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CRAFTED. is a show about great products and the people who make them. Top technologists reveal how they build game-changing products — and how you can, too. Honored twice by The Webby Awards as a top tech podcast, CRAFTED. is hosted by Dan Blumberg, an entrepreneur, product leader, and former public radio host. Listen to CRAFTED. to find out what it really takes to build great products and companies.
[00:00:00] April Dunford: And all of a sudden, your thing that was so unique and so differentiated, it's starting to look just like everybody else. And then the companies are like, well dang, now we have to shift this positioning if they even know what that is. And they don't know how to shift it because they didn't know how they made it up in the first place.
[00:00:19] Dan Blumberg: That's April Dunford and she's helped hundreds of tech companies nail their positioning.
[00:00:23] April Dunford: I should be able to say, look, you wanna pick us because we are the only product on the planet that can deliver you a combination of this, plus this, plus this. Value positioning is all about helping your product stand out against the competition.
[00:00:38] We start with this idea, if you didn't exist. What would a customer do?
[00:00:43] Dan Blumberg: And very often your strongest competition is nothing.
[00:00:47] April Dunford: We lose half our deals to do nothing
[00:00:50] Dan Blumberg: in B2B. April is the bestselling author of obviously Awesome, and in her latest book Sales Pitch, she describes how to take action on that great positioning and close more deals.
[00:01:00] Key to that is you don't sell. Instead, help your customers buy. It's really about helping a customer confidently make choices so they don't get all the way down to the end and go, I don't know.
[00:01:13] Dan Blumberg: And to illustrate that point, we have a really crappy analogy
[00:01:17] April Dunford: and he says, I'm gonna teach you how to buy a toilet. And I was like. Fantastic.
[00:01:23] Dan Blumberg: Welcome to CRAFTED., a show about great products and the people who make them. I'm Dan Blumberg. I'm a product and growth leader and on CRAFTED. I'm here to bring you stories of founders, makers, and innovators that reveal how they build game-changing products — and how you can, too. CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run, and verify applications anywhere without environment confirmation or management, more than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services, and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications. Learn more at Docker.com
And CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Mines, where my team and I can help you take a new product from zero to one and beyond. We specialize in early stage product discovery, growth, and experimentation. Learn more and sign up for the CRAFTED. Newsletter at modernproductminds.com.
[00:02:20] April Dunford: It's interesting to be the positioning expert because a lot of the companies I work with, you know, I'm dealing with the founder, and the founder generally has a technical background, not necessarily a marketing background, and people don't really get what it is. 'cause it's a bit of a difficult concept.
[00:02:37] So sometimes people will say, oh, positioning is exactly the same as messaging. And I'll be like, eh, well not really. You know, Uhhuh, you use positioning to build your messaging. But it's not exactly the same thing. Or they think we're, we're writing a tagline like, people really wanna write tagline. There's a certain kind of person, when you say positioning, they're like, I got it.
[00:02:55] Innovate. Explorate, you know, fascinate. That's it. Yeah, we're done.
[00:03:03] Dan Blumberg: Brilliant.
[00:03:03] April Dunford: And I'm like, you know, I think it's more than that. Um, so in my world, positioning defines how your product or your company. Is the best in the world at delivering something, some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about.
[00:03:20] I like to think of it a little bit as like context setting for products. Like, you know, and context is really important because when we encounter something new, you know, we will look for the clues in the context about what this thing is all about. Um, when we're talking about tech products in particular, like if I come to you and I say, Hey, I got this thing.
[00:03:41] It's cool, man. And uh, and what it is, is it's a CRM customer relationship management. If I just told you that, like it's a CRM, you're and, and didn't tell you anything about it, like who it's for or what it does. Mm-Hmm. Or, you know what? It costs anything. You would make a bunch of assumptions about that product based on what you know about that market category.
[00:04:03] So I say it's a CRM and I'd be like, oh. Well, you must compete with Salesforce and Right, you know, you must, you would make assumptions about what that product does. Like it's tracking deals on a pipeline, tracking companies tracking revenue. You would make assumptions about who you sell that to. Like I sell that to the VP sales and that's what I, that's who buys the CRM.
[00:04:22] I would even make assumptions about the pricing, which is kind of funny 'cause you know, there's CRMs for little companies and they're way cheaper than CRMs for big companies. So here's how this works. Like if I do a good job. Positioning and that positioning sets off a set of assumptions about my product that are true.
[00:04:39] That's great. You know, I, I've just saved marketing and sales a whole lot of hassle. But if I do it wrong and I position myself in a way that sets off a set of assumptions in the minds of customers, and those assumptions are wrong. Then, then I got this problem that I'm saying, oh, hey, I'm a CRM. And people say, well, great.
[00:04:57] Show me how you manage accounts. And you'd be like, oh no, we don't manage accounts. And we'll be like, wait, how can you, how does that work? Like you must compete with Salesforce. No, we don't compete with Salesforce. And then you're like, well, well hang on. So people will often. Poorly positioned products because what they started out to build isn't actually what they've got.
[00:05:22] Dan Blumberg: You've written that every company you've ever worked with has struggled to make their awesomeness obvious. What stops companies from being to quote the title of your book, obviously. Awesome.
[00:05:32] April Dunford: So I'll correct that a little bit because I think lots of companies. Stumble into great positioning and this stuff just works and they don't have a problem with it.
[00:05:44] So I've worked at companies where it's just happened, like the product got built, the positioning was kind of obvious and it just worked. And nobody had a problem figuring out what this thing was and why it was important to them, and they just sold like heck. But a lot of times what happens is it works for a while.
[00:06:03] And then the market shifts on you. And so what happens is, mm-hmm. You start getting so successful that other competitors start piling in and they kind of do what you do and all of a sudden your thing that was so unique and so differentiated a couple years ago is starting to look just like everybody else.
[00:06:21] And then the companies are like, well dang, now we have to shift this positioning if they even know that what that is. And they don't know how to shift it because they, they didn't know how they made it up in the first place. So I think some companies kind of stumble into this and they don't have a problem with positioning at all.
[00:06:37] It just all kind of works, but often. It, it degrades over time and then the company's in real problem. Now, some companies have it right from the beginning, like, you know, I've worked with a lot of companies where they're selling, but it's a struggle because the thing is so new and so innovative that it's really hard to explain.
[00:06:58] What it is and what it's all about. I'm thinking about a team I was working with this week and really fantastic innovative product in the data space, but kind of tricky to explain what it is, because you know, it's not a database, it's not an ETL tool, it's not an information integration tool. It's not a BI tool.
[00:07:17] So what exactly is it?
[00:07:19] Dan Blumberg: So how do you do it? I I, I know coming up with great positioning is not using the fill in the blanks positioning statement that drives you crazy. Yeah. So what's, what's, what's step one
[00:07:28] April Dunford: specifically when I talk about my stuff, it's very focused on B2B technology companies. And so when I looked at it, I knew the positioning statement wasn't gonna work because it was kind of just like writing, positioning down, like, you know, there's a blank there.
[00:07:41] It says market category. It didn't tell me. How do I figure out my best market category? So I'm just guessing and writing it down and calling that, doing positioning, which yeah, didn't make any sense to me. And so the way I reasoned it out was, you know, and maybe this is just a bit of my engineering background showing through here, but I was like, I.
[00:08:00] Well, why can't we break it into pieces and solve for the pieces and then put the pieces together? You know? That's how we solve stuff in tech. Yeah. That's why I was like, let's bust it into pieces. And so breaking into pieces wasn't that hard because we kind of agree on what the pieces are and those are like the blanks and the positioning statement.
[00:08:17] We got these five things. So the first thing is. Competitive alternatives, like if you didn't exist, what would a customer do or put another way? Like what do you have to beat in order to win a deal? Yeah, so that's the first thing, like alternatives to what you do. Second one is distinct capabilities, so things you as a company or your product can do that the other alternatives can't do.
[00:08:39] The third thing is differentiated value. So the customer doesn't actually care that much about your features. They care. What do these, what does this feature do for my business? Like, how's this gonna help me make money? How's this gonna help me save money? And so the, the differentiating value is this is the value that you can deliver, that your competitors can't.
[00:08:58] And then in B2B, we're never trying to sell to everybody. We're trying to sell to a specific set of customers. So I. What's our definition of a really good fit customer? And then the last thing is market category. Am I email or am I chat? Like, you know, right? So, so what the heck is this thing? So what's the context we're gonna position it in?
[00:09:15] So those are the five things. And then once I got to that point where it was all broken apart, I thought, well, I've gotta figure out the right answer for each of these. Piece parts. But the first thing you notice when you approach it that way is that all of the piece parts have a relationship to the others.
[00:09:31] So let's take differentiated value 'cause it's really important. Like that's the answer to the question. Like, why pick us the value that my product can deliver that no one else can? Like, where does that come from? Like what does that dependent on? It's, it's dependent on my differentiated capabilities.
[00:09:47] Like I don't get to just make it up. It comes from the stuff I can do that the other guys can't. Then when I think about it, like, you know, my differentiated capabilities are only differentiated when I compare them to a competitor. So, you know, yeah, those three things are really tied. Like I don't get to just bake up one and without knowing the others.
[00:10:07] And then even if I look at like, what's my best fit customer? Well, my best fit customer is a customer that really, really cares a lot. About the value they can only get from us. That's what makes 'em a good fit. So I can't figure out best fit customer without really understanding what my value is. And then market category is a little bit more esoteric.
[00:10:27] But if we think about it, like the best context to position my product in is the context that makes this value kind of obvious to these people. Mm-Hmm. So, you know, but then context would actually determine who my competitor is. So, oh no, everything relates to everything else. So where do I start? And. For a long time I thought, well, this is why we don't have methodology.
[00:10:48] 'cause there's no good place to start. And so what you do is you, you, you pick a starting point and you work your way around and you get a guess, right? So here's my candidate positioning. I take it out to the market, I test it. If it works, great, I run with it. If it doesn't, I throw it out and I come back and I take another guess at it.
[00:11:05] And so I did that for years and years. It was terrible actually, because, you know, it was great if you got it right the first time, but if you didn't get it right the first time, everybody's really frustrated with you. So how I get outta that mess is a really long story. But the short version is folks on the product side are really into Clayton Christensen jobs theory jobs to be done.
[00:11:23] Yep, yep. And I kind of went down that rat hole, you know, reading all the books and I'm kind of like, well, how does that intersect with this? And where I got to was we actually have to start with competitive alternatives. If we don't start with competitive alternatives, what we get is positioning That sounds good in the office, but doesn't actually work.
[00:11:43] Out in the market. 'cause it's insufficiently differentiated from the other options. And like, even more specifically, and your, your audience is more technical folks. Like if they're familiar with jobs theory, like how I really like my big aha was, you know, I was listening to somebody talk about the milkshake story.
[00:11:59] So there's this famous milkshake story, I don't know if you know jobs. Sure.
[00:12:02] Dan Blumberg: I, yeah, no, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm one of those people you just alluded to, product person into jobs theory. Ah, so
[00:12:07] April Dunford: you just. Do you know the milkshake story? So the, you know, for people on that are listening that may not know it, like the milkshake story is like, there's this company, they're a fast food restaurant.
[00:12:16] They're trying to improve the milkshake, you know, and so they're looking at how do people consume milkshakes, whatever. And they find out this little piece of data, which is a whole bunch of people are buying the milkshake in the drive-through in the morning, like, what is going on? So then they interviewed these people and they're like, what's happening here?
[00:12:31] And they said, well, you know, they got a long drive and they're bored, but they're hungry. And they're in the car. So, you know, they don't wanna buy like a breakfast sandwich 'cause that's messy and they don't wanna buy a donut maybe 'cause that's messy. But also it's over too quick, you know, and they're, they need a little boredom relief.
[00:12:49] So the milkshake actually does all the jobs. Like it's, you know, it's, it's kind of thick, it lasts a long time. It fits my cup or it doesn't make a mess, you know? So they're buying this thing for breakfast? Yep. The aha moment I had about that was. Well, heck, like what you found out is what you assumed was your competition is not your competition.
[00:13:08] And so if we started there, then we could actually build up the positioning that would work for these people because they're trying to make a choice between muffin and milkshake, and we think they're trying to make a choice between Coke and a milkshake, and that's wrong. Right. So the way my positioning methodology works then is we, we start with this idea.
[00:13:26] If you didn't exist, what would a customer do?
[00:13:30] Dan Blumberg: Yeah,
[00:13:31] April Dunford: they would either stick to their status quo thing, like whatever they already have. Which in B2B software, it's often Excel or I'm just gonna do it manually. Yeah. Or maybe I do nothing 'cause I don't even think I have the problem. And then if the customer decides they're gonna buy something, do they make a short list and then they compare you against direct competitors?
[00:13:49] And again, we could Google. Other companies that look like us or do things that we do, but you are often very surprised when you ask a customer like, what actually lands on a short list and who do they actually compare us to? That list is often much shorter than the list of companies that could compete with us.
[00:14:07] So anyways, we start there. That's our stake in the ground. Like this is what, where I got a beat in order to win a deal. So once I have that, then I can say, well, what have we got that they don't have? And then once I have that, then I can go down that list of things and for everything I can say, so what, so okay, I got this great AI feature.
[00:14:25] It's so advanced. So what, like what, what value does the customer get out of that? Like what does it let the customer do? Yeah. How does it help them make money? And when I'm going down this list and saying, for every single feature saying, so what? So what? I don't wanna end up with 9,000 points of value. I wanna end up with two or three value themes or value buckets.
[00:14:46] And once I get there, I should be able to say at that point, look, you wanna pick us because we are the only product on the planet that can deliver you a combination of this, plus this, plus this value. And for each of those value points, the features are tucked in underneath and this is how we do it. Yeah.
[00:15:04] Now once I have that, then I can say, okay, we're the only people that can deliver this stuff. But you know what? Not everybody cares about that stuff the same. So what are the characteristics of a target account that make them really, really, really care a lot about the value that can only come from you? I.
[00:15:20] Like, is it bigger companies that care more than little companies? Is it companies that have a Microsoft stack? Is it companies that have more than five people in the accounting department care about this more? Is this companies with a certain kind of business model? So I'm trying to figure this out in a bottoms up way.
[00:15:35] Like if I've got this value, who's a good fit for it? And then the last thing's market category. I got this value. I'm trying to communicate it to these people in my email or in my chat. You know, am my database or data warehouse. I. What's the best way to contextualize this thing so that we make it really easy for these people to figure out what this product is actually all about?
[00:15:59] Dan Blumberg: Yeah. I love your focus on one of the strongest competitors out there, which is do nothing. Yeah. Which you've talked about. You know, do Nothing is a, is a tough competitor, right? Like the switching costs are really high. We lose
[00:16:09] April Dunford: half our deals to do nothing in B2B. And it's funny to think like that because if you talk to your salespeople, you say, who's our biggest competitor?
[00:16:18] They'll, they'll tell you whoever they lost the last deal to, right? They'll say, oh, it's Oracle, you know? Oh yeah. We're losing the sales force. Yeah. But if you look at the data, you know, and you analyzed all your deals, you didn't get the stat on this is 40 to 60% of B2B purchase processes end in no decision.
[00:16:36] So it, it's actually the biggest competitor we have is customer embarks on a journey to go buy some and at the end they go, ah, forget it. Yeah,
[00:16:45] Dan Blumberg: they don't buy anything.
[00:16:47] April Dunford: Yeah, no.
[00:16:47] Dan Blumberg: As you've written in your, in your latest book, I'm not gonna get fired for saying Let's stick with what we've got. Just
[00:16:50] April Dunford: stick with what we've got.
[00:16:51] It's, you know, it's working okay. It's not perfect, but you know, like the, like it's, it is working all right. Yeah. What's really interesting about that data is when you scratch at that, people fall into two categories when they do nothing either they looked at the other competitors out there and decided, you know what?
[00:17:09] The thing we have is good enough, so they made a conscious decision to stick with whatever they're doing. Now we, you know, we could just keep doing this in Excel, like we could just hire some interns, but the majority of the time, that's actually not true. The majority of the time, the customer has looked at all their options, gotten right down to the end and has basically chickened out.
[00:17:29] So what's happened is they've got down and they're like, I don't know, man. I'm gonna have to recommend this to my boss, and I'm not sure I'm making the right choice here. And this happens an incredible proportion of the time.
[00:17:42] Dan Blumberg: Yeah. Another thing you've written that that resonates with me is don't sell your product but rather help your customers buy it.
[00:17:48] And you share a story of two different salespeople that you met when you were trying to buy a toilet. And so this feels like an incredibly LinkedIn optimized question, but I'm gonna ask anyway. Please tell us April, what buying a toilet has to do with B2B SaaS.
[00:18:02] April Dunford: You know, so it, so here's what I've learned about trying to.
[00:18:08] Teach people stuff, and I learned this in the first book when I was trying to teach people about positioning. If I came in and I went straight to a tech example and I said, look, you know, I had this thing and we thought it was a database, but it turned out it was a business intelligence tool. Yeah. What I get is technical people would get all caught up in the technical details.
[00:18:27] And they were like, yeah, but did it have a rollup and cube function? I mean, that's why, you know, and I'd be like, no, no. Like, forget about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I started talking about, you know, what's the difference between muffins and cake? Those are the same thing, right? They're just, but but a muffin.
[00:18:42] I pay a dollar and a cake is different. A cake. I have different competitive alternatives. Muffin is different. Muffin is breakfast cake, it's dessert, you know? So I started doing that for positioning. So I have all these analogies of, you know, what's a cake pop? Is it cake on a stick or is it more like a lollipop?
[00:18:57] Like, so the second book I'm talking about how to take your positioning and turn it into a sales pitch. And so I have lots of examples of. Sales pitches that I've transformed working with companies where, you know, we used to pitch it like this, but now we pitch it like this and that works way better. But I knew that if I was gonna write this book about it, I was gonna have to come up with an example that had nothing to do with tech.
[00:19:19] So I was thinking back in my own history of like, one of the key concepts to understand in selling software is that. We think it's really easy to buy 'cause we know it, right? So we're selling, let's say we're selling CRM. We're like, how hard is it to buy a CRM? Like you just look at the features, whatever.
[00:19:35] Like it's not that hard to buy A CRM, but what we forget is that the customer often has never bought a CRM before because how often do you buy A CRM? It's like a once every. 10 years kind of a purchase. Yeah. Right. And so I wanted to have an example of something that I thought that I thought was gonna be really easy to buy.
[00:19:52] And it turned out it was really hard. And so the example that came to mind was I did a renovation on my bathroom in my house, and the contractor came in, I. And he's doing this Reno and he says, April, you know you gotta go pick out a toilet 'cause we're gonna, you know, we're gonna replace this toilet. And I'm like, okay, toilet.
[00:20:09] I never bought a toilet before, but how hard can this be? It's just a fricking toilet. And then I, then I go to the store and the sales rep is there and he's like, what kind of toilet do you want? I'm like, dude, one that flushes like, what do you mean? What kind of toilet do I want? Yeah. Like, and the guys' toilets are back in the corner, like, go pick one.
[00:20:29] And I go back there and there's like a hundred toilets and they're, and they're all really different. And you know, some of them cost a hundred bucks something costs a thousand bucks. And I'm like, oh man, this is gonna be really hard. And then every toilet had this description and there were all these features.
[00:20:45] And, and they were like, oh, this one has the gravity assist flush. And I'm like, what the hell is that? And it's like, mm-hmm. This one has a flapper and this one doesn't. I'm like, what's a flapper? Why do I care about flappers? You know? And so I'm thinking, man, this is just like buying software, right? Like we're talking to 'em about, Hey, I've got this AI thing, or, Hey, I've got the, and the customer's like.
[00:21:03] Should I care about that? I don't even know what that is. So in my case, what happened is I looked at all these toilets and I was like, man, I don't wanna pick a bad one. And then I left and I went home and I did all this research. And what happened is, is like after a couple of weeks doing this, I just gave up.
[00:21:19] I just said, look, I'm a busy person. I don't have time to be a fricking toilet expert. I don't wanna be a toilet expert. I just want a toilet that works. And then I was like, you know what? The toilet I've got just works and there's nothing wrong with it. It's a little old, but there's nothing wrong with it.
[00:21:34] So I'm just gonna stick with the one I got. And that's just like what people do in software. It's the same thing. They're just like overwhelmed. And so in this particular case, it turned out I didn't have the choice. So I went back to my contractor and I said, I'm just gonna keep this one because I'm too busy.
[00:21:48] And the guy said, no, we pulled it out, we recycled it, it's gone. And I was like, shit. Then I had to go back, but I, I went to a different toilet store and I got this toilet salesman. He comes in and he says, I'm gonna teach you how to buy a toilet. And I was like, fantastic. And what he did was he said, look, like you only need to know three things about a toilet.
[00:22:10] It's like quality, aesthetics, space. And I was like, okay. And he said, look, like, see these, there's these cheap ones over here, and there's these more expensive ones. And it's mainly all these features that you're trying to figure out. It's just a measure of quality. And I was like. Dude who buys a low quality toilet, like that sounds stupid.
[00:22:28] Like, like why? Why would you do that? But plumbers are expensive. Yeah. And he said, well, actually. Some toilets barely get used. So I'm like, okay, but in this case it's pretty busy bathroom. So I'm like, I don't want the low quality toilet. And he says, okay, well we eliminate all those and now we're down to half the toilet.
[00:22:44] And then he says, aesthetics is the second thing. Like some people got a certain look they're going for in the bathroom and they want a gold toilet or whatever, and you're gonna pay extra for that. And I said, well, I don't have any toilet fashion requirements. So we eliminate all those. And then he says the last thing is space.
[00:22:59] Like some toilets, a tank fits into the wall, and then we're down to three toilets. Like we've done this in like four minutes. Yeah, we're down to three toilets. And I'm like, oh, like which one should I pick? And the guy says, look, I'm actually the total rep, so I'm gonna tell you to pick the total one. But you know what?
[00:23:16] You could pick any one. He says, I just believe in the total product. That's why I work for them. Go back and search online if you want. The total one's gonna cost you like $80 more, but in my opinion, it's the better toilet. If you just wanna pick a toilet and never think about toilets again, pick that one.
[00:23:30] So I was like, good, great. Slapped down my cart, bought the toto toilet, you know, still working. Great. I must add, you know what I was trying to illustrate with that story is like, why aren't we doing that? For our customers, like instead of just overwhelming them with like, I got the ai, I got the advanced analytics, I got the, whatever, all these features, like why are we not just painting a picture of the whole market and saying, look, these kind of solutions are good at this and bad at this, and these kind of solutions are good at this or bad at this, and we are designed for customers that look like this, that want this.
[00:24:09] So what I'm doing is giving you the rubric or the guide so that you can make your own mind up and you can feel confident that you've made the right choices, you made the right trade-offs, and you pick the thing that's the best fit for you.
[00:24:22] Dan Blumberg: I'd love that. Now, now that we have a lot of the principles, I'd love if you could give an example of how this manifested with, uh, one of the tech companies that you've advised.
[00:24:29] April Dunford: I'll give you one. 'cause they've been acquired, uh, by Salesforce. And so, uh, the, the founder doesn't mind anymore if I tell his secrets about his, uh, sales pitch, you know, because he's. You know, rich and acquired. So they're, uh, they're called Level Jump. And so what they have is sales enablement software.
[00:24:48] So think software to help your, a new sales rep get up to speed really quickly, and it's really, really crowded market. So the first thing we did with Level Jump when I was working with them is we worked on the positioning, who's their competition, where their competition kind of falls into three categories.
[00:25:05] Like you could just put stuff on a shared drive, it's free, and let the reps consume it and train themselves. That's the free, easy thing. But if you got a lot of reps, that starts getting to be hard and it's, it turns into the wild West. We don't know who's consumed what content and do they have the right versions and all that stuff.
[00:25:22] So you might move to essentially a content management system, which allows you. To put a lot of content in there, do version control on it, make sure it's all good, and then you can track who's consuming what and all that sort of stuff. And there's a whole bunch of solutions out there that are essentially content management system for sales.
[00:25:40] But the other choice is you could buy an LMS, which is a learning management system, which is, I can, I can define the courses and mm-Hmm, I can see how far you went in the course, and I can certify you and all that stuff. So if we think about. Differentiated capabilities, like there's a bunch of differentiated capabilities they had, but the main one was they were the only solution built on top of Salesforce, meaning they're right in Salesforce.
[00:26:02] Now, the question you might ask is, so what? Like what's the value of that and the value of, that's really interesting because, because they're built inside Salesforce, their data is in the same database as the sales data. So what that means is I can actually use sales metrics. To figure out, did the sales enablement work, meaning did it improve time to first deal?
[00:26:27] Did it improve time to make quota? Like this is what we really care about. And so that's their big differentiator is we can prove whether or not the sales enablement worked. Okay. So if you look at, well, how could we pitch this? A feature oriented pitch on that would be, Hey, you click on the button, it says Gimme a demo.
[00:26:47] Customer comes in. And the rep would be like, oh, hi. I'm here to show you a level jump. Here's how we log in. Here's how we set up the training. Here's this kind of training you can do. Here's how a rep consumes the training, feature, feature, feature, feature, feature. And at the very, very end, and this is what they were doing at the very, very end, they'd be like, oh yeah, and here's how you measure the results.
[00:27:07] Does it sound different than the other things? Not really. Like it does what a content management system. Yeah. Does it do the same thing as a learning management system? Yeah. Yeah. Kind of sounds the same. So it's not really answering the question for the customer, like, why should I pick you over anybody else?
[00:27:23] Instead, we rework the pitch. So the rework pitch goes like this. So I'm pitching to the head of sales enablement, right? So I come in and I'm like, hi, head of sales enablement. We're gonna give you the demo, but hang on a sec before we get there, why is sales enablement important? You know why it's important?
[00:27:39] Because every day your rep's not making quota. It costs you money. Yeah, we wanna speed that up as much as we can. That's our goal here. Now you got choices and you could put stuff on the shared drive, but you know that doesn't work, right? You're gonna grow outta that. It's gonna be the wild west. You could pick a content management system and all these, all these guys out here, they're kind of like that.
[00:28:00] It help you organize the stuff. You can tell who's consuming what, all that stuff, or you getting really fancy. You could pick one that's like a learning management system. Now I got courses and training certification and all that stuff. You know what none of those things does When you gotta go to your boss and your boss says, did that training work?
[00:28:19] What do you show 'em? Wouldn't it be great if you could show 'em and you could say, look, this is how this improved time to first deal. This is how it, this improved time to make quota. We want that right. Okay, great. Now let me show you how we do that, and I'm not even gonna bother Yeah. Showing you this stuff that all the other competitors do.
[00:28:39] And I'm gonna go right to the meat and say, look, we're the only ones built on top of Salesforce. Here's how we track this. Here's the report you can show your boss. Here's where you can see exactly what's working and not working, so that the next version of your sales enablement gets better. We are the only sales enablement product that allows you to demonstrate results.
[00:29:00] Dan Blumberg: Yeah,
[00:29:00] April Dunford: that's a way better pitch.
[00:29:02] Dan Blumberg: Yeah. Yeah. I, I think you just quoted the, uh, the outputs to outcomes aphorism, right. Not measuring a number of courses completed or any, it's just revenue. Yeah. Let's get right to deals closed. Exactly.
[00:29:13] April Dunford: Yeah. Yeah. And as technical people, right? Like we're technical people inside tech companies, we love talking about features.
[00:29:20] It's our comfort zone, but we just assume that the customer. Can figure out why the features matter, and often if our feature is really cool and really advanced and new customers just don't know, like if you think about a lot of consumer tech that you consume, like you've been trained to do. The translation between value and features.
[00:29:43] We can't assume that the customers know as much as we do. We are experts in solutions. Customers are experts in pain.
[00:29:52] Dan Blumberg: I'd love to talk a little bit about personal brand and positioning. You've not only advised many tech companies, you've also built a very compelling brand around yourself, uh, and your expertise. And I'd love to understand a little bit of, of how you did it and, and advice you may have for others who are embarking on a solopreneur journey.
[00:30:07] April Dunford: I do think as a solopreneur, good positioning can be a really powerful thing. Like when I started out, I didn't really know what I wanted to focus on and, and I was a little bit worried. I. That I couldn't productize positioning as a service. I was worried that positioning is something that the team really has to do.
[00:30:27] But what I did know was that, you know, if I came out and just positioned myself as a fractional CMO, like there's thousands of fractional CMOs, so how many different like, and why not pick a better one than me? So I kept circling around. Well, you know, the thing that I have a lot of experience in is this positioning methodology.
[00:30:44] Then it took me maybe two years to figure out how could I work with companies? Like how could a positioning expert actually deliver value for a company given the idea that I, I, I cannot be an expert in their stuff. And so I eventually landed on my offering, which is I come in as a facilitator, we bring together a cross-functional team from the company, and then I come with a process.
[00:31:10] To work people through that takes the opinions out of it as much as we can and helps the company get to a good result. And then I'm also a person there that knows what good looks like, so you know, I can push the team until we've got something that we think is really good. And so that works well. Once I decided I could do that, then I just stuck to that.
[00:31:30] And I think it's very hard when you're a consultant at the beginning. To just pick it and stick it. Yeah. And say, I'm just gonna do this one thing. 'cause like this is the only thing where I'm better than everybody else and I'm gonna say no to all the kind of distracting business that I could do it. Yep.
[00:31:48] But I'm not really the best at it. And then I think you get this compounding effect, like at this point I've done almost 300 workshops with B2B Tech companies. So now I'm really the expert. Like at the beginning, you know, I felt like I knew a lot about that, but at this point I've probably done more positioning with a B2B Tech company than anybody else on the planet.
[00:32:11] So if you're a B2B Tech company and you got a problem with positioning, why would you pick someone other than me? You should pick me. And that is not where I started, like at the beginning, I just looked like everybody else except worse, right? I'm a fractional CMO, except. Not from Facebook, not from wherever.
[00:32:30] So positioning is all about figuring out, you know, where you're the best in the world at something. How do you pick that, narrow down on that, and then stick it long enough so that. You actually are the best in the world at that thing. Yeah. Like look at me, I'm nothing special. Right? Like I like really like, I mean, if I can do this, anyone can do this.
[00:32:49] It helps that I spent 25 years being a VP marketing, but at the same time, like there's no real magic here. Like I had a thing I thought I was pretty good at and then I just did it a lot over and over and over again. So I think for solopreneur, that's a good way to do it. Yeah. But it, but it takes discipline.
[00:33:06] Dan Blumberg: It gets back to focus. I think that's been, been the key theme here. Okay. Um, congrats on all your success. Thank you so much for, for taking the time talking with us.
[00:33:14] April Dunford: No problem. Thanks so much for having me.
[00:33:17] Dan Blumberg: That's April Dunford. I'm Dan Blumberg, and this is CRAFTED.
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[00:34:10] April Dunford: You thought you were competing with Coke and you were competing with a muffin?