Obviously Awesome in Practice: April Dunford's Playbook for B2B Product Positioning

Dunford trained as an engineer and started in product marketing at a startup, where she was handed a product that was selling poorly. The team repositioned it, it took off, and she was made vice president of marketing. She then spent years as a VP of marketing at seven startups (six were acquired), repositioning products each time. About five or six years ago she moved into consulting, where she works only with B2B tech companies, mostly growth-stage startups, and says she has worked with roughly 200 companies.

Asked how you know you have a positioning problem, she says she wishes there were a clean metric, but weak positioning hurts the whole pipeline. Early on, prospects do not respond to marketing because they do not understand what the product is. In the middle, deals sag until prospects have had several calls with a rep. In the worst case, sales is good at closing but customers churn because the product is not what they expected.

When she joined a company as VP of marketing she would sit in on sales calls, and she lists the tell-tale signs. The prospect asks the rep to back up and pitch again, or confidently says "you're just like Salesforce" when you are not. The most damaging version is the prospect who says they understand what you do but do not see why anyone would pay for it, since they could do it in a spreadsheet.

Dunford says positioning is misunderstood even though the idea dates back to the 1980s, and a dozen marketing VPs would give a dozen definitions. Hers is that positioning defines how a product is the best in the world at delivering some value that a well-defined set of companies care a lot about. That covers the alternatives, the differentiation, the value only you can deliver, the people who care about it, and the market category you aim to win.

Because it touches so many functions, she says it cannot be cooked up in marketing or product and thrown over the wall. Marketing, product, sales, customer success and the executive team, particularly the CEO, should build it in one room, so that everyone leaves aligned. This also applies to PMs and general managers who position a single product or feature, not just founders.

In her experience the majority of cases are misalignment. Sometimes a founder who nails every pitch has hired new marketing, sales and product leaders who tell the story differently. Other times the market has shifted and the founder is still positioned for what it used to be, and the head of product or marketing struggles to convince everyone, since each function sees only part of the picture.

Great positioning, she adds, feels obvious. She cites Postman, an "API platform for building and using APIs," as a simple description that took a lot of work to reach. Because products and markets change, it is worth checking in on your positioning periodically even if you cannot measure it.

Dunford says the real test of B2B positioning is not whether a stranger or a grandmother understands the homepage but whether a qualified prospect gets excited when you tell the story. She is irritated by Startupfest's "Pitch the Grannies" format for the same reason: unless you are building for grandmothers, their reaction does not matter. A deeply technical product pitched to technical buyers can look opaque to everyone else and still be well positioned.

The first step is to identify competitive alternatives, meaning what you must beat to win a deal. In B2B that is the status quo (however poor) and whoever lands on the buyer's shortlist. She stresses that most people discount the status quo even though about 40% of deals end in "no decision," which really means losing to a spreadsheet, pen and paper or interns.

Next, list the capabilities you have that the alternatives lack, including pricing or services, and translate each into value by asking "so what?" The items usually cluster into two or three value themes, which are genuinely differentiated rather than a list of what everyone likes about the product. From there, define the characteristics of accounts that care most about that value, and finally pick the market category that makes the value obvious to those customers.

Her summary is a sequence of five pieces: alternatives, differentiated capabilities, value themes, best-fit customers and market category. Many teams start with the category and work backward, which she thinks is a mistake because there is then no way to judge whether it is a good one.

To make the method concrete, Dunford uses Help Scout, a growth-stage company selling customer service software against giant Zendesk. Its alternatives include Zendesk and other tools but also plain email and rudimentary shared inboxes. Its differentiators include a service-oriented shared inbox that avoids missed or conflicting tickets, and a philosophy of treating customers as people, such as a chatbot that appears only when a human is available.

Mapped to value, Help Scout delivers extra-amazing service that deepens the customer relationship. Not everyone cares: she suggests a phone company mostly wants to cut call-center cost, while direct-to-consumer and e-commerce brands often use customer service as their main way to drive loyalty and growth. Those brands are the best fit.

Dunford then turns positioning into a narrative. In Help Scout's story, customer success is a growth driver, backed by statistics, while every alternative treats customers as numbers and service as a cost center. Her workshops bring all functions together, document the five pieces, then storyboard the narrative so the team can turn it into a deck, demo or script and test it with qualified prospects.

The reason to go past the document, she explains, is that if sales cannot tell the story they cannot pitch it, and then "they're going to make shit up." The goal is that product, customer success and the CEO can all tell the same story too.

Dunford takes the customer's viewpoint. A VP of sales decides the company needs a CRM and delegates to a sales-ops manager, who is not an expert in the market, searches and gets a firehose of vendors on review sites. That person must build a shortlist and justify the pick to the boss, so the best thing a seller can do is explain how the market shakes out and why the product is right for buyers like them.

If buyers cannot work out how to justify a decision, they go back and say all the options are bad and they should stay with the spreadsheet, which is the "no decision" outcome. For that reason, saying "we're better" is not enough. Better has two pieces, the value and who cares about it, because better for a small company differs from better for a large enterprise.

Positioning is also distinct from messaging and branding, which she says people often confuse. Messaging is largely the text on the homepage, and it cannot be written until you know who the message is for and what your value is against which alternative. Likewise, you cannot decide what the brand should stand for until the target buyer and the differentiation are clear, so almost everything in marketing and sales flows downstream from positioning.

Dunford says you can often see a team that has not worked out the "so what" when the technology is spectacular. Magic Leap's launch demos were mind-blowing, but she could not see the target market or value, whereas it now sells B2B into manufacturing and its positioning is much tighter. She felt the same about Google Glass at launch, which has also found specific B2B use cases.

Her archetype is the Segway. Its founder, who raised $100 million from prominent investors, kept calling it a "revolution in human transport," so people speculated about flying cars, and he was invited on Good Morning America. When it turned out to be a scooter, the refusal to position it meant customers could not tell what to compare it to, and early users were honked at on the road and shouted at on the sidewalk.

On when to bring in outside help, Dunford says most companies can do positioning themselves, which is why she wrote *Obviously Awesome*. She is typically hired when internal attempts stalled because opinionated executives could not agree, or when a lot is at stake, for instance before hiring 10 or 15 salespeople or making a big marketing investment. Her own process is a week-long sprint, while teams on their own sometimes do it in a couple of days, and the work is done when everyone thinks the result is good.

Dunford has worked with companies at about $5 to $10 million in revenue, and she also gets calls from very early-stage startups. For those, she says, positioning is a thesis: we think we compete with these folks, are different in this way, deliver this value, and so will win this market. She believes that thesis is partly wrong 100% of the time, since it rests on assumptions and customer discovery.

Her analogy is a fishing net designed for tuna. Launching it as tuna-only risks failing hard, while describing it as a net for big fish lets fishermen try it, and you might discover it is great for grouper. Once enough signal shows the pattern in who loves the product and why, you can tighten the positioning.

The trigger to tighten is a pattern. At first, all kinds of people like the product for all kinds of reasons, but eventually a thread appears, such as customers sharing the same marketing automation tool or the same number of salespeople. At that point, she says, you are ready to put your foot on the gas and run at the market where you know you win.

Dunford says marketers confuse segmentation and personas because marketing education leans consumer. Segmentation splits a market, and personas are deep profiles of a particular type of buyer. In B2B, segmentation can use almost anything, such as firmographics like size, revenue and geography, or something like having a creative team of more than three people and a particular software package, and it should be actionable enough to build a target account list.

Personas are trickier in B2B because five to seven people take part in a typical enterprise purchase, including end users, IT, purchasing, legal and security. She criticizes marketing teams that write one-page personas for each of them, down to hobbies. Instead she asks how the deal actually gets done.

The person who matters most is the champion, the one who does the research, builds the shortlist, gets consensus and carries the deal to the economic buyer who writes the check. If positioning does not resonate with the champion, "we're dead in the water," because the company never makes the shortlist. The job is to nail that persona and then arm the champion to sell internally to IT, purchasing, users and their boss.