We have to make sales to be successful in business, but startups often struggle to communicate the value of their products. From pitches that drown customers in a word-soup of features, to high-concept vision pitches that leave customers confused and skeptical – the way we talk to customers isn't always clear or authentic.
April explains the difference between selling and helping customers buy and shows us how to use our point of view on a market to help customers understand what to pay attention to and why they should (or sometimes should not) buy from you.
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Hey, gang. Welcome back. We're in week six of TuringFest. So a quick recap, first of all, for what you might have missed last week. We had John Cutler from Amplitude on the North Star framework for product teams. Chris Savage, CEO and founder of co founder of Wistia, talking about brand affinity marketing, and Mark Logan, on the idea of scale models, something to think about as you're and for any size of business, actually, which was one of the most interesting parts about it.
And then on Thursday of last week, we had a chat with Erin Platts, she's head of Silicon Valley Bank in Europe. So really interesting perspective at the intersection of capital and innovation, and interesting thoughts about what's coming up next in the in the next eighteen months in European tech.
All of those videos and all the previous four weeks before that are available on the on the swap card platform. So go check them out and dig into anything you've missed. So for this week, on Thursday, we've got an interview with Andrei Venitsky.
He's the CEO of graphy. And Graphy is a company that you might not have heard of yet. They're still in a sort of a relatively stealthy phase. But Andre's had a fascinating journey. I met him two years ago, when he was living in Edinburgh.
And just when he was kicking off the journey had a very, very minimal viable product, but a very big vision. And within twelve months, he'd raised two rounds from some of the top investors in Europe and the US VCs and angels. And right now they're building a team building a product.
So we're gonna hear from him about that sort of whirlwind journey that he's been on. But later today, at four pm, we have Yara Paoli talking about growth structures and how to how to shape your company to take advantage of growth and when to pull the trigger on various different things.
We've got Amy Zima from Spotify talking about product strategy with some really interesting examples from her from her day job. But first up, we have someone who has, I think, made a real splash over the last year or so. She published a book last summer, I guess at this stage or sorry, summer twenty nineteen called obviously awesome, which is a brilliant title.
And it's a book on positioning. And both product positioning and company positioning. Excellent book well worth a read. And today, she's going to talk a little bit about a subset of that of that positioning idea. So over to April Dunford to hear more.
Hi. My name is April. Today, I wanna talk to you about how we can sell our product by pitching our point of view. This is kind of a big idea, and I have a short amount of time. So this is gonna be a bit of a gallop.
You're gonna wanna take some notes. So, let's start this way. Imagine you're a customer. You're a buyer of software. Let's say, for example, you work on a sales team and your boss has asked you to buy some software to help your sales team get trained.
So you have a look around to Google. Sales tech software. I don't know. I've never bought a thing like this before. And what do I get? I get a chart that looks like this. Terrifying. This is not solving my problem. These are too many things. I need to narrow it down.
I'm trying to get a short list here. Maybe I oh, I look and I see there's a box in there that says sales enablement. That must be what we call this stuff. That narrows it down a bit. Wait. Not enough. There's still way too many things on this box.
So that's not really helping either. Maybe I come across one of these comparator sites like g two crowd or software advice. And does this really help me narrow it down? Like, even if I were to just look at the things in the top right hand corner, like, there's still too many things there for me to evaluate.
And by the way, like, half those things in that quadrant look like they're for big companies, and I'm a smaller company. So is this really gonna help me narrow it down and figure out what to pay attention to? Now imagine you're a startup and you're trying to sell something to somebody that looks just like this.
And there's you, your little blue box down there at the bottom in the midst of a thousand other boxes. Is that gonna help you sell anything? I don't think so. What if that's you right there on that chart? You're not top right. You're just a startup.
The things in the top right are like HubSpot and stuff. So you're not gonna make it to a shortlist by that, are you? Here's a dirty little secret about these charts too. These charts are not designed to help customers make decisions. They're actually designed to keep customers confused.
The more confused they are, the more money they make because they fill in more forms and people buy those leads. So what do we do? Now imagine we finally do get a customer to talk to us and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna pitch them.
Now, generally, I have three styles of pitches. Now imagine I'm the customer. I'm trying to decide if you should be on my shortlist or not. And then I get on the call with you and you're gonna pitch me one of these ways. Well, the most common pitch we get is the pitch I call the features, features, features pitch.
And this is where you come in and you say, hey. Great. Great. You're here. Let me show you a demo. And then I pitch you features and then some more features and then some more features. Now the good thing about this is it's easy to do.
It's our comfort zone. We love features. We know features. The bad part is it puts all the onus on customers to figure out so what for each of those features? Are those features important to me and my business? And by the way, do all the other folks have the same features or not?
Well, you don't generally tell me that in the features features pitch. So it doesn't actually really help me make choices. Second kind of pitch we typically have as startups is, the origin story pitch. And this is where you say, look, customer, I feel your pain. I used to work in sales enablement.
It was terrible, and that's why I started this company. And I, you know, and I built this sales enablement thing. The great part about these pitches is it allows you to establish a really authentic connection with the customer that says, hey. I feel your pain. I get it.
But the downside of this is, one, some origin stories are complicated. Like, I don't know about you, but half the startups I work with, like, the origin story was, you know, we were building for this thing, and then we changed our mind, and then we did something else.
And then we fired a guy, and then somebody and then we and then by luck, we happened into this market. And so the origin story isn't always a nice story. The second thing is that works really well when the founder does it. Doesn't necessarily work so well when a salesperson does it.
Well, that's kind of pitch we have is sort of like the big vision pitch. You know? And that's where we're kinda pitching the future and we're like, oh, the world is changing and things are changing and there's winners and losers, man. And you don't wanna be a loser, do you?
And the problem with these pitches is they don't they do a good job of of talking about the future, but they don't necessarily connect well to the product that you have today. And because it doesn't admit the existence of other competitors, typically, doesn't, then it comes off sounding a bit disingenuous.
But it it sounds like ********. Like, let's just say it. And so, you know, people are worried that this is just a bunch of buzzword bingo. So you know what we actually need, in my opinion, is we need a way to sell that helps customers buy.
So what if we could do a pitch that kinda had the best of all those pitches? So it would expose our features within the context of why our features matter to the customers right now. It would give us a way to authentically connect with customers and prove that we understand their pain and we understand them, but do it in a way that's genuinely helpful and sort of no ******** and kinda gives them a way to think about the whole market, not just you, but all the other alternatives that they have to look at in
the market as well. Now this kind of a pitch works, and and data tells us that it works. This is some data taken from a great book called, The Challenger Customer and The Challenger Sale. And so, in there, they did a big research study with, buyers of enterprise software, and then they and then they looked at sellers.
And so they asked buyers, what do you want in a sales experience? And what they said was, we want unique and valuable perspectives on the market. We need you to help me navigate alternatives. We want you to avoid potential landmines, and I want you to educate me on new stuff and outcomes.
On the flip side, when they looked at salespeople who performed the best, the best salespeople were teaching for differentiation in the sales process. So they're teaching in a way that leads to the unique strengths of the product that they're actually selling. So I propose there's another way to do this.
I'm gonna call it the point of view pitch. So point of view pitch expresses your point of view on what the best solutions are to a particular problem for different types of customers. The goal here is to give customers a way to think about the entire market.
I'm gonna give you examples. So let's go back to my buyer who wants to buy something in sales enablement. Here's an example of a company that's in that space at LevelJump. They're in sales enablement. That's them. They're just outside of the leader quadrant on this thing.
This is a terrible space. It's hugely competitive. Now let let's look a bit at their positioning. So, who do they compete with? Well, people that are doing sales enablement, sometimes they put stuff on a shared drive, or they upgrade a little bit and they get content management system or repository for stuff.
Or if they're being really fancy, they buy training software and LMS. What unique features does LevelJump have? Well, it does integration with Salesforce data. So it's analytics that combine enablement and sales data. Their differentiated value is that they're allow you to do readiness programs where you can track the results and the metrics inside Salesforce.
The buyer of this is the head of sales enablement. Their market category is outcome based sales enablement. Now how can I do this point of view pitch if this is the product and this is the positioning I've got? Here's how I do it.
Watch how this works. So I'm sitting across from the head of sales enablement, and I'm like, hey. Sales enablement is important. You know that. You run sales enablement. Every day your reps aren't closing deals or making quota costs you money. And I could even go into a few slides of showing you exactly how much money it's costing you.
It's a lot. Now we know how companies solve this problem. We work with companies like that every day. And what we sue see is they do it in one of three ways. They either put the stuff on a shared drive. That's okay. It's free, and it's easy.
And when you're really small, that works alright, but there's no way to do version control on your sales materials. I got no metrics to show whether or not people are even taking the stuff that I put there. I upgrade to a CMS. Lots of folks do that. It's great.
I got version control now, and I could see who's done what. But I can't necessarily track what's happening with that training. And then if I get really sophisticated, I've got a full LMS, that's great. I can measure who's taken what courses and did they pass the little quiz or whatever.
But these things aren't designed for salespeople, and I can't track. Did did they take the training and then make quota faster? Did they take the training and get to the deal faster? So you know what I need? In a perfect world, I need sales enablement that gives us a way to measure effectiveness with sales metrics.
Right? Now what did I just do there? I didn't pitch my product. I didn't say a single word about my product. I pitched you my point of view on the market. Now if you lean over at that point and you say to me, right, right, right, we should have that.
Well, then the rest of my sales pitch is like rolling down a hill. I already got you aligned to my point of view. Then I go, great. Great. Well, that that's what we built. We got outcome based based sales enablement. Here's what we're gonna help you do.
We're gonna help you build enablement programs that actually track results. You can show the impact of those enablement programs to your boss and get yourself a raise, and you can optimize performance by looking at what works and what doesn't and optimizing around that.
Here's a proof that we could do what we say we can do. Eighty percent faster time to opportunity, twenty percent faster time to second deal, fifty percent decrease in ramp time to get your sales reps ramped. So how do we build one of these point of view pitches?
I don't think it's that hard. Step one though is you gotta start with your positioning. If you don't have that, I don't know how to build the pitch. I can't just run into building the pitch. I also I actually need to really deeply understand what are the alternative ways of solving the problem that I solve.
What are my capabilities? What's my value? What's my ideal customer program ideal customer profile? And what are the what's the market category that I intend to win? Once I have that, then I can map that to this point of view setup. Right? Where I say, here's the challenge.
Here's the market landscape and the alternatives. This is the insight I get from looking at that. And here's what a perfect world solution looks like. And then lastly, I do the follow through, which looks like a normal sales pitch. Here's the company. Here's the value I can provide.
Here are the features that enable me to provide that value. Here's the capabilities, and and here's the proof I can do what I say I can do. So we start with positioning. If you've heard me talk before, this is my jam. Positioning defines how our product is the best in the world at delivering some value that a well defined set of customers cares a lot about.
We can figure out our positioning by deconstructing it into five component pieces, and they are these. First, competitive alternatives. Second, unique attributes or features. Third, value. So what for my features? Four, customer segments. Who am I going after? And the last one is market category, which is like saying, am I email or chat?
Am I a c CRM or am I, team collaboration? These are the five things. To figure out your best positioning, you have to work through these in a very particular order. The first step to this is competitive alternatives. Now notice how I didn't say competitor.
That's because often, the real alternative to what we do, it doesn't look like a competitor. It looks like a spreadsheet or an intern or something else. If you get this wrong, then the whole rest of your positioning ends up a bit skewed. About every week, I get some startup comes to me and they say, you know what?
Our thing is all about ease of use. You know why? Because our competitors, it takes fifteen clicks to do a thing, but if you do it in ours, it only takes two clicks. And then I say, well, hey, I never heard any of those competitors.
Do you ever lose any deals to them? And a lot of times the startups say, no. No. We don't lose deals to them. And I say, well, if you didn't exist, what would they do? And then they say things like, well, they just use a spreadsheet or they actually they get an intern to do it.
Now, there you are positioning yourself around ease of use. Do you think you're ever gonna beat the intern on ease of use? No. No. The intern's super easy to use. The intern's like, hey, Joey. Get me a coffee while you're at it. Fill out the spreadsheet.
Come back when you're done. Anyways, we need to understand real competitive alternatives. Then we can say, what do we got that they don't have feature function wise, capability wise? Then I could take that, map it to value. That gets me my differentiated value.
Once I have that, I can say, what are the characteristics of a company that makes them really care about my value? That's how I end up with an ideal customer profile. And then market category is a little trickier, but essentially, you can think of it this way.
It's the context I position my product in such that this value is obvious to these people. Anyways, I could go on and on about positioning, and I have a very short amount of time here, so I'm not going to. If you're super interested in positioning, I wrote, like, an entire book about it.
It costs, like the equivalent of like what you'd spend on a beer. You could go way down the positioning round hole if you want to on that. So that's positioning. I gotta have that first. Then I build this point of view pitch. So the point of view part is simple.
I start with the challenge that and I phrase the challenge the way my best fit customers would frame it, but in such a way that it is kind of the it is kind of the reverse of my value. So I set up the challenge in a way that leads them to my value.
That's why I gotta have positioning first, one of the reasons. So I'd be like, hey, you guys, this is your challenge. Next thing I do is I explore all the alternatives. I don't necessarily have to name my competitors by name, but I can put them in groups and categories and say, look.
You could solve it this way or this way or this way, and let me tell you the shortcomings about each of those ways for people like you. That leads me to a piece of insight that is something that I haven't thought about before, and that leads me to the conclusion that, look, if we really wanna solve that challenge and given what works and doesn't work in the market today, here's the characteristics of a perfect solution.
And then you shut the heck up and you say, right? And if the customer's with you, great. Then the rest of the pitch is, like, rolling down a hill. If the customer's not, they've disqualified themselves. You got nothing else to talk about. Then after that, there's the follow through. Great.
Here's what we do. Here's my market category. This is what we build. These this is the value I could deliver and the features that enable that. So instead of doing features, features, features, I'm talking about value and features within the context of that value.
And then I talk about the proof, which is basically this is the proof that says that I could deliver on the value that I promised to be able to deliver on. Positioning maps of the component pieces this way. The challenge is why does your ideal customer care about your value?
The alternatives and shortcomings, that's your, competitive alternatives that you started with in your positioning. Your perfect world is the context for your value. You're talking about introducing the solution. That's your market category. Value and capabilities come after that. So, again, we need the positioning first to be able to do this.
What happens beyond the pitch? It it's not just a pitch, and some of you will say, well, we don't actually sell with salespeople, April, so we don't have a pitch. So how do I actually do this if I don't pitch customers in a sales situation?
There's lots of ways to take your point of view on a market and capture it. So here's another example from that same company I mentioned earlier, LevelJump. So, they recognize that people are having a terrible time trying to figure out or make sense of the sales tech landscape.
So they created some content around this. This is a piece where they said, sales techs explained you to using donuts. And so they partition things out, and they said, look. We've got sales intelligence. That's like saying, I know who likes the donuts, and here's three companies that sit in there.
I've got, sales dialers. I only call people who like the donuts, and here's three sales dialers. And then way down there, you'll see there's one called sales readiness and enablement, and it says, I trained to become the master at selling donuts. And who's there? Little Joe.
Plus two of their competitors, and they're not worried about them because they've got clear differentiation from them. They just wanna get on the shortlist. Once they're on the shortlist, then they can beat them. Here's another thing that they created. This is basically, to answer the question, how does your tech fit in with all the other sales tech I've got?
And they drew it like the map to a shopping mall. And they're like, look. At the bottom, you've got sales engagement tech, and it looks like this. And then above that, you might have a corporate learning stack and it looks like that. And that's fine. We play with all this.
We're up on top and we've got sales enablement. There's either content management system or sales readiness. And, oh, by the way, here's us over here top right. Their web page looks a bit like this. It's outcome based sales enablement. We're proving the revenue ink impact of our go to market readiness coaching and enablement part.
I'm running right at this point of view that says, look. The thing that matters here is tying enablement to revenue. So they've got a graph there. How level job ties enablement to revenue? Here's a bunch of features that help us do that. Here's our three big points of value.
Why do you care about outcome based sales enablement? Here's why. And then they're highlighting their metrics that show that they can prove what they say they show that prove that they can do what they say they can do. And again, their their sub tagline is prove the ROI of sales enablement.
So here's my key takeaways. Teaching customers how to think about a market is actually hugely hugely valuable to them because your customers are struggling with this. They don't know how to separate wheat from chaff. They don't know how to make a shortlist. If you can do that in a way that's honest, that's super, super valuable.
Your point of view on a market needs to be rooted in your positioning, so you need to have your positioning sorted out first. Communicating your point of view should help customers understand how to make choices. It's not all about you. It's about you within the context of all the other choices that they could make.
And then once a customer is aligned to your point of view, selling them is actually really easy. Thanks. So here's a few ways to reach me. You can send me an email or you go to my website or I'm at April Dumford on Twitter where I just tweet mainly stupid stuff, but occasionally something about positioning.
And that's it. So thanks a lot for having me here. Thanks. Okay. Great stuff there from April. And we've got her in the in, in her office or, home office or whatever it is these days in Toronto. So we're gonna bring her in, early in the morning for you, April. I hope you've had some coffee and ready to chat.
How you doing? Coffee's here. We're all good, and I'm ready to go. Good. Good. Same here. So so maybe first of all, just with ambient strategy, your your company, what kind of companies do you work with? So what I do is really, really niche y.
So I I as a consultant, a few things. So one, I only do positioning work. I don't do anything else. Two, I mainly work with, I only work with tech companies. Generally, I work with start ups. They need to be in market and have a little bit of traction.
Otherwise, we don't know what exactly it is that we're positioning. But assuming they're in market and they have some traction, I can work with them. I prefer business to business companies or companies that sell to businesses because that's my background, and that's sort of where I'm the most comfortable.
And the type of work I do, it mainly takes the form of a workshop. So me and the company's executive team get together over Zoom. Now we used to do this face to face, but we get together over Zoom, and we work through a positioning process to get to two things.
One, the component pieces positioning, and then two, we take that positioning and we translate it into the sales narrative much like I was talking about in the talk today. Okay. Got it. And interesting that it's mostly start I guess, startups that are a little bit into their life cycle and maybe they're past their are they past their original product market fit?
Or are they still searching for that typically? Yeah. I I actually don't believe in product market fit, to be honest, because I I I don't know whether people have it or not. But what I will say is they've got a product in the market, and they're starting to see some patterns around who loves their stuff and why.
If you're still in the in the market where you're like, you know, we sell to all kinds of people, and I don't I don't you know? And and some of them are like this, and some of them are like this. And they're big companies and small companies across any industry.
We don't actually see the commonality across them, then you're probably still in the phase where you're thrashing around a little bit. You're not exactly sure you have you you know, if you wanna call that product market fit. You but you're not really sure that you understand who loves your stuff the most and why.
In that phase, you still do positioning. Like, you're still gonna have words on your website that position you some way. But I feel like in that phase, you're better to keep your positioning kinda loose and and because you don't wanna close the door on some kinds of customers that may be your best fit, and you don't really know who's your best fit customer yet.
So I have a terrible analogy for this. It's it's a bit like, you know, let's say you designed a fishing net, and you think this net is perfect for catching tuna. So you could position this thing as exactly that, a tuna fishing net, and, you know, take it out to the ocean where the tuna are, and maybe it catches tuna, maybe it doesn't.
But you don't really know yet because it's just a theory. So instead, I would recommend you position it as a fishing net for, I don't know, big fish and keep it a little loose and then take it up to the part of the ocean where there's all kinds of fish, toss it out, and then let's see what we pull up.
Maybe what we find is that our tuna fishing net is actually really amazing at catching grouper. Once we understand that, then we can really narrow the positioning down and say, you know, we got here the world's greatest grouper fishing net, and that's how we're gonna be able to really grow on the marketing and sales side, if that makes any sense.
It does. It does. And it it's it I guess you're kind of alluding to the traps that you mentioned in in the book, but just just while we're talking about the book. Obviously, awesome. I I I bought this last year when it came out, but then I was having a beer in London with Mark from Business to Software.
And he was like, oh, I have a present for you. And he gave me another copy of it. So I have two copies of your book now. Oh, nice. You did you can give them away as Christmas gifts. Well, it's I've I've shared it with the team.
So, hopefully, everyone's done the reading. But it is obviously awesome as it's very well titled. The something that comes across in the book, came across in the talk, and it's kinda mind blowing, I guess. We'll we'll dig into this a little bit. Positioning is the foundation of every company's marketing and sales effort.
And if they get that wrong, they the company is not gonna go very far. But it's obviously something that companies really, really struggle with. And I've, you know, I have my own personal experience with this, and I've seen it a lot. How often do you see companies getting the fundamentals of their positioning wrong?
Well, here's how it tends to go. Like, you tend to either kind of fall into it and, you know, and your and your default positioning works or it doesn't. Like, most folks are not deliberately positioning. So how this works is like this. So you're a startup founder and, you know, you wake up in the morning and you're like, you know what sucks?
Email sucks. I'm gonna make better email because email sucks. And then you work away at this and you release it. Now maybe positioning it positioning it as email is fine, and everybody says, oh, yeah. I get what that is. That's email. It's perfect.
But maybe you get it out there and people say, you know what? I I I I don't like this, but I do like this. And you add some things and you change it. And fast forward a year or so, and all of a sudden, you've got this thing that, you know, it's it's really more like chat than email.
But you still think of it as email. And so, you you know, you're walking around talking to customers saying, hey. You wanna buy my email? And they're looking at it going, my dude, your email doesn't even have a calendar. Why is there no calendar?
And and where's your spam filter and all this stuff? And if you had walked in and said, hey. You know, it's not email. It's chat. Oh, well, they would have had different expectations. They wouldn't have expected you to have a calendar. And so what I see a lot is companies that the original kinda default positioning just isn't the best way to contextualize what they're doing.
And so so for those companies, I think they they have to take a step back and work through it. And that's very hard because they didn't get to the positioning they have now by doing a process. It was just kind of it is it it was what it was.
And so when you do get stuck and you realize, like, people can't really figure out what this thing is, and why is it taking us four sales calls to actually get a deal to move? And why is it we go in, we do the pitch, and at the end of the pitch, everyone's like, so pitch it to me again?
What is it again? And so they have this feeling like something's wrong, but don't even necessarily know that it's positioning. But then even if they do know its positioning, how do you fix it? Well, we didn't go through a process to position it in the first place.
So how do we know how to fix it? So my work and, you know, and my book is sort of about that. You know? How like, we know what positioning is. We don't necessarily know how to do it. My book is attempt to give you a methodology to to work through that and say, okay.
Here are the building blocks. This is how we put it together. This is how we make a decision about what's the best way to position this thing. Yeah. And it's it's a it's a great guide, and it's really it's very concise. I was just you're talking about positioning on the early stages and everything.
Was thinking about Twitter. Remember, Twitter was microblogging? Remember, that was what it was called? And then it feels like Yeah. Yeah. What are we? But twelve twelve years into Twitter, I think thirteen years. And now, you know, you've got all these mega threads and the threads get loads of attention.
And actually, the threads are microblogs. So it's it's kind of finally reached the positioning that they maybe thought it had in the first place. Something that you Well, you don't touch on in your microblogging. It's a it's a good example of, you you know, if you've got something that's truly, truly new that nobody's ever seen before, like, you know, people have a hard time figuring it out unless you can kind of align it with something that they already understand.
So if we know what a blog is and then you say it's microblogging, you're like, oh, okay. Well, it means you know? And then what comes with that? Well, it means everyone can do it. It means it's probably free. It means it's you know?
But it's it's little and not big long blog posts, little wee blog posts. Like, oh, okay. I kinda get it. Whereas if you had come and said it's, I don't know, group chat or something, that would be different expectations, different idea of what that is.
Or even even if you had come and said, I don't know what it is. It's a flue plumber because I'm making a new category here. It's brand new. It's a flue plumber. You would have said, bah. I have no idea what a flue plumber is, dude.
You're gonna have to explain that. And then and then they would have had to said, well, you know, there used to be blogs, and there used to be this, and there used to be this, and now we're this new thing. Like, microblogging in some ways kind of genius positioning.
I get it. You know? I get it. I may not get it exactly, but I kinda get it. One of one of the things that that comes across in your talk and, again, in your book is about looking at your product through your customer's eyes and sort of trying to understand how they see it, which is a way to help you try and position it your way.
Do you see companies and in the book, you specifically reference understanding the customers who love your product, and finding them and finding out why they love it. Do you think companies are still a bit reluctant to learn from their customers, and to and even talk to them?
Yeah. So so I you know, for the most part, I think companies are aware that they need to talk to their customers and they need to understand what's going on. I will say that for early stage startups, a really common mistake I see is that the companies get really obsessed with the companies with the customers that don't love their stuff.
So they'll be like, why did we lose that deal? And, you know, why are all these people not coming through our our qualification process, or why are we converting more trials to paid? And for me, as a vice president of marketing at early stage companies, like this what I used to be, I was never worried about that because you're a start up.
The vast majority of people aren't gonna use your stuff. It's a miracle that anyone uses your stuff. And and so the key to everything is finding the people that really, really love your stuff and figuring out, like, what the heck? You could have used anything, and you picked us.
That's amazing. So what is it about you that made you do that, and where do I find a whole bunch more people that look like you? So all good vice presidents of marketing, I know, they they over rotate on looking at who loves their stuff and and what is it about those folks.
What are the characteristics of those accounts? Like, what are the characteristics of those people? Whereas what I see a lot in, in startups is, you know, they'll survey their their customers, and they'll treat everyone the same, whether the customers are happy or unhappy.
And what they'll get is this data that's all mixed up. And then they'll come to me and say, yeah. We don't see any patterns. There's there's there's all we have customers all over the place, and they come from different industries, and they're different sizes and whatever.
And I said, well, look. Filter out the ones that are really happy. You can do net promoter score or something, but let's filter out the ones that are really, really happy. Now what do we see? And often when you do that, you do see a super clear pattern.
And and it's like, look. You're a start up. You don't have unlimited marketing resources, unlimited sales resources. What you wanna do is focus your marketing and sales efforts at people that look like that. And forget about the ones like, you're gonna close deals and sell people with with customers that are gonna churn on you because they're a bad fit.
But if everybody coming in is a good fit, you're gonna reduce that churn. If everybody coming in is a good fit, automatically, your metrics are gonna look better. So rather than trying to sell the people that don't love your stuff, what you should be doing is looking at who loves your stuff and then trying to figure out what are they like?
Why you know, what do they what were they using before? Why did they decided they needed to do something different? Who else did they put on the shortlist? How did we beat those other solutions on the shortlist? And and what is it that's common across these customers that makes them really love us?
And then let's focus all our efforts over there. So I think, you know, startups, I think, are doing a lot of talking to customers, but they're not necessarily they're not necessarily seeing this distinction between good fit customers and not so good fit customers.
Yeah. I think there's definitely a tendency in the early stages to just you know, anyone who's gonna buy your product, anyone who's gonna gonna send you send you a check, then, you know, they're they'll they'll do at the beginning. Yeah. Something that you had came up with a couple of times in your methodology is around acknowledging competitors.
And and it seems that something you clearly have found is that sometimes people really try and shy away from that or avoid, like, pretend that the competitors don't exist. Is that something that that people is that a tendency that you see companies having?
It's just like, no. No. Don't don't mind the market. Let's just talk about us. Yeah. Like, I I do see I do see a lot of a lot of startups that will kind of pretend they're the only thing in the market. And I mean, like, you know, there's nothing like us.
And, and here's how that works. Like, you don't necessarily wanna draw a lot of attention to your competitors. Like, you don't you know, if there's competitors that your customers don't already have on their radar, you don't necessarily wanna put them on the radar.
I also think you don't necessarily need to name your competitors. But you do, I think, need to acknowledge that there are other ways to solve this problem. But, you know and and some of those other ways to solve the problem are perfectly good for different kinds of customers.
The trick here is you've got a solution, and you need to deeply understand what are the types of customers that that solution is a really good fit for and why. And if you understand that, then I think you can very confidently tell a story to customers that says, look.
We do invoicing software, and there's there are lots of ways to do invoicing. And if you're a big, big company, you would use these kinds of invoicing things. And and if you were just a a solo, one person freelancer, you probably use a free free invoicing, and there's lots of companies down there that do free invoicing.
But if you're in the middle where, you know, you do you do more than fifty invoices a month and you, you know, you have this, that, and the other thing, well, you can't afford this, and this down here doesn't do what you need it to do either.
We're for that. And that helps customers understand what the market's all about. And it's not like you're in you don't necessarily have to name the competitors to do that. You can just talk about them in categories. But customers don't know the difference. If you've never bought invoicing software before, you'd be looking at all these lists of invoicing software, and you wouldn't even be able to separate things out that way.
You would you'd say, well, you know, why would I pay for yours when there's all these other things that are free? Or, you know, why is yours so cheap? It's fifty bucks, but this other one's a thousand bucks. I don't understand what I get in the thousand dollar one that I don't get in yours, but maybe I should pick that more expensive one because expensive means it's better.
Right? So I don't know. And so the more you can give your customers a way to think about the whole market that says, look. If if you want this, pick pick folks that look like this. And if you want fix picks, folks look like this.
But then confidently draw the boundaries around where you win and say, but look, you know, if you need this, this, this, we are the only game in town. We are the best choice for you. But, yeah, if you don't need that, go ahead.
Use use the freebie thing. That's fine. And and I think this is good selling right now when when our markets are so crowded and people need to make choices. Looks like that. You're helping people make choices. Yeah. No. Totally agree on that. I mean, a big part of, I think, what you're talking about is understanding what you are not and Right.
Understanding what your you know, which kind of customers you do want and which kind of customers you don't want. Exactly. Strict, being straight about it and getting everyone aligned. Yeah, I mean, particularly in the crowded markets that were that most of us are in, you know, most companies and software.
There's a question that's come in from the audience about competition. So what's the first step or the most important thing to do when your competition starts to copy your positioning? Is that a is that a good does that mean they've they've learned from you?
They've got there on their own? Is it a good sign? Is it just a fact of life? Yes and no. I mean, the like, great positioning starts with an understanding of the competitive landscape. Right? So so I'm looking at the competitive landscape, and I'm like, alright.
What were customers what are customers doing now? Right? So that's the first thing you gotta displace. And you might not think of that as a competitor, but it's like a spreadsheet or an intern. But what are the what's the customer doing now? And then they decide they're gonna make a change, and so they start looking at solutions.
Who else lands on the shortlist? And then what are the the but then some customers pick us. Right? So the ones that pick us, why'd they pick us over everybody else in the shortlist? Now once you understand that, then you can build your positioning around that.
And your positioning will say, hey. Customers like this wanna pick us for this reason. Now sometimes what you'll get is you'll get these little customers that that buzzing around that'll say, oh, yeah. Yeah. We do that too. Yeah. We do that exactly like that.
And so here's the thing. If they're small and you never see them in a deal, then they don't matter. You can ignore them. You're not losing any deals to them. They're they're like like, if they're just copying your positioning, chances are that isn't gonna work for them because they don't have your product.
Like, you've built your positioning all around the distinct capabilities of your product. They might be able to copy your message or your tagline or whatever else on your website. They cannot copy your product. Copying product is actually hard. It takes a long time.
You have a whole development team that's continuously working on your product and building things that are different than your product. Like, so it's the combination of product and message that matters, not just the message on its own. So that's the first thing. So I do see customers all the time or see companies all the time.
They get really stressed out that some little company that is that, you know, that has never won a deal half the time is copying their messaging. I'm like, ignore them. It's not impacting you. You're not losing deals to them. You never even see them in deals. That's the first thing.
Second thing is when you're building this positioning, you have to be really honest about what's differentiating in your product and what isn't. So if you've got if your product is the exactly the same as the other people on the shortlist, and sometimes you win, sometimes you don't, then it is possible that what you have is a completely me too product.
And, you know, maybe you're just better at selling. I don't know what. And and, you know, you then you're gonna have to figure out, well, how do we make this more differentiated? I'll tell you, though, most of the time, when I'm working with companies that have traction in the market, that is not the case, vast majority of the time.
What it is is they have differentiators. They just don't really understand what the most relevant differentiators are because they haven't done the work to say, look. These are the companies that choose us, and here's why they chose us. Here's the here's here's how we beat the competitors on our list.
So first thing is make sure you're positioned against the right competitors. If they're little folks that never pop up in a deal and you never lose a deal to them, then they're not your competitors, and you can ignore them. Don't worry about them, and do not position against them because they're not your competition.
You don't see them yet. Just because they could compete with you doesn't mean they do. Second thing is, you know, if you do have head to head competition that you do lose deals to, you know, are you not positioned enough around the differentiators that actually make customers choose you?
And that should be the stuff that you do different from those competitors. So it should be impossible that your positioning is the same because your product's not exactly the same. So those are the two things, I think. Hopefully, that answers. Wow. There's so between between the book and the talk and the chat, we've got a ton to a ton to, to dig into for everybody.
So but we're out of time. So we're gonna have to wrap it there. But, April, thanks so much for joining us. And, you know, when all this stuff is it feels like there's light on the end of the tunnel anyway, so maybe we'll we'll have you over in in Edinburgh in twenty twenty one.
Who knows? Well, I'm really bummed out that I missed Edinburgh this year. So, you know, I better I better get back for next year or the year after, whenever it is. But I'm I'm mad that I missed that trip, so I better get invited back because I really wanna go.
We'll make it happen. We will. Thanks, April. Take care. Alright. Thanks so much for having me. Okay, folks. So we're gonna take a quick break. We're back in fifteen minutes, and we'll be hearing from Amy for Amy Zima from Spotify. So see you then.
