April Dunford on Positioning

Intentional Performers with Brian Levenson

April Dunford is the world’s leading expert on product positioning. She works with fast-growing tech companies helping them clearly articulate the value they alone can deliver to customers. She is the author of the bestselling positioning book Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get it, Buy it, Love it.

April had a number of amazing insights during our conversation. Some of them include:

“My calling is more as a teacher than anything else” (8:00).

“In the work I’m doing right now as a consultant, really my job is to be a teacher” (8:18).

“As a teacher and a facilitator, I’m teaching the team and I’m facilitating the team to come up with the answers themselves” (14:25).

“When we’re doing positioning work, we’re very focused on customers, problems, solutions… how do we actually tell the story of this product in a way that really helps customers make a good purchase decision?” (15:24).

“When you’re inside a big company, you have to fight really hard to get a promotion, to move your way up” (17:00).

“You need to influence people that don’t work for you and don’t have to do what you say” (22:40).

“In the work I do with positioning, we always have sales executives in the room because if they don’t understand the positioning, it won’t be reflected in the way they talk to customers” (34:14).

“How do we take positioning and translate it into a sales pitch that really works for the sales team?” (35:55)

“We need to be ruthless about asking if this is a good fit for us or not? And if it’s not, we shouldn’t try to sell to those people” (37:55).

“We need to arm sales reps so they have the confidence to be able to say this one wasn’t a good fit. They didn’t care about these 3 things, which are the 3 things we focus on and care about”. (41:20).

“The goal of positioning is to make it really clear what I do and what I’m awesome at in a way that attracts a pipeline full of these best-fit people” (45:19).

“Just because you’re doing something doesn’t mean you’re doing it with any sort of repeatability” (51:50).

“We’re positioning whether we’re doing it consciously or not” (53:30).

“The first thing we have to answer in the minds of customers is what is this thing? The second question is is it important to me?” (55:00).

Make sure to check out April on Twitter, as well as her website here!

Thank you so much to April for coming on the podcast!

I wrote a book called “Shift Your Mind” that was released in October of 2020, and you can order it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Additionally, I have launched a company called Strong Skills, and I encourage you to check out our new website https://www.strongskills.co/. If you liked this episode and/or any others, please follow me on Twitter: @brianlevenson or Instagram: @Intentional_Performers.

Thanks for listening.

-Brian