay, who does it compete with? And why is it different and better", like, you need to be able to tell me all these things before we can go right messaging.

So in my mind, positioning is sort of this foundational, almost everything we do in marketing and sales, it's kind of the input to that. So my definition of positioning goes like this. So positioning defines how your product is the best in the world, at delivering some value that a well defined set of customers cares a lot about. So that's a big mouthful of a definition. But most of the time, when I'm talking to non marketing people, and I'm trying to explain it, it's the best way to think about it is like context setting for products, right? Like, if you encounter something brand new, you've never encountered it before, you'll look for clues in the context about what it's all about, you know, so you know, what's the price of this thing? And what are the features? And who do they compare themselves to? And what customers do they serve? And you'll piece that all together and kind of answer the big questions like, what is this so that you can pay attention to the little stuff?

It's a lot like, you can think of it as like the opening scene of a movie, right? You walk in off the street, you sit down, let's go down. And you don't know anything about this thing. Yeah, you maybe saw the trailer, right? But you don't know anything about the thing. And so the opening scene of a movie, the job of the opening scene is to kind of set context so you can get a feel for where am I what time frame is this? And who are these people? And how should I be feeling and then I can settle in and pay attention to the details. So the opening scene of almost every American movie starts with a panning shot of the city skyline. And you'll be like, oh, Empire State Building. We're in New York. Oh, Golden Gate Bridge. We're in San Francisco, you know, oh, it's the beach, whatever. It's Miami. And so And why is that? It's because a movie that takes place in New York is really different from a movie that takes place in Miami. I mean, which is really different from a movie that takes place in San Francisco. And so it almost always starts with that, then we'll zoom down to a neighbourhood and I can see cars and clothing. And I can tell what time is this modern day? Or is this in the past or whatever, then they'll zoom in on a person, and the person will be doing something, and you'll get an introduction to the character positions a bit like that. It's a bit like, Well, you know, what is the is what market is in what you know what's going on. And now I can pay attention to the little things that actually make you different, special, interesting.

Todd Chambers
And it's more difficult because you don't have the, kind of, visual slides, but you also break it down into kind of five components, right?

April Dunford
Yeah.

Todd Chambers
Do you mind just kind of like summarising...

April Dunford
Sure, yeah.

So I now give you a little context on this. So, first job I ever had after university, I'm in this company, and, and we got three products, and I get assigned, because I'm new, I get assigned to do this shitty product. So I get assigned to the one that's not selling. It's terrible. No one likes it. You know, we spent all this money building it, we sell it for 100 bucks a pop off the website, and we sold 200 copies of the thing in six months, it is a disaster. And so I get this job. And in my job is to, like, call all the people that have bought the product and decide how disappointed they're going to be when we shut it off. Because we're gonna shut it off. So I call the people and I did 100 calls, and 92 calls, people didn't care. Like, they didn't even know they had it! Like, they're like "we bought that, what? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we never use it for anything. Yeah, whatever". But then I got five or six that were like, "oh, this thing's amazing", you know, and they were doing something with it that we never anticipated.

So, we had originally positioned this product as desktop productivity software, like an alternative to Excel or Microsoft Access. And instead, what these people were using it for was like an embeddable database for mobile devices, really, really, really different. And so instead of canning the product, based on these five or six customers, we said, well, let's take a crack at positioning it as embeddable database for mobile devices. And so that was a really different kind of go to market. Like we had to hire salesperson, we had to change the pricing roadmap for the product change. At the beginning, the product was the same, we went out to things wildly successful, grew like crazy, we ended up getting acquired by some big database company in the valley. And you know, they made me VP marketing, it was amazing. I got like a huge team of people, and I can't spell marketing, like, I don't know what I'm doing. And I got this big team and this big budget. So I decided I'm gonna go to marketing school. So I, you know, I read in books, and this company had a big training budget. So I'm taking some classes and stuff. And this positioning thing keeps coming up. And I know it's important because we just did it. And it was literally the difference between a thing that was failing, and a thing that isn't failing, right?

So I go to the school, and there's a, we're doing a class on positioning, today's topic is positioning, I'm like, great, because we didn't know what we were doing. We just kind of stumbled our way through it, but good to know how I actually should do this stuff. So I'm in the class, professor gets up. And he's like, "okay, today's topic is on positioning. It's fantastic. And here's how you do it". And he puts up this slide, and it's the positioning statement. And I don't know if he ever did a positioning statement. It's like, fill in the blanks. You know, this product is a blank that does blank for blank, blank, blank, blank. And you fill in things like, here's my market category, here's my target segment, blah, blah, all this stuff. And he says, "that's how you do it". You just, you know, you take this statement, you fill in the blanks, and then you write this thing down. And that's it. And then he goes to switch to the next topic. And I'm like, "oh, hang on", I'm on the back. And I'm like, "no, no", I got my hand up. I'm like, "my dude, no, like, let me explain the situation". So I gave him the whole story about the thought it was desktop productivity software turns out as a bootable database from old devices, how can we have saved ourselves two years of effort, you know, how would we and you got a blank there that says, mark the category, but this thing could have been positioned in any market category. How do I know what the best market category is? And the guy did this thing where he like, you know, did the whole professor thing on me, I'm at the back. I'm like, "how do we know, how do we know?". He likes squints at me, and he's got glasses, you know, screws up his face, "who's that?". I'm like "me, me, how do you know?". And he's like... "Trust me, April. Just know".

And at that point, I was like, "oh, I get it. No one knows how to do this". Not even the fancy professor at the fancy university. And they did the marketing class knows how to do this. So at that point, I thought, "well, okay, no one knows how to do this. That's ridiculous". And at this point, I've done it a few times. So I figure, you know, I got ego, I'm like, "oh, I can figure this out". So I figure I'm gonna treat this like - I have a degree in systems engineering - and like, we're gonna treat this like an engineering problem. We're gonna break it into pieces and then solve for the component pieces. So, the first thing was, what are the pieces? Well, the pieces we're all in agreement on. So the pieces even the university professor would agree on. It's the blanks, and the positioning statement, and all positioning statements are all exactly the same.

But basically, there's five things. So we agree these are the five component pieces. So, it's, the first one is competitive alternatives. So we compete with second one is unique features or capabilities, what do you got that the competitors don't have. Next one is differentiated value. So what's the value that you can deliver for customers, that competitors can't. Next one is target customer segments. So you go sell anybody, but some people really love your stuff, who do your best customers look like. And then the last one is market category, which is, you know, coming back to this idea of context setting. It's the context you position the product in it, but it kind of answers the question, what is this? Like? Is it email? Or is it chat? Is it CRM? Or is it team collaboration to that's market category? So those are the five things I was gonna say one of the things by positioning is, it's like, there are so many components, and you can just change one of those components, and then the rest of them all.

Todd Chambers
So, it's almost like a moving puzzle, right? That's, if you choose a different category, it's like, "oh, man, I'm up against a whole different bunch of competitors, or different things of value". And so like, I guess there has to be some logical process. And I think your advice, correct me if I'm wrong, is that you should start with the competitive landscape first. like, who the hell are you competing against?

April Dunford
Yeah. But that wasn't obvious to me at the beginning. Like at the beginning, I was like, "okay, I think we can just break it apart. And, you know, we'll solve for the pieces, I'll get the best answer for each of the pieces, then I figured out how to bring them together. And that's how we're going to solve it". But yeah, like you, you have this problem that everywhere, everything you push, it bulges out on the other side. And that's the thing that they don't teach you with this positioning statement, is that the components all have a relationship to each other. They're not independent. So, if I look at value, like, where does differentiated value come from? It only comes from our differentiated capabilities. That's all. That's the only place that comes from, it can't come from anywhere else. So, those two things are inextricably tied. You have different capabilities, different value. That's how it works, right? But then I think about, well, "what am do my differentiated capabilities dependent on? Well, they're only differentiated when I compare them to competitive alternatives". So these things are all related. I can't just solve for one without knowing the other ones. And then it works the same with the other two, too, right? Like, so my best fit customer. These are the people that care a lot about my differentiated value. That's what makes them a really good fit. Yeah. And then the last one is market category, and that it's a little esoteric, but your best market category is the context you position your product in, such that you're differentiated value is kind of obvious to the customers you're trying to focus on.

So yeah, where do you start? Like, if everything connects to everything else? Where do you start? And I spent - not a word of a lie - two years, where I thought: "there is no starting point". That's why there's no positioning methodology, there's no good starting point, what you do is you pick a random spot, your work your way around the circle, you get candidate positioning, you take it out to the market, if it works, great. You run with it, if it doesn't, you check it out, and you go back, and you do the circle again, and you find another candidate. So for two years, I didn't like that. And here's the problem with this. Like, if you get it right on the first try, yay, everything's great. If we get it wrong on the first try, you got to go back and do it again. And your boss is pissed! And you're like, you know, am I gonna get fired? Maybe, because your co-founders are like, "come on, man, it's been three months already, you don't have this figured out!". And you know, testing it, I got to run a bunch of customers through the pipeline, and oh, God...

So, it was awful for two years. And how I eventually solved this is, I spent a couple of years going deep down the rabbit hole of jobs to be done. So I read a lot of Clayton Christiansen, and I was thinking a lot about what is the intersection between positioning and jobs. Because it the job stuff was mainly getting used for what features should we build next, and are we building the right things to accomplish the job that the customer is trying to do. And in particular, like, I don't know how much you know about job stuff. But, in particular, I was thinking about the milkshake story, you know, the milkshake story.

So, this is a very, this is very famous jobs to be done story. And so what it is, there's a fast food chain, and they want to find out how to make a better milkshake. And so they're interviewing people about you know, what, why do they buy milkshakes? When are they buying milkshakes and all this stuff. And what they discover is they sell a ton of milkshakes in the drive-through in the morning. And they're like, what is going on here? So they interview all these people that drive through and they find out people have got a long commute, and they're hungry, but they don't want to eat, like, a breakfast sandwich or something, because they're in the car, and it's gonna fall all over them and stuff. So, they want something that fits in the cupholder. But at the same time, they're hungry, right? So, they don't want just a drink, they want like a meal in the cupholder. And ideally, they want something that they're not going to finish in five seconds, because they got a lot more to drive, right? So they go to, you know, have the milkshake, and it's gonna last for a while and fits in the cup holder and all this stuff. So, the ending to that story was, "okay, well, how do we make a better milkshake for these people, when we're trying to accomplish the job of, you know, gotta fit in a cup holder or whatever", whatever. And I had this epiphany where I was like, "oh, shit, this is a positioning problem". Like, it's not a milkshake. It's a smoothie!

Like, what you learn there is that they were thinking about the wrong competitive alternatives. Because if I went in and asked those people, what are the competitive alternatives to the milkshake, they would have said, Egg McMuffin, or a muffin or bagel. And they wouldn't have been saying Coke, which is what you expected them to say. And so I had this epiphany, like, actually, we need to start with competitive alternatives. If we start with competitive alternatives, then we can say, "alright, this is what we got to beat in order to get a deal done here". And baked into that is the job that the customer is trying to do. But if even if I'm not sure that I can figure it out, if I can figure out what the real competitive alternatives are. So I'm going to start with competitive alternatives. Once I've got that, that's my stick in the ground. That's reality, I got to beat this. And then you say, Well, what am I got that the alternatives don't have? That's my differentiated capabilities. And then I can go down that list of capabilities and see what what is the value of that to these customers, and that will get me differentiated value. Now, once I have differentiated value that I can say, "alright, well, who cares a lot about this value", like, what are the characteristics of the target customer that makes them, you know, put a high price on this thing that you can do? And then the last thing is why, I got this value these people, what's the best context to position my product in such that this value is obvious for these folks? So, that's how I cracked the where do we start. And how do we get to it thing, everything flows from from the next into kind of a waterfall thing. So, in my mind, that's how it works.

Todd Chambers
Love it. Where should people start with position? Maybe that's a super obvious question based on what you just said, it's like, the first thing but, like, I don't know, if you're thinking about maybe building a SaaS product, how important is positioning like before you build the fit? Yeah. Or like, How could you, what advice would you give to like SaaS startups thinking about positioning?

April Dunford
So in the early days, like, let's say, you have something that hasn't even launched yet? Because I get this question a lot, right? And people say, "wow, we don't even have the thing out in the market yet, so I don't really know who I compete with". And here's how I like to think about that.

So, in the early days of a SaaS product, when you're still building it, what you have is a positioning thesis, right? So, and then my positioning thesis says, "here's who I think I compete with, here's how I'm, here's my differentiated capabilities. Therefore, this is the value I can deliver to customers, these are the kinds of customers are really going to dig that. And therefore this is the market, I'm going to win". And it's helpful to actually write all that down and say, and think about what are the assumptions baked into that. And so, while you're doing customer discovery, and all that good stuff that you do before you actually launch the product, you're trying to validate this as much as you can. That said; you are always wrong. Yeah, this is why this is why, you know, I have done this for 25 years, we never get it right! Like, we get as close as we can, but we never get it right. So, we're, you know, 90% there, sometimes we're totally wrong on everything, but, but we never get it right.

And so, here's the thing, I have this positioning thesis, but I don't actually want to have the positioning so tight, because I know it's probably wrong. And I'm gonna have to change it. So I actually recommend that companies keep the positioning kind of loose at the beginning, and wait to see where the market pole pulls them. This is my really bad analogy, but I then, llike that, I'll use it because I don't have a better one. So, it's like you woke up in the morning and you're like, "hey, I'm going to make a fishing net. And my net has been designed, it's amazing for tuna. So, that's my positioning thesis, tuna fishing net, tuna fishermen are gonna love it. It's gonna be amazing. I'm gonna charge lots of money for it, because this is, the world's never seen such a tuna fishing net. But, when I launch it, you know, maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't, man. And maybe it's really good for tuna, maybe not. So, instead, I think a better way to launch a product like that is to say, "hey, I got this thing as a net, right, fish big fish. Big, big ones, any kind of big fish". And then let's just put it out there and let's let the fishermen take it out to the park, to the ocean, where there's all kinds of big fish. Throw that sucker out there and then let's see what we pull up. Because maybe what we find out is like who It's actually amazing for grouper. And I just didn't know because I'm not a grouper person. And you know, and then it turns out, "oh, that thing's amazing for grouper, like, it's good for tuna, but it's really good for grouper". So, then, I get and then I, after I noticed that I can tighten it up and say, "oh, what I got here is the world's most amazing grouper fishing net", and run with it there. But, at the beginning, I don't want to get it so tight that I'm actually discouraging people to try it out. Because I know I'm likely wrong, I kind of want to keep it loose.

And so this is why when people come to work with me as the positioning consultant, if they're pre launch, or they're just starting launch, I usually say don't sweat it too much. And it's going to feel bad, like your pitch is going to feel mushy. And it's going to feel like I've got this mushy positioning, and it sucks. And I really want to tighten it up. And you just got to roll with that. Like, you just got to deal with your awkward teenage self in that moment and just say, you know, acknowledge that this feels bad acknowledge, "this is kind of a shitty sales pitch. It's not very tight, but it's okay". And you got to wait until you start seeing the patterns and who loves your stuff and why then you can really get tight on it and tighten it up.

Todd Chambers
I love it. I can imagine yourself as a consultant, and like a lot of companies, when you gave, go to the CEO, that they get a lot of pushback on the size of the market, because I guess the easiest ways to go for a smaller market that has a very, very specific problem, there's less, you can speak to them very, very deeply. But then the CEO kind of says like, "hey, how are we going to scale this thing to like 100 million, or what", you know, whatever the number is, you kind of... How do you balance that conflict between SEO and getting, like, that nice niche, easy to market to segment?

April Dunford
Well, here's the thing to think about. When you do positioning, it's not like we're carving this thing into the side of the rock, and it's never going to change over the lifespan of the company, right? We're not, it's a living thing. And your product is changing at year after year, the market is changing year after year, customers are changing, everything's changing. And so, when we do positioning work, we, you know, expect it to likely live for a year or two, but we don't know. And like, sometimes everything changes. And you know, we're changing the positioning every six months. But typically what happens is you're positioned in a way and then you get a big release the next year. And that allows you to puff out the positioning a little bit or change it a little bit.

So usually what we do when we're doing this work, and we're thinking about addressable market, we're usually looking out, you know, "what's our revenue target this year or next year?". And then you say, "how tight can we get this in terms of our target segment, and still make the number?". Yeah, so most of the time, what we'll get is, you know, I'll talk to companies and they'll literally be like, "we need to close 100 deals this year". You'll say, "okay", and they'll say, "but we don't want to just focus on banking, because that's too narrow". And I'm like, "you only got to close 100 deals this year. Is it really too narrow?". Like I don't know, like, and don't worry about it. Because next year, if you say okay, well, next year, I want to close 1000 deals, and I think banking is too narrow, well, we'll we'll expand it out then. And maybe we'll say we're, you know, we're for financial services, at that point, we will include insurance, and then no problem, 1000 deals.

So, most of the time, I think people they're trying to position for what they want to be in 10 years, and they're not there yet, right. And instead, a much better way to think about it is, "let's just position to make it really obvious and easy to bring on the best fit customers we can". And we'll worry about what the positioning is going to look like when we've got a broader product for a broader audience in three years, or four years or five years when we get there. Because the positioning is going to shift. And then the next thing everyone will say is, "yeah, but we'll establish this brand as being just for banks, and then you'll go to puff it out for other things". And it's like, "oh my gosh, every company you know has done this! It's not hard. It's not hard at all". People think branding is again, like, carving it into the side of the mountain. Like, let's talk about Salesforce. What was Salesforce when they started? They were the world's greatest CRM for micro companies, not even SMBs - micro companies. It was, you got three licences or five licences for free. Free at the beginning, like, and then they were like that for years. It was like, if you had more than 10 sales reps, you weren't in their target market. And look at them now. Does anybody, do we feel the positioning baggage of that? Does anybody look at Salesforce... That wasn't that long ago! Like, does anybody look at Salesforce and say "yeah, no, they're not for enterprise. They're only for little SMBs?". No, they just they evolved, the product evolved. And the positioning evolved as they grew up and they went up, up, up marketing. Now they're a terrible fit for a company that only has a couple of sales reps, in my opinion, particularly one that doesn't think they're going to grow into it. Why would you pick Salesforce if they're actually terrible fit for the market that they started out in? But they're a great fit for all kinds of other pieces of that market that are way more upstream and frankly, much more lucrative for them.

Todd Chambers
This is a hypothetical example. What if you... And I said hypothetical, but I've spoken to many different SaaS companies that kind of do this. You build a product, and then it can end up being quite complex. Maybe I can give an example of a recent one I spoke to. So they do invoicing, invoice and pay, which means they're up against like QuickBooks. And those guys, right, then they did inventory management, which is like a whole other thing, and have like VRP software, which is like a whole other thing. And like, right, like, they kind of come to us and they say, like, "hey, we have this thing. It's built, like, we have some customers, not too many, but, like, we just need you guys to throw some marketing magic dust on this thing. And like, get us some revenue. Guys, in the real world this, this doesn't work like that! Yeah, so how would you even go about tackling such a complex suites of products and trying to nail that segment of a customer?

April Dunford
Yeah, you know, and this is a thing we see in startups a lot, right? Like, a lot of startups that I've worked with, like, building product is their happy place, right? "We just like to build product and not have to worry about selling it too much". Like, "wouldn't it be great if everyone just bought our great thing". And so here's the thing, sometimes you want to sell the whole suite, because that's the easy thing to sell. Sometimes you actually want to lead with one thing and then back into the other stuff. And that's the first thing you're going to have to decide. So, what's the easiest sale here.

So, Salesforce, again, great example, like four years after Salesforce had Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud and a bunch of other stuff. If you went to their website, they didn't talk about any of it. They talk about CRM, because the idea was CRM was the wedge product, you were going to buy CRM. And then once you were all into their CRM world, then the reason you wanted their marketing thing is because it integrated with their CRM, the reason you wanted their service things because it integrated into the CRM. And so they got to sell you the wedge product first, then they worry about everything else. So if you look at their company, positioning was all about CRM were the world's number one CRM. And in fact, they've been doing that up until very, very recently. And now they've got this thing called Customer 360, which is their attempt to position the suite of stuff all together. And I would say, 9 out of 10 people still see them as a CRM company that does a whole bunch of other stuff.

Now, other times the the fact that you've got a suite of things all together actually makes it easier to sell. Like I would argue HubSpot was like this at the beginning, like, HubSpot was literally coming in and replacing a handful of dinky little one-off tools that you used to manage your website. At the beginning, this was before they were really marketing automation, they were just like on site stuff. And so they came in and said, "you know, we've got the all in one product that eliminates five other products that you've got that are a pain, and they don't integrate well, and they don't work well together. And so we're just selling you this one thing". Now, if you look at like, again, when we're tackling this as a positioning challenge, I can only make that decision between the two if I've actually tested it out. So you know, if the company comes to you and says, "okay, we've got this thing, you know, we don't really have any customers yet. And we don't know if it's easier to sell this suite or to just sell the individual things. We don't know, maybe one of these products is a good wage product. But we don't really know". And I at that point, I would say, "yeah, I don't think you're ready for positioning yet. I think you need to go and get a bunch of customers, you need to spend some time trying to sell some stuff. And let's see what works and what doesn't keep the positioning kind of lose. You know, you might want to call it a menu of things, not try to position it as a suite or an individual thing and say, look, here's what's on the menu today. You can buy them individually, or you can raise the all you can eat you tell me and we have to kind of figure it out". Yeah.

Todd Chambers
This one is kind of outside of positioning. I know you have a lot of experience in marketing. So it's a bit of a selfish question for me, because, in an ideal world, people that come to us already have a position in the market, and they want us to do the marketing. But let's assume someone has the hypothesis. So, the thesis of positioning, and they can't get it right. What are kind of the next steps in how you go about communicating that market? So, like, the messaging? Do you have any principles or things to think about when it comes to messaging?

April Dunford
So, here's the first thing. So, first thing you got to do, got to make sure that you're all really tight and in agreement on the positioning, that's the first thing, right. So, generally, what we've got is, companies will come to me, and sometimes their messaging isn't working. But the reason it's not working is because, you know, sales thinks the positioning is this, product has a slightly different view of it, marketing's got a slightly different view of it. So, it's always worthwhile to get everybody together, get them all aligned on the positioning. But, once we have that, and you know, we got the whole executive team, everybody's in agreement alignment, here's what we compete with, here's how we're different. This is the value we can deliver no one else can, these are the customers that love our stuff. This is the market we intend to win. Once we have that, I think what everybody wants to do immediately after that is go build messaging. And I don't actually think that's a good next step. But just because I don't know how we test it.

So, if what I'm trying to do is test the positioning, and I'm doing it with A/B test on landing page copy, let's say I'm testing positioning, but I'm also testing messaging, I'm also testing landing page design, I'm also testing a whole bunch of other stuff. And, like, how do I make sure I've got the right traffic? Do I have the right traffic? You know, I can't really assess what's working, what isn't working with a test like that. So what I think is a better thing to do is to take your positioning and translate it into a sales pitch. And so, in the work I do with companies, that's what we do. So we'll do the positioning bit. And then what we'll do is, we'll work out a storyboard for our sales narrative. So, how do I actually encapsulate this positioning in a sales pitch? Now, in a sales pitch, I got a lot more leeway to test the actual positioning. Because, you know, if I say it one way, and it doesn't quite work, I can try it again.

Another way I can mess around with it a bit, I've got, you know, I know exactly who the customer is. They've already been qualified. And I can see, where are they furrowing their brow? Or, where are they getting excited? So, you know, and then I can hear the questions they asked, like, we get halfway through, and they're like, so you're just, like, "Salesforce", you're like, "Oh, god, no, we're not". Say, okay, there's a problem here. So usually, what we'll do is, we'll storyboard out the sales narrative, and then marketing and sales will work together to build a pitch out of it. So, deck demo script, and then we'll go try it on a bunch of qualified prospects, and see if it works. And in the process of doing that testing, we're generally tuning the story as we go along, like, "hey, we can't use this word, it freaks people out", or "we got to have this come in before we talk about this". And we'll learn a lot about the pitch doing that.

And then, once we got a sales pitch, and everybody's comfortable with then we can take the pitch and the positioning, and go build messaging. And, so, what I recommend companies do is what they want to do is, go you know, do this homepage copy thing. At this point, we've already validated, the positioning and copy gets used in lots of places. And the homepage is just one place, right? And the copy for the homepage is different than copy on your brochure or copy for your emails, a copy for anything else. So, what I recommend that folks do is they build a messaging document, which is like, "here's the tagline, here's the 20 word description, there's a 50 word description, here's 100 word description, here's our three core pieces of value. Here's the approved copy for that. Here's how we talk about particular features". And we'll you know, we'll build the big messaging document. And that's our starting point for anything we got to do with copy. So, once we have that, then we can say, "okay, let's start from here, but build copy for the homepage, and we can A/B test that, let's start from here, build copy for the brochure, or the email, or whatever else we got, wherever else we're going to go do copy. So, that's what I recommend to folks. That's what I used to do when I was the VP.

Todd Chambers

That's incredible, incredible advice! I'm only speaking for myself, where, we're obviously an agency, so it's not like we're selling a $999 product. So, I have to go and pitch in to these people. And I can always tell, I fine-tune my deck over, like, 100 different times. And you can, for example, in the early days, I remember, I used to add values in - our agency values - and no one gave a shit! No one cares! You could see people's eyes glaze over... Nobody, no.

April Dunford
Simon Sinek, he's done us dirty! You know, like, like, the number of companies that come in, they're like, "we need to start with our why", and I'm like, "not in your pitch day! Start with it somewhere else".

Todd Chambers
Yeah, that's really, really good advice.

April Dunford
Well, and it works, right? Like, it gives you a feel for, again, what's the customer excited about? What are they not excited about? And it's really different when you're sitting across on a Zoom call like this, versus, I'm just looking at the data from the heat map, whatever, you know, I know people like this and they don't like that. And it's really different when you've got someone in there looking at it, it's like, "what is that thing?" And you're like, "oh, yeah, no, this isn't working for me".

Todd Chambers
So it was always right at the end as well. I'd have, like ,the values. We, like, the first section, which would be about us and I'd say, like, "quick, any questions before we move on?" and there would be, like, crickets every time, right? "Yeah, we're bored". Just, "yeah, we're waiting for the pitch to start, please!".

One thing that really strikes me about you, April, is that you're an incredible storyteller, you're one of these people who is blessed, when you, when you kind of, when I ask you a question, you're able to kind of the answer in a really nice story. Yeah, but like, was that something that you kind of consciously developed or just like, you just got loads of experience? So you have loads of stories to draw upon?

April Dunford
Well, yeah, that's one thing like it helps to be old, right? And then you're like, "oh, I sit down kids, let me tell you about when I walked to school in the snow up to my knees...". Yeah.

So, that's one thing. So, you know, you got a story for everything after you've been doing this for a while. The other thing is that, like, part of that's born out of necessity, again, positioning is kind of a complicated thing. And so I recognise really early on that it doesn't really click with people until you give them some examples. And so it's one thing to talk about it philosophically. And it's another thing to say, "hey, I have this thing. And it's thing". And then we did this, and it was better. Like, I think some things, again, if we're talking tactics, we don't need a lot of storytelling, right? It's like, flip the switch here, and turn this thing off. But when we get into the strategy stuff, there's decisions inside decisions inside decisions. And so, it's one thing to understand positioning, conceptually, it is a very different thing, to put it into an actual example, and say, "this was the set of decisions we had to make in order to get here. And it wasn't just one thing, it was 19 things, and we could have, we could have made different choices, and we would have really different outcome". And so, you kind of need to build that into a story or an example. Otherwise, everybody's like, "all I gotta do are these five things, you know, just solve for the five things? And it's all good, right?". Yeah. Good, great. And then you go to the office and try to do it. It's like, "no, wrong, actually". Can't even solve for one of them. "What are you talking about?".

Todd Chambers
Can I ask what your thoughts are on, there's a lot of, I know of, radical differentiation, it is a bit of a buzzword at the moment, but like, two cents on it, you know, what do you, what's your two cents on, yeah, being radically different?

April Dunford
I offer differentiation, like... This is the problem in positioning, right, it is, it's really hard to get chosen. Like, if you've got a product in a market, and there are other competitors in that market, and you're brand new starting out, like who would pick you? Why would anybody pick you? Like, you don't just have to be kind of different. Like, you actually got to have some spectacular difference, because people are taking a bet on you. Like, there's, they could use Excel for free. They could hire an intern, they could use their accounting programme. I know it wasn't built for that, but we already have it, and we know how to use it.

And, like, I get a lot of people come to me, and they'll say, "well, you know, why aren't we assessing the people that didn't choose us? Because don't we want them to change their minds and come and pick us?". And I'm like, "no, you don't understand how this works". Every customer that you get as a startup, you have to treat this like a small miracle. "Oh, my gosh, you had all these choices, and all these other things you could have, you picked us? Wow!". Yeah. "What is it about you, weirdo, that made you do that!". And what you're trying to do is get in under that. So, I do think that for startups to survive at all there needs to be differentiators.

And generally, they're not little things. They're not just nice to have things. It's like, generally, they've got a completely different approach to the problem, the ones that are successful. And so, they are radically different. And I think the key thing with positioning is to pull that differentiation out and put it in a context where customers get it, right. They get what it is, they get why it's different. And more importantly, to get the value of that differentiation and say, "oh, yeah, I don't want to use my accounting prog programme for that. Oh, yeah, I get it, everybody likes Excel. But we're not going to do that. Because this thing is so awesome". That's what you're trying to get at.

So, yeah, I think there needs to be differentiation. Like, some people come to me and they'll say, "we don't really have much differentiation, blah, blah, blah". And then I'll say, "Well, how much revenue are you doing?" "3 million bucks". And I'm like, "what are you talking about? You think your customers are stupid? Like, they're picking you!". And that's not a small thing. And you're doing two 3 million revenue. You absolutely have differentiators! And not only that, there's a yawning gap between you and the competitors, at least in the minds of customers, you might not see the differentiation in the same way customers do. And that's dangerous. So, let's figure that out.

Todd Chambers
Good advice. How was it for you with... This is the first book you've written?

April Dunford
Might be the last...

Todd Chambers
How was that process? How do you condense, like, 25 years of experience in marketing into one book? Like, what was that process like?

April Dunford
Well, so at the beginning, I thought I didn't need a book, I thought I could just write a blog post on it, you know, and be done with it. And so I tried to write a blog post and it got longer and longer and longer and longer. And then for a while I was teaching a class. So I was teaching a class at a couple universities and a handful of startup accelerators. And you learn a lot by teaching your stuff, because you'll get people that aren't marketers that know nothing come in and ask you a question. That sounds kind of stupid, but it actually exposes a flank there, where you're like, "well, I never really thought about... How does that work? I don't know". And so, you learn a lot about yourself having to teach it over and over, it also helps you explain it in, get to a point where you can explain in a simple way, like, at the beginning, I had the methodology, but I was the only one that had to understand it, because I was running it myself as the VP marketing, but then, you know, I try to explain it to other people or teach it to other people. And that's way harder than just doing it. So I probably spent three years or so just trying to teach this stuff. Before I felt like I was ready to start writing it down. And then I thought, "oh, I'll just make a blog post out of this". And the blog post got bigger and bigger. And I was like, "okay, this actually needs a book treatment".

And then writing the book itself wasn't that hard, because I already kind of had the story straight in my mind. But producing a book was difficult. So I went to it, you know, I thought, well, "I'm writing a book, I'll go get a publisher and do it that way". But then I went and talked to publishers, and I really didn't like... The story I heard from them, like they, you know, they were kind of like, "well, we own your book now. And so we get to make decisions, like what the title is going to be, and what the cover is going to look like". And some other covers are terrible! And we're going to, we're going to own the distribution strategy on it, including, you know, what languages we do, or do not decide to translate it into and stuff. And these folks literally didn't understand my audience at all. That would be like me developing a product, and then giving it to some marketers that had no clue about my audience whatsoever, and have them say, "yeah, like, we're gonna pay you pennies on the dollar, because we're doing all the work here". And it's like, as far as I can tell, you're not doing any work. Like, all you're doing is getting it in a bookstore. None of my people even buy in a bookstore! So like, what?

So, anyway, so I wasted a lot of time talking to publishers, and then ultimately decided I didn't trust them to be able to sell the book, and I thought I'd do better selling it on my own. So I ended up self publishing, like, with help, I hired a company to help me produce the book, you know, to editors, and layout, and cover design and all that stuff. And then I ran all the marketing myself, which you would do anyways, even if you had publishers, they don't really do any marketing. All they do is distribution. And their idea of distribution is stores, physical stores. And so instead, I just handled all that stuff myself. And so that was a bit of a learning curve...

Todd Chambers
Like, how did you do that? By the way? What was the marketing approach?

April Dunford
Well, so I treated it like a product. And so I said, "well, I'm going to run, you know, what I call the full IBM. So when I was at IBM, and we launched a product, we would have distinct phases of a launch. So, at IBM, there's the pre-pre-launch, the pre-launch, launch, post-launch, and momentum launch. And so my launch plan was a year and a half-ish, like, and it started six or eight months before the book came out. And so, there's a whole bunch of pre-pre-launch, which is, "hey, I'm thinking about a thing and you should sign up for my list". And I'm, you know, social media and blogging a bit about the topics and whatever. And so build a bit of a following and all that stuff. And then I've got pre-launch, which is, I know the date when the thing is coming. I'm trying to get everybody hyped. I'm like, "sign up here. And we'll let you know when it comes". And I did a little bit of a pre-sale, not much, but a little bit of a pre-sale. And then there's launch, which is actually the least interesting part of the thing, that was another thing that drove me crazy. But the publishers, they were all like, there's launch and that's it. It's a thing, it lasts three days, and then we're done. I'm like, "are you nuts? Nothing sells like that".

So then we had a launch and that was a week, you know, and it is a big thing like, "hey, this thing is available", you know, and then I had two or three things. And this is true for any product, right? Like, there's lots of marketing channels available to you, but not you're not actually able to work them all. And so generally what you want to do is pick the two or three that you know you can really work and then just really lean into those. So for me, that was public speaking. So, I had already been doing a reasonable amount of public speaking. So, I really leaned into that the year my book launch, I did 50, almost 60 speaking engagements in a year, so I have many weeks where I was doing like two or three in a week, and then podcasts. So I did a ton of podcasts where I'm like this, they're talking about the book, and a little bit of stuff on social, although I'm not super active on social, but I have not a very big following on Twitter, but they're very engaged.

So I ran some specials on Twitter and a couple of contests and things like that, just to get people hyped, and a very small amount of email marketing, but I didn't actually consider that the real marketing channel for me. And then I ran a couple of sales and I did a couple other things. But yeah, so that so I had a very long view on the marketing plan for this thing. And yeah, totally exceeded all my targets.

Todd Chambers
Congratulations, yeah! Congratulations. I mean, I just bought the book today. Working another sale, ROI on this podcast.

April Dunford
Nice, two bucks in my bank account!

Todd Chambers
Maybe I can ask you just to close up... Uh, actually, one really good question. I'm not sure if it's a good question, or...

April Dunford
They're all good questions, Todd.

Todd Chambers
What I was thinking was, like, what advice would you give to a SaaS marketer, that's like, looking to grow a SaaS product, or maybe in other ways of framing, like, you're looking to hire someone to run marketing, like, what characteristics or traits would you look for? Like, any advice for marketers in SaaS?

April Dunford
Yeah, like, you know, I used to do a lot of hiring like backgrounds, VP marketing, I, you know, digital hiring, and hiring marketers is hard for... It's hard for a lot of reasons. But one of them is like, you can have people with great resume, but there's a lot, but they got a lot of bad habits. And they bring them in, and it's like, "oh, you're so experienced, and yet I have to unwind a bunch of stuff". And then you can have other folks that don't have much on their resume, but just attitude, like, just amazing attitude. And they're just like, "I don't know what I'll do but I'll figure it out", you know, and these are always my favourite ones I'd hire like, those are the ones I like.

Yeah, so I, you know, at the beginning, I always tried to hire for experience. And towards the end, I was 100% hiring for attitude, like, so, you know, I didn't care if you didn't have too much experience, like, I'll teach you. It's not that hard, right? I'll teach you. But I can't teach you, there's a handful of things I can't teach you, right? I can't teach you to give a shit about the work. Like, I can't teach you to care about the output. I can't. And that's one thing that I was always looking for, like, where are people trying to do excellent work, like, give me an example where you know, you're trying to do excellent work like, and I can't sort of teach people either got that, or they don't. And I think that matters a lot in marketing. Because none of our stuff is great. It's all kind of crap. Like, we're all gonna do the best we can like, we just have all these constraints. And we're always trying to tease out a puzzle of out of all these constraints, and do the best thing we can. So it's very rare, we have a thing that is a total slam dunk, or a total failure, almost everything sits in the grey area in the middle somewhere. And we're just trying to push it more towards success and away from failure. So you kind of got to have this attitude of continuously trying to make it better and contend and be in jazz when something goes good and sort of doubling down on that thing when something goes good. So, I don't know.

I don't know if that's very... That's not really advice for people starting out. But, but that's what I was always looking for when I was trying to hire people. I was way more about attitude than I was about experience. Like, I could teach you how to do stuff, but I couldn't teach you how to care...

Todd Chambers
It took me, it's taken me quite a few years to come to that realisation. I think probably, in the last year, that's been a big shift for me, though I don't necessarily hire based on you know, fancy looking CVs, it's like, if you have the right mindset, and you have some evidence to back that up...

April Dunford
And we're all kind of self-taught in marketing to a certain extent, too, right? Like it is. Yeah. Especially when we're doing digital stuff. And in startups, like, almost nothing you learn in school is all of that applicable. Things change so fast! I mean, you know, you can go learn some of the tactical mechanics of things, right? Like, I can send you on a course to go learn AdWords, and you'll come back and be pretty good at AdWords. But then there's all the stuff around what actually makes it successful. And not, that you just got to kind of power through and you learn from experience, I feel like.

Todd Chambers
Well, thank you so much for doing this. Really, really great advice. And thank you for all the work you've done on positioning, it has definitely helped me with a bunch of projects I've worked on. So yeah, thanks again.

April Dunford
That's awesome. Well, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Todd Chambers
Thanks for listening to the podcast, guys. for links to any other resources, head over to https://uprawmedia.com/blog. And, super important, please let us know how we're doing! Check the links in the description where you can leave some feedback or you can just email me todd@uprawmedia.com. 'Till next time, adios!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai