How to Operationalize Positioning and Messaging with April Dunford

April Dunford: Part of nailing the positioning part is getting really tight on who do you actually compete with? What is the value you can deliver that no one else can? If you can answer those two questions really, in a really, really tight way, then you're going to have great messaging.

John Common: Welcome to Growth Driver, where the best minds in B2B are redefining growth. Hello everybody, John Common here. Welcome to Growth Driver. Look, if you ask me what the dead center of a winning B2B growth strategy is, I would say it's three things. Number one, your ideal customer and their needs. Number two, your product and how it solves those needs.

And then number three, the positioning and messaging that you use to attract and win and retain those ideal customers, right? So if you can get those three things right, You're going to avoid so much missed revenue, wasted go to market spend, and I think I would call it, what, professional suffering. Um, but here's the thing.

Congratulations, you've got positioning and messaging dialed, hopefully. But it can't just live on a PowerPoint deck, and it can't just live in one person's head. You have to, you know, operationalize your positioning and messaging after you develop it. And that is what we're unpacking today on the show.

And I could not have a better guest with me to do it. I'm going to try not to gush about her. April Dunford is a real deal B2B positioning and messaging expert. She has spent 25 years in B2B marketing product and sales. And along the way, she has written two very influential books. I am, if you think, if you think I'm kidding, they are dog eared to shit because I write, I read them all the time.

One is about positioning. One is about messaging and they are both must read books in my opinion. April, welcome to Growth Driver. 

April Dunford: Hey, thanks. It's so great to be here. 

John Common: Hey, I want to thank you first, right off the, right off the top. I want to thank you for writing, obviously awesome, your book about positioning.

And I want to thank you for writing. sales pitch, the book about messaging. I know that they're companion. They kind of, it's like peanut butter and chocolate. They go together. They're both really great. And I want to know, why did you write them? Why are they so needed now in B2B? 

April Dunford: Yeah. Like I wish I didn't have to write them to be honest.

Like the, for the first book, I was surprised that there was not a methodology for Doing positioning. Mm-Hmm. that, so the book came out of my frustration with that. So when I was a young, like early my career product marketer doing positioning stuff, you know, I, I read the Rise and Trout book that everybody reads, which is positioning the battle for your mind.

And I thought, well, this is amazing. Like, positioning is really important. Oh my gosh, I'm gonna have to do it. And I was so frustrated that that book didn't give me any kind of a clue as to how we were actually gonna go get that done. And then I took marketing courses and I talked to smart marketing people and I learned the positioning statement, which is kind of like, like if you don't know the positioning statement, it's like a Mad Libs fill in the blanks exercise.

We are a blank that does blank that need Y and blah, blah, blah. And so you fill this thing in, but you know, at best it's a way to write down positioning, but it doesn't give you a way to actually figure out you should put into blanks. And so I was very frustrated with the fact that there was no way, like a repeatable method.

Like if I was to get a gang of people together, we'll work on positioning, like what are the steps, like what do we go do? And so, uh, I was a repeat vice president of marketing at that point and was launching a lot of things and positioning a lot of things. And so over time, I developed a way that I would do that and, you know, and, and tested it and redid it and did it a lot.

And so I knew I had something that would work if you were B2B and a tech company. And so I thought, well, why not? Why not just write that down and put it in a book? And you know, at the time I was having a lot of little coffee meetings with founders and they'd be like, how do we do it? How do we do it? And I'd be like, okay, you know what?

I'd be trying to speed run this process with them. Okay, first you do this. And then you do this and then you do this. And then we run out of time. And then they're like, can we have another coffee meeting? And so I thought at first I thought, I'll just write a blog post on this. We'll just write a blog post.

And then I just point everybody and say, look, we're Read the blog post and then have the coffee, right? And then it got longer and longer and then it turned into a book. And so that's where the first book came from. And then I thought I was kind of one and done with that one, but then I was working with clients.

So now I'm a consultant and I work one on one with tech companies and we work through this process. And so as we're working through this process, part of my process is we take the positioning And we turn it into a sales pitch. So if you have a sales team, the first thing you want to do with positioning is test it.

A great way to test it is to turn it into a sales pitch and test it that way. And I was like, so we can use whatever, you know, sales pitch structure you like to use. And everyone's looking at me like, what sales pitch structure? And I'm like, uh, whatever sales pitch structure you want. And so I thought, well, I need to go find out what is the best sales pitch structure so I can tell these people what to do.

And it turns out nobody has one of those either. And I, and I'm like right back where I was with positioning. I'm like, really, really, like we all have sales teams, we all have sales pitches, and we don't have a structure that we use, like even as a starting point, nothing. And, uh, and I had a structure again, that I had been using internally and, you know, I could give you the gory background on where it came from, but I had been using, my own structure for a long time.

So I thought, all right, I'm going to write that down too. Put that into another book too, because somebody needs to do something that we could at least have as a starting point. So that's where the second book came from. And now I'm really done. Like that's it. I don't know anything else. No, I don't buy that one bit.

John Common: You're going to vote. No, that's it. I'm done. Super done. Okay. Bookmark this moment. I predict you've got many books and I hope you do because I really, I think, I know a lot of people who, uh, and I'm one of them, um, you know, uh, we have a bunch of people at Intelligent Demand who have been benefiting from your thought leadership and your, and I appreciate so much what you said, which is that there's, it's not hard to find an opinion about what you ought to do.

It's less. It's less prevalent to find a really proven expert way to do it. And, uh, that you can adapt, you know, in the last mile of your, you know. 

April Dunford: Well, yeah, like, this is the thing. Like, I mean, we should at least have something to start with. Like, that's the thing that really got me about positioning. I'm like, I like, and I don't, I think there should be like 9, 000 methodologies to do positioning.

I don't see why there wouldn't be like, mine's just for B2B tech companies. People come to me all the time and they say, well, would this work on consumer? I'm like, I don't know. I don't do consumer stuff. I'm the consumer April Dunford that knows how to do this thing. I don't know how to do it. You know, or they'll come to me and say, what if it's, what if it's a service?

And I'm like, well, I've worked with a few service companies, but only if they do tech stuff. If it's outside of that, I don't know. Find the person that does this for law offices or whatever. Like there must be a thousand people like me around there that know how to do this stuff. But it's surprising to me that they're not more visible.

And then same thing on the sales side. They're like, there's a lot of deep thinking going on around. Sales methodologies and how to handle objections and how to do pricing negotiation and how to develop rapport with a client and how to move a client through a sales process and all this kind of stuff.

Just not a lot of stuff like when you read that stuff, it all just kind of assumes that a pitch just exists. Yeah. And I mean, we should have something to start with and you know, and something that's been like this, the advantage of being a consultant is you can take some and try it a whole bunch of times with like a hundred clients and then, and then come out and say, okay, like, I don't know if this is perfect, but I've done it with a hundred clients and it's worked a hundred times.

So it's probably better than what you're doing. Cause you've used that like twice. 

John Common: Oh man. That's very true. Well, you know when when you and and our audience, uh tend it skews away from startups, right? So our audience are cmo's cro's the vps and directors who report to them at pretty large complex companies, right?

so that's who's tuning into growth driver and I've noticed that whenever we talk about positioning or messaging really to any audience, but especially that audience It can quickly kind of turn into like this confusing word salad because everybody brings different experiences and terminology and this is the way we did it at Acme and this is the way we did it at Beta Company and I read a book once and, and so just for that, let's level set right now in the show, in the episode, give us a quick pragmatic definition of positioning and then a quick definition of messaging.

April Dunford: Yeah. So in my world, messaging uses positioning as an input. So messaging is one of the ways that we represent our positioning, but we actually represent our positioning in lots of other ways. We represent it in our branding, we represent it in our sales pitch, we represent it in all kinds of stuff. But we need to have the positioning done first.

If you came to me and said, We need to go right messaging. I say, okay, great. Let's do it. But first I have questions for you. So the questions are who do you compete with? Like if you didn't exist, what would the customer do? And so we got a position against that. So I need to understand who do we compete with?

How are we different? What's the value that we can deliver that no one else can? And, and who's a really good fit for that, like what kind of companies are we trying to go after? My positioning defines this. So your positioning defines how your company or your product is the best in the world at delivering some value that a certain kind of customer really, really cares a lot about.

Like that's it. So we have to define that first. And I can't write messaging until I understand that. Like we don't actually make messaging up from scratch. Like we have to understand what is the differentiated value here that I'm trying to communicate. Then I can write messaging around that. And then messaging is different depending on the purposes.

So I've got messaging that lives on the homepage, but I've also got, Messaging that lives in campaigns and I've got messaging that lives in email and I'm going to a trade show and I'm Writing a brochure or something. I got messaging in there There's messaging all kinds of all all over the place and it's specific for the purpose that you need it to do Positioning is the place where we start.

It's the place where we start. 

John Common: Yeah Yeah. Uh, let's, let's unpack each cause you, you obviously, you know, you wrote obviously awesome about positioning and then you wrote sales pitch as the followup that said, Oh gosh, I think they, I think they want some more help. And so you're providing it there. Let's go into positioning and, and look, uh, to the folks who are listening there, um, April has been out there and has some really great, what I would say, deeper dive episodes with other shows where I think you've done a great job of unpacking each book, but just in case they missed it, I think what we ought to do is, could you give us a quick kind of run through of your five step positioning process that you brought to us in Obviously Awesome, and then we'll do the same thing with your eight step.

messaging process in book two. But I want to make sure that our audience gets that. And then, and, and I know you're, you'll do a great job of unpacking that for us. So take us through the five step positioning process. 

April Dunford: Sure. So I can tell you exactly how, you know, I'm going to condense like nine years of my life into like five minutes.

So here's how it went. So I was like, Oh, I'm the vice president marketing. Now I need to figure out how to do positioning. I should learn how to do that. And I go have coffee with all my friends who are vice presidents of marketing and nobody knows how to do it. And I'm like, Oh boy, like this is bad. I took a class, and I learned, uh, this positioning statement thing, and I asked the guy teaching the class who's a very smart professor at Northwestern University, and I said, hey buddy, there's a blank in there that says market category, but as far as I can tell, any product could get positioned in multiple different market categories.

So how do we know we got the right one? And you know what the guy said to me? April, you'll just know. And I was like, Oh my God, we don't know how to do this. I can't believe it. No one knows how to do this. And yeah, not even the smart professors at Northwestern know how to answer this question. So then I thought, all right, at this point I had positioned a bunch of things.

So I thought, all right, we're going to treat this Like we would treat an engineering problem because I'm an engineer. So I said, okay, we're going to break positioning down into component pieces, solve for the component pieces, smash them together, voila, good positioning. So breaking it into pieces isn't all that hard because we kind of agree on what the pieces are.

It's the blanks and the positioning statement, more or less. So the five pieces are first competitive alternatives. So I, what do I position against? Put another way, what do I got to beat in order to win a deal? Okay. Second thing is differentiated capabilities, which is what have I got, capabilities of the product or capabilities of the company that the other guys don't have.

So I can list these, make a big, big list of these. The next thing I've got is, uh, differentiated value. So customers don't actually care all that much about your features. They care about what the features Can do for their business. So we need to understand what's the value we can deliver, the other guys can't.

So that's the next component. Uh, component number four is best fit customers. So who's a really good fit for that value or who cares a lot about that value? I'm not trying to sell to everybody. I'm just trying to sell to the people that are really good fit for my stuff. And then the last one is market category, which is kind of like the context you position the product in.

And so those are the five things. So once I got to the five things, I thought, Ooh, I'm doing good. I got five things. Now all I got to do is figure out what the best thing is for each of those five things, figure out the best answer, put them together, good positioning. Now, when you break it apart like that, the first thing you notice Is that each of the five components has a relationship with each other.

John Common: Yeah. 

April Dunford: They are not independent. And this is something that they don't teach you in marketing school when they're teaching you that positioning statement that those blanks actually have dependencies. So for example, differentiated value, the value that your product can deliver. That no one else can is absolutely dependent on what is dependent on your differentiated capabilities.

We don't get to just make this up. It comes from the stuff you can do with the underlying tech or the stuff you can do as a company or whatever. Stuff you got that the other guys don't. But then you think about it, in the definition of that, differentiated capabilities are only differentiated when I'm comparing them to a computer.

competitor. So those three things are related. And then if you think about it, what's a best fit customer, a best fit customer is a customer that really, really cares a lot about the value that only you can deliver. So I can't figure out best fit customer until I figure out my differentiated value. And then market category is a little bit more esoteric.

But when you think about it, like if market category is the context I position my product in my best market category, If I position the product in that category, this value kind of makes sense to these people. But that then also defines, uh, competitors. So, oh no, everything has a relationship to everything else.

And so, so where do, so where do we start? So where do we start? So, so for years I struggled with this. Then I thought, okay, I got the components. I know they relate to each other. I can work, I can pick a starting point, work around the circle. I get candidate positioning. I go test it. in the market. If it works, great.

I'm a hero. Everyone's happy. I run with it. We're good. If it doesn't work, I got to throw it out. Start it back from the beginning. Go tell my boss, oh yeah, sorry, that didn't work out. That's a good way to get fired. And, and so for years, I did it this way. Cause I was like, there is no starting point. You know, I used to, I used to draw the circle on the thing and say, we, there's no good place to start.

Until, uh, and it, so the real story is I got into Clayton Christensen jobs to be done. So all the people on the product side of the house are really into jobs to be done and jobs theory and all this stuff. And they kept saying, well, how does jobs theory fit in this? And I'm like, I don't know, man. And so I just kept looking at that and I met all these people that are smart on this stuff and I'm reading all this stuff.

And eventually I came to the epiphany and the epiphany was this. We need to start with, um, competitive alternatives. If we do not start with competitive alternatives, then what we get is positioning that sounds good in the office, but we take it outside. It is insufficiently differentiated from the other guys.

Therefore it doesn't win. So then if you start there, then this is what it looks like. First you go in and you say, look, if we didn't exist, what would a customer do? So that's, I mean, first there's status quo. Maybe they're doing it in a spreadsheet. Maybe they do it with manual processes. But there's also the guys that end up on a short list against you.

So that's our stick in the ground. So once we know that, we can say, okay, this is what we got to beat. In order to win a deal, then once I have that, then I can say, all right, so what do we got that those guys don't have? I can make a big list and then I can go down that list and for every one of those capabilities, I can say, Ooh, I got this fancy AI thing.

So what? Why does the customer care? What is the value that this thing delivers? I can go down that list, translate this stuff to value. And what happens is you end up with two or three value themes or value buckets. At the end of that step, you can say, look, we're the only company on the planet that can deliver you customer.

This plus this plus this, and the features are tucked in underneath, this is how we do it. Once I have that, then I can say, look, you know, we could go deliver this thing to anybody that has this problem, but not everybody cares the same. So what are the characteristics of a target account that make them really, really care a lot about the value that only we can deliver?

That's going to be my definition of best fit customer. And then the last thing is market category. Basically what I want is, okay, I got this value. I'm trying to communicate it to these people. Am I a database or a business intelligence tool? Am I a self driving car or a robot? Am I email or chat? And so that's how we figure out market category.

So it cascades down from that. So the book explains all the woo ha around that, but that's essentially what I recommend we do. We get a cross functional team together, marketing product, Uh, marketing products, sales, usually I got the founder, CEO, or the division head in the room. And together we work through that cascaded thing and that's how we get our five component pieces of positioning.

John Common: It's almost like you've talked about this before, April. Yes. Yes. Thank you. It's like pulling the string. No, that's great. And I want to unpack that a little bit and just really reiterate a couple of things. I love what you said and I love your methodology for positioning. Um, and I will, I will admit that when I read it, I had a reaction to your specific, the specific order that you recommend that you do it in.

I was old April. I was the younger, earlier April when I first read it. And I was like, well, I mean, you know, you can, there's five, but I mean, well you could start anywhere. And I, cause I sort of thought that. And, but then I, then I actually used your methodology. Um, in a couple of specific use cases and I was like, Oh shit, I get it.

I get it. 

April Dunford: Do you want to know the thing that unlocked it for me? Like the actual thing. So in, in the jobs to be done, people talk about this story and it's this famous story where there was this company, they're a fast food company and they wanted to improve the product and the product was the milkshake.

And so they looked at all the sales data of the milkshake and they found out that a whole bunch of people were buying a milkshake in the drive thru in the morning. And they're like, what is going on here? And so then they, then they interviewed all these people buying the milkshakes in the morning and they're like, why are you buying a milkshake in the drive thru in the morning, buddy?

What is wrong with you? And they're like, Oh, well, I'm actually using it as breakfast. I got a long commute, I'm hungry, but I don't want to eat like a donut. It's going to make a mess. And, and it's done too quick. Like I got a long commute and I'm bored, but the milkshake's all sort of thick and whatever.

It's entertaining for more than five minutes. And so what they got out of that was they're going to make the milkshake thicker and they're going to make sure it fits in the cup holder and all this kind of stuff. And when I heard this story, I was like, No, what you discovered was you were thinking about the competition wrong.

You thought the milkshake competed with Coke, but in this situation, the milkshake competes with donuts and egg McMuffins and whatever else you eat for breakfast. And so if we know what the competitor is, then the job is baked in. If we just ask these people, if the milkshake didn't exist, what would you do?

They'd say, they'd say muffin and you go, all right, I got to make a thing that beats the muffin. And that was the, that was the unlock for me. I was like, Oh, so we got to start with competitive alternatives. If we start there, then we know what we're actually against. And if we're in market and we're selling already, We know who those competitors are.

We know who lands on a short list. We know what the status quo is. So we can put our stake there and then build the thing around that. 

John Common: Yeah, that's great. That's really great. And just, there's a universal point that I wanted to call out for the audience too, which is that, um, especially when you're talking about kind of go to market relate go to market strategy related things.

And man, the topic of this show is a hundred percent that roll back the tape to what April just said is that it, it's an achievement to know each of these components of, um, of a good go to market strategy. But I think what your book shows is you got to understand the interrelationships. And, and understanding, and it's complex, sorry, don't, don't kill the messenger, but if you can, if you're willing to not just know what your product does in isolation or what your point of view is in isolation, or what your unique, but what she's saying is you got to bring it together and, and, and see how the one feeds the other.

That is where great strategy comes from. 

April Dunford: Well, that's exactly it. Like I would say the most common mistake that people make with positioning is that they is they think it's about sitting in the room and saying, well, what's so great about us? Like, what's the best thing? Why do people love our stuff? And that's actually not how stuff gets bought.

You know, how stuff gets bought in B2B, like big ticket B2B, there's always a short list. And the question is why pick you over the other guys? That's the question we got to answer. Not why are we so great? It's why are we better than them? Well, and also, I mean, cause we're all great. Why are we so great? To who?

Back to your, to who? For what? And yeah. To who? For what? All that stuff. But I mean, it's like, you know, saying why you're great. I'll get you on the short list, but it doesn't get you picked. Doesn't get you picked. 

John Common: Your books are like so many great books. And that when you read one of the insights that that is in them, you go, I think I knew that or either I, or I felt that like, I didn't know the detail of it, but like, and here's, here's one of them.

Yeah. That I, that I re learned most recently from you. And that is, uh, the positioning and messaging you use for an investor or a board ain't the same as the positioning and messaging you use for an actual prospect or a customer. Which when you say that out loud, you're like, well, duh. And yet you tell me how many companies have made that, they're making that mistake right now.

They're taking their investor deck or their board message or their private equity message and they're plopping it on their home page Wondering why no one's buying or why it's taking so long Yeah. So common. Yeah. This one. So, okay. 

April Dunford: And I mean, it makes sense, right? And where it gets really bad is you've got an executive team that has just come off a big fundraise and like fundraising, I've been through it.

It's a big deal. Like you've, you've probably spent six months on the road and you have had 9, 000 meetings and you've done that pitch 89 times. And then it's hard. to go back into customer mode after that. And you've been sitting there with this person who is not a customer, right? Who's a VC, who's looking at you and looking at, well, where are you going to be in 10 years?

And what's the big, you know, what's the big play on this thing? And how are you going to be a hundred million revenue business or a billion dollar business? And all these things, like the investors are looking at you in a completely different way than customers are, but you've been doing this pitch over and over and over again.

And it's hard, I think, to come back. And then listen to your sales people pitch the product that you have today and say, no, no, no, no. We could be telling this much bigger story. Like this won't get anybody excited. Like, you know, and the problem is what you, what you end up with is this VC pitch that is just baffling the customers.

It's way too far in the future. You're pitching things you don't have. And positioning needs to be really oriented in the present. It's why pick us over the other alternatives with the product we have today in the market it's in today against the competitors we have today because we're talking about today's money and nobody's giving you today's money for tomorrow's promise of some great thing.

The other thing is in in b2b our biggest competition is the customer going you know what now it's not a good time. Like, let's do it next year. You come in with that vision pitch, you are giving them a perfect opportunity to go, man, I love that. I love that. Come back here next year and sell me that shit when you're done.

I love it. It's great. I'll read your blog, 

John Common: but I will not give you my money. Yeah. So, but 

April Dunford: you know, like, and so if we sell too much on the vision, like we're not giving people a reason to give us their money today, right now, like, what are you going to do for me right now? That's what closes the deal. 

John Common: Yeah.

And 

April Dunford: the investor pitch is very different. The investor pitch is about the future. It's about where we're going. It's about like, the investor's not buying your product right now. They're buying a piece of the company for what it's going to be 10 years from 

John Common: now. Yeah. All right, I want to get to, I want to ask you the same, see if you can do the same five minute amazing job of defining messaging.

But before I do, I don't want to leave the audience hanging. So read her book, obviously awesome. And one of the things you'll run into is I think something that was originally sourced from Jeffrey Moore around the bowling pin strategy. That's how you go from today to the vision. Just put a pin in that and, and go get her book and read that.

But let's go to messaging April. So. Give us, give us a, uh, take as long as you need, but give us kind of a, a, a, a good practical definition in light of the positioning that you just helped us understand. Now define messaging. 

April Dunford: Well, so here's the thing. Like I think that most companies don't have a hard time doing messaging, to be honest.

What they have a hard time with is getting the senior stakeholders on the team in agreement about the underlying positioning. And because we don't have that, we go to work on messaging and everyone's like, I don't like that word. Why are you using that word? And everybody's complaining about the words.

But what the reality is. Is people, when you say, who's our competition, they don't agree and because they don't agree, they don't like the messaging that's coming out of you. So I think we need to do positioning first and then that positioning needs to go into messaging. However, if you are B2B and you have a sales team, I there's before you get to messaging, I think you need to take positioning and turn into a sales pitch.

So we need to be able to know how do we tell the story that resonates with a customer that maybe knows a little bit about our stuff, but not too much. Like the, the story we tell in a first call, like, so the customer's been lightly qualified. We've not done discovery with them yet. It's a first sales pitch.

In my opinion, that is where we need to really stress test the positioning. It works way better than trying to test the positioning with messaging because then we get into, well, you know, is the message good or bad? Did we design the landing page right? Are we driving the right traffic to that landing page?

Do we, do we even get enough traffic to get a statistically significant AB test out of this thing? Like it's, we're now in the world of testing a whole bunch of stuff that is not really testing the positioning. If I get the positioning and turn in a sales pitch, now I can sit down and have a conversation with a customer and I can see, are they making this face or this face?

Are they excited? Are they confused? What questions are they asking me? Like, do they get it? Do they not get it? Uh, what happens when we get to the end? Like, what are the objections that come up? Who do they compare us to? Do they understand where we fit in the market? So I can get a lot of signal out of a sales pitch that I can't get in an AP test.

Okay. 

John Common: So Holt, so I want to. Well, I think what you're saying, I'm pretty sure what you're saying is step one, get your positioning right. See the book. But then don't go from your positioning. If you can avoid it, don't go from your positioning exercise to rewriting your homepage or doing landing pages or creating guides and content that the most, I think what you're recommending is the most efficient, effective way to do this is put it in a well structured sales pitch and then see how it works.

Is that what you're saying? 

April Dunford: Yeah. Let's test it and tune it with prospects live in pitches. Yeah. Why, why does that work better? So much more signal. So I had this problem in that, you know, we would take positioning, we'd write messaging, and we'd A B test different versions of the homepage. And we'd always get these kind of inconclusive results.

One was we weren't, we're B2B enterprise software. We don't get a ton of traffic on the homepage. So we'd have these tests that go on forever, drive me crazy. The second thing is that sometimes, you know, we'd look at it and tests would fail and I'd be like, but I don't even know, I don't even know if that's the right traffic.

I don't even know if these are the right people. Like maybe this is failing because the wrong people are coming on our page. And you know, so how do we know that? And then, and then I felt like we were testing a lot of things, and we were testing messaging, like how did we write up the positioning. And so I started to think, you know what, a better way to do this would be Test it live with people and it's like, okay, well, if I'm going to test it live with people, I can't just read copy.

It needs to be in a story. Welcome to the worst pitch ever. Right. Right. So it needs to be in a story and it's like, okay, well, what kind of a story? Well, actually what we should do is turn it into the sales pitch because we need that. I mean, once we do the positioning, the first thing we're going to do is turn it into a sales pitch.

So we need that for the sales team anyway. So why not just build the sales pitch and test it there? And then once we know the story works there, then we're basically making messaging to match that sales pitch so that we're telling the same story across the whole funnel. What the marketers want to do is they want to start with the messaging and then build a pitch out of that.

Yeah. Yeah. But I'm like, why not do it in the reverse? Because it's way more efficient. We get a lot more signal from a live customer interview. Here's the other thing is I get the benefit of working with a senior salesperson. So here's the way I recommend we test this. So we get the positioning. We turn it into a sales pitch and then we take what usually what I would do is I would take my best salesperson, my best salesperson.

So this is a salesperson really gets customers, really gets why they buy, really gets our product. We train them up on this pitch so that they're really good at doing it. And then we go in and do a bunch of pitches and that a great salesperson knows where the pitch is working and where it's not. So after every pitch, you can go by and say, all right, what sucks about that?

And they'll say, you know what? I lost them right here. Here's where I lost them. And I can tell you why and whatever. And I can ask that a good experienced sales pitch, once they're comfortable with the pitch, which is a big, you know, you gotta spend some time getting them comfortable. But once they're comfortable with the pitch, I can say, look, does this pitch feel better than the old one?

And they can tell me. They know if this is better than the old one, because, you know, because this is their job. This is what they do is talking to customers. And I trust that way more than I trust A B testing on a landing page with a bunch of, you know, I don't know what traffic is going in there. I don't know whether it's my layout, page layout or whatever I did that's, that's working or not working.

Instead, I've got this real live customers and I've got this sales acumen that says, Oh, trust me. This is way better than the old one, which is usually what we get. So I think testing it with a sales person in a sales situation is the purest test we can get. We're controlling for a lot of things. We're controlling, we're only doing qualified prospects.

We're going exactly to the people we want. We're doing it in a purchase situation, exactly the way that we want with an experienced salesperson. So I'm, I'm controlling for salesmanship and whatever, but we're doing And then the words don't have to be perfect, like in a sales pitch, you can dance around stuff and try it a few times and whatever.

So we're not testing the words, we're more testing the thing conceptually. Does the story work, yes or no? And then once we got that, okay, now we can say, all right, just make the words pretty. We can go do that after. 

John Common: So your recommendation is step one, get your positioning right. Step two, don't go to messaging.

Step two, go to a sales pitch. Go prove it, learn it, get that, get that high levels of signal, low levels, lower levels of noise, and then operationalize it appropriately. And that's what we're going to talk about in a second. Then build 

April Dunford: messaging after that. Once it's been validated with the, with the sales pitch, then we go build messaging 

John Common: in these days of efficient growth, throwing siloed tactics at your growth goals is not going to get it done.

So what will work aligned, go to market strategy that guides the right integrated growth motions. If you need a partner who understands how to build that strategy and then help you execute it, At a very, very high level, go to intelligent demand. com, book a meeting with an expert growth consultant. They'd love to talk to you.

All right. So walk us through the sales pitch methodology, eight steps to two segments, ape stats, the market, and then your solution. Walk us through that, please. 

April Dunford: So this is newer for me talking about this stuff. It took me a long time to teach people how to do this sales pitch thing. Like I was doing it, but it's one thing, you know, you know how to do something.

It's another thing to know how to teach it to people so they get it. Oh my gosh. So when I started out, All the sales pitches that we did in tech were product walkthroughs. They were not sales pitches. They're product walkthrough. They're like, buddy, we got 15 dropdown menus and I'm going to click on every single one and just show you the product.

And at the end, I'm like, so you want to buy it? That was the pitch. And then if we were getting really sophisticated, we would have like one or two slides in there. Like we, we always, we used to have this one where we defined the problem and this is, this was terrible slide, but we always thought we were geniuses.

We were like, We find the problem. So like, I'll give you an example. We're selling a database. And we're like, what's the problem? So much data, man. So much data. It's, it's growing exponentially. We got data. And you know what you need to do? Manage that data. You need a database. Yes, you do. Let me tell you about my database.

I got 15 dropdown menus. I gotta click on all of them. Like, it's so stupid. Any of our competitors could have said the same thing. Right, right. It's like, we're all solving the same problem, buddy. And then we might have, you know, a couple of slides at the end, like here's some customers, you know, we throw out some logos, we might throw it out, you know, and then, and that's it.

And then, and then I went to IBM and, and at IBM, they had this pitch structure that was like nothing I'd ever seen before. It was like super sophisticated. It, When I started using it, I was like, this thing is way too over engineered actually. And there was a lot of stuff in there that was specific to IBM.

You wouldn't use it outside of IBM because they do very, very, very big deals. But, um, but two things really jumped out at me. One, they never started with the problem, nor did they jump straight into product. They always talked about their perspective on the market and they called this the insight step.

And so they would come in and say, Hey, Databases. Why do we care about databases anyway? You know why big companies like you care about a database? Because all that data, you're going to use it for something. And a lot in the future, a lot of your innovation is going to come out of freaky stuff you do with that data.

So you know what your database that manages that needs to be? It needs to play nice with everything you've got now and everything you're going to have in the future. Because it ain't a database. It's a platform for innovation. Now, that's very different from the way Oracle, which was our biggest competitor, was talking about that at the time.

Oracle would say, you know what you want in a database? You want a database that's all integrated up and down your stack with your applications and everything else and buy everything from one vendor all locked in. And you want that because it's really fast to deploy and it's cheaper to deploy and if something goes wrong you only have to call one person instead of ten people.

And that worked for the companies they were dealing with which were a little bit smaller than the companies we were dealing with. Our pitch worked really well if you're talking about a fortune 20 which was like our, our companies were like fortune 50. 

John Common: Yeah. 

April Dunford: And talking about this platform for innovation was really different.

So I love this, this idea that we started with something that only we could say. No one else could say it and it was rooted in the differentiated value that our product could deliver that no one else could deliver. So I thought that's really smart. Second thing was we never talked about features outside of the value that those features could deliver.

So we never come in and say, we got the world's best API. We'd say, you know what, you need a database that plays nice with everything 'cause you don't know what the future is gonna bring. So you want a database with the world's greatest API, lemme show you how that works. , 

John Common: right context. 

April Dunford: So we would never, we always focused on value, not features.

Value not features. We show you the feature. But we'd never show you the feature without telling you why the feature mattered. So when I left IBM, I went to a startup that was selling much smaller deals, and I took the IBM pitch structure and I startupified it. Which means I stole some of the stuff that worked and the stuff I thought was irrelevant for smaller companies and smaller deals, I threw it out.

And I started using, and I used an evolving version of that pitch structure from that point forward. So what I have written down in this book, Sales Pitch, is the final form of this thing that I have now used. I used it when I was an in house VP marketing on maybe a dozen products. I've now used it with almost 300 companies.

So I think it works pretty good. You don't have to use, like, you could just use it as a starting point and then do whatever you want. It's better than nothing and it's way better than just doing a product walkthrough. So here's how it works. Two pieces. There's the setup, the follow through. The setup is not about you and your stuff.

The setup is about the market. And so it starts with your insight into the market. It moves into like, Hey, there's, you got lots of choices and these markets are competitive. There's lots of folks out there, but you know what? They kind of bucket into two or three different approaches to the problem. And here's the pluses and minuses of those.

And Hey, look, there's a gap and we're in here. And then we would, do we end the setup with this thing? Like, look, Like, if we understand what the real problem is here and we know what works and doesn't with the current set of alternatives out there, can we all agree that a perfect solution in this space would tick these boxes?

And if the customer says, yeah, yeah, I'm with you on that, then you switch gears to the follow through. The follow through is, is. Here's the introduction to us. Here's the value we can deliver. And so if we're doing a demo, we're like, we deliver these three points of value. Value point one, we're going to make it way faster for you to do whatever.

Let me show you how we do that. And then I show you the thing, value point two, value point three. So the bulk of the time is still spent in this value step. And then we have a few other things. One, we need to deliver the proof that we can deliver on the value that we say we can deliver on, which is Case studies, metrics, sparklers, whatever it is you use to prove that you can deliver the value you can deliver.

There's an optional step for handling a big unspoken objection like, Hey buddy, this sounds really good, but that sounds really, really, really hard to roll out. So how are you going to help me do that? Or this sounds great, but way too expensive. So, you know, and so you're going to handle that objection. And then we finished with the ask.

Which is whatever we want the customer to do next, whatever the next step in the sales process is like, Hey, you know, can we sit down and talk about a project? Who would need to be in the room for that? Why don't we book the next meeting? So at a super high level, that's how the pitch structure is structured.

John Common: Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Uh, and you know, I, what I love about not just showing up with features and products is. That your methodology also aligns with, I think it's Gartner talking about buyer enablement versus product enablement or sales collateral. It's about saying our buyers need help navigating this ever shifting complex set of choices.

And if we can, the, the, the, the firm that gives them, um, trustworthy information to navigate and understand their pain and then match that pain to the right solution. I 

April Dunford: think we really, really underestimate how difficult it is for B2B buyers to make a purchase decision. And so the Gartner stuff really unearthed a lot of that stuff and they've got good data around this.

But if you look at it, like the stats on it are terrifying. Like 40 to 60 percent of B2B purchase decisions end in no decision. 40 to 60%. So like half of them embark on a purchase process and then say, eh, forget it. And then when you scratch it, that data, like people will say, Oh, well that just means they decided the status quo was better.

No, they scratch it. That data in the majority of the cases, the customers, Got all the way down to the end of the process. Decided that the new stuff was better than what they were doing now. But they were gripped with indecision. And the indecision was, I don't know, like these things all kind of look the same.

And what if I pick the wrong thing? Maybe I'm going to get in trouble. What if this thing fails? What if, you know, what if nobody likes it? What if this is a bad choice? What if, you know, what if the project fails? Oh my god. And then they just freeze. And say, you know what, now is not a good time. Let's just do it next year, or the year after, or the year after.

And so, what we have to do to overcome that indecision is, first of all, we have to teach the customer about the whole market. Like, not just us, but the whole market. Like, how does everything fit in there? Because the poor customer's coming at it and they're like, oh man, I'm doing all my research and all the companies look the same.

All the companies say the same thing. I look at the Garter Quadrant and there's all kinds of stuff in the top right. I'm going on these comparison sites like G2 Crowd and all that stuff. And You know, it's one's a 4. 7 and one's a 4. 8. I don't know, man. They all look good. There's 29 things up in the top right box.

Which one should I pick? I don't know. And so customers have never had so much information at their disposal. But they are starving for insight. And so I believe that in B2B, Companies that can do a really good job of teaching customers how to buy, like how to make a good purchase decision are going to win for that reason.

And 

John Common: there's so many good reasons. Here's two. One is. You're helping them qualify themselves toward you or out of you. And yes, they're not a good fit for you that it doesn't feel like it, but that's a win because now you get to go to someone who 

April Dunford: will buy from you. Right. And then the last thing we want is our expensive sales resources.

Yes. Taking two, three months monkeying around with an account. That's, that's a bad fit for us. Let's get rid of those early. 

John Common: And then the second reason is want to build trust with someone. Help them. Yes. Help them. 

April Dunford: Yeah. 

John Common: Yeah. Oh, that's really great. Like 

April Dunford: how does anybody buy anything? Like, like, think about it.

Like, let's say you're going to buy accounting software. Like you, you wake up tomorrow and you know, you're like accounting software, like, and, and let's, and let's be realistic, like how this works. The boss wants accounting structure, accounting software, and they come down and point at you and say, buddy, it's your job now.

You find something, you recommend it to me and I'll bankroll it, but we need new accounting software and figure it out. And like that person is like, what? Like they've never bought accounting software before. Like you're selling enterprise software, guaranteed the person buying your stuff has never bought a thing like that before.

So maybe they've been a user, but that's it. They don't know who the vendors are. They don't know what the state of the art is in accounting software. They don't know what accounting software does and doesn't do. And they go on these websites and everything looks the same. Everything looks the same. I'm at Gartner.

I'm doing all these things and it's like, ha, like, and then, you know, and then they finally get on the call with your sales rep and what does your sales rep do? Here's a feature. Here's a feature. Here's another feature. I got 29 drop down menus. I'm going to talk about every single thing. You know, versus coming in, if you could come in and say, look, I get it.

Accounting software is hard, but here's how we look at it. There's enterprise accounting software and that's overkill for you, man. It's really expensive. There's all this, it does all these things, but it's complex. It's difficult to learn. It's whatever, but then there's low end accounting software and that might be enough for what you need.

You know, and you've got compliance things you've got to worry about. Like, if you could help me figure that out, Then what I'm going to be is I'm going to be prepared to make a very confident decision and be able to go to my boss and confidently say, look, I looked at the options. Here's all the things we should pick this one and here's why.

As opposed to coming to your boss and saying, well, I don't know, this one sounds pretty good. And your boss going, what? No, that's stupid. You're fired. Go back and try again. And you're all embarrassed. Like, and most companies. If you look at the story they're telling on their website and the pitch they're doing in a first call pitch, it is not helping the customer figure that out.

Most first call pitches are not designed to answer the question, why pick us over the other guys? They're designed to just say, look at all our feature function. Like, look at all our stuff. Don't you love it? Don't you want to just buy it right now? But the customer is sitting there going, Oh no, like, does everybody have this stuff?

And like, you have this thing that you're talking about. I don't even know why I want that. Like, what's the value of that thing you're talking about? It seems to be special because you're showing it to me three times, but I don't know why I need to know about it. Like we're just not given, given prospects what they need to make comfortable, confident decisions.

John Common: That's right. All right. All right. We, we are now at a exactly where I have been looking forward to in this, in this, in this episode. Here we go. So imagine we have done a great job of developing positioning. Step one, step two, we have used that as our guide to create that sales pitch. And we've now been testing it and we feel really good about it.

Getting good signal sales or the senior trustworthy salesperson is like, I am winning with this. I'm you can't take this out of my cold dead hands. Okay, great. Now, how do we activate and operationalize that beyond that first salesperson? And before you, before I hand you the microphone, I want to I want to really lay it out because I, and I don't expect you to even necessarily April to have all the answers, but let's do it together.

So you've got positioning, you've got positioning, you've got the sales pitch. 

April Dunford: I 

John Common: love your opinions. They're better than most. So now I, here's what I want you to imagine. We're standing in front of whiteboard and then at the top of the whiteboard, it says April and John are going to. Activate and operationalize positioning and sales pitch across.

There's a column that says acquisition. There's a column that says renewal. There's a column that says expansion. And then the row is on this whiteboard. Top row says brand. Right below it, it says acquisition. Demand marketing. Right below that, it says SDR. Right below that, it says sales. Right below that, it says partner.

And lastly, right below that, it says account management or CS. And that complexity, think about that whiteboard. That is the reality that your and my customers face after they read your books. They're like, okay, I did it, but how do I bring it to life? Yeah. And it's a big, I know it's an unfair question, but I'm asking it.

What advice? So 

April Dunford: no, I got opinions. So, so here, so here's, here's the, the order of operations and again, the way I used to do it when I was VP marketing, but the way I recommend to my clients to do it and for the most part, the way they do it. Okay. So we take the position and we turn it in a sales pitch. We test it with our one great sales person.

We validate it. Okay. Things are good. Now there's a, there's a set of things that cascade out beyond that. So the first thing is we now have to take that pitch and roll it out to the rest of the sales team. And that requires a very deliberate specific effort. So what that means is We need to, if we have sales enablement, sales enablement would have been involved in the testing of this pitch.

Um, but if we don't have sales enablement, then it's product marketing or whoever is going to, is going to help us train the rest of the sales team on this pitch. And we are going to leverage that first salesperson that helped us test it to train the rest of the team. Because I need that salesperson to go to the team and say, look, Old pitch bad, new pitch good.

See these deals in the pipeline. They came from me using this new pitch. If you use the old pitch, you're a loser. Stop it. And then we have to have a training package that includes a recording of that good salesperson doing that pitch and the script that matches that. And then we are going to. We're going to train all the salespeople on that, and we're going to do pitch testing.

Meaning, the, everybody on the sales team has to test pitch with their boss, which we call validation. So we need to do some kind of pitch validation, and that doesn't just happen once. We tend to want to do that again quarterly or at least twice a year, because, you know, salespeople, things will drift off message if we just leave it there.

So, uh, so we've got final version of this. We've got deck demo script. We're going to roll out the training to the rest of the sales team. So that's what's happening in sales. And we're doing that with the help of the sales team who was deeply involved in testing this thing in the first place. So this isn't really a marketing effort.

This is more like a sales team effort. So this is, so that's going on now on the marketing side, we now have the positioning and we have this story that we like that is working in sales. So marketing can now go work on messaging. In my opinion. The best way, if we want to do this well, we do not just go straight and do messaging for the homepage, which is what everybody wants.

What we should do is create what I would call a messaging document. So what a messaging document is, is a place where you want It's the single source of truth for messaging for any purpose across the company. And so we're going to write what I would call boilerplate messaging. And that boilerplate messaging is, here's the tagline.

Here's the 50 word description of what we do. Here's the 200 word description. Here's the 500 word description of what we do. We have three points of value. Here's the approved language that we use for those three points of value. Those three points of value are supported by these. Features. This is the way we talk about these features and it is approved.

These are the diagrams that we use to describe how this thing fits in the middle of your whatever. Here are the approved customer quotes we're going to use as proof for this thing when we talk about the proof stuff. Here are the approved customer case studies. All this stuff, including the positioning that we worked on, goes into this messaging document.

We have copywriters work on this stuff. We build it. It goes around. It gets approved. And then we all agree. This is this is the single source of truth now now when we go to want to write messaging for the home page We want conversion copy. Well, it depends on what your home page does to be honest But depending on what you want your home page to do We start with the boilerplate and then we use whatever we need to do to do home page copy if we want to go use Tailor it to that use case.

Now, if we want to copy for email sequences or whatever, we start with the approved boilerplate stuff from the messaging document, and we tailor it for that use case. If we don't have this messaging document, We get this six degrees of Kevin Bacon thing going on where like Everybody's looking at the homepage and then they do some stuff for this thing and then they do another thing for this thing and six Months from now you won't recognize any of that copy because it'll be 29 Degrees away from your home page or wherever else you started So we build a messaging document the messaging document does not change the Until the positioning changes, so that stays there.

So this is, this is usually what happens downstream, um, and how we're operationalizing. the messaging and the sales pitch. We got to roll it out to the rest of the sales team. We have to do that. Then there's the ongoing care and feeding of this thing. So typically if there is a product marketing team, typically product marketing then becomes the quote unquote stewards of messaging.

and the sales pitch. And it is their job to work with the rest of the team to make sure that we're not producing things that are way outside of these stories. So they kind of become the positioning cops. They're like, why, why is that there? Like, why are you doing that? Why? And so they're working with sales to make sure that sales is retesting the sales team once a quarter or twice a year to make sure that the pitches are not getting way off.

what the approved pitch is and they're also looking to make sure that anything that marketing's creating, new copy or new stuff, um, is not getting too far away from this approved boilerplate stuff that lines up with the positioning. They are also in charge of Get in our positioning gang together a couple times a year, or maybe I used to do it twice a year.

To say, if we have changed or the world has changed, our competitors have changed. That's right. Right. To get everybody in and say, look, has anything changed? Are we seeing competitors we didn't see when we did the positioning last time? Have they caught up with us in some ways? And the thing that used to be differentiating is not differentiating anymore.

Maybe there was an acquisition, maybe someone new come in the market, like, is anything changed? And if nothing's changed, then we go. Nothing changes with the pitch. Nothing changes with the messaging. Carry on CN six months. But if something's changed, maybe we need to get the gang back together, do an adjustment on the positioning, which means we do an adjustment on the sales pitch and we run it through.

Okay. Okay. That's right. 

John Common: This is why I invited you on growth driver, April Dunford. All right. I want to say something. Remember at the beginning of this episode, I said, I don't believe it. You got, you got a third book in you. And I think I just found the third book. And if you, Oh God, no. So you got to the part where you said messaging document.

I just want to point out, we don't have to unpack it right now, but I just want to point out, I know 

April Dunford: we need a good book on messaging. 

John Common: Yeah, let's write it. You and me, but here's the, I just want to, I want to point out the real complexity of, and I know you know that, but it's important that we, that we, because here's the thing, the, The positioning work that that begets the sales pitch That begets your messaging.

Let's be honest. It is very acquisition focused and it is also kind of you know kind of by definition middle funnel into the bottom of funnel and so What you just sort of said rightly in my opinion is okay Now you take that validated sales pitch and you blow out your messaging bible I'm pointing out that that messaging bible is not just middle and bottom of funnel acquisition, right?

You I have empathy for the marketing team that copywriter quote unquote that's got to be like, well, what about renewal motion? What about land and expand motion? What about brand? So I just want to say that's a lot of complexity And we're gonna write a book if I have my way 

April Dunford: No, 

John Common: but really 

April Dunford: though we'll see if i'm not dead yet perhaps perhaps 

John Common: Okay, but I really like thank you for because i've i've been wanting really i've been wanting to talk to you about that activation and opera.

I know I'm not the only one, you know, 

April Dunford: Oh no, it like all the clients I work with, we, we spend a couple hours at the end of the workshop saying, all right, good news, bad news, good news is we've done the workshop. But to be honest, that's easy. Bad news is now the works on you. Here's all the, here's all the crap that has to happen downstream from this and blah, blah, blah.

But yeah. 

John Common: Okay. I, uh, I want to do a kind of the old lightning round with you. So you're, you're a pro you'll kill this. Oh gosh. I just make shit up. That's what I do. It's pretty good. Um, 

April Dunford: that's what the lightning round is about April, April making shit up. All right. 

John Common: Here we go. I'm excited. Um, I'm gonna ask you a simple and overly simple question.

You're going to resist the urge to write a book. Just give me the first thing off the top of your head. All right, here we go. One piece of advice for CEOs about positioning and messaging. 

April Dunford: The big thing for CEOs, first, one piece of advice, one piece of advice. Those two things are different, and you really gotta nail the messaging part, or you really gotta nail the positioning part.

Part of nailing the positioning part is getting really tight on, who do you actually compete with? What is the value you can deliver that no one else can? If you can answer those two questions really, in a really, really tight way, then you're going to have great messaging. You're going to like, things downstream are just going to sort themselves out.

But if you can't really succinctly answer the question, why pick us over the other guys? Cause you can't even figure out really who the other guys are. Then, then, then we're in trouble and we're in trouble. You 

John Common: CEO answer the question, who are your competitors? And they say, nobody. 

April Dunford: Oh, lots of times. 

John Common: Yeah, lots of times.

Like, oh, buddy, 

April Dunford: yeah. But, like, most of the time, they'll say, the competitors are this, this, this. And then it is not unusual at all that when we get into the positioning workshop, the team disagrees. Oh, total. Well, okay. All right. Team disagrees. 

John Common: All right. Next lightning. Team. Yeah. This question is about the CMO CRO dynamic.

Am I, I'm asking you one piece of advice for that critical marketing sales dyad, the CMO CRO dyad, one piece of advice. For that, those two people who are embarking on a new positioning and or sales pitch project. 

April Dunford: You know, I think, I think it's really important for, for marketers to understand exactly what's happening in sales.

And so I find that often, you know, if sales doesn't understand perfectly what's happening in marketing, that's not a disaster. If marketing doesn't understand what's happening in sales, that's a disaster. That's an interesting insight. Yeah, it's true though. I've never heard it put that way. That is really true though.

It's true because it's downstream and they're closer to revenue than you are. And so if things go bad in sales, they're going to point up at you. Oh, that never happens. So here's the thing. When I was new vice president of marketing, I would always make it my mission. Like sales is gotta be my partner on this stuff.

And if I can't get a good partnership going with sales, there's no point in working on anything like that comes first. And so, They, they know a lot. They know a lot about how customers behave. They know a lot about how customers make a decision. So we really need to understand what's going on over in sales, what's working and what's not working over in sales.

If they don't understand what we're working on, that's, that's actually okay. 

John Common: Sales right along, Joe. Marketing, yeah, okay. 

April Dunford: But sales right along, that's my secret weapon. Every company I've ever been at, I spend the first two weeks hanging out with sales, listening in on sales calls and stuff. Like it's the key to everything I think in Big Ticket B2B.

John Common: All right, now we're going to swing this lightning round cannon at product marketing. Product marketing, one piece of advice for how product marketing and demand or growth marketing. can get their act together better. 

April Dunford: That's a good one. Um, here's what, here's my actual thinking on this, depending on the size of the company, you don't always need a product marketing function, but you need People that are doing product marketing stuff.

And so sometimes that expertise sits with somebody that has a growth title or somebody that has a straight marketing title that is doing all the things, but that work still needs to happen. So whether or not you call it product marketing, I think is irrelevant, but it, but it still needs to happen. And so the big things in my opinion are, positioning, positioning and sales pitch, like those two, if you've got a sales team, it's positioning and sales pitch.

So who's ultimately responsible for that? Like, who's the person that puts up their hand and says, Oh my God, there's that big acquisition happened yesterday. We need to do an adjustment here. Let's get the team together. Like who's responsible for that? Like, who is the person that's looking at all this stuff out there and saying, wow, man, we got, we got this message over here and this message over here and this message over here.

And these three things are really different than a brand 

John Common: marketer or a product marketer. Yeah. I see your point. 

April Dunford: I think it doesn't really matter what you call that person, but somebody needs to be the keeper of the story and the consistency on the story. And then they need to be also looking at the market and figuring out, oops, does the story need to change now because something big just happened?

And so someone needs to own that. Yeah. So often when I was in smaller companies and I was the VP marketing, often it was me. It was you, 

John Common: right? 

April Dunford: Right. Because we didn't have, you know, we didn't have headcount for product marketing. So I'm doing the product marketing job. But in these big companies, they 

John Common: suffer from a, as you know, they suffer from the opposite problem, which is the balkanization or the fragmentation of Marketing into many marketings and that begets, I don't know, for lack of a better term, API alignment problems, right?

So we're Well, 

April Dunford: it's really hard to have a junior person in charge of positioning, like it just doesn't work, right? You need somebody with enough political cloud to get the gang together and to make things move when the positioning needs to move. So, you know, I think, I think that's important. 

John Common: So I think that, I think the insight here that I'm hearing is don't really care, like I'm sure you have, we have opinions, but.

depending on how big your company is, et cetera, et cetera. Just make sure the right person and someone owns it. And someone 

April Dunford: owns it and somebody that can actually do the job. Right. And part of doing the job is putting the hand up and saying all this stuff happened. We need to sit back and we need to go, we need to go relook at our positioning and we need to do that.

It's a team effort. And that team effort includes basically the senior team. 

John Common: Yeah. 

April Dunford: And so if that person is too junior that everyone's just going to go, eh, shut up, Timmy. Timmy. I like that. Yeah. All right. 

John Common: Yeah. 

April Dunford: That's good. Then they're not the right person for the job. If they can be summarily 

John Common: dismissed, that's not the right person.

That's right. Wow. All right. Well, hey, um, thank you for being on Growth Driver. This was every bit, it was better than I thought it was going to be. And I said it to begin, I'll say it again. Thank you. I think everybody who's ever written a book has told me it's way harder than you think. Thank you for writing the books.

We are all benefiting from that. And also just thanks for being so damn cool to talk to. All right. 

April Dunford: Well, thanks so much for having me. This has been super fun. See everybody. Awesome. Bye. 

John Common: All right. Well, uh, April just took off. Um, that conversation was even, I knew it was going to be good. It was better than I thought it was going to be.

Um, We covered a lot. This, this is one of those growth driver episodes. I know I say this a lot, but this is one of those growth driver episodes you want to save and probably listen to and definitely share because if you think about it, we covered really good definitions of positioning and messaging. She unpacked, she did a quick but really good job of unpacking her positioning methodology, her sales pitch methodology, and then we had a really good conversation.

I loved the part where we started getting really real and detailed about how to operationalize positioning and pitch and messaging across the whole process. Um, she's just, uh, also just so down to earth and smart and funny and has a great story for so many things. Um, Anyway, that was, that was a blast. I know I kind of knew it would be fun, but it was even better than I thought.

Hey, thank you for joining me and April today, uh, giving us your time. Um, we're trying to do something really valuable and unique here on growth driver. And I think today is an example of that. I hope you like what you hear. If you do please share it with your, with your friends and colleagues who you think might benefit from it.

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Look, if you work at a B2B company that is running an outdated growth strategy, and you're listening to Growth Driver, you probably know that they're running an outdated growth strategy. So go to Intelligent Demand, request a growth playbook consult. They will help you align your go to market teams around efficient growth.

And, if you need it, give you the tactical expertise you need to actually execute that sucker. So, that's it for today. See you soon here on Growth Driver. Again, I'm John Common. This has been fun.