Understanding positioning is one thing; putting it into practice is quite another. In this lively fireside chat at Turing Fest 2024, Positioning expert April Dunford joins Matt Lerner, co-founder at SYSTM for a chat on the missteps and mistakes teams most commonly make when working on positioning.
April walks through a set of examples and give her advice on making sure your positioning work is successful.
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Years ago when I first met Brian, I asked him, what does it take to give a good talk? And he said, there's a thing they teach you in standup comedy. You always open with your second best joke and close with your best joke.
So I don't think it's a coincidence that they brought April up here last because you're going to learn a lot about positioning, but you're going to find out she's also hilarious. Maybe. I mean, you be the judge. So in case there's anyone in the room who hasn't read your book, first of all, just start by how do you define positioning?
Yeah, so positioning in my mind, it's a funny thing, being a positioning expert, right? Nobody knows what positioning is really. And so in my mind, positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering something, some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about.
And I like to think of it in a few different ways. You can think of it as context setting for products. It actually defines how we win in a market. So it defines who's our competition, what have we got that's different than the competition?
What is the value we can deliver that nobody else can, who cares a lot about that value? So who's a good fit customer for our stuff? And then what is the market that we intend to win? It sounds simple. Okay. And what are the things that most people get wrong when they think about positioning?
Yeah, I would say the most common one in startups is that companies have this belief that the positioning just is what it is. It's kind of like destiny. And so if you think about how most companies get started, the founder wakes up in the morning and says, you know what sucks? Email sucks.
I'm going to make better email. So then they go out and they make email and they get it in the world and customers say, I like this bit, I don't like this bit. And it changes. And you go back and forth, back and forth, and then all of a sudden your email thing, maybe it's not email anymore, maybe it actually looks more like chat.
But we are inside the company and we're like, oh, this email, what else could it be? Can I tell you a story? I'll tell you a story. So I got hired at this company and they're called Infobright, but they don't exist anymore. They got acquired, but they had this really innovative database technology.
So the company was founded by two guys with PhDs and database science, and they literally described themselves as database guys. We're database guys and we're building the world's most amazing database. And what this database did was if you had an absolute mountain of data, just terabytes and terabytes, absolute mountain of data, it could do a certain kind of query really, really fast.
And so their first customer was a bank, and this bank had this query that queried so much data that it took all weekend to run the query so they could only run it on Fridays so that it would go Saturday, Sunday, and they would get the answer on Monday.
And so we had this database that you could do that query in a minute and a half. So spectacular technology. We got these guys with PhDs, we got patents on this thing, no one else can do this thing. It's great. So I joined as a VP marketing and I'm running campaigns.
I've got email stuff going and we're doing events and we're doing webinars and we're doing some ads and nothing is working, nothing, nothing. After two months, nothing. Nobody clicks on my ads, nobody consumes my content. Events were the worst. We would have this booth and people would come in and just kind of squint at us and be like, so what are you guys doing? We're like, oh, we got this cool database thing. And they're like, oh look, Microsoft's got T-shirts. And off they go. And I'm like, oh my God,
this is terrible and I can't figure it out. We got this magic thing. Who doesn't want a query to go from two days to two minutes? The value of this seems obvious. So anyways, we had a sales rep. So I thought I'm going to tag along with the sales rep, and I'm going to find out what happens in the sales meeting when the sales rep comes in and introduces this thing to the customer.
So he sets up a bunch of meetings and we go to the first meeting. And so we go in, sales rep goes in, he sets up, and the people we're selling to come in and we've got the, because sometimes the CIO or this is on a techie side of the business and there's a whole bunch of database people, database administrators.
There'd be like six, seven people in the meeting. And my rep gets up and he's like, okay, people we're sell you this fancy new database, and you could just see it the minute he said that word database. Half the people in the room are like, oh geez, cat videos.
People are pulling, they're literally pulling out their phone and thinking. He's like, no, no, no, you don't understand. We've got the PhDs, we got the patent. He's explaining about this kind of query and it takes two days and then we can do it in two minutes and blah, blah.
And we have this sales pitch deck and it's like 50 slides along. He's on slide three. And the senior person, this is like 10 minutes in senior person puts up her hand and she says, you know what, dude? I get it. I get it.
You got that fancy database thing looks great. But you know what we don't need around here another database. We actually Oracle shop, everybody here is certified on Oracle. We've done all the Oracle training and stuff and we've standardised on Oracle. We're not married to it. We don't love, it isn't perfect, but we are not bringing in another database.
And what we'd really like is for you guys to just get out. She kicked us out. So she kicks us out after four slides. I'm going to go to the car. And I said to my sales rep, I'm like, my dude is this what happens every time you go to a sales pitch? And he goes, yeah, yeah, pretty much. Pretty much that's what happened. I'm like, why are we doing this?
We need to go home and dust off our resumes and get other jobs because this company is not going to survive. And so he had set up five, six meetings. Every single one was the same. We barely got past slide three and everybody's throwing us out. And anyways, it was terrible. And so after day three, I'm like, okay, well that's it. This company isn't going to survive. I got to get a new job.
Everything sucks. And then we had the last meeting on the last day and this was what we called the sympathy sales call. You know what that is? That's when your founder knows a guy who knows a guy and they agree to give you a meeting out of pity.
So we go in and he shows up, he doesn't even bring his team. Pretty sure this is a big waste of time. So he shows up and he's this senior dude at this big insurance company, and my rep comes in, it goes up and he's doing the presentation and the guy is not interrupting him, he's super polite, he's Canadian, super polite, and the guy's going all the way through. And we go all the way through.
First time we've gone all the way through the sales deck in the week, we get all the way to the end, and then sales asks him, what do you think? And the guy says, I love it. It's amazing. I love it. We need this. How do we get this in here?
I love the thing. I love it. And we're like, yeah, someone loves our stuff. And we're like, great. And he goes, you know what though? I got to say about halfway through there, I had this big confusion. I didn't know what the heck you were.
And then I kind of figured it out. And then after that everything was good. And I was like, so what you think we were? And he said, well, you guys kept saying database. And then about halfway through it twigged to me that you're not a database, what you actually are is a data warehouse.
And then all of a sudden it made sense to me. Now, I had only been with the company two, three months, and my first instinct when that guy told me we're not a database, we're a data warehouse, was to have a argument with him. And so I was like, no, we're not a data warehouse. We're not a data warehouse.
We don't have rollup cube function, whatever. We're geeking out on database stuff. I'm like, we don't have rollup cube function. He's like, you don't need a rollup a cube function because blah, blah, blah. And then we went back and forth with the little fight thing and then finally he said, look, database, we use databases for all kinds of things.
Your thing only does one thing here. And if I want to do that one thing, I would buy a data warehouse to do that. And holy crap, you're like the vice president of marketing. You don't even know who you're like, who hired you? I was like, ouch.
Anyway, so we went back to the office and it sparked this conversation. Are we actually a database? And I'm telling you internally, that was hard. The founders were like, we are database people. It was like their identity. We are database people and data warehouses.
At the time, people were building data warehouses. There was not a lot of packaged data warehouse software on the market, but we convinced ourselves internally and made the shift and started talking about this thing as a data warehouse. And everything was different. We go in and have this conversation with the customer. We walk in, we're like, hi, we're here to tell you about this data warehouse stuff we've got.
And everybody's like, Ooh, same people. People are, oh, that's great. Yeah, tell us about that. We don't have one of those. Maybe we should have one of those. And so the biggest mistake I see people make is this idea that it's this thing. We built it to be this thing, but sometimes it evolves in a way that we could actually recontextualise it and it actually makes a lot more sense to customers. In this case, we just started calling it data warehouse.
We had to build some stuff around and make that totally true. But once we did that, then everybody got what it was. We weren't competing directly against Oracle anymore. We were in this space where it was wide open and there weren't a lot of things.
We weren't trying to take an Oracle shop and make it something else, and all of a sudden everything was easier to market. And so. Okay, that's cool. So a lot of people have this where people aren't buying their products. It might be a positioning problem, it might not.
Do you just wait until a customer beats you over the head with it and tells you what your product is? How do you know when it's positioning problem? It would be great if we could just do that, right? Because we could just go out and say, you tell me what it is, buddy.
But the reality is your customers in general are not experts in the market. They're experts in pain, they're experts in their own problems, but you know who all the other vendors are, you know what's possible with the technology and what's not possible with technology? So it's up to us. We got very, very lucky in that situation that the customer came and was smart enough and senior enough to recognise that we were something we weren't. So the question you should be asking is what are we?
Are we actually that thing? Should we be something else? Maybe there's a different way to put this into context. So we actually have to figure it out there ourselves. And how do we figure it out ourselves? Well, here's the thing. Everybody inside the organisation sees the product or sees the customer at a different stage of the journey.
So we've got sales that understands who's our competitor and who do we compare to. They also understand who are our best fit customers, who really loves this stuff and who doesn't. Product knows a lot about differentiation. So they know who else is in the market and what have we got that they don't have. Marketing understands value, so they understand what works and doesn't work in the early stages of a deal to get a customer interested and move them along.
So if we're really going to work on this thing, we actually need a cross-functional team to come together. So when I do this work with clients, we have marketing, sales, product, customer success founders together in the room, and then we need a structured process to work through that says, okay, let's start here and then build on this next step, next step, next step.
So in my world, that's how we fix it. Okay, so can you give us an example maybe of a time where you found you had the wrong positioning, your customer didn't tell it to you, and somehow through this process you were able to figure out this is a positioning problem and here's where we're messed up.
So there's a handful of things. So when I used to get hired as the new VP marketing, I would always come in and everybody would want me to just run campaigns like, let's go do email, let's run campaigns, let's get this thing going.
But I'd like to check and see is the positioning good first? Because if it's good, then we'll go run campaigns. But if it's not, we should fix that first. Otherwise we've got the wrong messaging aimed at the wrong people and whatever. So I would come in and sit in on sales calls and listen to what's happening in the sales call.
And so sometimes what you've got is this situation where if the company's been around for a while, sometimes what you have is the positioning is really good, and then all your competitors have caught up with you or something has happened in the market and all of a sudden things feel really hard and people are like, what happened? This was working really good and it's not working really good.
I'll tell you a story. Can I tell you a story? I got acquired. So I worked at this company, we got acquired by this big company in the Bay area called Siebel. And so Siebel was the sales force of its day, big company.
And so I got put in charge of the banking vertical. So I had retail banking, insurance, investment banking, and so that was 800 million revenue that slice. So I'm running marketing for that big thing and I inherit this through this. So we get acquired, I don't know who the sucker was that built all that crap before I showed up and they're like, April, this is yours now.
And so every week I'm getting this spreadsheet and this is all my campaigns that are running and how everything's running. Then every week I have to do a meeting with my boss and the five other heads of the verticals. So, every week this is terrible.
I have to go in and none of my stuff is performing. It's not even my stuff. It is not even somebody else's mess. And I inherited it, I go in and so the first day he says, my boss comes in, we got the five people, and he says, what's going on here? And I said, I don't know.
I got to be honest with you. I don't know. I don't know what's going on here. It's not good. I know that. And he says, well, why is it not good? And I said, I don't know. I don't know enough yet. I've only been here a couple of weeks, I don't know. And then he went around the table and everyone else said, well, it's the economy, economy suck.
Nobody's got any money and IT departments don't have any money. And at the time we were selling to IT and in IT the budgets were all frozen and they were like, nobody's buying anything. And it doesn't matter what we run, it's not our fault, it's the economy. We can't get around it. And I'm like, okay.
So every week I have this meeting and everybody complains about the economy, and then they get to me and I'm like, yeah, probably economy. I don't know, dude, I don't know. I haven't been here long enough. I don't know. So I decide I'm going to go down. So I'm looking for what's working.
This is a trick in marketing. You look for what's working, then you try to do more of that and nothing is working. So I'm going through all these spreadsheets, everything sucks, everything sucks. But I discover I have this inside sales team. And so the inside sales team, they get all leads from marketing and their job is book a meeting with the sales rep.
And so I got one guy on my inside sales team is crushing it. Everybody else sucks, and it's the only bright spot in all of this data that I can find. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to go down and see what this dude is doing in there, to make this magic happen. So I go down, it's nine o'clock in the morning and at Siebel, we have a funny company culture for a startup.
We were all very serious. We wore suit jackets to work. We started at nine on the dot. So I go down there at nine and I'm like, Hey, I'm looking for this guy, Joey, is he there? And they're like, oh yeah, he comes in a little bit later, but he'll be here soon. And I said, okay, I'm new.
I'm your boss's boss and I'm here to listen in on some sales calls. And they're like, everybody's really polite to me. And they're like, yeah, okay. So I listen in on some sales calls that these sales calls are terrible. So they get the head of IT on the phone and they're like, Hey, we're here to sell you some CRM. And the head of IT is irate.
The head of IT is like, we have no budget buddy. Do you not know we're in the middle of a recession. Everything sucks. Don't try to sell me anything. I got no budget this year. I got no budget next year. Fuck off. It was like this, all these calls are terrible. And I'm like, oh my gosh, we're never going to sell anything and I can't wait for this dude, Joey to show up because he's booking meetings. And I'm like, what kind of magic does this guy do? 10 o'clock,
Joey rolls in and Joey rolls in, he's wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and we were not a jeans and a T-shirt place jeans and a T-shirt and the wrinkles on this. And his hair is all sticking up. And he's like, real California guy. I swear to God.
He slept on the beach, he got up, smoked a bong, came into the office at 10 o'clock, you should see this guy. He shows up and he goes all around the office like, Hey dude, hey buddy, dude. And then he sits down and I'm like, hi, I'm your boss's boss and I'm here to find out... He goes, he goes, Ohhhh! He goes, he actually did this thing. He's like, pound it, bro. And I'm like, alright, alright, settle down.
We're just here to listen in to all the sales calls. And he goes, okay, okay, makes a bunch of calls. Finally you get somebody on the phone. So he gets his head of IT on the phone and he does this whole shtick. He literally has his feet on the desk, he does his whole shtick where he's like, Hey buddy, head of IT. Listen, I'm not going to sell you anything.
I know you got no budget, right? And the guy says, you're right, man, I got no budget. I'm glad you're not trying to sell me anything. I don't have any budget. He goes, I know it's really bad, but they're making me call you and then you don't have any money and how come you don't have any money? Yeah, whatever. And they're like, things really suck.
Yeah, they suck. And they talk about this for five minutes. It sucks. No, it sucks. No, it really sucks. Super duper sucks. Yeah, it sucks. And then he goes, well, what's happening over there? You guys had a sales team. How do they track deals and stuff on the sales side? And he goes, oh, they're doing it all on a spreadsheet. And he goes, oh, so what happens when they got to do the quarterly sales reporting stuff?
What happens? Oh, they come to us and they make us do all these customer reports and stuff. I said, that's probably a pain in the ass. It is a pain in the ass. And he says, well, and so the sales guys just expect you to do this every quarter. Yeah!
They expect us to do this. He said, look, we got software for that. I know I can't sell it to you, but why don't you send me over to your head of sales? I'll talk to that guy. I'm going to get you some budget.
I'm going to get it from that guy. We're going to solve this problem. He goes, great! Gives him the name of the head of sales, transfers the call over, and we get over to the head of sales and then Joey transforms. He takes his feet off the desk, he gets in it and there's new Joey and he's like, Dave, you're the vice president of sales. How's everything going over there? Hey, I was just talking to your head of IT and sounds like you guys don't get very good service out of IT when you guys got to run this sales report
every month, that guy sucks over there. Yeah, I hate it. The guy has to do the thing. And he goes, well, he told me you're running everything on spreadsheets. Is that true? You're running everything on spreadsheets? Yeah, we're running everything on spreadsheets. And he's like, look, we got this software and he starts pitching the software.
We have this software that's going to track everything that your people do and it's going to generate these reports. He goes, look, I sent you a report right now. And he's like, oh, okay. He is walking him through the report. We got to do this thing looks pretty good.
And we're like, yeah, yeah, it looks pretty good. And he says, well, you know what? If you want, I got a rep, he can come and give you the full demo. And how's next Tuesday? Oh, next Tuesday looks good. Whatever. Books the thing.
Books the thing, Joey. So he books the thing, okay, here's the meeting, books the meeting, Joey gets his feet back up on the desk and he hangs up like this, boosh! Boosh, he says, and I'm sitting there, I'm the head of marketing, I'm driving 800 million revenue.
I have a marketing budget of 15, 20 million bucks. I have a database of 200,000 names and all of those people work in IT. I'm running multiple campaigns. All of these campaigns are focused on IT. I'm running all kinds of AdWords, I'm running target accounts, selling, I'm doing all this stuff.
Everything is focused on IT. And what I just learned is we are selling to the wrong buyer. This is the oh shit moment. So then I got to roll into that weekly meeting and I got my boss there, Bruce. Bruce says, okay, so how's the results? And I'm like, Bruce, it's a good news, bad news kind of situation here.
Good news is I think I know what's causing it. And yes, the economy, whatever, but the result of the economy doing this is the budget has gone over to the line of business. So the bad news is we have to completely re-architect our go-to-market motion.
This went over like a lead balloon. This was like, and in fact nobody believed me, so I had to keep coming back. And so I started running experiments. So we're running experiments with this that, but I'm not getting any budget to go re-architect everything.
And so I had to keep going back every week, every week and saying, this is broken. This is what we ran this little experiment though, and it looks like this. It looks like this. And I couldn't convince everybody. Anyways, meanwhile the stock is tanking everybody.
We went from $200 a share to a hundred dollars a share. And then we were like $20 a share. And then we were like $8 a share. And then we started doing a layoff every quarter. And then we were doing a layoff every month. And then we got to month six.
I just laid myself off and that was the end of that story. This was sounding so promising. Yeah, it was. I was loving it. But the moral of this story is not just that everything sucks. The moral is that if we do not have a way to regularly check in on our positioning, sometimes what happens is stuff happens and things change.
And we have this positioning that worked really good. It got this company to 2 billion revenue, and then a big shift happened in the market, which was the shifting budgets from IT to line of business. And there was no way for us to get feedback from the front line, the people that were in sales selling that stuff.
And so in the work I do with clients, we work through the positioning, but what we have is a check-in. So every six months we get people around the table, we get sales, marketing, product, everybody around the table and we're having a conversation, is anything changing? Are we seeing the same competitors we've always seen?
Have the competitors caught up with us? Things that used to be differentiating before or not differentiating now. Or if we had Joey in there, Joey would be, my dude don't even try to sell to IT, it's not even worth it. But we didn't know. So all we could tell is on the spreadsheet, one guy's doing really well, but why?
But we've never caught this idea of the shift. And by the time the company never did actually successfully make the transition from the one market to the other, but had we had a regular check in to check in on the positioning, we would've seen an early sign of that and it would've given us some time to turn the big boat a little bit to try to capitalise on that.
So I'm hearing a theme from your first two stories besides that they're hilarious. There's the funny good part, and then there's the part I. Was so hilarious I had to quit. But you got a good story out of it. Your options were worthless, but you got a good story. Yeah.
Yeah, that's right. That's right. I did. I had walked away from all those options. I had options at $200 and stock was trading at $8, I was like, oh, I'm going to give that up. You can keep 'em, thanks. Yeah. But in both cases, the good part of the story was you learn something from sales, from customers, and then the sad part of the story was internally, oh, but we're a database company, but we sell to IT managers.
So it feels like 10% of it is just getting to the right answer. 90% of it is this organisational alignment and buy-in any thoughts or pointers on how to drive that mindset change? So this is something, this is a question I get a lot from the marketers.
So the marketing often feels the pain of positioning first because they're running campaigns and they're out at trade shows talking to customers, and they're buying ads or they're doing things and they feel the pain of bad positioning is like, nothing's working, nothing's working here.
And so they'll get this idea, Hey, we're positioned as this, but maybe we should be positioned as that. But then they go to the founder, the CEO, and the founder or the CEO is like, what do you know? And they're like, well, I went to the founder and the founder doesn't want to change stuff and they don't believe me and whatever. And sometimes the problem isn't a positioning problem, but sometimes it is.
And so what I used to do when I was the brand new VP marketing, I would come in, I would sit with the sales team. So instead of just, sometimes I would look at it and I would suspect that the positioning was bad, but I wouldn't know for sure. I think, you know what?
These people have been here a long time and I'm brand new. What do I know? I actually literally know nothing. So maybe what I should do is I'll just go sit in and listen in on calls with the sales team. And this is neat because when you do this, you see the signs of weak positioning. So the first sign is this, what is it?
You'll get your rep who's doing a great job pitching and they're having a conversation with a customer and they're getting on slide four or something, and the customer's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Back up, back up. Two slides, three slides, back up, three slides, back up, three slides, okay, do it again. Pitch it again.
And it's just this confusion of you're pitching something, they're like, they just don't get what it is. So that's the first sign. You get that, that's a positioning problem. Second one you'll get is customer that is convinced, they do know what you are, but they're wrong. So they'll say, oh, yeah, yeah, I get what you are.
You're just like HubSpot. And you're like, oh dude, okay, I'm backing up now. No, we're not HubSpot. Lemme go back. I tell you again what we are. So you're saying something that is triggering this thing. And then the last one you'll hear, and this is the worst one, is when customers are like, yeah, yeah, I get it. I get what you are.
I am comparing you to the right people. I just don't get why I would pay for that. Why would I pay for that? I could do that in a spreadsheet. I could just hire an intern to do that. And so what that means is they get who you are, they just don't understand the value of it.
Why should they actually pay you to do it? So usually I would start, so if I heard that, then I would go have lunch with the VP sales and say, this is what I heard. Am I do we get this all the time? And usually what you get is the VP sales says, oh yeah, nobody can figure out what we are. Oh my God, it takes us three calls before the lights come on.
Or everybody keeps comparing us to Microsoft, but we're not like Microsoft or Oh yeah, we have a really hard time with the pricing. Nobody really gets the value. And then I educate them and I say, well, you know what? In marketing, usually that's a sign of a positioning problem ever done, have we ever looked at the positioning in this company in a formal way, got everybody together and talk about it? And the answer is always no.
And then I'd say, alright, well maybe we should do that. And then I would go have the same conversation with product management. So I'd be like, look, I was over at sales. I don't know nothing. I'm a dummy. I'm brand new here. I don't know anything, but I heard this.
Do you find we have that when you're in sales calls, do you find people are comparing us to the wrong thing or they have no idea what we are. And usually product management will say, yeah, that happens all the time. And I'm like, you know what?
Have we ever done a formal positioning exercise? No, not really. Then you go to the CEO, right? So once I've heard that, then I go to the CEO and I say, Hey, I don't know nothing. I'm brand new here, but I heard this over in sales and I'm thinking that maybe we should get the gang together.
I'm not saying the positioning's going to change, but we should check in on it. And usually the CEO says, well, I don't know. What does John in sales think about that? And I'm like, I don't know, you should call him. And then he calls John and then John says, yeah, I've been thinking about this and I think it's a positioning thing.
And then they're like, yeah, okay. So then we get the gang together. So then it's like, okay, so we're going to get this cross-functional team. I mean product, marketing, sales and the founders. We get everybody together. And then if we get everybody together, we can't just have a, let's brainstorm the positioning thing because you know what? That turns into the founder and the head of sales having a fight.
Marketing doesn't get to talk. We sit in a corner and wait until they decide who wins by yelling or something. And so we have to have a process. And so a lot of my work is focused on that. How do we have a process once we get the gang together, what is the process we should follow? That's how I think you get buy-in.
Everybody is involved in building the positioning. So everybody gets to get their stuff on the table. We get agreement and alignment across the team on the positioning. Because we created it together and then we go figure out how to take it out to the market.
That is super helpful and actionable. Thank you. Now I want to take this a different direction because so far your stories have been like people weren't buying the product. We.have a position and people buy it. But I feel like sometimes when people read your book, when you get a hammer, everything looks like nails.
Have you ever been in a situation where or how do you know when you get in and people aren't buying the product and it's actually not the positioning. Yeah, all the time, and this is just a piece of advice for all of you.
I'm the positioning lady, so I'm going to talk about positioning stuff and all my examples are going to be positioning with shit company, with shit. Now's great, company's great, everything's great. So sometimes what you'll get is people will call me and they'll say, Hey, help us with the positioning. And I'm like, well, just back up a bit.
How do you know you got a positioning problem? And then we'll walk through that. What happens in a first sales call are people actually confused? Because companies die for all kinds of reasons, and sometimes your positioning is perfectly fine, but nobody's getting exposed to your positioning because nobody knows you exists because you're doing a lousy job of getting yourself known out in the market or you're doing a bad job of lead generation or you just got terrible salespeople.
There's all kinds of reasons your company can fail. They have nothing to do with the position. The positioning could be perfect, and I have stuff not work. Shall I tell you a story? I'll tell you a story. This is the last one. This is my favourite one.
So I was working for this company and they were kind of growth stage startup, about 80 million revenue, and I was running marketing and I had this real hotshot team. Everybody was really young, but they're hot shots. And we were doing a bunch of great marketing stuff.
I had very sophisticated email marketing running at this company. We sold ERP stuff to mid-size manufacturers. We were doing 80 million revenue. We had a list of every mid-size manufacturer in the United States and in the UK, and we were target account selling in there. So we were doing email events, webinars, lots and lots of content, and we were tracking how many touches we were doing to each of these accounts on this great big list. And so things are going okay, we had decent growth.
And we did this analysis. One of my hotshot marketers does this analysis and identifies there's this pocket of companies that never respond to any of our stuff. And so she comes to me and says, you know what? I think our positioning for these people need to be different because they don't open our emails, they don't go to our events, they don't consume our content.
It's just not working in there. And I'm like, how do you know that's a positioning problem? Maybe they just never get exposed to our stuff. And my digital marketing gal is like, well, how could they not? We are literally pounding them with stuff all the time, whatever. Anyways, all of them were auto parts manufacturers, just weird.
And so a bunch of them are in Michigan, the auto industry is concentrated in Michigan. So I'm going down to Michigan to go to a trade show. So I think you know what I'm going to do? I'm down here for a trade show, but I'm actually going to rent a car and I'm going to go visit some of these people and find out what is wrong with them.
Why do you not respond to any of my marketing? So we did everything inside sales because our average deal was quite small, so we couldn't afford to have sales reps on the road, but I'm going to go out and talk to these people face to face that ignore all my stuff. So I go to the first one and every single one's the same.
Their little manufacturing plant, CEO is like a 70-year-old dude. He drives a Cadillac that's parked right out front. You go in and there's a woman running the front desk and she's mean, she's mean. She doesn't want you to talk to that guy. Her job is to protect that guy from people like me. And so I come in, she's all mad, he comes out and he's a sweetheart. He's like, I'm going to give you the tour. He gives me the tour. We go around and I'm like,
Hey, I work for this software company. I'm just trying to figure out people like you we're having a nice chit chat. Then we go to his office and I'm like, so tell me about how you made your last software purchase. And he goes, I remember it well, the year was 1999. There was a Y2K crisis.
People were talking about it and I had to upgrade. And I'm like, honestly, you haven't updated your ERP since 1999. He goes, Nope, works fine. And I'm like, so how would you find out about new stuff? Do you read any email? Do you do email?
Are you on any email lists or things? And he's like, no. He says, look at my office. He doesn't have a computer in his office. His woman outside has a computer and she has strict instructions, anything that looks like marketing, she should just delete that shit before it gets anywhere near him. Okay, email forget that. Do you surf the web? Do you..? No, he has no computer. We're like, okay, do you go to events?
He is like, why would I do that? I'm not looking for software. I'm like, okay, fair game then. So we do this thing. And I'm like, what do you read? He's like, I read this. And it's the local newspaper. It's like some local newspaper.
I'm like, oh man, I'm going to have to run ads in the local newspaper. No. And so I'm getting all bummed out and I go like 3 or 4, 3 or 4 of these. They're all the same. So I decide, you know what?
This is a group of people that I simply cannot market to in a digital way because these people are not digital. And how I'm going to get 'em is they're 70. They're not going to live forever. And when they die, their children will take over and I will sell to their sons and daughters, and those people are going to be amazing. But until we just need to wait.
So anyways, I'm having the last one, I'm having the last tour with the last guy, and these guys are all so great. They're so nice. These guys are so nice. We're just having a chit chat about just life right at the end. I can't tell you anything. So fine. So we're having a chitchat about life, and I'm just about to leave. I'm talking to the guy, I'm just about to leave and there's this noise, the noise brrrrrrrrrrr, and we stopped talking and I'm like, is that coming from here? Yeah.
Brrrrrrrrrr. I'm like, what's that noise? And he walks over the corner, he's got stuff all over his office. He's been in his office for 40 years. He lifts up this big pile of paper and underneath the pile of paper is a fax machine, and he's getting a fax. It's like brrrrrrr, and the fax is coming out and we stop talking. And then he pulls the thing out.
He has this look of utter delight, like this. And he says, ha, fax. I said, do you get a lot of faxes? And he says, no, I haven't had one of these in years. And I was like, I've got you. So we go back to the office and I got my hotshot marketers, and I'm like, okay, listen up. I get everybody and everybody there is like 24 years old. I'm like, listen up, listen up.
We're going to do this thing. It's a fax campaign. And my head of email marketing goes, that's awesome. What's a fax? And I'm like, well, it's like this thing. And then we knew there was fax software, so we tried to find fax software to send these faxes, but there was literally no software that would run on our modern computers.
And so then we were like, maybe there's a fax machine in here somewhere, and we find one in the closet. We haul this thing under, blow the dust off it, put it down. My digital marketing gal is like, how do we hook it up to the internet? And I was like, it actually plugs into the phone jack. She's like, what?
That's nuts. Anyway, so we ran this campaign and this other campaign went, we sent them a fax, and the fax said, is your ERP older than this fax machine? That was the message. And then while the fax was coming through, my inside salespeople called them and they get the mean lady at the front, and the mean lady comes in and they say, oh, hey, I'm here to talk to John.
And she'll say, well, you're not allowed to talk to him. Do you have a meeting with him? And he goes, no, no, no. He's reading my message right now. He's over there. And half the time they could hear the guy laughing in the other room.
They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Put 'em through, put 'em through, put 'em through. And then we sold all kinds of stuff. So I had to do a weekly report on all my campaigns, and I was so worried this thing wasn't going to work, that I didn't want to let anybody, like the CEO know that I was running this fax campaign. So we give it a name, we called it the F plan. And so every week we had to go in and the thing is going up, up, up, up. And eventually he's becoming my best performing campaign.
And eventually my CEO's like, what's this F plan thing? And I'm like, my dude, we are running a fax campaign. He's like, you're doing a what? Anyways, the thing was awesome. And we did literally millions of revenue on that thing. Here's the point. Was this a positioning problem? No, it was not a positioning, position was fine.
We just didn't get in front of these people. So here's the thing. What I sit on this stage and say, you know what you guys should do? You should run a fax campaign. No, that would be terrible advice, right? This would be terrible advice.
But you as attendees of this conference or other conferences, a lot of the advice you're going to get from people on stage is like that. It's well intentioned. It's true. And it worked for one person in one very specific circumstance, one very specific time.
And so your job, unfortunately, is to filter out the stuff that's going to work for you from stuff that is actually a good story, a good thing, a good whatever. There's no way it's going to work for your business. So just because, anyways, I want to make that point. Sometimes I'm the positioning leader. I'm up here.
I'm like, positioning is so great, whatever. Maybe your positioning is just fine. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. But the point I want to leave you with is you have to figure out what's going to work for your business and what is going to work for your business, and what is the most pressing problem right now? Positioning might be it, but it might be something else. Anyways, that's it.
That was brilliant. Thank you.
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