April Dunford: The Marketing Expert

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/a3afe06a7f1fa352

So you can't tell just using, you know, what I would call the grandmother test. You know, would your grandmother understand this? Well, unless you're selling a grandmother's, it doesn't matter if the grandmother understands it. So some people will say, well, we need to dumb this down and we need to have it so that anybody understands it. I super disagree with that in B2B.
If I'm selling a specialized thing to specialized buyers,
It just needs to resonate with them.
It's okay if it doesn't resonate with your grandmother.
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My guest today is April Dunford.
Her book, Obviously Awesome, totally changed how I think about positioning when it comes to business.
This interview originally aired as a members only episode, but I had so many requests for members to share it with their team at work.
that I decided to make it public so everyone can benefit.
April is an expert in product positioning, and this episode goes from high level to very detailed examples.
We discuss the critical role of positioning as a strategic approach, not just a marketing exercise capable of totally transforming a product's trajectory. April illustrates this with the example of labeling a muffin a muffin and not a cake, demonstrating how effective positioning can shift perceptions and drive sales.
If you're interested in getting more sales, loyal customers, and bigger promotions, this episode is for you.
It's time.
To listen.
And learn.
I wanna start with the basics. What is positioning?
It's interesting. I so I'm a positioning expert. And when I started out as a consultant being a positioning expert, the worst part about that is nobody really knows what positioning is. They think they do. So people will say
Positioning that's just like messaging, isn't it? And I'm like, actually, no, it's not quite that. Or they'll say
Positioning is like a tagline. We're coming up with a tagline. And I'm like, Oh gosh, no, there's a lot of things that we do
They aren't.
Tagline related. My
Personal pet peeve is when people talk about brand positioning. That drives me nuts. There is positioning and there is branding.
Those two things are actually really separate.
So most of the things that we confuse with positioning
are actually things we do with positioning.
Once we're done with it, but positioning is an input.
So if you think about it this way, if everything we do in marketing and sales is the house, positioning is the foundation upon which the house is built.
So my definition of positioning goes like this. Positioning defines
How your product is the best in the world.
at delivering something some value
That a well defined set of customers cares a lot about.
Now that's a bit of a mouthful.
A lot of the folks that I work with are not
marketing people, they're CEOs of tech companies, so they don't have a background in this stuff.
So I think the best way to think about it is it's like context setting for products. It's the context
I position my product in
Such that customers kinda have an idea like what is this thing? What's it all about? Why should I care? It's a starting point for a conversation with a customer.
Can you give me an example? When uh one of the things that really
stuck out to me. I was always trying to explain
to tech company CEOs with a tech company example. And whenever I did that, the tech company CEOs would say, Well, that's a database that you know, and we're not like a database. So I thought I need some examples that have nothing to do with
technology, they're really simple. So I was trying to come up with an example. And I was on my way to work and I went to Tim Hortons.
Coffee shop in Canada.
So I'm standing in line.
And the guy in front of me is ordering breakfast. It's eight AM.
And he orders this thing, which is a double chocolate salted caramel.
Muffin.
And I was like
That is some genius marketing stuff right there. So
I've got a piece of cake.
It is double chocolate caramel cake.
But if I put it in the muffin format.
And I call it a muffin.
Everything about that is different. The whole context around it is different. It is socially acceptable to o to order double chocolate caramel whatever
If you say it's a muffin.
Because I'm now comparing it differently.
So if I said it was cake, what's cake?
Cake competes with
All the things that are like dessert. It competes with
Ice cream and teramisu, and other things you would order for dessert. What does cake cost? Well if in a restaurant it's
Ten dollars, fifteen dollars.
Um, where do I get it? I I might go to a bakery, but I get it at a restaurant too.
When I'm talking about muffin.
Well muffins totally different. A muffin's breakfast. It competes with a bagel and a donut.
What do I charge for a muffin? I charge a dollar, two dollars for a muffin. The whole context around it is different.
The product, however, is the same.
Like that thing that you're eating is a piece of cake, whether whether it's in cake form or muffin form.
So I can choose to position it.
As a muffin, it's the same product
But the assumptions about that, the competitors are different.
Your value is different.
the c assumptions that customers have about that product are different.
Because I've placed it in a different context.
What are the most common misperceptions about positioning that companies have?
I would say the
Most companies just don't think about positioning at all.
In the vast majority of cases, the companies that I work with.
The positioning feels
obvious it feels like you couldn't possibly position it as anything else.
So it started like this. The founder woke up one morning and said
You know what sucks? Email sucks. We're gonna make way better email. It's gonna be fantastic and it's gonna fix all these things I hate about email.
And then they launch it and customers say, I like this part, I don't like this part.
They change it, it evolves over time, maybe the whole market evolves.
If we fast forward two years from now
The founder and everybody inside of the company still says, Email, we're building this email thing.
But maybe that product
Actually looks more like chat.
Because that's kinda like email too.
And so we'll start having this disconnect where the customer

And I'm
company is saying Well this is email, look at our amazing email and the customers like
I don't know. That kind of feels like chat, you're calling email.
I feel like maybe it's chat and now I'm confused.
And I don't really know what this thing is anymore.
When the company figures out they have a problem
Like, oh maybe this isn't email, maybe we should reposition it.
Nobody knows what to do at that point because they never
deliberately positioned it or did a thing to decide it was email in the first place. It was just obvious. Of course it's email. That was our idea. That's what we're gonna do. Product positioning is basically
shaping the environment in the consumer's mind by which they draw comparisons and know what to expect. That's a good way to describe it. It's a bit like
The opening scene of a movie.
So you walk into the movie, let's say you're going to movie theater, you walk into the movie theater, you know a little bit about it, you bought a ticket.
But the job of the opening scene in the movie is to set context for the movie because you have these big questions. Where are we? What time frame is this? Who are these characters? What is the vibe of this whole movie? You need to get these
Big questions answered.
before you can settle in and pay attention to the details of the story.
Um
So if we take I usually use Apocalypse Now as the example of a great opening scene. The opening scene of Apocalypse Now sh starts with a shot of the beach. It's palm trees. It's all nice. It's lovely. You walk in and you might think, Oh
Yeah. I know it's called Apocalypse Now, but maybe it's not Apocalypse right now. Maybe it's apocalypse thirty minutes from now.
So you walk in, but suddenly this thing changes like the music gets a little bit more intense.
We see this thing, it looks like
smoke, dust, and you're like, Oh, it's actually smoke. Helicopters go goes by and boom the beach is on fire and all of a sudden we're in the middle of the Vietnam War. And then the scene changes and it's Martin Sheen. He's in his hotel room, he's drinking, smoking, he's clearly in distress.
He walks over the window, he peeks out the blinds, and we get the first line of dialogue, which is actually his thoughts.
of the movie, he looks out and he says Saigon shit.
I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle.
So here we are. We're three minutes into a
Uh
three and a half hour movie and we know a lot. Wh where are we we're in
The middle of the Vietnam War, specifically we're in Saigon, our lead character has been there before.
It didn't go so well. He has PTSD. This movie is not gonna be funny, it's gonna be kind of intense.
Now I can settle in and pay attention to the details of the story.
Positioning works the same way.
If I
Walked up.
in Shar Tank, or I forget what we call it here in Canada. What's it called? Dragon Skin.
So let's say we have Weirdo Dragon's Den.
And
I'm not allowed to give you my whole pitch for something. I'm just gonna talk about
the market category. So the category that the
product is positioned in.
So I walk out and I say
I've got this amazing thing, it's revolutionary next generation thing, but it's CRM customer relationship management.
If you're tech people
And you know what a CRM is.
You will make a whole bunch of assumptions about that product just because I called it a CRM.
So you'll say, Well
it you must compete with Salesforce. They're the absolute leader in that market, the girl in that market. So I will just assume that you compete there.
I will make assumptions about what that product does. I will assume that it
track de tracks deals across a pipeline. I will assume who the buyer of that is. I'll assume it's the head of sales, vice president of sales.
I'll even make an assumption about the pricing.
Even though I said nothing about what that thing is or who the expected customers are of that thing.
But if you assume
That Salesforce is my big competitor.
Because they're the absolute leader in that.
Space.
I'm not charging more for my CRM than Salesforce is.
So
This is how this works. What it does is I position that product
In a market category, that market category has set off a set of assumptions
In the customer's mind.
about that product. If I do this well,
It sets off a set of assumptions about that product.
That are true.
And that's great. Now I've saved marketing and sales a whole lot of time, energy, effort. I don't have to tell you exactly who my competitors are. It's assumed. I don't have to list every single feature. A lot of that stuff is considered table stakes in the category.
But it works the same way if I do a terrible job of it.
So if I do a terrible job of it
I position my product in a market category such that
It sets off a set of assumptions about my product that are not true.
Now marketing and sales has their work cut out for them on doing this damage that your positioning has already done, where they're like, No, no, no, we don't do that. No, no, no, I know you think that. No, no, no, it's not that. It's this other thing.
So if I'm trying to compete with Salesforce.
Should I do that in a way where
I have a product. It's it's probably inferior because I'm a startup. Right. Uh, and so we can't go toe to toe on every
every aspect. How do we position that in a way
to a consumer
Which in this case would be a business. A business that's a buyer.
The most common way
that tech companies successfully position.
Is
They find an underserved
sub segment of the market.
And then they attempt to dominate that sub segment.
And then push out from there. So I can give you an example. I worked at a company
Called Jana Systems.
And at the time this was
quite a while ago. So Sebal or Salesforce was a small company at that point and only selling to the very low end of the market. But the gorilla in that space at the time was a big, big company.
in Silicon Valley called Seaball. And so they were fantastic company, two billion revenue, fastest company to ever get to a billion revenue in the history of Silicon Valley. Amazing success story.
They were positioned as enterprise CRM. They were the absolute kings of enterprise CRM.
We had a product that was also enterprise CRM. So we would
position ourselves as enterprise CRM. And so not surprisingly, we would get a meeting with a customer and the customer would say
Okay, so your enterprise CRM.
Their enterprise CRM
How are you better?
And the answer to that question was
we simply weren't better than them. They had we had
Yeah, we had two million revenue, they had two billion revenue, they had four hundred customers, we had six, they had
Thousands of employees, I was employee twenty-six or something. They I mean we were just th no comparison at all.
However
We had
A feature.
That they could not copy.
That was really interesting.
And we thought it would be really valuable to customers. We didn't really understand the value of it for customers.
But we always showed it in meetings. So we go in, we show the thing, and it's this neat feature. And we say, Hey, here's the feature. It's really great.
And customers would look at us and say, Hey, that looks cool.
What do we do with that?
And we'd say.
Anything you want And then the customer would say, Hm, okay, well that's confusing. What else you got? And then we'd say, Well, you know, we're really cheap if you want us to be really cheap because we're desperate to close business.
How we got out of that mess and eventually landed on positioning that was really good for us is
We uh we sold a deal to an investment bank.
And it was kind of by accident. We hired a sales rep that had a relationship with somebody very senior at the investment bank.
Th we did a good pitch in there. We showed him our magical feature.
And what that customer taught us.
is that feature was actually very, very valuable to investment banks.
And the way that they wanted to manage relationships inside the bank.
Once we figured that out, then it was like okay.
We actually have a feature that's really, really valuable for a sub segment of this big market.
And we knew at the time
Cel couldn't copy us on that feature.
So we narrowed down the positioning and instead of saying we were enterprise CRM, we were CRM for investment banks.
And the great thing about that is that
We never got into a real head to head against those guys again. So we would come in and say, Hey, we're CRM for investment banks.
And the customer would say
Oh.
Well wait.
Doesn't CBL do that? Like don't you guys compete with Cl?
We say, Oh C bo
We love those guys so big, so smart, so many people. They're like the world's greatest.
general purpose CRM for like
call centers and manufacturing plants and I don't know what, but not you, woeful Wall Street. You need something special. Let me show you this thing. And then we would show them the thing and talk about the thing. And so our plan
Was to absolutely dominate that space.
And then once we had dominated that, we would be building the product and making the product more mature.
And our dominance in investment banking was gonna allow us to get into retail banking.
So we were gonna expand the market from there. And then if we were successful in retail banking, that would allow us to get into insurance.
At that point we would reposition ourselves as CRM for financial services.
If we were successful there, then we'd be big enough and successful enough to challenge the market leader and take over and be enterprise CRM, which was still the long term goal.
So is this the bird?
shrinking your target market.
or your ecosystem in a way in which you're gonna compete to one where you have an advantage or an edge over somebody else.
And then expanding from there. Often in technology companies, that's exactly what we're doing. That seems
Yeah, that seems like very intuitive. Why don't people do that to you?
Um, there's a lot of reasons.
So
The biggest one is people get very worried about what we call the addressable market.
So if I was trying to fundraise and went to an investor and said, Look, I wanna build a thing and it's just CRM for investment banks
The investor would say.
Well, how many investment banks are there in the world? I need you to be a billion dollar business. That's not a billion dollar business. I don't know how you're gonna do that.
Uh so they
For a
Investor, you need to talk about the long term story. Where do we want to be in 10 years? Where we you know, how would we what is our path to getting to be?
A billion dollars.
And if I look at that example I just gave you, we had that long-term vision. We were gonna be a billion dollar company eventually.
But for most companies
When you start
I'm not trying to do a billion dollars this year. I'm trying to do a million. I'm trying to close five deals. I'm trying to close ten deals.
And in order to close any business at all,
You have to be the best at something.
Customers not gonna come in and say, You know, there's these three options and I'll pick this one that's just okay.
No, the customer says they want the best thing for their particular thing. So
Great positioning
Is all about defining
Where do you win? Like where are you the best in the world?
And even if that market is very small at the beginning
You need to have a pathway to get to this bigger market. So I'll win here, then I'll win here, then I'll win here.
And the market will expand.
So the vast majority of companies that we know
did exactly that. Like Salesforce is actually a great example.
When they started out
The enterprise part of CRM was absolutely dominated by a big competitor. So it didn't make sense for them to enter that market there.
Instead, they entered the market at the very bottom. So they were selling to small medium businesses and
And their secret sauce, or the thing they could do better than anyone else, is they were one of the world's first SaaS businesses.
So it was hosted in the cloud. The value to the customer.
Was that
You could get CRM just like the big companies had.
even if you didn't have an IT department to babysit it. So their big slogan of no software was all about that. They were selling to tiny companies that had no IT department that could never touch CRM.
And there was no competition there.
So it's very easy for them to go in and
I was working at
Siebel at the time.
And when they started down at the bottom, we were like, we don't care about that market. We're not gonna chase them down there. We sell great big million dollar enterprise deals. Never read the evaders dilemma, I guess. We had no interest in that. Our goal was to just was to just sit in the rare air at the very top of the stack.
And just sell all of that.
And that was it.
So of course what Cebel did was they started at the bottom and then crawled their way up.
That's fascinating. So basically to compete.
from a staffing point of view, from a V C funding point of view, you you sort of
Say our total market is huge.
But then on a practical basis to develop a product, you have to start small in a in a land and expand sort of fashion.
generally if you look at
most the vast majority of successful companies
They've started by dominating a market that was too small for the market leader to care about.
So they dominated that market. And then what they did was they proceeded to push the boundaries of that market.
and creep closer and closer and closer to whoever the market leader is.
What's the difference between B to B positioning and B to C, like business to business positioning versus business to consumer positioning?
There's a lot of things that are different.
Kind of if we think about the core of good positioning
The core of good positioning is thinking about what your differentiated value is, meaning
the value you can deliver for a customer that no one else can.
And then great positioning puts that in a context that a customer can understand it. If we think about value
In B to B it's very different than value in consumer products.
Value can be all kinds of things in consumer products. I you know
I might buy shoes because
I just like the color green, man. Or I'm buying consumer things because I think it makes me look rich.
or it's gonna get me a date, or there's a lot of different things that are valuable in consumer.
In business to business
It's very different. In business to business typically
There isn't one person buying. Typically there's a
a a group of people.
There's five to eleven stakeholders in the deal.
So if I'm buying accounting software
My boss comes to me and says, Hey, I don't like the accounting software we have right now. You go buy us some.
That's terrifying.
I uh my neck is on the line. If I make a bad choice here, I look bad in front of my boss, the end users don't like it, maybe the software screws up, I get passed over from
promotion, I might actually get fired.
So there's stakes in a B2B purchase decision.
The way we think about value is also really different.
We
I can't go to my boss and say, I feel like the vibe of this software You know, I have to make a business case to my boss for why we should buy it.
And in businesses, I mean, we kinda only have two things. We're either helping you make money or we're helping you save money, and that's about it.
So
You know, I might.
Make a very irrational decision about a product.
And often we do make very irrational decisions, even in B to B.
About a product.
But I can't say that to my boss. Right. I still have to go to my boss and say, Here's why we picked it, here's the list of reasons. There needs to be some justification. That's exactly it. That's explainable to somebody else. Exactly.
So we think a lot about you know in in consumer consumer marketers talk a lot about emotion, invoking emotion. In B2B, the granddaddy of emotions is
Fear.
Fear of making a poor choice. Fear
looking bad in front of my boss, fear of getting fired, like fear of making a mistake.
Drives a lot of decisions.
M B to B.
This is why incumbents, like whoever's the leader in the market.
Has such an advantage in B2B technology because it is the safe.
decision. Nobody is gonna get fired.
For picking Salesforce at this point. They have double the market share of their closest competitor. You can go to your boss and say,
Look, I looked at all the other options.
But I pick Salesforce because everybody uses Salesforce. They have a big ecosystem. They have the best this the best that. They're the biggest. It's the safe choice to make. If you're trying to compete against Salesforce, that's really hard gravity to pull against. It's very risky to pick you.
If the choice is you
versus sales force or an established market leader.
When you think about consumer positioning, I'm really interested and I I know this isn't your sort of
Area of expertise. When you walk into like a Louis Vuitton or a
Or Maz.
How do you think about positioning
such that they can charge
Thirty, forty thousand dollars for a person. Thirty four forty thousand dollars is the point.
Right.
I'm not buying that bag because I think it's
thirty thousand dollars better than a bag that costs twenty bucks, although it it it probably is
finely craft and all that sort of things. A lot of times I think luxury goods
Are really about as
A signal.
to the market. It's like
Ама річ, сусесфу пер.
um that has made enough money that I can carry a Louis Vuitton bag, or wear a Rolex watch, or whatever luxury things are.
It's outside of my wheelhouse.
But
You know, again, when we look at consumer stuff, value comes in all sorts of forms.
Like we buy things in very rational ways.
In consumer products.
Um
We're we're also irrational in B2B too, but most of that irrationality is around fear. It's like I just don't wanna make a bad choice here and look bad in front of my boss or do something that the company's all mad at me about later.
The thing we have in B to B that's actually a real problem is
It's so scary to purchase something in B to B.
That
fifty to seventy percent of the time
A deal that gets started actually ends in no decision. And the no decision
isn't they they voted to stay with the current product that they have. It's usually no decision because
Everything looked the same.
I couldn't confidently make a decision that I was sure I wasn't gonna get in trouble for. So it's easier to just go back to your boss and say, you know what, now's not a good time. Let's buy the accounting package next year. You know, we don't we don't need to get into this now.
And the person who's been tasked with making that decision is just crossing their fingers that
They don't have to be on the hook to make the decision next year when the decision comes up again, like, Okay, let's go and look again. They just don't wanna be the person that has to stick their neck out to
advocate for something.
Which is totally different.
From how we
to buy a pack of gum or buy fizzy water at the corner store.
Or buy a purse. Th the downside there is really small. And at work the downside's huge and the upside's like nothing.
Right. So if you advocate for a different product that's outside of standard
Best practices or standard industry standard.
then if you're successful
Everybody forgets that you advocated for it, but if it fails
I mean in rare cases. Exactly. In rare cases.
You'll see senior executives at companies.
Where
their role.
Is to change things.
So their role is transformation in some way, innovation transformation or a digital transformation. You see a lot of companies right now that have been tasked by the CEO
Were there teams that have been tasked by the CEO
To figure this AI thing out and make sure we're not falling behind. Yeah.
In those cases, the person driving that program, if it is successful.
is gonna get a promotion, they're gonna get a raise, they you know, it's gonna look really good on them.
If they can successfully do it.
If it's not successful, then they're a bum.

Would you say the biggest mistake then that you see, especially with software products, is competing
I'm positioning in too big of a market.
That's one of the things. I think a lot of times if you look at the positioning
That the company has
The biggest mistake is not deliberately positioning.
I think a lot of companies start looking at
Their product in isolation almost.
Like there are no competitors.
You see it a lot in the way companies do sales pitches. Like
They'll walk in and they'll give this sales pitch and they'll they'll talk about the product with this great feature, that great feature, this great feature. It's amazing, you should buy us.
But the
buyer on the other side of that conversation
They're terrified of making a bad choice.
And they're sitting there going
Well that's all great.
But I just had three other sales calls with your competitors. Some of that stuff sounds the same.
And so we walk into these situations as vendors in general.
thinking that the answer the the question we're trying to answer is why pick us?
But the real question we have to answer is
Why pick us over the other guys?
And I think most companies
don't really wrestle with that. They don't sit down, put themselves in the
shoes of a buyer.
Recognize how hard it is to make a purchase decision.
And think
Like how do we position versus everybody else? Well it's really easy to go with the incumbent.
The largest.
Really and then you have to basically get people out of that default somehow.
Exactly. That's fascinating. Can you tell me about a time when repositioning
A product failed.
And what happened?
Yeah.
So
I worked at a company where
Uh, we were building a thing. The original conception of this thing was that it was a database, but it was a really fancy database.
That could do
A certain kind of query
Really, really, really fast.
It was originally developed for a bank and
And
There were a set of queries that the bank did
That
We're so difficult.
To process
that they would run them on Friday and the query took all weekend to get the answer back. So you're asking the date of this question and it took three days to get the answer back.
So these folks
Couple super genius database guys.
Came up with this
database to fix that problem and it could run that query.
In seconds.
So it's amazing technology, fantastic. They got patents on it. Nobody's seen a database like this before. Really, really innovative.
So the original conception of this thing was that
It was a database.
Uh I joined as the head of marketing and
And
We
We're having a terrible time selling. The positioning was terrible. Like nobody wanted a new database. There's an absolute giant in that market. They're called Oracle. Everybody's standard on Oracle. Everybody gets certified on Oracle.
Companies don't want to have multiple database solutions to do something. So we would come in and say, we've got this nifty new database, and the customers would say,
Well that's yeah.
W we're Oracle shop. Like we're not married to Oracle. We don't think Oracle's the best thing, but we can't bring in another platform.
We eventually repositioned it as a data warehouse, which is
a specific purpose built kind of database for doing analytics, which is exactly what we're doing when we're doing this big query.
So we did that repositioning and it was much, much better.
Much better.
First call was better.
Much better than we were doing before.
The problem was
When we looked at
We had an assumption that if you had these queries that took three days.
You would want to be able to do them in ten seconds versus three days.
And it turned out that assumption was wrong.
So when we went to the other banks and said, Hey, you're doing this thing and it it takes three days
You could use this thing and it would take three seconds and they're like
It's okay, nothing's nobody's really doing anything over the weekend anyway.
We don't need the answer right away.
So then we had this question, well
Who needs the answer right away? And we had never asked ourselves that question. Like our whole value proposition is speed, doing this query fast.
It turned out
The only customers that needed the answer right away
Were customers that were doing the query.
Bi for customer service.
So their customer calls in, they're on the phone and they're like, Hey, I need to know this thing. Well, I don't want to wait three days to get the answer. They want to do it.
In seconds.
And then we looked at
The universe of companies
That had
Data of a scale where our thing was appropriate and
and needed this query answered to do customer service.
And there was literally ten companies on the planet and that was it.
So the addressable market was so small.
But it wasn't a viable business. So we had
Essentially built a product.
Didn't nobody want it. It was neat.
It was really innovative.
It was really cool.
But there was no market for it. It didn't solve a problem that anybody really had.
So if you're a startup, you have limited resources.
And how do you go about identifying those pain points then to better position your product? I mean the the idea behind the famous book on this is uh
Eric Reese's lean startup.
And the the way the lean startup
describes this is you should be out doing something called customer discovery. So before you write anything, you should be out interviewing customers or potential customers and validating
the assumptions that you have about this market.
Is this a thing that people would pay for? How many how much would you pay for it? Are there a big enough group of people that have this pain?
To solve it.
And in a perfect world, that's what we would all be doing.
But often products just don't happen that way. Like often
Products you know, like this
This particular company, they had built it custom.
They had done the deal with the bank in such a way that they owned the IP, it seemed like a good idea.
They had a bunch of assumptions baked in there. They never tested those assumptions until later.
But it was good enough to go raise money. They just went and raised some money and okay, now we're going. We're doing a thing.
So I don't think
A lot of startups do enough customer discovery at the
Beginning
to make sure that they've got a thing that people really want.
The second thing is that even if you do do customer discovery.
It's really hard.
It's really difficult.
Customers will sometimes tell you things that aren't true.
Um, or they'll say, Yes, yes, we would buy that and we would buy it for this much.
But by the time you've actually built the thing and you have a prototype of the thing and you get it in customers' hands, like actually there's a different way to do this, and we decided to do it this different way, or there's a you know, that customers have lots of options.
So startups are very hard because we're we're
Dealing with uncertainty. We're dealing with a certain amount of
Assumptions or assumptions may prove to be wrong, but
And we have to be able to move and pivot and look for other things. And sometimes our first crack at it isn't gonna work.
Then we're gonna have to go to the draw back to the drawing board and kind of invent something else and see if that works.
How do you position your product on a page? A lot of B to B starts with
a sales rep or somebody
looking at a page for a product. How do you position that product within you have probably, I don't know, ten seconds to get somebody's attention. Yeah, ten seconds to get somebody's attention.
So the way I think about positioning is this way. Um
I like to positioning I like to break positioning up into a set of components. So
uh the component pieces of positioning are competitive alternatives. So if you didn't exist
What would a customer do?
And then we need to understand what makes us different.
Which is our differentiated capabilities, like what do we got that the alternatives don't have?
thing that we really need to understand is why those features matter.
So what is the value that those features can deliver for a business And you mean the features no one else can that nobody else that no one else has. So that's our differentiated value. It says, look, we can do this for your business and no one else can do it.
And then the next thing we have to understand is well who cares a lot about that?
Because just'cause we have that thing, if only three people on the planet care about that, that's not a viable business.
So we need to understand that. So
What is it?
What are the characteristics of a target company that make them really, really care a lot?
About the thing that only we can do.
Once we have all of that.
Then we need to build messaging around that. So if we think about
typical home page of a product.
It needs to communicate
What is the value that we can deliver that no one else can?
And is this for me, me as the browser, the person that's there. So I need to communicate who's this for.
Why is it different?
Why is it better?
And that's really hard to do on one page. You don't have a lot of copy to do that. You don't have a lot of ways to do that. But that's what we really have to focus on.
The biggest
mistake I see technology companies making is
They're so certain that the
That
Their features are valuable and people will just understand what the value of those features are. They're talking about the features, but they're not talking about why the features matter.
So they're they're talking about they're not talking about the benefit.
Exactly.
So if I use the example of the CRM company I was talking about earlier.
We had a feature.
We just assumed that customers would look at that feature and know what the value was. But they didn't.
Th they didn't. And so we all we did was talk about the feature. We're like, look, you can model relationships this way and they were like
But why? Wha why do I actually want to do that? And what's that's what's that good for? And we're like, what's good for anything you want to do with it? Like you figure it out. And I think in technology companies
We get
We're very technical people. We know a lot about technology. We get so close to it.
We just assume that the customer can make the translation from feature to value.
But a lot of times they can't, and in particular with something that's
really innovative, really new, they've never seen it before.
Устан.
Why those features are important. If we think about a lot of consumer tech.
We've been trained how to do this.
Like if I tell you I've got a
phone on my camera and it's 2000 megapixels. You know 2000 megapixels is way better than a hundred megapixels. You've been trained. We know that.
But the first time anybody ever talked to you about megapixels, you had no idea what a megapixel even was. Companies had to teach you why that was important.
It's interesting'cause that's sort of gone away at this point. Like nobody's asking how many megapixels are in their phone. At one point it was like big differentiator. But that's a good that's a good um sort of segue into the
My next question was just
How has the digital transformation
over the last twenty five, thirty years changed positioning.
I think the fundamentals of positioning haven't changed at all.
is is my opinion. If you read the original book on positioning was called Positioning the Battle for Your Mind by these guys Reason Trout. They came up with the concept
They published a book in nineteen eighty two.
And if you read that book
The first chapter talks about
Why do we have to worry about positioning?
Why is positioning important?
And they talked about how it's important because
Previous to that
In any given market category, there were only a handful of products.
So consumers just made a choice between the two or three choices that they had, but it wasn't all that important for companies to really differentiate.
Between those choices.
But in nineteen eighty two
Oh my gosh, we have so many choices now.
Positioning's really important.
Because
The customer has thousands of choices, hundreds of choices.
Now if we look at
The difference between nineteen eighty two to now?
That has just exploded. Like I think it's much more important now.
To really establish that position, it's much harder now.
To stand out.
In a world where
We're exposed to millions of advertising messages a day. Like think about digital stuff. I am constantly bombarded
With messages from companies. I cannot avoid it. It's millions a day.
Compared to nineteen eighty two.
So in order for customers to really stick out, sorry, in order for companies
To really stand out in a market that is so crowded.
And so overwhelmed with messages from brands. We're gonna have to get really succinct on
What is this thing?
What is the value of this thing?
Who is it for? How is it different from the other things in the market? And we're gonna have to be so clear about that.
To break out from the noise.
And why you should trust us. Because if we're a small company and we've got like five employees and we're competing with Salesforce, but we have one particular feature that they don't have and we have our sort of positioning in our niche market. Right. Well now there's still a brand issue because it's like nobody's ever heard of you.
A lot of this stuff. So if we think about so if I go back to that example of that CRM company I was in
The great thing about that
was
We manage to establish our self.
In this little bubble.
Of investment banking.
And once we had done two customers in invest investment banking.
We were the kings of investment banking.
With only two customers.
Because we could walk in and say, Well, you
Goldman Sachs?
And Merrill Lynch.
What have they got?
They got a bunch of call centers and a bunch of manufacturing and so we could
Put a circle around it.
And kind of make like the rest of the market doesn't matter to you.
investment banker. Like you don't want the world's greatest general purpose CRM. You want the world's greatest CRM for people like you.
That's how we win in this thing.
If I walk in and say, we're just CRM, we're CRM for everybody, and we're just the greatest CRM ever, nobody wants that.
It's like you're you're changing the frame, almost like taking a f uh photographer. Like there's this great quote about, you know
What makes it great?
Photograph as knowing where to stand.
And it's like you're basically almost picking somebody up and you're being like, Look at
This way. Yeah. This is the this is the Warren Buffett quote, you know, How do you beat Bobby Fisher? You play him in any game but chess.
How do you go about evaluating
Product positioning.
Um
This is an interesting question.
People want me.
To look at their website.
And tell me whether or not their positioning is good.
And in B to B that is almost impossible.
Almost impossible.
So you have this thing, it it serves a market.
I am not the buyer for that thing.
So I could look at your website and say, I don't I don't have a clue what this is all about.
But the thing you sell is for
Airplane mechanics.
It's fine if I don't have a clue about that. It needs to resonate with airplane mechanics.
So you can't tell just using you know what I would call the grandmother test. You know, would your grandmother understand this? Well, unless you're selling a grandmother's, it doesn't matter if the grandmother understands it. So some people will say, well, we need to dumb this down and we need to have it so that anybody understands it. I super disagree with that in B2B.
If I'm selling a specialized thing to specialized buyers,
It just needs to resonate with them.
It's okay if it doesn't resonate with your grandmother.
What it does mean is if we're trying to assess the positioning.
What really matters
Is
When we are
When we have a brand new
Prospect.
That comes in.
That doesn't really know too much about us.
How long does it take us before it clicks?
And they're like, Ooh, I get it.
Oh I get why you're different. Oh I get why that's good. Oh I get why.
In my career, so I used to be an in house vice president of marketing.
And so the latter part of my career
I was very focused on positioning. So if the CEO hired me, they hired me because I could talk intelligently about how we were gonna fix this positioning.
I would come on board and what everybody would want me to do is just
Run campaigns April, make the revenue go up to the right.
And I was always worried about running campaigns on weak positioning because it's a bit like pouring water into the leaky bucket. And so what I would do to assess the positioning, whether it was good or not, is I would walk over to sales.

And there would be
People doing
Salespeople doing first calls with customers.
And you hear it in a first call.
And it sounds like this.
Your sales rep is doing a great job.
They have a pitch.
Customers there.
And the sales rep has
As a pitch, this may be a dozen slides long.
And they're saying, Okay.
Here's what we are, here's what we do, we do this thing, they're getting into the pitch.
And you'll see the customer if it's a video call, you'll see the customer and they'll be making this confused face like
And what'll happen is and they're not saying too much.
And a good rep will stop and be like
Are there any questions? Like, are you with me still?
And the customer will go.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just back it up. Can you just go back to the beginning? Back it up and go back to the beginning. Like pitch it to me again.
And and there's this
Fundamental disconnect, like I don't even know what bucket to put this thing in. Like is it a s is it a database? Is it a business intelligence tool? Is it a thing? Like You haven't framed it. Figure you know, and so there's something in that positioning
That is just confusing the heck out of the customer.
That's the most common sign you see is the customers looking at it and they're like, I just can't figure out what this thing is.
The second common sign you'll see with weak positioning
As the customer thinks they've got it figured out.
Um, but they're actually comparing you to something that you don't actually compete with.
So you'll get to slide three or four and the customer will say, Yay, I get it. You're just like Salesforce. And you're nothing like Salesforce. You don't compete in that market. You're not that. And then the rep is like, No, no, no, no, no. Let me go back. I'll go back to the beginning. We'll do this again.
Um so you'll hear that a lot.
The other thing you'll hear, and this is almost the most terrifying one.
Is in these early conversations with a prospect.
Prospect will say.
I get it. I I get.
What you are, I get who you compete with.
Just don't really get why we would pay money for that.
Can't I just do that with a spreadsheet?
Can I just do that with my accounting package?
Couldn't I just hire an intern to do that?
Why would I pay money to do that?
So they kinda understand the product, but again, they don't understand the value of it.
Why would I give you money in exchange for that thing?
Who's in charge of positioning at a company?
Good question.
This has traditionally been seen.
As a marketing.
function.
Um
And even more specifically in tech companies, we often say this is a product marketing function.
But
I don't believe that. I think that's
not the right way to think about it.
If we really think about what we're doing in positioning, is we're getting really tight on
Who's our competitor?
How are we different? What is the value we can provide to them to the
customer and who exactly are those customers.
If we made a change in that.
That would be a big change in the business. If I think about
Again, my CRM example, if we switch from being
general purpose enterprise CRM
to CRM for investment banks? That's a that's a whole different company. Yeah.
So I don't think marketing
Uh has

They're not talking to customers every day the way sales is.
uh they don't necessarily understand
the differentiation amongst competitors the way the product team would.
And sure as heck the CEO is gonna have something to say.
about where we're selling and how we win in the market.
So in the work that I do with companies with positioning
We do it with a cross functional team.
So we bring together
Product, marketing, sales, customer success, support.
And we bring everybody together and everybody comes
With what they understand about customers and how we win.
And we work through the positioning
Together.
as a group exercise.
Now somebody needs to be the steward or the police of that positioning once we've said it.
to make sure that we are consistent about that and the way we're using it in marketing and the way we're using it in sales. And that's typically marketing that does that.
I also think
It's good to have
somebody be the person that puts their hand up and says
You know what, things are changing in the market.
we we maybe need to come back together and check in on that positioning.
But I don't think that marketing should be able to
change positioning or look at positioning or do it on their own, they could try.
But it won't stick because sales won't believe in it, CO won't believe in it. What we actually need is
a cross functional team to get together.
And look at it.
make some decisions, get everybody in agreement and alignment on it, and then we can all go execute on it in in our
respective departments.
And then marketing can be the steward of
Here's the positioning, here's how we define it. This is the messaging that comes out of that positioning.
And then marketing be the person to put their hand up and say, You know what, this big acquisition just happened in our market and we might need to step back and look relook at the positioning.
It's interesting that you you say that when we were talking about a salesperson and the first call, I was thinking, Oh, like
If things don't go as planned, the salesperson points to marketing, marketing points to the salesperson.
Everybody points to product and and but you even expanded this. So you have a cross functional team of sales, marketing, product, customer success, support, and then you have the CEO involvement at some point in there too. Exactly. And when things are going well, everybody is a winner and everybody's responsible for success. But the minute
You have a problem.
Everybody starts pointing the finger at everybody else. How do you determine when that's a positioning problem versus
Mm.
A larger problem.
It's interesting because you know, I do this as work as a consultant and sometimes companies will call me
And they think they have a positioning problem. And then I have a conversation with them and I'm like, I don't actually think that's a positioning problem, because there's lots of reasons businesses aren't successful and positioning is just one of them.
So typically so sometimes companies will come to me and they'll say
You know what?
Every company we talk to
Loves us.
Mm. If we can get'em.
In a meeting?
We close all that business.
That tells me the positioning's good. You're just not getting enough meetings. You're just doing a terrible job at lead generation. You should go fix that.
You just need to get more at bats.
Uh sometimes what you have is a sales execution problem. Like there's something in the way you're executing in sales that isn't working.
So my test is often
Like so first of all
Do you have
Good, happy customers.
That stick with you and love you and are referenceable and whatever.
Most of the companies that come to me and say, Yes, yes, we have that.
Okay.
Uh confusion
When at the beginning of your sales process
where they come in and they just don't get it.
That gap
between what a customer knows and what a prospect knows, we can close that gap with good positioning.
What role does storytelling play in all of this?
Storytelling is one of these things marketers think a lot about storytelling and obsess a lot about storytelling.
Particularly on the consumer side.
business to business marketers.
Like to think about storytelling. I don't think a lot of B to B companies are doing an amazing job at storytelling. What's really funny about that is if you go over to sales, sales doesn't care about storytelling. They never talk about storytelling, and yet they're the ones that actually
are face to face with a customer and if anyone should be telling a story, maybe it's your sales team. Most of the storytelling stuff that you see, or at least what I learned as a marketer going through m if you go to marketing school and learn storytelling.
A lot of what you'll see is this hero's journey.
structure for storytelling, which um
is very common in entertainment. It's the way most movies are written. A lot of stories are written with this hero's journey. So in B2B storytelling,
We think about the hero as the customer. So the customer has a problem, they embark on this quest, they meet a guide. That's us, we're the guide.
And we give them a plan and we help them be successful and avoid defeat. We have this hero's journey. The problem with that storytelling arc.
Is
There's kind of no
competitor in there.
And if we think about what a buyer is actually trying to figure out is why pick you over the other guys?
A hero's journey doesn't really give us an arc.
To do that in the work that I do with customers.
We start with positioning.
So we get really clear on
What's the value we can deliver that no one else can?
Who are the customers that really care about that?
And then we want to build a story around that.
The story that we're trying to tell needs to answer this question. Why pick us over the other guys?
So in that storytelling framework
We need to s we need to have a spot in that framework.
To paint a picture of the whole market.
And then show where we fit.
And where everybody fits.
So we shouldn't actually be just talking about us. We should be talking about the alternative approaches to the problem.
Which means we're gonna talk about competitors.
Or at least the approach that the competitors take.
In the work I do, we
Take the positioning, we translate it.
into a sales pitch.
That sales pitch.
has a storytelling structure.
That starts with
A conversation around the market.
So we'll talk about
Look.
We look at this market.
In a different way.
Than our competitors.
And because we look at it in a different way, we've built the product in a different way.
And you're you're
Customer, you have you have lots of choices. There's other products that you could buy, there's other approaches you could take to this problem. Let's talk about that. We think about this all day, we have opinions about it. We want to hear what you have to say about it too.
So this is the way we look at it.
You can do it this way.
This way, or this way.
And here's the pluses and minuses of these different ways of solving this problem. And this is a conversation with the customer more than me.
Telling the customer stuff.
But at the same time, I'm teaching the customer.
Або.
is important in a purchase decision.
Which most customers don't know early in their purchase process.
They're trying to buy accounting software. Half the people doing a purchase in B2B have never purchased a product like yours before.
So they're doing this for the first time.
They're overwhelmed with information on the internet.
Every vendor says
We're the best. No, we're the best. No, we're the best.
What we need to do in good sales storytelling and B to B
Is help customers
Understand
How to confidently make a decision.
In order to do that
I have to paint a picture of the whole market.
So they feel good that they understand Ah.
If I choose this
I'm choosing to go.
big on this and low on this. If I choose this
Here are the trade offs for this. If I choose this, here's the trade offs for this.
Or you could choose us.
And here's the trade offs for us.
Are we a good fit for you or not?
That's what we should be doing in a good sales storytelling, in my opinion.
And who does that really well, in your opinion?
I have a bunch of clients that I've worked with, but
One that I think is doing an amazing job of this for a really technical, complicated product.
is a company I worked in s with in San Francisco called Postman.
Postman does
Essentially
A platform for
um developing APIs.
This is a new concept. Nobody had this idea of a platform for APIs before Postman came up with it. They do an amazing job, I think.
Of talking about
Why APIs are important, so important that you actually don't want a set of disjointed tools across your organization to work on them, why that's important. They've coined a concept called an API first world.
And then they've done an amazing job of storytelling around that. So if you go on their website on their homepage and you scroll down about halfway,
They have
A graphic novel called
The API first world.
And it's a graphic novel devi designed for
технікопіпо
To understand this story of
What's an API? Why is it important? Why do we really want to have high quality APIs? Why is that important for your business? And why do we need
A platform to enable that.
So I think they do an incredible job of that. And they do it in a thousand different ways. Like if you see
The CEO do a conference talk, he's actually not talking about the product.
As much as he is
talking about the market.
En this концепt
And why we need to think about APIs differently.
But if you are aligned with his point of view on the market.
You're gonna buy his product. But they've really done a good job, I think, of
Developing a point of view on the market.
Helping customers understand
The context around their product.
And the things that you need to understand in order to understand why their product is valuable and why you might pick it.
How important is that from a CEO perspective at conferences and talks and media
Tim.
basically put yourself out there and say, I see the world this way, which is slightly different than most people see it. I think it's super important. I think this concept of having a point of view on the market
is really important
Most founders that I've worked with, if you talk about
How the original idea for the product came up.
They'll say, you know, I was really frustrated. I looked at all the databases and I decided all the databases were doing it wrong. And if you were smart and you knew what I knew, I had a better way to do it. Yeah, you would build a database like this.
Part of what we need to communicate.
to
customers is we kinda need to take them on that journey.
And say, look, we have a different perspective on this. Like we look at this problem different. We it's not the problem, it's we see a problem inside the problem. We have a perspective on the problem.
That if you understood it the way we understood it.
You would pick our stuff.
Right.
So that point of view, I think, is really super important. And if you can nail that.
He's the key to selling lots of stuff.
And how important is it to you mentioned coin the term, like how important is it to define the vocabulary by which the customers use ultimately
To make a choice or to own a term so that if it becomes
Top of mine to them.
Nobody else has that term. It's really important if you are doing something that is truly
Innovative, like an emerging thing.
So earlier we talked about market categories and most of the time
If you look at the way most successful companies do this, they're going into an existing market category and they're serving an underserved corner of that and they're expanding from that.
About ten percent of the time that's not true. Ten percent of the time we have something that is
emerging. It's a market that is emerging. There is no leader in that market right now because that market doesn't even exist right now. This is something brand new. You could never even do this before because
Technology wouldn't wasn't there to do it, and so it's emerging.
When it's emerging
There's no good vocabulary to talk about it.
Because we've never talked about it before.
And often in those cases what we're doing is
We're defining or attempting to define
what the boundaries of that emerging market category are, what's important and what isn't important in that emerging market category.
And in those case.
We often very much do
Wanna put some names on things. We may want to specifically name the market category.
In a way that advantages us.
We may want to name key concept inside that.
In a way that
Helps customers understand.
why this is an important key thing that you need to understand in that.
And so if you see companies
That have
Truly done.
Category creation.
Often they've done a very good job of
helping customers understand key things that they needed to understand in order to understand, ah, this is a totally different problem. I didn't even know I had this problem.
Me you know, because if the customer knew there was a problem and they have that problem, there would be a category of solutions to solve it already. In emerging markets, it we're often addressing a problem that customer doesn't even define it as a problem. They don't even know this is a problem. This just this is just the way the word world works. There's no way to solve this problem. If we can help them become problem aware.
Then
You know, that's a step closer to that, well, you know, now that you know that you have a problem, we're the thing to think to s we're the thing to solve that.
How do you think about independent bodies that play a role? And I'm thinking like
cybersecurity, there's the Gardener quadrant and if you're not on there, like people won't even consider your product. But that sort of limits your ability to Absolutely. How do you think about that?
I spent a lot of time working with Gardner in my past roles as a VP marketing.
На Врин См.
An analyst or an expert body or somebody whose opinion matters a lot, but in some segments we do. So I spend a lot of time in the database market.
No large enterprise
buys a database without talking to Gardner Group first.
So in that case
We spent a lot of time helping Gardner Group understand what our stuff was about, why it was important, why they should include us in the
Quadrant.
Because we literally needed them.
To position us properly.
to clients that called them and ask for advice.
I've had other markets that I've been in
Where
The buyers simply don't call Gardner Group.
'Cause I don't care what Gardner Group has to say about that, because Gardner Group doesn't cover that space and Gardner Group said it does a really good job in enterprise IT.
Outside of Enterprise IT.
They're a bit less influential.
I think it's important if we're a vendor.
To understand
Where do our customers look for advice?
And where do we need to
educate those people or those entities because they're giving advice to our customers.
Sometimes that's
industry analysts like Gartner.
Sometimes it's
service providers or system integrators like like Deloitte.
Uh, and then we'll go to Deloitte and say, What do you think about this? You know, we're being doing a big digital transformation. You're our trusted advisor on digital transformation. What do you think about these products? In which case, maybe I need a partnership with Deloitte.
Because they're not gonna recommend my stuff if they don't get some kind of money off of that. So it's important to understand who influences your buyer.
As we go down market, it's interesting there
There'll be people like
Like you, like podcasters that people listen to, um people that are experts in things. People ask me my advice about marketing technology all the time.
So in a small way I'm an influencer there.
Um, in the work that I do, companies will often ask me, Well
You know, we we now need to do all these things in sales. Who do you know that's really good in sales? Is there particular technology you should recommend in sales?
The important part is vendors, I think, is we need to understand who has influence on our buyers and do we need to invest some energy and attention in making sure that those influencers understand our stuff and are positioning us well.
What are the most interesting mistakes you've seen people make when it comes to positioning? So many things.
The first mistake is not thinking about it at all. And just assuming that
There's only one position we could possibly take.
Most product
we could position them in a dozen different markets, and if we really step back
And
forgot about the history and where we came from and looked at it with our fresh eyes.
we might see something really different. So we need to think about this in a way customer thinks about it.
So not thinking about positioning at all is the first mistake.
The second mistake is as we talked about before, treating it as a little marketing exercise.
Yeah, we're just gonna put some new words on the home page and that's it. We're done.
But sales has no idea how to pitch it.
Product doesn't really understand it. It doesn't actually represent the truth.
of our product at all is just nice pretty words.
This is not repositioning, this isn't gonna move the dial on anything.
Um, and then lately what I've seen is
Um
Companies that love the idea of category creation
Or an R
Attempting
to create a category
When
they obvious fit in an existing market category and it's kind of wishful thinking that this is a new category. So they say, no, no, no, we don't have any comp competition. This is a brand new thing. Nobody works like this. And the result is the customer is like
But wait, aren't you just a CRM? Why are you using all these other words? I'm just confused.
So I've seen a lot of companies have come to me
That have
attempted to do category creation or pretend that they're doing this new category of things.
And then it's
been a disaster. Customers are just very confused. They don't understand why this is different from the existing things they're doing.
They can't figure out what bucket to put it in because they're trying to create a new bucket.
And it's been a disaster. And then they come to me and they're like, Uh, now we gotta fix this and how do we do it?
When
There's an obvious spot where they could easily position in a very big sub segment.
Of an existing market category.
And that would be way easier to sell, way easier to tell the story, way easier to do deals.
So I see a lot of that right now.
What's the difference or maybe what do schools get wrong about B to P marketing that when you
In the academic environment, that sounds good, but
In the real world it falls flat. Oh my gosh, so much stuff.
Most of the research that's been done in marketing, like when I went to marketing school, it was so disappointing.
All of the research is done on consumer package goods.
All of it.
And often what you'll get is a professor.
inside a marketing department at a university
Taking these things that we've learned about consumer packaged goods
And then stretching it out and saying
Well, obviously this works in B to B exactly the same way.
And it's like, well wait a second.
So we'll see things like
I can't I must have this conversation about once a week where people will talk about
Uh
What's that water? Liquid death?
You know this? I don't drink that. The marketers are marketers are obsessed with this thing called liquid death. And all it is is fizzy water in a can made to look cool. And they sell it at bars. So you don't wanna use so you don't want to consume alcohol. You're not into booze.
You go to the bar, you still want to look cool. You can order this liquid death, it's got skulls on it and stuff. They do all this really creative advertising and all this stuff.
And the B2B marketers look at that and say, why can't we do that?
Right. Like why can't this just be marketing? Why do we have to worry about product at all?
And often you'll get these marketers say look
Can we really differentiate on product? Cause people can just copy.
Our product eventually everyone will just keep catch up to us and all the products will be exactly the same.
And if you're in tech
That is nonsense. That is nonsense. That that would be like saying
You don't think any of the innovation that Apple's done
Matters.
They could have just it's just marketing.
Do you really think that?
So there's
Kind of this belief that we can take these things from consumer.
And apply it.
to a very considered purchase
І на бі тобі ситуацієн.
Where there are stakes involved where the person making the decision might get fired.
Right.
And say, Oh yeah, that's just like buying fizzy water. Oh, at the end of the day, these people are all people and they're driven by emotions. We have to connect with their emotions.
I agree with that.
But the emotion is fear.
It's not looking cool.
It's not Hey I like the one with the skulls. I can't go to my boss and say
I bought the database with this with the skulls, man. Come on. I just can't get away with that.
And so
I've heard a lot of things in marketing classes.
Where I've leaned back and said
Okay, man, if we're selling toothpaste.
Fine.
But if I'm selling a million dollars worth of middleware
Not fine. These rules do not apply. So I think in schools we don't teach enough about B2B.
We don't teach enough about the difference between
a highly considered purchase versus an unconsidered purchase. I don't think we talk enough about buying committees. I don't think we look enough at the research around
How difficult it is to get over indecision.
in a B to B purchase process and what that means.
for our positioning for the way that we do sales pitches.
for a lot of the stuff we do. So I don't see that covered enough.
in schools at all. Every great B to B marketer I know
Hazlern this
On the ground, hands on, doing it in companies. We're all starting from scratch. What do you know about B2B decision making that you would say most people get wrong?
The the biggest one is this idea of a customer indecision.
That people
Do not understand
How difficult it is to make a purchase.
If you understood the research on that.
It's amazing anything gets bought at all. There's a great book out there. It's by this guy, Matt.
Dixon is called the Jolt effect.
And
The research in that is incredible. So when we went into lockdown in Covid.
Uh he took this opportunity to study sales calls because all of a sudden all the sales calls were happening virtually. So everybody was doing them on Zoom. And so
They took some AI and they analyzed two and a half million sales calls and
And they did it in partnership with a with these companies so that they could look at
What happened on the sales call and then what ultimately happened? Did we get the deal? Did we not get the deal? What works and what doesn't work?
And
That research is terrifying when you look at it, like that's where this number comes from.
Forty to sixty percent.
Of B2B purchase processes end in no decision. This is the most fearsome competitor we have in B2B by far.
Is no decision.
And this no decision
Is not because
we've made a decision to stay with the thing we have because we think it's better is because we look at our choices, we can't figure out how to do that in a way that we're sure isn't gonna get us into trouble.
So we just don't do anything. If we really understood that.
I think we would operate very differently in B to B. You can see the difference in
People that get that and people that don't.
What's fascinating, I think it's really interesting to sort of think of sales cycles. I like the fear concept.
My friend who who runs a cybersecurity company, I was like, Oh, put me in charge of sales. He's like, What would you do? I was like, I would show up with a binder of newspaper clippings about companies that got hacked and be like My job is that you don't appear in this book. And that would be my entire sales like they don't care about the technical feature.
They're not buying features, right? They're buying the benefit and
When you're selling something negative, which you know doesn't contribute to revenue directly, you you're basically selling the prevention of something negative from happening. Right. How do you do that? I was like, Why wouldn't that be effective? I don't know.
Right.
Mm-hmm.
This has been a fascinating conversation. We always end with sort of the same question, which is what is success for you in life?
Uh so
I feel like
I
So I spent my whole career
being a vice president of marketing. I did that for twenty five, thirty years.
And the thing about being a vice president of marketing, it's a really hard job. You have to know a lot about a lot of things. Marketers talk about being T shaved. You have to know you have to be this deep on so many things, and then usually you have one thing that you're really deep on. For most of my career
I was a T shape marketer and the thing I was really
Deep on the
was positioning.
Now I'm a consultant and I just get to do that thing.
That I love.
And so that has been such satisfying work. It's been so satisfying.
To work with companies
Wrestle this thing that is really thorny
Really hard.
And when it clicks it feels like magic.
It feels like magic. The good positioning
When you look at it afterwards.
People will say.
Of course that's what they are.
Of course that's what they do.
And you're like, actually that was really hard for us to get there. And if you had asked us two years ago, we had no idea what that is, and now it's this, and it seems obvious, but it wasn't obvious.
That is very satisfying work to do.
So I just feel that is success for me. When we get to the end of these
These projects
And everybody in the room is like
This is so much easier to sell. This is so much easier for customers to understand. I had a client come to me two weeks ago.
And
They're doing the the first roll out of these new sales pitches that they're doing.
And so the first pitch that they did, and they were very scared to do it because of brand new pitch, and it was a really high profile client, really big deal.
They went in and it's a competitive deal.
So they know that
The prospect is talk to their two competitors and then they're coming to talk to them.
And the CEO sent me an email and said
After we did the pitch
Okay.
prospect CEO pulled him aside and said
I have never seen a sales pitch as good as that in my entire life. And like we've seen a lot of sales pitches. Like that was really great. That's awesome. And so
That is the most satisfying thing. And so he's happy, I'm happy, everyone's happy.
You also hit on something in that answer that I I think goes underappreciated in life, which is
Avoiding uh your weaknesses.
So doing the thing that you're really good at and structuring your life in a way
Uh where you're not.
you doing a lot of the things that you either don't want to be doing or that you're not as good at. It's so amazing. I wish I had been doing it sooner in my career, although I don't know if I'd be good at this if I didn't have
Twenty five, thirty years of being a hands on vice president of marketing?
But this does feel like the reward phase of my career, that I just get to work in my little zone of excellence.
Doing this thing that has really big impact on companies. I love it, they love it, I'm happy, they're happy, everybody's happy. It's uh if if this is all I do for the rest of my life, perfect.
Yeah.
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