April Dunford on Marketing Strategy and Positioning Yourself to Win

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts. Everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving, registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op. So you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5 that's z-u- dash dash-l.com exit5 to learn more. This episode of the Exit 5 podcast is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers.

They've helped customers like lessonly drive 40%.

Of their revenue from Organic Search and they help Terminus make Organic search their number one source of demos.

Here's how it works.

Number one is results. DemandWell is built for driving the outcomes that B2B marketers care about demand traffic, leads and revenue. Number two is ease and control. Junior team members can follow recommended steps right in the platform, while experts can customize and maintain full control over their work.

Number three is speed.

With everything in one platform, DemandWell helps you crank out content that ranks and drives leads in minutes rather than hours. SEO expert or not, you can give DemandWell a try and listeners of the Exit 5 podcast can get a free.

Competitive SEO audit to see just how.

You'Re ranking relative to the competition, go to demandwell.com FOMO that's F O M O.

And you can get a free SEO.

Consultation today right from DemandWell.

That's demandwell.com FOMO FOMO.

And you'll get a free SEO consultation today.

1, 2, 3, 4.

Exit. Exit. Exit 5.

On this episode of the Exit 5.

Podcast, my guest is April Dunford.

This is a conversation that we did.

About a year ago, and I thought it was great and not enough people have listened to it. And so we are republishing this interview here on the Exit 5 podcast feed.

April is awesome.

I love her book, obviously.

Awesome.

I think she's one of the best thinkers and gives really specific and clear and direct feedback about positioning and messaging and strategic narrative. So I really think you're going to enjoy this conversation with April. Here it is.

Okay, so I'm just gonna start talking to marketing with you, if that's okay, because this is what people want. They don't want to hear. They don't want to hear from me. So, funny story is a bunch of people have told me about your book. Since when did your book come out? 2019. Ish.

It feels like eternity ago, to tell you the truth, but yeah. 2019. May 2019.

Okay, May 2019. And I just curious, as a marketer and a creator, from your standpoint, has the book done better or worse than you expected?

Like, exponentially better than I expected. Like, wait, okay, let's be honest.

Like, can you go back to that? Like, who were you at the time? Like, I wanted to put a book out into the world and what?

Well, so. So the idea was this. So, you know, I had already been consulting and doing this version of a consulting business where I'm very focused on positioning work. I'm only doing positioning work with B2B companies. And one of the biggest problems I had was that I would have to have these kind of long conversations at the beginning. A founder would call me and say, hey, I think we need to do positioning. And I'd have to do this big explanation of how we were going to get it done. And I kept thinking I should have a hefty blog post or something that explains this methodology that I can send to founders and they can read it and figure it out. And so I tried blogging my way out of it and it was too complicated. And I was like, no, this is actually a book.

Did you have a framework? Is this your way of doing it? Or the book process turned it into a framework?

Nope, it was my way of doing it. The book was just writing it down. Then that was the second thing was I would get these calls from founders at super early stage companies that they aren't even paying themselves. They're not going to pay me, they don't have any money. And instead I'm doing these coffee meetings and I'm trying to explain the whole methodology In a coffee meeting. I'm like, okay, here's what you do. Write down some notes while I talk. And so I thought, well, I have this book and It'll serve these two purposes. One, for CEOs that don't get the methodology, I can say, read the book. You know, you're either with me or not. And you know, if you think it sounds like bullshit, don't hire me. And then for these little guys, you know, I could slide it across the table in a coffee meeting and just say, read that, come back with better questions. And so I thought this thing would be really niche, right? Like, like I wasn't sitting there thinking, oh, I'm going to sell thousands of copies. It was like it was written for a very distinct purpose. And that really didn't have all that much to do with book sales.

Well, no, it probably was a way for you to launch in a great business around like consulting and coaching and, you know, people that hire you to help do positioning.

Well, I was already doing that, but it certainly accelerated that.

Why do you think we're in this, like, renaissance where, like, what would Al Rees and Jack Trout say if this many people were out there talking about positioning? But what do you think has changed in the last year and a half? Like, why are so many people caring about this now?

It's an interesting question. I have kind of a theory about it. I think in marketing we tend to work on. The pendulum swings back and forth between us being very, very focused on what I would call marketing first principles. And I would consider positioning to be one of these things, like sort of bedrock marketing fundamentals. Like shit you have to have figured out in order to do anything good in marketing, in my opinion, versus hacks, right? Like, we're just going to hack some girls, man. Tips and tricks. I'm just going to hack my way through stuff. And I don't care about any of that bedrock stuff because that sounds hard. I just need to do something hacking and get it done today. And so. And I think we swing back and forth and I think where we need to be is somewhere in the middle, right? But when I think we're coming off a few Years of, you know, if I'm rolling it back 2018, 2017, 2016, where, you know, it was all about hacks and tricks. And the one thing that grew my whatever by 9,000%. And I think what happens with that is if we get too focused on that stuff, we realize that it's not sustainable, right? Like, a lot of this hacky stuff is not sustainable. And it's not sustainable because the fundamentals underneath aren't there. And so then we kind of swing back, right? And then we're like, oh, we need to get a bit more strategic about this stuff, and there needs to be a little bit of planning. And I think right now, we're maybe in the pendulum swinging back the other way, I guess. I don't know. Otherwise, I have no idea.

Maybe we're just talking about it. I love it, as I love.

Maybe somebody wrote a cool book that everybody's reading.

Yeah, yeah, someone wrote a book, and it's become wildly popular. But I love your book, and I love positioning and just thinking about overall company storytelling. Because I think what you said is important, which is, like, right now, everybody's talking about clubhouse.

Okay?

Clubhouse is a thing. I think it's gonna stick around. But it's an example of in marketing, in tech, in this kind of bubble that we live in, we love to get obsessed with the new thing where. I love your book because you go back and you kind of unpack some of the timeless lessons. Like, look, this concept isn't new, but it often is the thing that can have such. Storytelling has the biggest impact on your business. I'm not sure if you talk about it as storytelling, but my friend Andy Raskin, he said to me, and I've stolen this line from him now, but he said, like, your story is your strategy. And I think that that's such an important line from a marketing perspective, because it's like. And you talk about this in the book, it's not just marketing's job, but if you have a clear story, or in this case, if you have a clear position, that then dictates how you go to market, what type of sales team you have, how you service customers who you partner with. And, like, it's almost the 80, 20 rule of running a business, right? It's like, it's the one thing that will make all these other things easier. If you have a very clear story, a very clear position. It's companies that try to be everything to everyone or have, you know, fit. Well, how many people do you talk to, April? That's like when you tell them like, okay, well which Persona are you focusing on? They're like, well, you know, we actually have six. And it's like, okay, well how about you pick one and let's start there? I just think it's like, I wish every marketer would start here as opposed to like immediately in some type of Google Analytics funnel.

Right, right. In my opinion, if you think about it, everything we do in marketing has a fundamental set of inputs, right? And a lot of shitty marketing, in my opinion, is a result of crappy inputs. So if we think about it, like, we're going to go do lead generation, right? So I'm going to run lead gen campaign. What do I need to know to do that? Well, who am I targeting? Right? Who am I targeting? And then what's the thing going to say, so what's my value proposition? And then who am I against? So, you know, who do I need to win against? And so how am I different and better? So, you know, when I started out in marketing, everybody seemed to be doing stuff by gut feeling. And worse than that, it was a little bit like what I would call the marketing fashion assessment. Right? So it'd be like, hey, we're going to do blog. Why are we doing a blog? Because everyone else is doing a blog. Hey, we're going to do a podcast. Why? Because everyone's doing a podcast and it's like, is our audience there and what is our goal in doing a podcast? And I used to refer to this as the golf tournament problem. And this was because once I took a VP marketing job at a company and we were like 70, 80 million revenue and I was in there in the first week of my job, the head of sales walked in and said, look, I know what we got to do. Golf tournament. That's what we need. Golf tournament. And what I realized is that if I'm just picking stuff to do because it's popular or because whatever, you know, I got no good argument against the golf tournament. You know, I'm picking stuff for whatever reasons. The VP sales is picking stuff for whatever he likes to golf, so why not have a golf tournament instead? I think we need to get serious clarity around the inputs, right? Which is, who do I gotta beat? Who am I up against? How am I different? What is the value that my product can uniquely deliver? Who am I targeting? What is the market I intend to win? I need those things before I can do anything in marketing and sales, including storytelling, in my opinion.

I love that answer.

Tell them like, who's the hero who's the villain? Who's the whatever? Where does that come from? It needs to come from somewhere.

Yeah, I love that answer because, like, inside of this group DGMG, there's 2,300 members, and people ask a million different questions, and they're hard to answer because so much of marketing and business answers, it's like, well, it depends, right? Because. Because there's so many variables like you mentioned. It's like, I think so. I used to work at a company called Drift, and when I would be working with the CEO on. On anything, the very first thing that he would do would be like, hold on. Before we talk about pricing, or before we talk about this event strategy, let's get on the whiteboard and we're going to map out the guardrails for this project. I'll never forget it. I remember us planning our first event, and I said to him, okay, so let's talk about the guardrails. And he's like, well, I want at least a thousand people there. It's got to be in Boston because we're not paying for travel this year. We want to have speakers that are not too super technical market. And so we listed out a bunch. But that. And what hit me when I read your book is you talk about positioning as context setting. You need to make context marketers out there listening for the decisions that you're going to make. And so I love the point that you made, April, which is like, look, do the analysis. If none of your competitors have a podcast and you think your customers listen to a podcast, then maybe that's an opportunity where you should go start one. But, like, maybe you have no experience doing that and no budget. There's all these variables. Your team, your budget, your size, whatever. I got questions coming in. So, Jonathan, why don't you come off mute and hop in and say, hey to April.

Well, hi, April. I'm a huge fan. So I've read your book, and I think that the book is a really good process for repositioning, like, a current product, right? Like, you find the competing alternatives, you find your best fit customers. Especially, you find, like, the tail end of the bell curve of your customers. You find, like, the raving fans. Right? That's what you said. That process is really good for repositioning, like, a current product. But, like, what if you're. What if I. It's my example. We're developing a new product line, and so finding the quote unquote, best for customers of customers of a product that doesn't exist yet is really hard. Right. And so positioning for a new product.

Line, but you don't have them.

Exactly.

Right, exactly. So I guess the general question is, like, when you're developing a new product line or launching a new product entirely, what would kind of be your suggestions for process for positioning?

Yeah, so I got opinions about this. I get asked this one a lot. So if you got something that's brand new. Right. You hopefully have. If you believe in lean startup methodology at all, you've gone out and you've done some customer discovery. So you've gone out, you've interviewed a bunch of folks that you think might be interested in buying your stuff. And what you end up with is what I would call a positioning thesis. And so your thesis is, I think I compete with these folks. I'm different in this way. My differentiated value looks like this. Therefore these kind of customers are going to love me. Therefore, this is the market I'm going to win. But it's a thesis. And so you're going to put that out in the market and test it whether or not this thesis is correct. Now, my experience, having launched, like back when I used to be a VP Marketing, I launched 16 products into market, and our thesis was never totally correct even once. So we launched it in the market. And, you know, people are weird and customers we didn't expect to love us, love us, and, you know, things we thought would be really hot were. And so because of that, what I generally counsel people on is not to actually freak out too much about your positioning before it's launched. Like, I keep it kind of loose because it is going to change and you're not going to get everything right. And so my bad analogy, which I'll give, because until I find a better one, I'm going to keep giving this one is like, you built a fishing net and you think the fishing net is for tuna. That's your thesis. But, you know, if you launch it as a tuna fishing net, maybe it's great for tuna. Maybe the tuna fishermen take it, maybe it pulls up some tuna, maybe it doesn't at launch. I would kind of just you know, maybe keep it a little loose and just say, you know, it's a net for big fish of any kind, man. And then you sell it like that. Go to the part of the ocean where there's all kinds of fish, toss it out there, see what you pull up. Maybe it's grouper. And then you're like, shit, it's a grouper net. I didn't know. Then you can tighten up the positioning, once you start seeing the patterns and get really, really tight on it, and then just go run at the grouper thing.

Makes sense, if that makes sense. Big nets. Big nets all the way. Thank you.

You're welcome.

It's so important, though, because marketers, we love to just, like, hold on to. We love to hoard this idea. Like, we think that we're going to have a whole new way of doing things, and we're not going to tell any about it, anybody about it. But on Tuesday, February 15, we're going to launch this to the world. And, yeah, it's going to work. We're like. The thing that I'm obsessed with now is, like, I think what's so cool about positioning, April, is like, 20 years ago, you could write positioning and have to do this, like, big product launch to test it. But today you got social media, you got advertising, you got content. Like, you can quickly get feedback on your message and then adjust. And so to your point, your bias should be for getting feedback on your positioning, not in the fact that we.

Created it in the beginning. This is all you got, right? Because again, we're pretty much always wrong. Like, you know, we think we got it, but we don't. Here's the other thing, too, is you're positioning even when you've got it. Like, even when it's awesome and you're totally nailed it. Positioning isn't a static thing. You don't get to just set it and forget it, right? Because your product's not static, your market's not static, your competitors are out there doing stuff. So, you know, the landscape's changing. What makes you different today isn't necessarily differentiating. Six months from now or a year from now, and you might be in a totally different market. So people, I think, can overthink this stuff. Like, it's a living, breathing thing. We're going to set it as good as we can dial it in right now, but we're going to have to come back and check it every six months or so and jump in and say, are these still the same competitors, are still the same differentiators? Does our value still resonate like it did? The customers still prioritizing things the way they did? It's going to change.

All right, let's go to Ivana.

Hi, guys. So my question is also obviously related to positioning, specifically in SaaS and B2B. But I'm wondering, like, how can you stand out and make your brand stand out when you're competing within a landscape of, like, very similar Products. Right. So it's like you're offering very similar things. And I know that if I work for this company, I'll think like, oh, but we have this differentiator. But like our consumers, they look at us as the same.

Right.

So where do I start? Like, brand wise?

Yeah. So here's how I like to think about this. You're right. Our markets are stupidly crowded, like, stupendously crowded. Like, there's so many options and I don't even care what you're selling. Like, there's a million different things out there that look just like you. But here's the deal. Every day, if you're successful and you have reasonable traction in the market, every day, customers look at that landscape and they pick you. Some of them do. Right. So they pick you for a reason.

Yes.

This is the thing. Like a lot of times I get these companies and they'll be like, well, we don't really have anything different and there must be something different. How are they making the choice otherwise? There's something there. Right. Like if you're winning deals, you're winning deals on something. Now sometimes that something doesn't feel like a lot. Like sometimes it feels like, ah, we got 98% the same, but there's this little 2%. But if that 2% is significant, that's enough. It's enough. Right. I got to make a decision on something. The trick is being able to contextualize that 2% in a way that people understand why that bit of differentiation is really, really super important and why they should pick the one that's got that 2%. And sometimes that's all you've got.

Yeah, that helps.

I still think the best way to think about this is to think about who are your alternatives. Right. If you didn't exist, what would they pick? Right. And then what have you got that's different? What's the value of that? If you can figure that out and get it really tight, then you could ask yourself, well, who cares a lot about that value? There's some people out there. Again, they're picking you over all the other people out there. They must be doing it for a reason. What's that? And can we get really tight around that to make that obvious? In everything we're doing across marketing and sales, people like, you should pick us for this reason.

And it needs to be a company level thing too. Right. Like, if you try to do this solely in marketing, then you're just kind of like scrambling where, like, if I give you, I can give you an example from my past, for example, which is like when we were early days of drift trying to create this category of conversational marketing, there was lots of other chat products and other things in the market. But our wedge was we were the first people that were specifically building this use case for sales and marketing. And so that helped drive the positioning because we said, look, there are other great products out there, but they're built for product managers or messaging, right?

Not for you.

For you, exactly. So are you a product manager? Maybe you're better off using that other product. But oh, are you in sales and marketing? Do you care about driving revenue? Then we got that for you. Another angle could be you can also win by being simpler, right? Easier to use, having a better brand. But like I think these have to be like company internal level conversations because they need to drive. Like if you say that you're going to win on brand, for example, how are you going to connect that to the actual product experience? And what does that mean other than.

It'S got to be true, right? Like you, you can't, like we don't get to unfortunately, right? We don't get to just make shit up and say, hey, we're the best at blah blah. You know, our marketing cannot be right in checks that our product can't catch, right? Like, like it's gotta be true.

Today's episode is brought to you by Ahrefs. You probably know Ahrefs as an SEO tool, right? I've been using Ahrefs personally for over a decade to see how we rank and see what's driving traffic to our site. Content marketing has always been a big part of the playbook. I use their product at Drift, at Privy and now we're using it at exit 5. But over that time, Ahrefs has evolved a lot and they're not actually just an SEO tool anymore. They're a full on marketing platform built for marketers like you and who want to grow traffic, understand our audiences and make smarter business decisions in the AI search world. Their marketing intelligence lets you see what's driving traffic to your site, to your competitors, understand top performing content, paid keywords, backlinks, and you can even understand how much or your organic traffic would be worth. Put a actual dollar amount to all that organic traffic that you're driving. They've also got tools for AI powered content and keyword research. 24, 7 Site monitoring, real time analytics, backlink tracking, brand mentions, you name it, you can do it all in one place. With Ahrefs, it's really a Marketer's dream. If you're a marketing nerd like myself, one of the coolest features in my opinion is their new brand radar tool, which allows you to explore what people and AI says about your brand, topic or niche. You can do this to do amazing research to help understand what's actually happening in AI Search today and just what the conversations are online about your brand. Plus, you can try their free analytics tool to show you how many visitors you're getting from AI search like ChatGPT or Perplexity. And look, as a firsthand user of this, so much easier to use than something like Google Analytics. I love it. We use it on our site. I've used it for Exit 5 and we just found out that over the past 30 days we've got 105 visitors to Exit 5 from AI search. 95% of that was from ChatGPT, 5% of that was from Perplexity. But it's really cool to understand and this is the way that search is going and shifting. So Ahrefs not just an SEO tool anymore. It's a legit marketing platform for anyone serious about growth in today's AI driven search world. If you do any type of content marketing at all, you got to go check them out. Go visit ahrefs.com that's a h r e f s.com today. Go check them out.

You know, because customers are pretty good at sniffing out our bullshit.

So you guys are basically saying that the differentiator isn't really like having the coolest brand. It definitely has to be tied to something about the product itself that is a differentiator, whether it's something very small and cash in on that small thing.

And sometimes it can be something that you wouldn't even traditionally think of as a feature. So, for example, a company having deep expertise in a particular use case is valuable even if there's no feature difference. Right? But if you say, look, nobody else is selling the marketers, we're selling the marketers. We have the same product as everyone else, but we're going to help you get going. We understand your use case. Our support team knows how to answer your question. You need to integrate this thing and a bunch of things. We know how to do that because we've done it a thousand times. It can be things like experience and expertise in a particular thing. It could be things like, we understand this segment of the market better or we have people on our team with a skill set that the other folks don't have.

Yes, April, that was the exact thing that we did. We.

Sorry.

As a marketer, I leaned on the credibility of the founders and said, look, these two guys have spent the last 20 years building sales and marketing products. One of them was the chief product officer at HubSpot, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so like, even if there was no differentiated feature, to Ivana's question, right? Like, we tried to win on credibility and trust and experience. Like, we've been doing this for 20 years. Even though this is a new product, here's why you should. It's like, you ever go to a restaurant and you're like a new restaurant in your town, when you can actually go to those things opens up and it's like, oh, no, that's Amy. She has the sushi place down the street and now she's got the new whatever place you're going to go there even if you've never tried her food, if you've only gone to the other restaurant before.

But like, I'll give you an example. Like, you know, and I have tons of them. But I worked at a company where we were in the enterprise CRM space and we arguably, if you stacked out feature function, our stuff versus the leader in the market at the time, like, our stuff was crap. Like, the leader in the market had been around 10 years. We were brand new. They had 5 million more features than we did. We had one thing, one that was differentiating. But the key to our success was figuring out the value of that one feature and who it was valuable for. So in our case, the key to it was we could model relationships between PayPal in a way that no other CRM could do. And for the longest time, we didn't really understand who cared a lot about that. It turned out investment bankers care a ton. So we sold a deal to an investment bank and then after that we just sold investment banks. We just walked in and said, hey, we're CRM for investment banking. And they're like, well, wait, wait, don't you compete with this 2 billion revenue company in the space, whatever that does everything. Everything. We're like, oh yeah, they're amazing. We love those guys. They're like the world's greatest general purpose enterprise. CRM. Not for you, Wall street. You want this thing? Because we. And we show them our one differentiated feature and literally land deals on that. The key is, what's the value in that differentiated feature, even if it's small? And then who cares a lot about that value? And you got to close the loop around that.

Awesome, guys. Thank you. Very enlightening.

You're welcome.

All right, Chad, you're next on April Dunford Radio Hour.

Oh, here we are. Great.

How are you guys?

So I had a question, and I think it maybe will apply to both of you from a positioning standpoint. Let's say your company is more or less the first to market in their space. In the traditional positioning book, it says if you're first to market, you realistically have the biggest advantage of keeping that positioning and keeping most of that traction throughout the entire life of the company.

But at the same time, the Rise of Trout book says that. And, man, is that ever wrong. Right, right.

And based on your comments about not staying static in your positioning, I think that that is absolutely.

If that was true, we would be using Ask Jeeves. If that was true, we would all be using MySpace. If that was true, creative MP3 players would be a thing. If there's one thing we've learned in tech is that early entrants are very often the folks that create a market category, do not survive to own it.

Sure. So I guess my second part of the question then is if my current company's positioning is. Has been using first to market for a good deal of time and they're starting to innovate some other products besides their first one. Right now, our default main bread and butter product can be easily mimicked by another competitor that comes into the space, but it's ideal for that industry. Would you think that it would make sense to potentially create a category for that industry so that they continuously innovate and can add these new products onto their list instead of just, you know, hitting home that one positioning strategy?

So you've got a thing that. That here. So I'll give you. It's not defensible. Right. So you got a thing and it's really different, but somebody could come and copy you and wipe you out. Is that the idea?

Yeah.

Correct. Or even another company that's not in the space. So I'll give you the specific example. We are a payments platform for cargo and logistics company. That space is so antiquated, nobody else is doing that. We've had great traction so far hammering that positioning as the first to market and evolving that technology. But at any given time, I feel like a payments platform is relatively easy for another competitor to come in and take a decent amount of market share. So do we continuously keep building on our positioning as far as, you know, as we bring new products into. Be like the logistics technology company type category aspect, or just keep hammering home our current, you know, first to Market.

This is more than just a positioning question, right? This is a bit of a company strategy question. But here's the thing. Just because somebody can compete with you doesn't mean they do ever. One of the great things that I learned from working at a big company for a little while, so most of my career I spent at startups was startups kept getting acquired. And so at one point I ended up at IBM. And at one point, you know, when I was at the little company, we were always like, oh gee, IBM could come in here and wipe us out at any minute. They could just enter this space and wipe us out. And then I was at IBM and at one point I was trying to build this little feature on my product that did 300 million revenue in a year. And I wanted two developers to build this little feature. And it took me a year to go through the process to get approval to get two developers to work on a thing for six months.

Big ships move slow.

Yeah, it's like it takes a lot of ocean to turn that boat. Right? So, you know, and then if you looked at IBM like the way we made decisions was nothing like the way I thought IBM made decisions. Like we literally made decisions like this. We were like, if we can't make a billion dollars in five years, there's no point doing it right. So I worked on a thing where it was like, you know, it's a new thing. And that was the goal. It was a billion dollars in five years. Otherwise why do we bother? So I think that a lot of times we worry about big competitors doing stuff in our space and they just never do. So that's the first thing. Maybe nobody ever comes into your space, so I wouldn't worry too much about it until something happens. The second thing is you're owning the space right now. You're dominating right now. There's a lot of things you can build. That again would be that 2% differentiator that the general market leader is not going to copy because it's only important for logistics. But you guys could build it and essentially build a moat off a couple little things that they just can't build it because it would hurt them in other markets that are way more valuable to them.

It's great feedback.

I give my earlier example with the CRM thing, we built shit that the market leader would never do because they made 90% of their revenue in call centers. And we were selling at the opposite of call centers. We're selling investment bankers. They're like the anti call center. And so we Built a bunch of stuff that was no big deal to build, but they were never going to copy us because it wouldn't be interesting to anybody but investment bankers. And we were crushing it. Investment banking, they didn't even have one account.

Great insights as always.

Thank you.

I'm surprised more people aren't asking questions. This is like gold I get direct access to. April.

I know, it's killer. Ridiculous. Yes.

April, do you have any strong opinions about the relative challenges or pros benefits of repositioning for a B2B product that has kind of consumer level scale?

Right.

We're talking like 60,000, 70,000 customers. Right. Like I think my takeaway from your book is that there's a lot of like the discovery for figuring out the new positioning requires a lot of qualitative interviews. And that's cool and like for sure that's always necessary. But you know, at this scale, tech talk to 60,000 customers.

Right.

And so would you have any suggestions or approaches? How would you differentiate your approach for a product?

I've done this a bunch of times. And so here's the thing, like the more variability there is in your customer base, the more interviews you're going to have to do and the more you're going to have to go get data. Right. And so the less variable, like if I'm only selling to investment banks, like they're all the same, you know, and I can talk to five of them and I know what investment banks are like, but if I'm selling to like, I don't know, convenience stores or dry cleaners or I don't know what, and there's a bajillion of them, then they're all different and some of them are big and some of them are small and they've all got different things. And so in order for me to start seeing the patterns, I need to be able to do that at scale. So in the book. A lot of the examples I'm giving in the book are more enterprise B2B bigger deal sizes, like deals where there's an actual salesperson involved. Right. If there's no salesperson involved, you're going to have to do a customer research effort to go and figure out the answers to some of these questions. And it's harder than it looks because what you're looking for is stuff that it's very hard to get out of a survey and it's easier to get out of an interview. But even in an interview you're going to have to do it in a very careful way. And so the way I've done it before, we've been looking at it. So the first thing is you might have 20,000 customers, right? But not all your 20,000 customers love you the same. And when you're doing a positioning exercise, what you're trying to do is get the positioning really tight and crisp, such that it attracts these really good fit customers. Since you get a pipeline full of the best people, right? So the first thing you want to do is, when you're looking for insight, I want to eliminate the not good fit people, because, trust me, you got tons of them. And so I don't care what those people think. I want to know what the really good fit people think, because I want my position to resonate there. So first, I would do some kind of customer happiness score. And so I always use Net promoter score. I know everybody thinks it's stupid or it's problematic, frankly, but it's easy to administer. And if all you need is a swag on customer happiness, it's a pretty good way to do it. So you can Net promoter score people that'll give you, like, I got the happy people. And then you got to figure out, how am I going to get this information I need? And what you really want is, what were you doing before we showed up? That's the first thing, right? So you're trying to figure out what was status quo in the account two, what happened that made you think you couldn't keep doing it that way? So I need to understand this purchase trigger. Then the next thing is, okay, you decided you couldn't keep doing it this way. You're going to do it another way. What was your process for figuring out what a potential solution might be? Did you make a short list? How'd you build the shortlist? Who was on the short list? And then the last bit is, you picked us. Why? And you're trying to figure out that. But it's really hard to get to in a survey. It's better in an interview. In an interview, you can get to that. My experience, too, is that it doesn't take thousands of interviews, but it might take you 50.

Fair enough.

Cool.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Good question. Okay, we got some in chat in the Q and A, and I'll. I'll read them for you. So here's one. This one is from anonymous attendee. Boilerplate messaging is a brilliant tool. When have you witnessed it being used, well or poorly, to drive change in some of your clients?

Boilerplate messaging? Well, here's the thing, right? Like, we never Use boilerplate messaging. We have boilerplate messaging as the starting point for messaging for other uses. Like, in my opinion, that's how messaging should work, right? So you have your positioning, you know, so we figure out, here's what we compete with, here's how we're different. This is the value, these are the people we're going after. Here's the market we're going to win. Great. Then I can build messaging from that. And what I used to do when I was a VP is we're going to build a messaging document. And the messaging document is going to say, this is the tagline, this is the 50 word description, this is the 100 word description. These are our three main points of value, and this is the approved copy. And how we describe those three points of value, we have these 17 key features. This is the stuff we use to talk about that, blah, blah, blah. So we'd have all that stuff and it'd be approved. Now everything you go to do with that boilerplate has a specific purpose. So if I'm going to go write messaging for the webpage, well, the webpage has a very specific function in my funnel. And so it could be for lead generation, it could be for lead acceleration. You need to know in your own sales process, and then you're going to take that boilerplate and make it sing for its purpose on the website. Same thing with, you're going to go do a trade show and you need a banner. What's it going to say on the banner? Well, it depends on the trade show. And it depends on, you're going to start with the boilerplate and then you're going to use it for whatever purpose you need it for. You're going to build sales materials. Same thing. What's the sales material for? I think there's value in having boilerplate messaging as a starting point so that you don't get too much message drift. Right. I don't want people to say, oh, let's just start with the messaging on the homepage or the thing we did for the trade show and then we'll do another thing and then another thing and the next thing you know, the messaging is all over the place.

Well, it's like if somebody says, hey, send us your logo, like you need something to send somebody and that's 80% sure. But like, yeah, somebody says, oh, give.

Me the company description. Yeah, yeah.

Because like at scale, right, if you have a company, I mean, I think of your experience at a massive company with, you know, tens of thousands of employees, there's gotta be some level of consistency in, like, hey, here's an asset to, like, you know, we're gonna send this out, but I was gonna ask you about this, actually. Maybe this is a good place to do it.

What is the out?

Like, it's one thing to go do positioning, but then what's a good way that somebody has gone and then implemented this? Because it's not just going and updating the homepage headline, right? What are all the tactics to go and do that?

It's not. So the thing is, you've got positioning, and then what are you gonna do with it? Right? And typically, if we're in B2B software, the two big things you want to immediately do with your positioning is you need messaging, typically for the website or something, and you need a pitch for your salespeople. Right? So what I do with my clients when we work through positioning is we work through the positioning stuff, and then we take that positioning and we translate it into a sales narrative, which is like, if I'm sitting across from a good fit prospect that meets my qualification for a good fit, and they say, hey, what do you guys do? This is the story I tell them. And I like to use that as a way to test your positioning as well. Right? So if I can put it into a pitch, then I can take that pitch and put it in front of customers and test the new positioning and see if it works before I go forklift. All the messaging all over the place. So in my opinion, what you should do after you've got new positioning is you should build this pitch that essentially articulates your unique point of view on the market that says, here's the problem. Here's all the different approaches out there right now to solving the problem, but there's a gap in those. And we believe. We believe our point of view on the market is if you really want to solve this problem for customers like you, this is the important stuff. This is what you need. And you're either with me or against me on that, right? And if you're with me, then it's like, well, good. If you believe that, then that's what we believe. That's what we built. Here's the value we deliver. Here's the features that enable that value. Here's some proof we can do what we say we can do. Buy some stuff so we can start those sales narratives. In my workshops, when I'm working one on one with a company, we'll do the positioning, then we'll take that positioning and turn it into this, what I would call a sales narrative, which is like, how do I tell that? Like a customer facing story around that?

That's good. Because I think like one of the best lines I've heard about messaging is like, until you believe you have the right story and then everyone in your company is sick of talking about it, Only then do you feel like you're onto something. Like there is some years and months of repetition. It's not just like, well, you know, we read April's book and we did it and it's not working well. Like, do you have weeks and months and years of this message in market in all different forms?

Like, consistently? You just have to grind it and grind it and grind it. And it needs to be consistent across everything you're doing, right? It needs to be consistent. Marketing, sales, all the stuff you're doing, and you just add it over and over and over again until everyone on the marketing team in particular is super sick of it. And that is the exact moment where it is just starting to hit. Right?

Because that's internal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Anthony said boost my levels a little bit. Anthony, I'm turning up the gain for you. Don't worry. Okay, go ahead.

I'm like far away from my phone.

No, it's all good. Go ahead, Mark.

Let it rip.

All right, so Tamaya is in the space of doing debt to B2B SaaS companies. And one of the problems we keep on running into is that people will decide not to engage with us because they found cheaper capital, maybe by a percentage point.

Right.

And so we sit between equity and traditional banks and we're lending like 1 to $4 million. So it's effective in growing a company. Like if you spend our capital in sales and marketing, double or triple the size of your business, that's very effective. However, our competitors are offering very similar features. So how do you articulate or how do you win over a client on a term? How we're flexible versus just cheaper.

Well, so this is the thing, right? So you got these competitors and they kind of look just like you. And what's your differentiator? So what do you got that the competitors don't have?

Yeah, so for example, we're very flexible in, let's say your burn cap. So we're comfortable with companies burning to grow, whereas others might not be as comfortable.

And the other ones, they would still lend you the money, but it'd be shitty terms or.

Yeah, like a little bit more restrictive, more restricted.

So here's the thing, right? So you Got this flexibility thing, let's say, right? Like, you got to teach me the value of that. Because if I don't know that, then you just say, well, we got the flexible thing and whatever, whatever. And I'm like, nah, how does that impact my business? How does that impact my ability to do anything? So the flexibility thing, that's a feature. But you need to be able to take that feature and say, here's why this matters for your business. That's the first part. Second part is you need to understand who cares about that, because not every startup cares. And make sure that you're targeting the ones. That bit is actually the deal breaker. Right? That bit is actually important. So it's the match between the feature and the people that care a lot about the feature. So first I got to take the feature, translate it to value, and then I got to say, well, what are the characteristics of a company, a startup that really makes them care about that value? And let's just pitch to them. That's what we're going to sell.

That becomes very difficult because there's not a lot.

Well, I mean, there's. There's people out there doing this, right? Like, so I did some work with Clearbank, for example, who's in the space? And you know, they're very specific about who they target. They're not just out there trying to sell to everybody. Right. Because the way their whole thing works is they can analyze your return on your marketing spend, your digital marketing spend, and approve you based on that. So there are very specific types of E commerce businesses that fit that profile. And if you're outside of that profile, well, then they're kind of not for you. Yeah.

Oh, good question, Mark. All right, Shannon, let's go. Shannon asked a good question in chat and I asked.

Hi, April and Dave, thanks so much for bringing me up. So my question is around Personas and specifically, like, So I think as a company, we're pretty good at determining, like, what our Persona's motivations are. And we're recently kind of retargeting from Chro l and D space into CROs and like, we're calling them the ambitious growth leaders. So as I said, I think that it's pretty easy to figure out what their motivations are, but I think we struggle a bit with determining what their behaviors are like and where the commonalities exist between them. And I'm wondering if you have any best practices in that process.

And why does it matter? Like, why do you need to know that?

That's a good question. So I'm actually pretty new to marketing coming out of sales. And the way it was described to me was that, like, the product marketer's job is to figure out what those motivations are. And my job as a kind of experiential marketing person is to figure out what their behaviors are.

Right, Right. So I'm going to say a thing that's a little controversial. All right? So I think we spend way too much time on Personas, and I think as marketers, we do a lot of effort on Persona work that never gets used. And so in my experience. And you know what we don't spend nearly enough time on? We don't spend nearly enough time on segmentation, which is at the company level. So I'm trying to sell to certain kinds of businesses. Like, what I really need to know to do great campaigns is how do I target the businesses that are most likely to buy? That's the first thing. Then the Personas inside, I need to understand what their motivations are. I need to understand how my value matters for them. Otherwise, it's not good expression of value. But there's a lot of stuff I see people, including in Persona work that I'm like, it's intellectually interesting. I just don't know how you're ever going to use that stuff. I work with companies that bring out these things, giant binary things of Persona stuff. And I'm like, I don't know where you're ever going to use it. The other thing is, I think we do way too many Personas when what we really need to be focused on is who's the champion in the account and how do we arm them. But that's a whole other discussion, too. So I don't know what the answer is. Your question. If I was you, I might go back to my boss and say, why exactly. I was always that person. I'd be back there going, so why are we doing this again? But this might be one that it's like, do you actually need to know what their behaviors are? Like, I'm assuming there's some behaviors in a certain context that are important for your product.

But can I give you a spoiler? Do you know what CROs and salespeople care about? Shannon, you were a former sales. Do you know what you care about at the end of the day in that job?

Generating revenue, period?

True for every sales role ever. You know, like, Gong Gong is a good example of a company that has basically aligned their brand to that, and their content is all around that. And so if you know, the motivation, but it's not matching on your end. Then maybe what the company has to offer or what you're offering doesn't match that. So, yeah, I am motivated by revenue, but your brand or whatever is not interesting to me. And so, like, there's more diagnosis to be done on the offer side of things.

Yeah, that's a good point. Your value needs to be aligned to that Persona. Right. Like, those two things need to jive and that's it. Like, in my opinion, like, all this other stuff about, you know, I see this Persona stuff and it's like, Carrie likes art and she goes to the gallery on the weekend and I'm like, who cares? Why are we writing?

I've been sinking so much time into, like, stalking all these types on LinkedIn.

And looking at what they like and follow.

So you are going to like, some.

Of that's really important. Right. It's important for campaigns. Like, I need to know where these people hang out because sometimes I want to run campaigns at them, you know, where they are as opposed to where I am. But sometimes I feel like we go a bit bananas on the Persona stuff and we end up with a bunch of Persona work that doesn't actually get used anywhere and we kind of lose sight of the goal.

Got it. Thanks so much.

You're welcome.

I love it.

She says you don't need Personas.

I'm a bit like Personas, honestly, because.

Most people just like, they wanted the default in marketing is to like, oh, I gotta spend time in a template or a framework where it's like, the bigger reward is like, do you clearly know who you're going after? Right. Like, at Privy, where I work, we don't have a formal doc that has Personas in it, but everyone in the company knows that we're focused on small e commerce brands. And typically it's the owner who's very busy and doing 15 other things. And so therefore, the way that we need to market is blah. And that is we just say that's our icp. And so, like, we just use that as a guardrail for how we talk to the world.

Yeah, it doesn't need to be way more complicated than that.

All right, I got more questions. We got like 10 minutes. I'm going to rapid fire through some of these questions. And by the way, if you're still here, feel free to raise your hand. I'll give the hand raisers, the brave ones that want to talk more, priority over the Q and A. So do that. While I read some of These. This question's from Jennifer. Came in a little bit earlier. She said, I've just developed and launched a digital campaign targeting one icp. We have similar issues internally where we can't align on one or two targets because we can sell to everyone. At what point would you recommend we analyze whether or not the target messaging works or doesn't and go back to the drawing board?

Like, if you think you got too many ICPs, like, you know, they may. It does make it really hard to market, right? If you're trying to just kind of market to everybody. I would tend to again, go back to who's super happy. If I look at my existing customers, like, and I just follow the love, right? Like, so if I go back and I look at who's super happy, what's common amongst those super happy people and can I define my ICP that way and then target them that way? And so think.

I think that's a question though. But Jennifer, But Jennifer saying, like, I'm not sure I see her on here anymore. So no, she's not. But the point is, like, if you're a marketer inside of the company and you think you have too many Personas, probably there's a good chance. And especially if you're in early stages. Oh, hey, Jennifer, if you want to hop on, you can.

Especially in the early stages.

Because especially in the early stages, like.

Bandwidth, the budget, the people, the time.

Like if you have no traction, you can be like, the model's gotta be like, look, we can sell to five Personas, but we have zero traction. So here's what we're doing. We're going to focus on one core Persona.

Use that as a low hanging fruit. One, right? Who's easiest?

Build our business off of that. And by the way, then you learn, you actually go do marketing and sales and so you learn what works within that segment and then you can clone it and say, okay, now let's bring on Persona number two and Persona number three.

This is Jeffrey. This is Jeffrey Moore bowling pin strategy, by the way, if you want to read the book on that.

Oh, I love it.

But yeah, it's from crossing the chasm. We've been doing this since 1985. Again, coming back to fundamental first principles stuff, right? Like we've been talking about bowling pin strategy since the 80s. Like this is how you get it done. Everybody knows this is how you get it done. We have to rediscover it every like five years.

Well, look at Apple. Did Apple come out and say in the 80s when you know, was Apple like we got a personal computer, an iPad like no. There's an evolution as you learn through your customers and different Personas evolve. Okay, I'm going to shut up and get through these questions. Marco. This question is from Marco. Other than working with your clients, how do you keep updated and learning? April, what are two books that you always keep at your desk? Asking for a friend.

Oh, do you know what's so funny? I'll show you what's sitting on my desk right now. So there's actually three. So the first one is the old school bible and positioning reason Trout. It sits here on my desk and sometimes I yell at these guys. And then this one, which if you haven't read this, this is like if you do B2B and you have read this book, there's something wrong with you, which is called the Challenger Sale. And even better than that one is the follow up one which is this one. If you're in marketing, Challenger customer, these people have the data to back me up that Personas are bullshit. So that's the conclusion of this book. Personas are bullshit. And then if you're into storytelling thing, Donna Miller's Bill and a story brand, like if you're trying to do case studies and sh. That in my opinion this is very good structure to do it. And is that my three books? Yeah, I think that's it. That's it. But I don't know, you know how I find out about new stuff. I just. Other people tell me about it, people are talking about it.

Most importantly though, you got the classics. Study the classics.

Right now I'm going down a bit of a rat hole on this. I'm trying to teach this concept of how to build a good point of view pitch. And so recently I went back and rereading like the foundational stuff for sales which include Challenger Sale, Challenger customer spin selling, the new strategic selling, blah blah, blah. These are like the books that all the salespeople read. And that was super interesting to go back to that old sales stuff. And I don't know, I'm into sales.

What's the point of view thing that you mentioned?

Well, so here's the thing. If you're doing a really good job of positioning, the way it manifests itself in your marketing and sales is and particularly your sales team, your sales team should be able to confidently articulate your point of view on the market. So, and if you read through for example Challenger Sale, the data in here tells us what does a B2B buyer want out of you? In a sales process, what they want is they want to make sense of the market. They don't actually want to know about your product. They want to know what are all the different approaches to solving this problem and which approach should I pick. And then once I pick an approach, then I'm going to worry about which product. We do a lousy job of that in general, good point of view pitch does exactly that in that it basically says, look, here's the problem. There's these kind of approaches. You could do it on a shared drive or whatever. It's cheap, it's free, it's easy. Or you could use solutions that look like this and they'll put them in a bucket. Here's one approach, here's another approach. Here's the pluses and minuses. But hey, for people like you, for people like you, you need to have these three things. And if it doesn't have that, we don't believe. Is it our point of view that a very good solution to that kind of a problem for people like you has to have this? And that's not me selling my product. That is me selling my point of view on how you should look at the market. And so I'm kind of obsessed with this idea right now because I'm teaching my customers that, and I do it one on one in workshops, but I don't do a very good job of just, like, explaining it.

So if you're a DGMG member and you're listening to this, do you know, want to know why April's really good at this?

Because this is her craft.

This is what she studies, is what she learns about. This is what she reads about. And so, like, if you're like, I want to get better at positioning my company, and you never pick up a book like, this is what it takes. Buy the positioning book. Buy Challenger Sale by April's book. Soak it all in. And what you learn, though, is the reason April is referencing books from the 80s is because people have not changed. Tools and technology have. And so, like, I love that you.

There's a lot of fundamental stuff. Like, I mean, we don't need to reinvent it.

Fundamentals, right?

Like, if we're trying to build, like, people have been building sales pitches since the dawn of time. Somebody has had a lot of really smart ideas about this. So if I'm trying to figure out how to build a really good sales pitch, I should go look at what everybody else is talking about previously and build on that. I don't need to start from Scratch.

Yes. Okay, April, this was fantastic. I'll give you a couple minutes to hop off. If you're still on, come off mute and just, you know, we'll give, we'll give April a quick round of applause for coming here. You know, it's, it's.

Thanks for having me.

This was the hardest part. You probably would do a ton of speaking pre Covid and, you know, the hardest part is like presenting into the black hole of zoom. And so thank you.

I know you get to the end and it's just silence. You're like, okay, I'm done.

And then it's just, how quickly can you hit the end of meeting button? Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

Of the Egg Exit 5 podcast.

If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates, plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community.

We have a job board.

We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch that, that's Hatch fm.

They produce this podcast.

It sounds amazing because of the work that they do. And they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you gotta do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

Today's episode is also brought to you by Paramark. It's July 2, half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's gonna be here. But let's be real. Most teams are still guessing when it comes to what's actually working in marketing today, which channels to double down on, which campaigns are worth running again or not, and what's just noise, what's actually contributing to pipeline and what's not. It's Messy. This is B2B marketing. And that's exactly where Paramark comes in. Paramark is a marketing attribution platform that shows you what' working and what's not so you know exactly where to invest your next dollar. They use marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing to give you a full picture of performance across every channel, tactic and region. And it's built by a marketer made for marketers. And right now they're hosting a special office hours on helping you with your second half of the year, planning, forecasting and putting your best foot forward for the rest of this year and into 2026. It's not a sales pitch from them, but this is your chance to get real help from their experts that are at the intersection of marketing and planning. Bring your data, bring your questions, your roadmap and the Paramark team is gonna help you figure out what's driving results, where to cut and where to invest moving forward. So stop guessing and you can plan smarter right now with the team at Paramark. But you gotta grab an office hour spot. I highly recommend doing this. Pranav is awesome. The rest of their team is great. They totally get this space. You should go check em out. Go to paramark.comofficehours that's Paramark. Com office hours.