Positioning consultant, author of Obviously Awesome
April Dunford wrote Obviously Awesome, led teams at seven B2B startups and has worked with over 200 companies on their positioning. Her second book, Sales Pitch, builds on a 25-year career. In both conversations she comes back to differentiated value: what you can deliver that no other company can. Positioning, in her terms, is the context that makes that value obvious to the buyers you're going after.
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Positioning
Positioning
Start with what customers would do if you did not exist, not who you compete with.
Alternatives to Help Scout are a handful of things. Most folks start using a shared inbox. It's easy to use and the reps love it.
Positioning
Five components in a fixed order. Competitive alternatives first, market category last.
the last piece of positioning of course is Market category and so again a lot of people will just start with Market category and then try to back up which I think is crazy
Five Components of Effective Positioning
Five interconnected components that define complete positioning: competitive alternatives, differentiated capabilities, differentiated value, best-fit customers, and…
Three Market Category Positioning Strategies
Three distinct approaches to market category positioning: compete head-to-head in existing market, dominate a subsegment (big fish small pond), or create an entirely new…
Value Theme Clustering
Group unique attributes into 2-3 value themes or buckets that resonate with customer needs. Value themes make differentiation memorable and communicate coherent benefits…
Competitive Alternative Analysis
Reframe competitive analysis from 'who are our competitors' to 'what would customers do if we didn't exist' - revealing the true competitive set including status quo,…
Start with competitive alternatives, not competitors - ask what customers would do if your solution didn't exist
When beginning any positioning exercise, the first step must be understanding real alternatives from customer perspective
Competitive alternatives are different from competitors - often the biggest competitor is Excel, hiring an intern, or doing nothing
B2B software positioning where status quo is the real competition
If you get competitive alternatives wrong, everything downstream is wrong
The positioning framework is sequential - errors compound through each step
Unique attributes must be different when compared with capabilities of real competitive alternatives from customer perspective
Differentiation only matters if customers recognize it against what they actually compare you to
Sales
Positioning
Positioning is what you are. The sales pitch is how you say it to one buyer: setup, then differentiated value.
The pitch structure has two big pieces. So the first is the setup. The setup piece is not about us, it's about the market and our point of view on the market. The second bit is all about our differentiated value, so why pick us over the other guys.
Never use your investor pitch for customers - investors care about future potential, customers care about value today
Sales pitch strategy - separating fundraising narrative from customer acquisition
Sales Pitch
If enterprise buyers aren't deciding, they may be afraid of making a wrong choice, not unconvinced
40%+ of B2B purchase processes end without a decision due to buyer fear
A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford
Use discovery conversations to teach customers about the market, not just to learn about their pain
Sales discovery approach
Sales Pitch
The leap from positioning document to sales story is bigger than expected - they must be explicitly connected
Positioning articulates what you are. Sales pitch operationalizes how to communicate that. Without deliberate translation, sales teams create their own inconsistent…
Sales Pitch
April Dunford
starts from what the customer would do if you did not exist, then positions inside a market category buyers already understand so they arrive with the right expectations. The category is a tool you pick deliberately, and usually one that already exists.
argues the durable win often comes from counter-positioning: a stance, and sometimes a whole new category, that the incumbent structurally cannot follow without damaging its existing business. Fitting an established frame can hand the advantage back to the leader.
April Dunford
treats the pitch as a designed sequence: a short setup on the market and your point of view, then most of the call on differentiated value against the alternatives the buyer is actually weighing. Structure is what stops a sound positioning doc from producing a flat call.
would say the twelve minutes you spend talking are twelve minutes you are not learning. His opener is a label or a mirror that gets the other side explaining their own position, on the view that the person doing the talking is the person giving away information.
April Dunford
puts the market frame of reference at step nine of ten, because the category you claim should fall out of the alternatives and the capabilities only you have. Start from the category and you inherit its expectations before you have checked whether they help you.
hands you a fixed fill-in-the-blank statement with the category near the front, so a whole team can align fast on one crisp sentence. The structure is the feature: it forces the decisions and keeps everyone saying the same thing.
