65. Positioning power play: how to make difference pay

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcription service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes. 

 
00:03 
Dom Hawes 
Welcome to Unicorny. This is a podcast about the business of marketing, how to create value and how you can help your business win the future. And I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Welcome to part two of our deep dive into positioning with April Dunford. April is one of the best practitioners of product positioning. She’s made it her life’s focus and she’s written two books on the subject. She really knows her onions. In part one, we looked at the number one red flag in positioning. If your customers struggling to get who you are or why they need you, well, you need to work on your positioning. And we looked at a better process to follow. And when I say better, I mean better than the dreaded fill in the blanks positioning statement.  

 
00:51 
Dom Hawes 
April gave us her five step process, all working from the customer's point of view. Now, in part two, we're going to find out how April goes about finding the information she needs to complete that process. Then we're going to see how she pulls it all together. Buckle up because we're going deep. How do you get the information you need to complete your five step process?  

 
01:11 
April Dunford 
Most people look at that and they say, oh my gosh, we're going to have to do all this research, figure this stuff out. I work mainly with b two b technology companies, and here's how this works. If it's a b two b tech company and we have a sales team, which is a big assumption, if you don't have a sales team, you're going to have to go do some research. You don't know much about what customers are doing. But if I have a sales team, if I go to that sales team, my sales team knows who my competition is. They know because they're dealing with it every day. They know what the status quo is in the accounts that they're selling to and they know who else ends up on a shortlist. They know because they're talking to customers about it every day. Day.  

 
01:51 
April Dunford 
So we know that if I have a sales team, when I get to the second step, which is what have I got that the competition doesn't have? Well, I know the competition from talking to sales. My product team, if it's a product company, generally knows this because they're tracking the competition. They're building a roadmap. They know what the feature function comparisons are between us and the competition. The third one, the value. When we're translating to value, we really need to understand a lot about how our customers make decisions, what's valuable to a customer and what isn't. But if we're in market and we've done a reasonable number of deals. We know that as an organization, we know it. We know what's valuable and what isn't.  

 
02:31 
April Dunford 
Again, we're doing the translation from the differentiated capabilities, which is very different than just going to a customer and saying, what do you love about our stuff? They might have stuff that they love, but if your competitors can do the same thing, that's not the reason they picked you. They picked you for the value you can deliver that the other guys can't. So I'm doing this differentiated capabilities, then translating it to value. But all of this is dependent on a lot of institutional understanding of competitors capabilities and value. Now, if you're in market and you've done a reasonable number of deals, if I get the right people together in a room as a cross functional team, we can do this without doing a whole bunch of customer research ahead of time. If I don't have a sales team, forget it. All bets are off.  

 
03:18 
April Dunford 
I got to go. I got to go research that. Because you can't even answer the question, what does a customer compare me to? All you got are guesses. And then same thing. If my product team doesn't know much about competitors and isn't fluent on how our product stacks up against the competitors capabilities, well, then I'm going to have to go that research to figure that out. And then the last bit is value. If I've not done any deals at all or I've only done a couple of deals, I don't actually know that much about what customers find valuable and what they don't.  

 
03:48 
April Dunford 
So I'm going to have to do more deals to understand that or I'm going to be completely reliant on some kind of customer research to try and do my best guess of what I think people would might find valuable about my product.  

 
04:01 
Dom Hawes 
See, I think that's such a great, and by the way, a very refreshing approach that you probably have the knowledge internally already. So one of my big observations from running a b two B product company myself is oftentimes when you go to speak to a customer and ask them what they want, they don't tell you what they actually want. They don't tell you why they're actually going to buy. And so you can ask them a load of questions, make a load of changes to your business and actually lose ground. Not gain ground, because they're telling you either what they think you want to hear or just something to get you off the phone. Phone, but actually identifying and taking apart the work you actually do with your team, I think, is very refreshing.  

 
04:36 
April Dunford 
Well, that's it. Like, customers are experts in pain. They're experts in pain. They're experts in their own situation. What they want is an outcome and what's bugging them. They're experts in that. They are not experts in solutions. They don't build software. They don't know how to build software. They don't know what we're capable of or what we're not capable of in technology. So going in and asking them questions like, what do you want? Is often a fool's errand, but we can ask them, what drives you crazy? What do you wish was easier? What do you wish was better? Would you pay for that? We can ask them questions like that, and then we can certainly ask them questions about how they make decisions. If we didn't exist, what would you use?  

 
05:19 
April Dunford 
And we can understand the dimensions of their problems so that we can understand what might be valuable to them in their situation.  

 
05:30 
Dom Hawes 
It's about how good the questions you ask are.  

 
05:32 
April Dunford 
I've seen this before where people will say, well, we do great customer research, Ava. We can do this. We know a lot about customers, so I think we don't have a sales team, but we know enough. We can go do this. We can go to this positioning thing, and I'll say, okay, who are your competitive alternatives? And they give me this great big list. There's, like, 200 companies on the list. And I'm like, there's no way that your prospects are comparing you to all those ones. And the reality is they've never actually asked the customer that. They went in and they said, so, why do you love us so much? This is usually the question they ask, why do you love us? What's the best thing about us? Or they're asking the opposite, like, what drives you crazy about us?  

 
06:08 
April Dunford 
None of those things will tell you why the customer picked you in the first place. If you want to understand why the customer picked you in the first place, you're asking a completely different set of questions. You're saying, look, take me back to what you were doing before, and then what made you wake up in the morning and decide, we can't keep doing it? Like, what was that? And then you decided you needed a new solution. How did you make a short list? Who ended up on the shortlist, and then why'd you pick us? That's a very different customer interview than what you normally get, which is, you know, tell us the things you love the most and the things you hate the most whatever. That's a completely different set of questions.  

 
06:44 
April Dunford 
And you're not going to figure out from those questions why the customer picked you in the moment.  

 
06:48 
Dom Hawes 
No. And I think the who would you use if we didn't exist? Is a great question. I mean, a really good question.  

 
06:53 
April Dunford 
What's really interesting is to get them back in time to when they did the decision, because they know you in a different way now. And so, you know, back in time they're saying, oh, were using a spreadsheet and it was a pain in the neck and we made a mistake and that was costly for the business. And then we said, you know what? We got to stop using the spreadsheet for this. And then you say, okay, great. Well, so how'd you make a short list? Did you Google? What did you Google? Like, what were you actually looking, what did you think you were looking for? And that's an interesting set of questions because once they get used in your stuff, they may actually think of you in a very different way.  

 
07:30 
April Dunford 
But when they originally went and did the research to make a short list, they were like, well, we thought that the solution to this would be like a CRM. So we looked at CRMs, but then we discovered, no, that's not CRMs. Don't do that. So then we looked at something else, and then, you know, this whole chain that went down, that happened. And as marketers and product people, we need to understand how the customer does that. Like, what was the path that they followed? Because we want to show up wherever it is that they're, you know, when they're in that moment trying to make a short list, we need to show up there. Yes, we do need to understand what they think about us after they buy and what, you know, what they would like us to build next and all that other stuff.  

 
08:08 
April Dunford 
But that stuff doesn't necessarily tell us what we need to know to do good positioning. The other thing is that a lot of times when you're having this discussion like, what do you love so much about us? Customers will say things like, they'll say, you guys got great support. I love the support. Every time we got a problem, we call you answer it. It's amazing. All your people in support are really experienced. We love them. But in general, customers don't get exposed to support until after they've bought. It wasn't the reason they picked you. Sometimes it is like you might have something in your support that's different. Like we do twenty four seven and the other guys don't. Or we do multi language support and the other folks don't. So there may have been a reason there, but in general, it's a retention feature.  

 
08:50 
April Dunford 
Like, it keeps, it makes sure that you don't churn. It's super important. We want to make sure we have it. But it wasn't the reason you picked us, because you didn't even know. Like, you didn't even know we had great support until after you picked us, and then you needed to call support.  

 
09:07 
Dom Hawes 
That's a classic, right? You're trying to find out what makes you different, why your customer picked you over your competition, and they tell you something they didn't find out about until six months into your relationship. Getting the right information out of customers is really hard work. Going back to April's five big positioning questions, the great news is that most of us have a sales function we can tap into to get a lot of the answers. Sales know one hell of a lot. They know who the real competition is. Not the Google version, the actual two, three or more companies that they come up against all the time. They know about what type of customer constitutes a good fit, and they know the context of the market. It's not that talking to your customers is pointless, far from it.  

 
09:54 
Dom Hawes 
But you have to remember where they're coming from. They aren't really thinking about you or your competition. They're thinking about themselves and their own problems. As April said, they're experts in pain. This guides how you frame the questions you ask them. So stop asking, why did you pick us? What do you love about us? What do you hate about us? Instead, ask them, what problem did you have that prompted you to call us? Who was on your shortlist? What can you do now that you couldn't do before we started working together? And what does all of this really do or mean for your organization? Once again, Unicorner’s. It's about working from the outside in. Start with your customer's point of view and work back to see how what you do can be positioned right. Let's get back to the studio.  

 
10:46 
Dom Hawes 
What other mistakes do you see when people are trying to put together their own positionings?  

 
10:51 
April Dunford 
One of the most common mistakes I see are companies not really understanding what the competitor is. Often the company will make a competitive list by Googling, which makes no sense. And so what they'll do is list. These are companies that could compete with us. But the reality of the ground is often very different. And if you go talk to the sales team again, the sales team will say, we don't see any of those we only see Microsoft. Or even worse, they'll look at this and the company will be so wrapped up into these 25 competitors that they've googled and trying to make sure that they position against all of those. But then you go talk to sales and they'll say, oh, number one, competition is a spreadsheet, man. If they don't use us, they use a spreadsheet.  

 
11:32 
April Dunford 
And it's like, well, you better be prepared to do battle against the spreadsheet then. And so you'll see these companies that'll be positioning around things like, I get this a lot where the company comes and they'll say, it's ease of use. Like, that's our big thing. You know, we're easier to use, and that's why you should pick us. But then you go to sales, and sales says, well, the actual competition is the intern, like, manual process. We're going to hire an intern. The intern's going to do it. And it's like, do you think you're going to beat the intern on ease of use? No way, man. The intern's really easy to use. You're just like, joey, fill out the spreadsheet. Get me a coffee. Come back when you're done. Like, it really easy to use, right?  

 
12:08 
April Dunford 
But the intern sucks at all kinds of stuff. Like, the intern makes mistakes. The, you know, you got to train the intern. The intern leaves on you, and then that sucks. And then you got to replace the intern. Like, you know, there's all these things that software does better than the intern, but you got to know that the intern's the problem in the first place in order to position a record, that stuff. So I think really understanding who a customer compares you to is really important for positioning. That's probably the most common one I see. And then the second most common one I see is companies trying to position around features or capabilities, but not the value that those features deliver. You see this a lot in tech product companies. You know, product people.  

 
12:50 
April Dunford 
We're really into features, and we kind of assume that a customer can do the translation from feature to value in their own head. You see this a lot when we're selling to very technical buyers. There's an assumption, well, I don't have to tell you why that's valuable. You know, in some cases, it might be true, especially if it's a kind of a feature that's been around for a while. So the customer knows what it is and knows how it works and knows why it's valuable. But often the things that are really differentiating about our product are things that are kind of innovative, kind of new kind of stuff nobody else does. And so we can't just assume that the customer knows why that's valuable. Like, we're going to have to actually spell that out.  

 
13:29 
April Dunford 
I think most tech companies are just exposing all the features and saying, you know, here's all the great stuff we can do. And the customer's left scratching their head a little bit going, well, why do I care about that stuff? Like, is that actually valuable for me? I don't know.  

 
13:42 
Dom Hawes 
I think that's a really good observation. Also, for service companies, too, you tend to get, like, everyone's obsessed about benefit statements, not value. In obviously awesome. You've created a tool that people can use to ladder between feature, benefit and value.  

 
13:56 
April Dunford 
Yeah, I think even if you're getting the benefits and not features, you're ahead of the game.  

 
14:03 
Dom Hawes 
You're out of the blocks. You may not be in the race, but you're out of the blocks.  

 
14:06 
April Dunford 
Because I think it's, you know, I think the way we differentiate between benefits and value is actually kind of esoteric and only the marketers really understand it. And at the end of the day, whether you want to call it benefit or value, I don't actually care all that much. What I really care about is you coming and saying, I got this whiz bang AI thing. Here's how it works. And the customer's question is, so what? Like, so what did you just have to answer? So what? For the customer, I don't care if that's a benefit or pure value or whatever, but you need to answer the question, so what, like, why do I care that you have this thing? What is the impact on my business?  

 
14:41 
April Dunford 
One of the things I see in services businesses that I've worked with, they are often not honest with themselves about what their differentiated capabilities actually are. So what you'll get is, you know, the company will say, okay, here's our competition. People could build it themselves in house, or there's, you know, there's agencies out there that look like this. And then we say, well, what do you got that they don't have? And they'll often say, well, you know, they'll say, well, you know, we're great at doing this online experience that looks like this, okay, but then someone will pipe up and say, well, that's not all. Like, we're also like, we can do mobile apps. And it's like, yeah, but really, do you though, like, how many mobile apps have you done? And they're like, but we could.  

 
15:26 
April Dunford 
Or do you actually have people in house with those skills? But we could hire them. And I think you have to be very careful. Like in a product company, the features are what they are. You know, like they just are what they are.  

 
15:40 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah.  

 
15:40 
April Dunford 
In a services company, our capabilities, we have to be very hard on ourselves to say, do we really have that capability? Could we prove it? Could we actually say, you know, we're amazing at doing mobile development when we've only done a couple and we don't really have people that are certified in house to do that. We don't really have a process to do it. You wouldn't pick us. And so when we get to that differentiated capability stage in a services company, we need to be able to say, look, we're really good. Like if you take my positioning, let's take me as an example as a consultant, I'm very good at doing b two b. My whole background is b two b. And not just b, two b with a sales team.  

 
16:18 
April Dunford 
If you're not b, two b with a sales team, I don't even touch you. Like, if you call me, I say, look, you're a consumer product. I don't do consumer product. Like maybe I could, but you're not going to get the benefit of my 30 years of experience doing positioning with 200 other companies that, by the way, are all b two b with a sales team. Why should I be chasing this consumer thing like I am not the best choice there? Could I do it? Yeah, maybe, but it wouldn't be as good as if you were. If you were b two b with a sales team in tech, with a product, you come to me and you get the benefit of the fact that I've done this 250 times. We're going to get to something really good.  

 
16:58 
April Dunford 
And it would be not lying, but just not genuine to say, oh, I could position anything, anywhere, I don't care what it is, I could take a crack at it, but, and that's why people choose me. They choose me because I've done that little narrow thing 300 times and that allows me to charge a little bit more for that, be a bit picky about who my clients are and stay in my lane. And I think for most services businesses, they would do better to find out what they're really good at, where they can claim leadership and stick in that space, because that's how you get your rates up, that's how you get better class of clients. It's the more repeatable stuff that you can do.  

 
17:38 
Dom Hawes 
And that's something I have to fight. I have to say a lot because you get the, oh, I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket. It's like, oh, but what happens if someone comes and walks? It's like, don't do it. That's what you do.  

 
17:50 
April Dunford 
I think when the service businesses start, you don't have the luxury of that because you just have to kind of take your victim where you find them, keep the lights on. But I think at some point the great services businesses at some point gravitate towards the area where they can really claim leadership and over time build on that and build on that until you fast forward a few years and you can say, wow, like, they are the people to do this kind of thing and that's why we want to pick them. And then that's where the good stuff happens.  

 
18:23 
Dom Hawes 
There's a whole debate these days about those who are peddling brand marketing that, like, if you've got great branding, positioning doesn't so much matter, which I fundamentally disagree with. But there is this debate about, is positioning important anymore if you're in an organization that has been influenced by those organizations, like, how could you advise our listeners to frame their argument to look at positioning first?  

 
18:46 
April Dunford 
I do think that there are situations where the brand does matter more than positioning. For example, if I'm selling what I would call a consumer product.  

 
18:59 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah.  

 
19:00 
April Dunford 
That is an unconsidered purchase. And what I mean by unconsidered is I'm not doing my research on it beforehand. There's no real stakes. If I buy the wrong thing, b two B software is very considered purchase. We make a short list. We do our research. You know, we have long purchase processes. Positioning matters a lot in there. A lot. Brand might get you in the door, but it doesn't win the shortlist battle. Like, the shortlist battle gets won over. You know, what can you, why pick you over the other guys? But if I've got a thing like, let's say I'm selling water, fizzy water, brand matters a lot because I'm not doing my research beforehand. It's an in the moment decision. I walk into the store, I look at the fridge, and I'm like, I got to make a choice here.  

 
19:44 
April Dunford 
I don't want to spend all day. And you would, you are maybe very lucky to pick the thing that you're like, I've seen their ads. I know this. I'm familiar with them. I get a feeling about their brand. And I like that feeling and I'm going to pick that. Like we can do things in consumer that are go way beyond positioning and the product often doesn't matter all that much in an unconsidered purchase. Like, how you feel about the product I think matters a lot, but I'll work over in that space. Obviously, I'm the positioning lady. Why would I work in the space where positioning doesn't matter? Right. But if we're talking about a big ticket b two B purchase, the way the purchase gets made is very different. And we have to think about the person in that moment.  

 
20:29 
April Dunford 
There is a person tasked with making a recommendation of what to buy. And so often that person has to get consensus across a team in a b two B purchase process, typically five to eleven stakeholders involved, and those eleven stakeholders all got to agree and then we're going to make a recommendation up to our boss to go get the money to buy it. I can't go to my boss and say, I just like the green one, man. I'm just feeling green. It's, you know, I just, it gives me a feeling and I love it.  

 
21:01 
Dom Hawes 
You could if you wanted a new job, right?  

 
21:03 
April Dunford 
You know, now you may have made the decision for irrational reasons. So you may say, we're gonna pick Salesforce, even though I think the other thing is better, because I'm not gonna get fired for picking Salesforce. It's the market leader. That's the easy decision to make. And then I go up and justify it to my boss with a bunch of features and other things and, you know, the app store is better and it integrates better. But even though my, so even though my reason for picking it is irrational, I still have to give my boss a rational set of reasons. And there's stakes involved. Like if I go buy the wrong pack of gum, who cares? I just don't buy that one again. Right. If I pick the wrong accounting software, I'm going to get fired.  

 
21:48 
April Dunford 
And so we think about this stuff very differently. So most of the time when people come to me and say there's no such thing as real product differentiation because we can copy anything, these people have never worked in tech. That is just fundamentally not true. Like, if you think features don't matter to Apple, if you think features don't matter to Microsoft, like is, it's laughably wrong. And I think, and I think people fundamentally don't understand how products get built or how products get delivered. It is very difficult to copy features. Like, let's be honest it takes investment, it takes resources. Most of the time the products are actually dramatically different because we have dramatically different points of view in the world. And that is true even for very mature markets. Salesforce looks nothing like any other CRM on the planet.  

 
22:48 
April Dunford 
If it was true that in a CRM, this is a market that is very mature. It's been around forever. So why doesn't somebody just copy Salesforce? Why don't they just have a product that looks exactly like Salesforce? Because that's bonkers. We don't do that like, so I do believe that we can't think about this stuff all the same, the way we buy a pack of gum is not the way we buy a CRM. And so how we sell those things are different. How we buy those things are different. And in some cases, and I'm not saying brand doesn't matter in a c in b two b, it does. And it's certainly being known for something helps to get you on the short list, but it is insufficient. Like, it can't just be brand.  

 
23:27 
April Dunford 
I can't just go in and say, hey, you should buy us because we're fun, nice people and we're going to give you this feeling. You got to back it up with actual product because again, I got to justify it to my boss. But if I'm selling bubblegum, you know, I can maybe get away with the feeling thing.  

 
23:40 
Dom Hawes 
Boom. April, thank you so much. There we are. Boom, indeed. Oh, we covered a lot there, Unicorner’s. And I want to recap what we heard so it cements nicely into our memory banks. We started with April's excellent definition of positioning. As she described it, positioning fills the critical gap between what an existing customer knows and what a new prospect is trying to figure out. Oh, that's such a goodie. It just shows you how critical your positioning is because without an effective one, your customer just kind of flails around in the gap. It's a no man's land where they don't really get you and by the way, where sales struggle to make anything stick. And if that's happening, it's actually quite helpful. It's a clear symptom. Your positioning is off and that's where you need to start work to fix it.  

 
24:31 
Dom Hawes 
Coming out of this, we saw the real nature of positioning lies with how the customer thinks of you. It's got much less to do with figuring out who you are from within. That doesn't mean just going with whatever perception they have of you, but it does mean working from the outside in, figuring out just what exactly it is you're solving for them, and to discover that we saw the importance of crafting the right questions. I loved April's description of customers as experts in pain. It might sound a little bit derogatory, like they're a bunch of whiners, but actually it's just bloody useful because it helps us shift our approach. So rather than asking them what they love about us, we ask them about their pain and how we solve it for them.  

 
25:14 
Dom Hawes 
And the power of that, of course, is it will really resonate with new customers. We then talked about the power of leaning into your sales team, assuming you have a sales function, of course. It's an invaluable source of information, and it's free. It's completely focused on your competition, and your market context. That is the sales job. You won't need to splash out on expensive research that might not get you anywhere. Lastly, we look to what happens when you pull all of this together. There's a fear of being a little bit too narrow here, a fear of not covering all the things that you do for all of the audiences you have. And that's not just now. It's for all new possibilities in the future. But April was clear on this. Why try and be nothing to everyone when you can be something to someone?  

 
26:02 
Dom Hawes 
And I've never found a tight positioning to be limiting. On the contrary, Unicorner’s, there is nothing like the freedom of knowing where you're going. And if that position is taking me right to the heart of my customer, well, I will be forever happy. Before you go, I have one small, tiny, itsy bitsy simple favour to ask you. Please hit the subscribe button. That's it. It's so easy. It doesn't take long, but it would mean so much to me. Thank you for listening. See you next time. You have been listening to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nichola Fairley is the series producer. Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant. Pete Allen is the editor. Peter Powell is our scriptwriter and editor. Unicorny is a Selby Anderson production.