Misfit Founders
Misfit Founders
April Dunford Shares Her Journey to Becoming a Positioning Expert
Ever wondered how top companies master the art of positioning to stand out in the crowded tech market? Discover the secrets of April Dunford, a bestselling author and renowned consultant, as she reveals her journey from a marketing executive to a specialist in product positioning. Learn about the nuances of crafting a unique market position and how April’s expertise allows her to spot patterns others miss, ultimately commanding higher rates and delivering exceptional value to her clients.
Are your marketing and sales teams speaking the same language? In this episode, we tackle the often-disconnected relationship between marketing and sales in tech companies. April and I discuss the critical importance of aligning these teams to ensure a coherent sales pitch that resonates with potential customers. Through personal anecdotes and real-world examples, we highlight how cross-functional collaboration and customer conversation data can bridge the gap and enhance positioning strategies.
Positioning isn’t just about strategy; it’s about differentiation and adaptation. We delve into how different departments perceive competition and the importance of aligning on value propositions. April shares insights on the challenges of customer acquisition and revenue generation, especially during mergers and acquisitions. From navigating complex tech markets to the enduring relevance of books like "Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind," this episode is packed with actionable advice for anyone looking to refine their positioning and drive business growth.
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Not long ago at Sastok, I had the pleasure of chatting with the amazing April Dunford. She's the bestseller author of hits like Obviously Awesome, how to Nail Product Positioning and Sales Pitch how to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win. She's also a consultant working with tech companies, helping with positioning, figuring out the positioning components and also how to translate that into a sales pitch. Very interesting topic, so check out the conversation.
Speaker 2:For the most part in a first substantive sales call. Most tech companies do a very bad job of helping the customer understand. You know, where do you fit relative to the competition? Why pick you over the other guys? And I thought, no, it's time to go do something different. So I think, well, I'll go do consulting, that's what we do. I will go do consulting and you think, well, I'll do the same thing I was doing at my job in-house. I'll just do it for three or four different companies at a time. So I just put the word out hey, you're a company and you're looking for a little bit of marketing help, but you don't want full-time help. You know, call me.
Speaker 2:I like sort of really gnarly tech stuff my favorite because the positioning is often very difficult and if you can get it right it feels like a magic trick. If there's a little dent I made in the universe, it's that there's a certain number of people out there that were banging their head on a wall trying to fix this thing, couldn't get it fixed, bought my book for like seven bucks and fixed it.
Speaker 1:You mentioned that when you move from being internal to doing consultancy, you've done a couple of things, and then you settled on messaging positioning. Sorry, not messaging positioning. How did you got to that decision?
Speaker 2:I think I went through the same process that almost everybody does when they come out of doing an in-house role, and that process is stupid, but it's like we all have to make the same mistake and I don't know why I did it this way, but I see people do it this way all the time and even though I say don't do that, it's like everybody has to do it and then figure out, no, that was the wrong thing to do. So usually what happens is you know, I've been a vice president of marketing for 25, 30 years. I came out of my last company and I was like really, april, you're going to go do this number eight? And I thought, no, it's time to go do something different. But I don't know exactly what that different thing is. So I think, well, I'll go do consulting, that's what we do. I will go do consulting and you think, well, I'll do the same thing I was doing at my job in-house. I'll just do it for three or four different companies at a time.
Speaker 2:So today we call this a fractional CMO. So I came out and did that. So I just put the word out. Hey, if you're a company and you're looking for a little bit of marketing help, but you don't want full-time help. You know, call me.
Speaker 2:So I did that and the projects were all a little bit different. Some people wanted me to work on lead gen, some people wanted me to work on communication strategy. Some people wanted me to work on positioning, messaging things bundled up in that. Some people were looking for help with sales support or sales enablement. So I did all of it and, you know, after a year of doing that, you get to the end of the year and you're like well, this is terrible. Positioning man. Like why would you call me versus any other fractional CMO? Like, we all look the same and, in fact, I'm based in Toronto. If you look down the list of companies that I've worked at, some of those were very, very successful B2B companies. But the thing about B2B is there's lots of successful B2B companies you've never heard of. Yeah, so they're looking at my resume and who are you going to pick? Me, or the person that came out of, I don't know, linkedin or Twitter or Facebook or something you recognize. That's why I was like well, this is terrible, am I always just going to be doing this? And you know.
Speaker 2:And so I went back and I started thinking about, like you would in any positioning exercise like what have I got that other that the other consultants don't have? And I settled on positioning because I had a methodology or process that I had been using internally for the last four or five jobs that I worked on. So I thought, well, that would be a good thing to focus on. But then it took me a while again to figure out like, is that a consulting engagement? Like, is that something you could do with somebody from the outside? I knew how it worked on the inside, but I wasn't exactly sure how you would do it from the outside. So it took me a while to figure that out.
Speaker 2:But then, once I did, then I became sort of a market of one or very few. There were very few people like me out there saying, nope, I'm not going to do your communication strategy or your lead gen or your sales enablement, I just do positioning. We're just going to work on that. If you want anything else, go somewhere else. All I do is this thing. The great thing about having really tight positioning like that is people know when to call you, but you also get you know. In being so specialized, you get really smart, like all I'm doing is positioning work, positioning work over and over again. So you, you get really smart at that. You start seeing patterns that people didn't see. People who only do this once a year, once every couple of years, don't see which means you're better at the job, which means you can raise your rates.
Speaker 1:It's good for consulting and, honestly, that was the reason why my first question was did your process change like over over time, over over the nine years of um of doing this? Because I suppose you do have that level of experience of doing it with I think I got a lot better companies.
Speaker 2:Yeah, doing it more being more, but the problem didn't actually change that much, like I would say I leaned more into like.
Speaker 2:The only thing that maybe did change was when I started I was very purely focused on positioning and then we always created a sales pitch at the end of that exercise.
Speaker 2:Because you need a way to test your positioning and I think if you're a B2B company and you have a sales team, the best way to test positioning is to translate it into a sales pitch and let's try it with some qualified prospects and see if it lands. At the start I kind of thought that was you know, we're just going to do that sales pitch bit just so we can test the positioning. But as I got doing it it became clear to me that the vast majority of tech startups or even bigger scale ups and now that I'm working with really big companies I see it there too the vast majority of them have terrible sales pitches, like just awful, like just terrible pitches, and so now part of that's a symptom of the positioning. Their positioning is a little loose. So the sales pitch is a little loose, but you can tell in most tech companies they've never really thought about how do we represent that positioning in a first substantive sales call with a prospect which is kind of bonkers when you think about it.
Speaker 1:Why would you do positioning if you wouldn't apply it into your sales?
Speaker 2:That's right. And yet, if you look at most tech companies, the marketing team is sweating positioning like crazy, like they're just sweating it. They're like, oh, they're tuning in every little word on the website. You know they're having big arguments about what goes in the ad copy and, oh, you know everybody's freaking out about making the positioning just this. And then we get a lead comes in through that and what happened? Like it goes over to the sales team and the sales team is literally like, oh hi, good to see you.
Speaker 2:Look, we have 14 dropdown menus. I'm going to click on every single one and tell you all the features and every single thing it does. There's no positioning happening in that at all, and so the customer is then left to figure it out on their own. They're left to figure out which of these features are important or not important for me. Which of these features are differentiating? Does everybody have that feature or just you have that feature and half the features? They don't even understand what they do. We're showing them and then they're like well, what's the value of that feature? Why should I care about that feature in my business? For the most part, in a first substantive sales call. Most tech companies do a very bad job of helping the customer understand. You know where do you fit relative to the competition. Why pick you over the other guys?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, that gave me flashbacks now because I've been part of the purchasing process when it comes to technology and other companies and I recall so many times and even for my own company when I was buying software and such you see all of the savvy taglines on the website and you get intrigued and then you go into a demo call and confused more confused than anything, right?
Speaker 2:So you're like, but hold on because your website says this.
Speaker 1:But here you are. Something doesn't connect to how you talk about your product and offering versus what your website says.
Speaker 2:This is exactly it For most companies. There's this complete disconnect between what's happening in marketing and what's happening in sales, and so I think if we're, you know, if we're getting together to do a positioning exercise, it's the perfect time to fix that sales problem too. So we're going to take the positioning and then we're going to translate it into a sales pitch and do it with the same group of people that was working with positioning, While we've got the vice president of sales there, while we've got product and the founder and everybody else. We don't just end by saying, well, this is the positioning. We say, OK, now here's how we tell the story in a first call with a prospect that doesn't know too much about us.
Speaker 1:And how does that come? I know I'm probably getting a bit into your um, uvp here, service and such um, but I'm curious because you know we've done positioning, positioning, uh, positioning internally. But we've done it internally. Yeah, not um had the expertise and most of the times we've done it the way we saw fit, not really trained or gone through a lot of standardized processes in a sense Right. And one of the things that we I'm just setting up the scene here to ask you the question basically One of the things that we've done was to pull a lot of data from conversations with customers to really understand how they talk about the challenges that they're facing, to help kind of handcraft our positioning in that sense. Of course, there was also parts that were more like this is where we want to head and this is what we're targeting for, this, our mission and such. I'm curious when you go through these processes with companies, with customers, what is the team that contributes with the most data when it comes to great questions?
Speaker 2:So here's what I've found is, the reason I do this with a cross-functional team is every part of the team brings something unique to the table.
Speaker 2:For example, a key thing when we're thinking about positioning is well, who do we get compared to, or what do we have to position against? So if I ask you who's our competitor, you will get a really different answer from sales versus marketing, versus product, versus sometimes the CEO or the founder as well. Now let me yeah, so let me tell you why that is. Product team thinks about competition in a completely different way than the rest of the company, because they're thinking about the roadmap. So they're thinking about, you know, what are we building next year and the year after to stay out in front of competitors. So they're worried about a really long list of competitors, and not all those competitors show up in deals today. They're worried about where they're going to be. You know, next week, the week after, marketing is a special case because marketing is looking at the competitions is marketing. So marketing gets really distracted by competitors that are spending a pile of money on marketing. So they'll be like, oh no, you know these folks are everywhere and you know we got to be there too, because they're sales. On the other hand, sales knows exactly who we compete with. In fact, sales is the only team that knows who we compete with, because sales knows what's the status quo in the account that we're trying to displace. Sales also knows who ends up on a short list For the purposes of positioning. That's all we have to worry about. I don't actually have to worry about who my competition might be three years from now. If a new competitor pops up, I'll adjust my positioning to worry about them later.
Speaker 2:Positioning is all about getting a great story for the product we have now against the competitors we have right now, so we can close some business right now. So that's the first thing. Competition Sales knows that If you go and ask them, they know exactly who status quo is. They know who ends up on a short list. Then you get to the well, okay, how are we different and what's the value we can deliver? That's different from the competitors. Well, product knows more about that than anyone else. They know more about the differential in features because that's they spend all day sitting there worried about that stuff.
Speaker 2:So if I go to product and say, okay, well, the competitors are actually just these two guys right now. So what do we have that's different than them? What capabilities do we have that's different than them? And we can make a big, long list of capabilities and product knows more about that than anyone else. And then we get to the next step, which is value. So they say, oh, I have this amazing AI capability, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 2:Well then the question is well, so what? Why does the customer care? What is the value that that capability delivers for end customers? And marketing is the only team that's actually thinking about value. So marketing understands that better than anyone else. If marketers are interacting with customers a lot, they understand what marketers think. They understand what customers believe is valuable and what isn't. Sales understands exactly why customers buy and where we win against the competitors. So they understand that. That differential in value. They know that. And then I've generally got a founder CEO that gets pulled into a lot of deals, talks to a lot of existing customers, so they have a perspective on that too. So the thing is, is we actually need everybody in the room together? And then I'm there as the facilitator pull that information out of people. It's not as easy as just going to customers and saying you know, give me that data, yeah.
Speaker 1:Give me the data, yeah.
Speaker 2:Like we actually need way more than that. Yeah, give me the data. Yeah, like we actually need way more than that.
Speaker 1:But if we have the right people in the room we can get it. Consequence of that some misalignment internally between teams on what the current competitor is, where the company should be in terms of the features and so on.
Speaker 2:This is one thing that people get very, very confused about this. So, in my mind, positioning is not strategy. So I've heard people say this positioning is strategy. I'm like no strategy it's strategy. Positioning is something else.
Speaker 2:So if we think about, in particular, venture-backed tech company, we have the vision right and the vision is the thing we sold to the vcs. You know, here's where we're going to be in 10 years the all singing, all dancing. It's amazing. Look at this fantastic thing we're going to have in 10 years. It's going to be incredible. And then there's the product we have right now, which looks nothing like that. And generally we have a strategy that says we're building towards this vision and along the way there are going to be steps. And so you know we're going to build out this thing and then, at this point, we'll be able to monetize our data. We can't do it now because we don't have the data, but when we get here we will. And then, when we do, our value proposition changes completely to the market. Or we say, look, we're going to build out feature XYZ and right now we're only selling to small businesses, but once we get there, we have these additional features, we're going to sell the mid-market or we're going to sell the enterprises. Positioning is going to be totally different when we get there. So what we have is the vision is a far future.
Speaker 2:We have the strategy that describes the steps we're going to take between here and there and that might change, and then for every spot on the journey, we have positioning. And positioning describes how do we win right now. But baked into that is change. Like in every tech company that I've ever worked at, we've shifted the positioning three, four times between being 1 million revenue and being 100 million revenue. It wasn't the same positioning all the way through.
Speaker 2:A lot of people come into positioning exercise and they think, oh, we gotta carve it on the stone tablets and it's never, ever gonna change. Well, that doesn't make any sense. Our product is changing, our competitive landscape is changing, the attitude of customers is changing. Like there's nothing but change. It would be insane to think that we could even come up with a positioning now that would work five years from now. It just doesn't happen. So if you look at most of the big tech companies we know and love, if you track their positioning over the years, they've gone through incredible change from where they were when they were very, very small to where they were when they were 10 million, 50 million, 100 million, a billion revenue. That positioning is shifting.
Speaker 1:Do you with the companies that you work? Do you find that the exercise of positioning itself sometimes has an impact on how the teams one work together and two where the company is heading? Because we've had this a couple of times where we went to a positioning exercise and we realized, well, we discovered a couple of things while doing this exercise.
Speaker 2:Right. So sometimes and I would say it's there's a couple of things that come out in this exercise. So one is in the act of getting clarity on what the real value is that you could deliver to customers versus the competition is sometimes a bit of an aha moment, because the team is used to talking about features instead of the value that the features deliver, and so when we get into the value space, it's like, oh well, we're actually all about saving companies money through doing this. Or, oh gosh, we're actually all about increasing top line revenue because we can deliver this, and that will often give the company additional clarity on the roadmap. So is the roadmap really about making that one value proposition stronger and stronger? Or is there an idea that you know at some point we shift from helping you make money to helping you save money? If so, we need to think about that. So that's one thing that happens. So sometimes we'll get clarity on that.
Speaker 2:Again, I don't believe that positioning should drive the strategy, because positioning is where we're at right now, and where you want to go in the future is up to you, man. It might be anywhere. Here's the second thing that has come out a couple of times, but it's rare, thank goodness. But you know. But if I look back at like 300 companies that I've worked with, I would say maybe twice we've got to the spot in the exercise where we say, okay, here's the competition, here's how we're different, this is the value we can deliver that no one else can. And then we ask ourselves, well, who cares a lot about that value? Meaning, what are the type of companies we're going to go sell to that really really care a lot about that value? Twice, I've had it happen where we get to that step and there's a bit of an oh shit moment where we realize there aren't a lot of companies that actually would fit that description.
Speaker 1:There aren't a lot of companies that actually would fit that description.
Speaker 2:And so, even though the company is doing okay right now, the addressable market, the true addressable market where they can obviously win, is actually not big enough to support their revenue goals in the future, in which case that is not a positioning problem, that is a product problem.
Speaker 2:We need to go back and build some differentiated stuff so that we can win in the market. So you see this occasionally, where the market's very, very competitive and when we get down to, okay, our differentiator is this, the value is this, and then we get to the next step and it's like but there are not that many people that actually care about that value. Now we're going to go build different products. It's much more common that the opposite happens, though, so it's much more common that the team will come to me and say oh my gosh, the market is so crowded. You know, we like there's nothing different, we don't do anything different than anyone else in the market. And I say well, tell me your numbers.
Speaker 2:And it's not unusual for the company to say we're doing a 30 million revenue, we're growing at 40%. I'm like 30 million revenue, you're growing at 40%, you're doing something right. And then we get into it and it turns out they have huge differentiation. Just, customers are struggling to find it, they're doing a terrible job of talking about it and they're making it really hard for customers to figure out what that differentiated value actually is. That's actually much more common. A lot of companies come to me and they think they're going to be like those two where you go oh no, there isn't much going on here, we're going to need to fix product. It's much more common that we come in and the differentiation is way bigger than the company suspected. They're just doing a terrible job of explaining it.
Speaker 1:I'm surprised, to be honest, that that's the case, because or maybe I'm just running around bad circles.
Speaker 2:Well, I'll tell you like one thing is. One thing is that some companies come to me believing they have a positioning problem and I don't think it's a positioning problem.
Speaker 2:They have it all Right. So some of these companies I might disqualify If the company is really running on fumes and don't have any differentiation, like their revenue's flat, or maybe they're not doing very much revenue. Sometimes companies come to me and they say, look, you know, when we get a prospect in front of the sales team, we close all day, right. The problem is we're just not getting enough prospects in front of the sales team and I'm like, well, okay, it sounds like your positioning is fine, but your marketing sucks okay, right.
Speaker 1:So it's not necessarily that they don't exist that much. It's just that there's no reason for you to work with the company when they don't have a positioning.
Speaker 2:Maybe I don't know, because most of the there's a lot of companies where the problem is not positioning. The problem is you know. Nobody knows who the company is. They're not generating enough leads. They do a terrible job of closing the leads when they do have them. Maybe they have a product that just isn't differentiated in the market and so there is no good position, like a lot of companies that come to me that if they feel like that, I probably wouldn't work with them because it's a product problem, it's not a positioning problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, that's what I've kind of experienced often talking to founders. Friends mentored and advised a couple of founders as well and most of them think they have something special. And when you really untangle the weeds you realize not really.
Speaker 2:Only customers get to tell us we have something special, like that's the hard reality. So a lot of times what we have is you know, I get a lot of companies call me. They're very early stage, so they either haven't launched the product yet, or they've launched the product and they have a couple of customers Like at that stage we have nothing to grab onto, like we don't know, like all we can do is come up with a positioning thesis, right, and the thesis is going to say well, we think we compete with these guys and we think we're different, like this, and we think, therefore, this is the value we can deliver, therefore, these are the kind of customers are going to love us. Therefore, this is the market we're going to go win. But it's a thesis. It's a thesis and then we test it in the market and so the first wave of customers is all about well, did that work? And what?
Speaker 2:You know my experience, back when I was in-house head of marketing, I launched I don't know across, know across my career maybe 16, 17 products. Not once were we right. Sometimes we were 20% correct and 80% incorrect and sometimes it was the other way around, but we were never completely right. The thesis was never completely proved. Most of the time what happened is we launch it and then we find out oh, customers are comparing us to something we never thought they would compare us to.
Speaker 2:Or we thought these kind of people would love us. It turns out these kind of people love us and these kind of people wouldn't touch us with a 10-foot pole, because of a bunch of things that we didn't even think about. Or we have some killer feature. We think it's killer, we think it's amazing. We take it out there and customers are like meh, take it or leave it, I don't know. So then we got to go back to the drawing board and figure it out. So I don't actually think we need to worry about tightening up positioning in an early stage startup until we're past that first wave of customers and we start seeing the patterns and who loves our stuff and why.
Speaker 1:Up until then, you know we're testing the thesis, that's it that would have been my, my next question with which is how? What's the smallest size of a business that you worked with?
Speaker 2:well, you know, again, I think you need to be in market and you need to have enough traction for us to know there's something there for us to work with. So again, again, I'm typically saying you know, you can see some patterns. So if I were to say, like, you kind of have an idea of the kind of companies that love your stuff, you kind of have an idea of, you know, deals that you should win versus not win, like you know, you know enough to do that. I can't really put a number on it because I'll tell you, like you know, some companies will say, well, how many customers do I have to have for you to know that? And I'm like, well, it should be more than a few. And then they'll say, well, how many is that?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, one company I worked with only had three customers, but each one of those customers was a $10 million deal, so they had $30 million revenue. Customers was a $10 million deal, so they had $30 million revenue. And if you look at their pipeline, they had 15 prospects in the pipeline. It took them a year and a half to close a deal, so it's kind of like having 17 customers. So, yeah, they were fine and we worked together. It was good I'd have other companies come to me and they're doing a very small deal like a couple thousand dollars. They've only done three or four. That's probably not enough for us to know what we're dealing with or to be able to see patterns, so we need more than that. So I wish I could just give you a number.
Speaker 2:But I think it's you're right, it's, it's quite it's usually the companies that come to me are usually at the very, very low end have you know, more than seven, eight, ten million revenue, um, and then at the high end of, like you know, billions.
Speaker 2:But I work with a lot of companies that are in that 20 to 50 million space and a lot of those companies, you know, had an easier time selling earlier in their journey.
Speaker 2:Now their markets have gotten a bit more crowded because there's money to be made here and people can see it, so there's lots of fast followers piling in the market and so they're working on their positioning there. But I also do a lot of companies that are way bigger than that, like 100 million, 200 million revenue companies that are doing acquisitions. So they've thrown a new product in the mix and now they have to shift the positioning around that. And then big companies big companies are often usually acquisition scenarios as well, like I did one recently with a very big company and they had acquired four little companies and thrown them together into a business unit, but the sales team was having a terrible time trying to figure out how do we pitch these things together? And then the individual people working at the individual companies they don't know because they don't know what the other things do, and so we need a workshop to get everybody together and get a story around this thing where we can communicate the value. So yeah all kinds.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you were talking about because we had our company acquired at the end of 2022.
Speaker 2:So we've been.
Speaker 1:Thank you. We've been through that process of Fameful right, yeah, well, especially that the company that acquired us was on a shopping spree in 2022. And we were among that shopping spree. And you're putting all of these solutions together in the same room and now like, okay, figure out, how are we going to position messaging and even going at an event and having to create banners to talk about, to just encapsulate in a couple of words, what is it that your company does when you have a mismatch of solutions and so on, is very difficult.
Speaker 2:I think acquisition is actually golden opportunity for the acquiring company to get the people together in a room and get everybody in agreement and alignment, because otherwise how is it going to happen? Like you have all these individual people and people come and they know a lot about their product which just got acquired, but they don't know anything about the other things. They don't know anything about the parent company. Usually they don't know anything about the other little grab bag of little things they've also acquired, and then you've got a poor sales team that it's like how are we supposed to sell this again?
Speaker 2:oh yeah or the marketing team that's like okay, build us a brochure. Well, what exactly are we saying about this? So somewhere inside the company is, like, you know, the strategy team that came up with this strategy to go acquire all these bits in the first place, but there's often no communication down to marketing or sales of. You know. Well, this is what the story is going to be post acquisition, so we can go out and actually make some revenue out of this thing. It's a good opportunity to bring everybody together. We do this cross-functional positioning thing and then we work on the sales pitch, then we solve all of that, and in the process of solving that, we've educated everybody around the table too. Now you understand more about the acquiring company and all the little bits, so your team can then do a better job of understanding where they fit in the middle of this new soup.
Speaker 1:What are some of the companies that you like the most to work with, and this is from an industry, from, let's say, team size, whatever comes to mind.
Speaker 2:I have a fairly big background in data and database stuff. I worked at a couple of database startups back when I was in-house VQ marketing and then even when I you know, post-acquisition, I worked at a couple of big database companies. Data's hot right now and so I like sort of really gnarly deep tech stuff. Right, my favorite because the positioning is often very difficult and and if you can get it right, feels like a magic trick so you can take something that's really really complicated and then come out with this positioning that makes it very easy to understand, very easy to understand the value, very easy to understand why you want to buy this thing and what you're going to get if you buy this thing. These I like a lot, so I've done a lot of companies that look like that, or I've worked with a lot of companies that look like that, so I like those ones. Um, I also like um companies where the tech is not necessarily that complicated but the landscape is complex. Um, there, you know, the company's operating at the intersection of two or three different markets and this is just gnarly to figure out and often these companies have been attempting to solve this positioning problem internally for a while before they get to me, and so those ones are always fun again, because they're hard, and the harder it is, the more satisfying it is when you get to the end and you've got this pitch that is just kind of clean and it just rolls. You say, look, here's the landscape, here's what it looks like, here's why you should pick us. It's very satisfying to get to the end of one of those. I love those a lot. Those come in all sizes.
Speaker 2:I worked with companies. I worked with one recently that was on the smaller side 7 million revenue really neat AI capability revenue really neat AI capability Company was really struggling with expressing the value of that or why that capability was important and I thought we did a really good job on that. And then two weeks later I did a company that was a 700 million revenue division of a great big company with a bunch of gnarly stuff and some acquisition stuff thrown in there just to make it extra complicated. But the same thing like walking in. It was so confusing, like I don't know how a sales rep would pitch that stuff together at all and at the end very clean. So these are. These are the ones I like the best because you really feel like you really moved the needle on something at the end of the workshop.
Speaker 1:Right. So I hear that you love a challenge.
Speaker 2:That's basically when it comes to Smart, things are good.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Like I said before, I think a lot of times companies can do this themselves. Sometimes the positioning is just obvious and it's interesting. A certain number of companies come to me and they'll say look, like we never had a problem with this before, like when we launched it it was just obvious. And that happens Like we have a thing and it's like it's obvious what the value is. It's obvious how we should position it. How else can we position it? It's fine. But then you fast forward three, four years and all of a sudden there's a bunch of Me Too, competitors have piled in and the market itself is shifting a bit, and then the sensibilities of customers has shifted a little bit and all of a sudden this thing that was so obvious isn't obvious anymore and the company's really stuck because they never went through a real process to position it in the first place and so now they need to shift that positioning and they're like how do we do it? The last time we didn't have to think about it, it just happened and it was there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, as you mentioned as well, you wouldn't take a positioning job if it's not really a positioning job. So in the early days, it does sound from what you've been telling me that in the early days, if you know, it does sound from what you've been telling me that in the early days when you're starting up, let's say, you just built a new product, um, and you have a clear enough way to vocalize it yeah one thing that I've, that I've, that I've heard from you earlier, is also be ready to get it wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In the early days the first time, second time, expect to get it wrong In the early days it doesn't sound like there's much need of that potentially. And then, as time goes by, the impact of not having that as things change, becomes greater and greater. At what point do people call you how difficult the challenge is the task is internally for someone to come in and say you know, april we actually realize we're at a state where we need your help with positioning.
Speaker 2:You know, some companies, like a lot of companies, are wrestling with positioning and they don't even know what to call it right.
Speaker 2:They're not even sure that positioning is the thing they're wrestling with right. Um, because positioning is not super well known, like it's a marketing concept, and so if you didn't come from marketing, maybe you don't even know what positioning is. Um, all you know is we're doing this pitch and sales, and nobody can figure out what we're all about. Man or our marketing's not working very well, or what you hear a lot is the prospect comes into sales and sales gives them the pitch and the prospect's like so what are you? Again there's that question Like, so, back it up, back it up, like pitch, pitch it again, pitch it again. I don't think I got it the first time, you know. So you'll hear that when the positioning is bad, and sometimes the founder will say my sales team is terrible, they just do a terrible job pitching it. They pitch it. The customer has no idea what it is, and so you know, sometimes it's the sales team's fault, sometimes it's positioning, like you know, like, like, how else should we pitch it. Does anybody have a better idea? Like so, sometimes we have that. Sometimes we'll have the thing that um prospect comes in sales is pitching it, or even on you see it, even on the marketing side where everybody says, oh, you guys are just like sales force and you're not. You're nothing like sales force, you don't compete with sales force at all. It's super frustrating. And so the ceo will come to me and say everybody compares us to this thing and we're not even in that market. I don't even understand Salesforce at all, and it's super frustrating. And so the CEO will come to me and say everybody compares us to this thing and we're not even in that market. I don't even understand why. Why is everybody compared to this thing? And this is a positioning problem. The third one you'll get is customers will come in and say, oh, that's great, I get it, I get what you do. It's fine. But why would anybody pay for that? I could just do it with a spreadsheet. So they get what you are-ish. They just don't understand the value of what you deliver. And so, again, that's a positioning issue.
Speaker 2:So a lot of the times companies call me and they're wrestling with a bunch of stuff and the path to me looks like this They'll come somewhere. You know like, we're here at this conference, right, the CEO will show up at the conference. I'll get up on stage and I'll be doing my thing about positioning. And you look out in the audience there's two or three guys looking at me like, oh crap, this is the problem we've got. And so then they get woke up to the world. They're like, ah, maybe this is a positioning thing.
Speaker 2:And then after that they usually go read my book. So I got a book that explains it, and you know. So they'll read the book and then after that they'll try to fix it internally. A lot of them will try to fix it internally, and then a certain percentage of those will fix it and off they go and they're fine. But, like I say, the hard cases will get stuck and then they call me. So most of the time, by the time the company gets to me, they know they have a problem, they know it's positioning, they've attempted to solve it themselves. It hasn't worked for one reason or another, you know, and then they're calling me. So that's usually how they end up.
Speaker 1:I feel that that's a testament of all of the good marketing that you're doing, then I mean, the marketing looks like that for a reason, right Like so.
Speaker 2:When I first started doing this work, the biggest problem was, you know, nobody knows what positioning is. So if you don't know what positioning is, how do you know your positioning is bad? Then why would you call the positioning lady if you don't even know what positioning is? So I had to do something to wake you up to the problem. So, you know, going on podcasts or speaking at conferences is a good way. There's a certain percentage of people listening. They'll go oh, that sounds like me actually. And then, well then, what do you do? Well, you don't necessarily just call the consultant after that. That seems like an expensive brute force way to solve the problem, like, let's try to solve it ourselves first, and so part of the reason I wrote the book was to get it all down on paper so that the people that aren't you know, aren't a hard case and could just sit down and do it themselves, can just buy the book and just do it yourselves, and then you know the hard case.
Speaker 2:People will then be like they'll get to the end of the book, they'll try to do the thing, they'll get stuck and then be like well, now we got to call the positioning lady.
Speaker 1:Positioning lady.
Speaker 2:That's how it works. That's the whole pipeline right there.
Speaker 1:So what's your book called?
Speaker 2:There's two books now. So the first book, the book on positioning, is called Obviously Awesome, so I wrote that book to outline the process I go through with my clients to work through the component pieces of positioning. That book came out in 2019, so it's been around for a while. The second book I just launched last October and that's focused on the last piece, which is how do we take this positioning and translate it into a sales pitch. So that book's called Sales Pitch, for obvious reasons.
Speaker 1:So I mean mean you basically split the work that you do in two books?
Speaker 2:yeah, that's it. No more books for me, that's all I know, it's like it's all out there.
Speaker 1:Exactly, I like this but I mean, um, definitely I. I don't know the notoriety of your first book, but your second book is a bestseller, it's quite.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it depends on how you define bestseller, like we could have a whole podcast on what does bestseller actually mean, but I have sold a lot of books, I'm an Amazon bestseller, but it turns out that actually is a pretty meaningless thing to say, is it? Yeah, it's not that hard.
Speaker 1:Because everyone kind of like I know gives that hey bestseller I know, but you know what.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can make your book 99 cents and be a bestseller for a day or an hour and that little badge will show up, and then you can say I'm an Amazon bestseller. So I'd be pretty disappointed if you weren't an Amazon bestseller, to be honest.
Speaker 1:Like everybody, should be an Amazon bestseller. I'll make sure that if I ever write a book, I'm going to stay away from that. I'll tell you how to do it. It's not that hard.
Speaker 2:Then there's all these other bestseller lists that you know may or may not mean anything, but yeah like New York Times. Not mean anything, but, um, yeah like new york times bestseller is a very specific thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we can do a whole podcast on what does bestseller mean, but it's doing great and it's it's driving you business, okay it's job um, and how about the? The first book? Was that similar?
Speaker 2:yeah, that had similar path was really, uh, a surprise to me because I thought, well, I'll write this book. It's about this weird, you know narrow little topic positioning for b2b tech companies. I'm not expected to sell a lot of this book because it's kind of a weird topic. It's really narrow and for the first six months, eight months I sold you know, wasn't exactly flying off the shelf, but sold some books. And then all of a sudden it just I don't know word of mouth was going around about this book and then I started selling a lot of books.
Speaker 2:And then the interesting thing to me, which I wouldn't have anticipated either, is I'm selling as many books. I will sell as many books in 2024 as I sold in 2019, the year the book came out. So you would expect it to drop off at some point, but I haven't seen that yet. So I'm happy with that book. Like, I've sold a lot of copies and again, it's ruined a lot of business for me, but it's been way more popular than I would have expected. Like, I think it's kind of a dry, weird niche topic. Like why?
Speaker 2:does anybody want to read a book on that Turns out a lot of people do.
Speaker 1:Well, I have a bit of a deja vu because you know I've talked to, had a podcast with Wes Bush. He wrote Product-Led Growth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, he put that book out about the same time that I put my first book out. There we go work it on number two and you're both from living canada and it's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, uh, so he's working on the. Yeah, that's actually quite right. So you've just launched your not long ago your second book and he's just about yeah interesting path um but he just copies me probably, yeah, the record yeah, bush, the record Bush has been copying me when I talked to him the other day.
Speaker 2:I think we came out around the same time. I remember when he was working on the first book too, yeah, and I think he's done well with that book too.
Speaker 2:He told me that he's still surprised that it's still making quite a bit of revenue well, I think what happens with books is either it's a flash in the pan or or it lasts for a very long time, and so I think what you want to do if you're you know, if you're writing a business book is you want to write a book that's useful, like you want to write a book that people go. Oh, you know, I need to do this thing. I should get this book because it's going to help me do this thing. I think a lot of people read books and it's just kind of a grab bag of stuff and you know it's fun while you're reading it, but it never really gets. Maybe that word of mouth thing going for the book to sustain over the longer time. A lot of books are idea books thing over the longer time.
Speaker 1:A lot of books are idea books, but that's the one thing that I wouldn't say surprised me because, you know, product-led and the notion of product-led has been around for a long time and it continues to grow, and on one side, thanks to Wes as well, um, positioning as well, it's been around for a bit and you know it continues to grow in popularity and so on. But if you, if you think, at that point, right when I first heard of product led, I thought that it's. I definitely didn't think that it's an evergreen topic, I thought that it's a trend. Right now, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then we'll move on to something else. The next best thing, because we did have quite a few trends around. You know how to make your business successful? Well, no, now you have to focus on this side of your business Now sales is important, now this is important, and so on. So I thought that that's not going to be evergreen, but it seems like it's evergreen, and it seems like positioning is evergreen as well for you.
Speaker 2:Well, I'll tell you, positioning like on, like product-led growth, like positioning has been around since the dawn of time, like the original book on position was written in the 80s, like 1982, like pre-internet we were talking about positioning, and so my contribution to that was I felt like we needed to have a book that told you how to do it.
Speaker 2:So all the other books were this is what positioning is, and you know, this is why it's important idea books, not how to book right and so I thought, well, the world needs a how-to book on positioning. So that was what I was going for in that book. Um, some things yeah, like I agree with you like some things come and go and they feel a bit trendy, like we get this with a lot of marketing tactics, you know like you know, one year everybody will be really into email and then the next year people say, oh, email's dead, we're not doing that anymore.
Speaker 2:We're all. You know. One year everybody will be really into email and then the next year people say, oh, email is dead, we're not doing that anymore. You know, we're all doing social media ads. And then a year later, oh, that's dead, we're not doing that anymore. And the reality is we're still doing email, we're still doing ads.
Speaker 1:In-app chatbots and all of that stuff. Right, that's it.
Speaker 2:Right, that's it, and so you know some things. I think the hype half life on these things are quite short, but stuff tends to hang around like the good stuff tends to hang around a long time. But I don't know. Product like growth, I think that's. I mean, we had product-led growth before there was a name for it. Yeah, so that's been around for a long time too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, true. What's the most difficult part about writing a book? Now that you've launched your second?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, Maybe there's something more specific for you. Oh, I'll tell you what's the easiest part is writing the book. That's easy. It's everything else that's hard, like editing. I found editing to be very painful, like I worked with a company and they had several layers of edits. That was very, very painful, you know, because you think your stuff is so perfect and so easy to understand and then the editor comes back and it's all red and it doesn't make any sense, and then you've got to go back and forth. Editing was painful. In the first book I thought the hardest thing was it felt so personal, like it felt really personal, and so I really didn't want to put out a book that people weren't going to understand or thought was just terrible or whatever. It felt really personal. And so there were several times in the process of launching that book where I thought this is shit, I'm just gonna throw it out. Several times where I thought I just abandoned the project personal, do you mean as in?
Speaker 1:you felt like it wouldn't, it would be just your.
Speaker 2:I felt like it was going to be a reflection of me and my expertise, and if the book was bad, that meant I was an idiot oh like so it felt very personal that way like I see I used to be an in-house vice president of marketing before this.
Speaker 2:So you know we have launches, we have things. Sometimes launch goes good, sometimes not. You know, I'm not taking that personally. You know we're selling a product here, but here the product is my brain. Yeah, that's why I'm watching this book and everyone goes and it's kind of like saying your brain is thumbs down, so, so that was hard. And then I think it's. I think marketing a book is hard. Everybody's writing a book. There's lots of books. You know. There's all these terrible statistics like the average book.
Speaker 2:The average self-published book sells less than a hundred copies wow there's something like this stat I heard was something like only one percent of books published or self-published. Any book only one percent sells more than 5 000 copies, which is not very many that's not.
Speaker 1:I was about to say.
Speaker 2:That doesn't say and then uh, and then when you get into like 10 000 copies, you're into like 0.025% of books. So it's like very, very few books sell more than 10,000 copies Very, very few and so it takes a giant effort to pop up above the noise there and have your book be. You know, have people still talking about it and reading it and saying things about it even six months after you launch is very, very difficult. So I think you need to have a marketing plan, you need to be serious about it and then you need to sustain that marketing for way longer than just hey, my book launched today and that's it, and then go away and expect everybody to remember your book six months from now, like that's just not how it works away and expect everybody to remember your book six months from now, like that's just not how it works.
Speaker 1:Question are you given?
Speaker 2:that you're in the 0.0, whatever person. I can't believe it. I can't believe it, but yeah I am is it?
Speaker 1:what's the proud what? What are you proud of are you proud of? Are you proud of people enjoying and understanding and taking value out of the book more? Or are you proud of the effort that you put into?
Speaker 2:very good is I get a ton of email and messages or people will go on my website and like, fill in my contact me form and just say nice stuff about that book and say you know, we were really stuck and we didn't know what to do and whatever, whatever. And then your book unlocked this big thing and saved the whole company. You would not believe the number of messages I get like that. So it makes me feel very good when people tell me that they thought the material in the book was useful, like that was. The whole point of the book was. I don't want. This is not an idea book, this is a how-to book.
Speaker 2:You're supposed to go do it yeah and then the process of doing it should have a positive result. So I don't want anybody to say, oh yeah, I think you're really funny, that joke you told on page 20. I don't care, I don't care and I don't want to tell me I'm a good writer. I'm not a good writer, that's my editor and like I don't care if people enjoyed the book. What I really care is that people used the book and did something and you know and thought it was useful and at the end went, oh man, we were stuck on this thing. It was so useful. Like I used your stuff, like I just can't get enough of that. People sending me emails telling me the thing was useful. That was just my favorite thing. So I feel very proud about that.
Speaker 2:I feel like you know, if there's a little dent I made in the universe, it's that there's a. There's a certain number of people out there that were banging their head on a wall trying to fix this thing. Couldn't get it fixed. Bought my book for like seven bucks and fixing it like the e-book E-books are cheap. Okay, yeah, eight bucks, maybe, I don't know Fifteen for a paperback. That's a lot of value, that's a lot of value for seven bucks.
Speaker 1:For sure, for sure. My next question was more on the, because, clearly, over the last nine years, you've been in business for nine years, yeah and switched to from in-house and you've done a lot along the way, a lot of initiatives and activities, in order to get the word out around positioning, because it sounds like when you started you had to explain a bit of hey, it's called positioning and this is what it is and this is how it works. I explained it a bit. I explained it.
Speaker 2:It's co-positioning, and this is what it is and this is how it works.
Speaker 1:Explaining a bit, Explaining a lot, a lot, so you clearly were successful. With that. I mean the fact that both of your books are okay. I'm not going to use the word bestseller, whatever that is, but it's popular.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You are having a lot of public appearances and everyone wants you on their expos and events and so on. That's cute, um well, is it not true?
Speaker 2:um, you just told me that you've been a trust thing well you know, public speaking is a different thing like public speaking. Here's the key to public speaking at the beginning, nobody wants you to speak because nobody knows you. And then, at some point, someone gives you a chance and you have to nail that one, because if you don't then nobody ever gives you a chance again.
Speaker 2:but if you show up and you nail that one, then people talk and then you get more invitations to speak, and more invitations, and then at some point you're speaking everywhere. They just always ask you back or whatever, because they think you're good or whatever. That's the key to public speaking. You don't actually need a book or anything else. You just need to do one good talk.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but you clearly have had a path to getting to where you are today.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:So safe to say, there's a lot of pr around april and the the good work that you're doing. How did how did that evolve your business right? Because I suppose nine years ago we started yeah you know you were working with people that you knew, companies that you knew from your past, and so on. How did that evolve today? Are you still? Is it still you, or do you have a team?
Speaker 2:it's still just me, right, but that's on purpose. Like I mean, I could have a team. I suppose I could have a team if I wanted to. Um, but uh, when I started this business, I kind of decided I just wanted to do it solo. For a bunch of reasons, like one was previous 25 years, you know, I was vice president, marketer, cmo or whatever, and I always had teams like I always. So I always had people reporting to me, I was always hiring people and growing the team and whatever. So I always had teams. And when I moved out to do consulting, I kind of decided I think I'm done managing teams, I don't think I want to manage any people anymore. Like managing people is a hassle, you know. And so I thought it'd be fun to not have a team and it would be fun to see, like I wonder how big of a consulting business you could grow if it's just one person.
Speaker 2:That'd be kind of interesting to see how that worked out. So that was one thing. The main thing that's changed since the beginning of me consulting and now is you know there's a lot of good stuff. That happens when you're known for a thing, and so the obvious one is your rates go up. So you know you can charge a lot more because there's more people. You know, and it's just me, so there's only so many workshops I can do in a year, and every time I get really, really booked up, like if I'm booked up, I like to be booked up a quarter in advance. If I'm booked up more than a quarter in advance, I'd put the price up. That's kind of my thing.
Speaker 1:That's actually really an interesting strategy.
Speaker 2:Too much pipeline, and so if I have too much pipeline I put the price up and that slows it down a little bit and then I run at that until I have too much pipeline and then I put the price up a little bit. So that's been the main change, is you know? It just costs a little bit more money to work with me now than it did seven years ago.
Speaker 1:Does it also mean that you have to be a lot more selective now?
Speaker 2:Because I suppose you get a lot of mocks at your door um given, yeah, not as yeah. Like I mean, at one point I was clearly under charging for what I was doing and so that was that was really difficult because I had so much inbound interest and so many people, I had to really qualify hard and that was difficult. And then I was booking really far out and then everybody was very disappointed because they had to wait eight months to do a workshop with me. But yeah, you put the price up and that solves that problem.
Speaker 1:Okay, so it's auto selection.
Speaker 2:It's no different than what we do in software, right? If the thing gets really popular and you're established in a market, the price goes up Like it's.
Speaker 1:Do you have to. So I suppose you reach a point where, for very good reason, your service costs a significant amount because you're in demand. Do you find yourself needing to let's not call it justify, as in present, why this is such a kind of like benefit and it costs this much to get it right? Or do teams come with that prepared when they're about to invest, let's say, in your service?
Speaker 2:I would say that the majority of them are. I don't get a lot of pushback on the pricing of the service. Sometimes I have very small teams come to me and they're so small that the founder's not even paying himself and he's trying to figure out how to get enough money to buy me. That's different. But most of the teams that actually you know reach out to me again. They've already invested considerable time, energy and effort to try to solve this problem and if you add it up like what's the last six months of your life worth, it's worth more than what I'm charging.
Speaker 2:So a lot of these companies come and they're not you know. Like you know again, they've. They've bought the book, read the book, tried it internally, thrashed around on it Like the vast majority of the companies that call me have been thrashing on it for months. Occasionally I'll get ones that be like we've been monkeying around with this thing for two years. Please help, you know. So if you've already felt the pain and you understand how difficult it is to solve the problem, then you just want somebody to come and get it right. Is what you really want.
Speaker 1:And I suppose, yeah, and I don't get too much of that.
Speaker 2:The other thing is, with the way I do it, we get to the end and we work on this sales pitch part, and so there is immediate value. The minute you leave the workshop you've got a you know a new sales story.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so a lot of companies can do the math on that, like, what if we doubled the number of first calls that turned into opportunities? You can actually put a number on that, and most companies will do that math in their head and go, oh, this is kind of a no-brainer thing to do. If we could even increase it by 10%, that would pay for this thing, and so, again, it's not that much. I don't get too much pushback on price, which probably means I should put the price up. I used to have a boss that used to say that if you don't have 40% of your customers complaining about the price, the price is too low.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm going to take that on board with my next services business 40% came from.
Speaker 2:But he used to say this was in software. We were selling a software product, but we were always having the argument about whether we should be putting the prices up. And he used to say that all the time he was like who's complaining about the price? What one guy out of a hundred? No, the price is too low. He's like everyone should be complaining. He's like we should have half the people complaining. If they're not complaining, then the price is too low. Right now nobody complains. So bad. But you know, if my old boss was here he'd be telling me that my price is too low.
Speaker 1:The thing is that I don't see people having the opportunity to complain, In a sense, when to me, if you get positioning and you apply that to sales, then it's easy to quantify the impact that this piece of work has.
Speaker 2:So I wouldn't say it's easy, like I wouldn't say it's easy, like, like here's the reality of it is. There's companies going to come into me. We're going to work on positioning and we're going to work on the sales pitch that goes with the positioning, but the company has to implement it. I can't do that for them. So the marketing team is going to have to retool all their messaging. They're going to have to retool all their campaigns. They're going to have to think about how this new, how this new positioning impacts their entire go-to-market strategy. In some case it impacts where they're running campaigns, what kind of campaigns they're running, who they're targeting in those campaigns.
Speaker 2:Like, a lot of things is going to change, and I'm not the VP marketing. They have a VP marketing. Vp marketing is going to have to do all that stuff. Same thing on the sales side. We're coming up with a new sales pitch, but there is effort in getting a sales team to stop using the old pitch and start using the new pitch, and I've been through that effort many times and that is not insignificant. And so the company is going to have to do that. And so I do a lot of talking in these workshops about you know, we're doing this amazing piece of work here, but there is a whole work stream that happens after that that the company is going to have to do so in order to get the benefit of the snazzy new positioning and your sharp new sales pitch.
Speaker 2:You're actually going to have to do a pretty good job of rolling it out, and a lot of that stuff is something no consultant can do for you. Stuff is something no consultant can do for you. You're going to have to actually work through the steps to do it internally and roll it out internally, and then you've got to make it stick.
Speaker 1:Completely agree. So it takes a lot, so there's all of that.
Speaker 2:So trying to quantify, that is and I'm very open with founders when they call me about that is some companies I work with do an amazing job of it, like I could. I could point you to a dozen companies that I think just smash that execution Amazing. Some companies not so great a job.
Speaker 1:Yes, um, my point was it's. It's not ambiguous, right? If you take that message messaging, that positioning and the sales pitch messaging and everything and you actually do a religious job at implementing throughout the structures of your organization implemented throughout the structures of your organization.
Speaker 1:It's easy to track. You know, positioning to sales in a sense. Right, that's what I would refer to. It's not ambiguous as in you're losing the well, we don't know if it's the positioning or if it's that, and so on. So if you have the means to track how you know and test A, b, well, we used to talk to the customers like this and we've implemented everything new. Now and we're talking like this, it's quantifiable in a sense. So that's what I meant. Yeah, it's a completely different story aligning everyone and now implementing and executing on something different.
Speaker 1:The reason why I was asking that was because I'm wondering if you practice this and if this is something that you advise, let's say, young entrepreneurs out there and founders to do this. You have a company that comes and they're ready to pay to get you to consult them, but they're interested in understanding a bit on whether you know the type of impact that you'd have in an organization like that. You've had 300 companies that you consulted so far. You've had 300 companies that you consulted so far. I assume that there's some repetition in terms of patterns and type of companies. Here and there Do you go or how do you go around this? Do you go and basically show them let's say nothing confidential or anything like that but tell them kind of the impact that good positioning and implementation can have based on your previous customers, like, for example, just bringing in conversations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like I can't give them a number, yeah, it would be impossible to give them a number because every company is so different and is so different and what you would improve would be so different. And so for the most part, the companies come to me already feeling the pain of not having it good, so they already know what it's costing them. They don't necessarily know how much better it's going to get when we fix it, because no one can predict that. But most of them come to me and they're so frustrated because, like I would say, maybe half the companies just want to stop having the conversation, so it's impacting their ability to go execute on anything because they keep revisiting the conversation.
Speaker 2:So every time they go to do a new campaign, instead of just rolling out the new campaign, we're getting a team together and we're having a two week fight about well, are we really targeting these guys, or should we be targeting these guys? Are we really doing this, or should we be doing this? Every time someone goes to create a new piece of marketing material or they're going to do something with the sales team or do some kind of sales enablement type stuff, there's this big fight internally well, are we really targeting that? Well, who said are we really doing mid-market? Now, is mid-market, where we're going now or not, and so the founders come for me. A lot of times the founders come to me and they're like we just need to stop having that fight. We need to.
Speaker 2:Just let's get everybody in agreement and alignment it costs a lot of money right this is like we're everything in the company is just slowing down and there's great value and just we're just going to go and execute now, instead of having to relitigate every time we go to do something like do we really want to be in that market? Well, I don't know. Are these really our buyers? Like which of this thing? And it feels like all these piece parts of positioning are up for debate every time we do anything, you know.
Speaker 1:And so the founders come to me and they're like we just want to stop having a conversation right, I got that so you don't have to pull the card of well, I've worked with other companies and you wouldn't do that and basically saying, well, you know, with a, with a company like yours, I helped a company in the past with similar type of thing or similar type of profile and, um, they were able to increase x, y, z.
Speaker 2:So here's what's interesting too is, you know, startup founders all talk to each other and a lot of times they all know each other. So a lot of times the founders are coming to me and they've already talked to three founders that work with me already right, so they've gotten it straight from the horse's mouth.
Speaker 2:you know what the impact was or wasn't from working with me, like most of the time like I've got a list of companies and logos on my websites. You can go look at that. You hear me talking about companies at conferences. I mentioned a whole bunch of companies in both of my books. So you know, if you know somebody at Postman you can call the guy at Postman and he'll tell you whether he thought my stuff was good or not.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you don't need to do much social validation in the conversations.
Speaker 2:Usually that's what happens, so there's still a certain amount of. This is the thing about being a consultant You're going to live or die on the word of mouth about your services. If you're focused on a narrow group of clients, because they all know each other, everybody talks yeah, very true so if you were bad at it, the word would go around, everybody would know how many of you?
Speaker 1:I'm curious, how many of your customers do you meet at sastok? Well, you said this was the first one in austin, but when you go to dublin, yeah, in dublin.
Speaker 2:Quite a few of them, I mean a lot of the companies I'm working with are. You know, I worked with them when they were smaller and now they're bigger and they don't do stuff like that anymore you know. So they've graduated on to bigger things or whatever. But oh yeah, I bump into the founders all the time.
Speaker 1:This has been very insightful for me because, again, apart from me doing a couple of um positioning workshops and I didn't even call them, positioning, it was yeah, it was uh workshops for you know, setting up, vocalizing, ruvp, this, that and so on, um. So it's very insightful for me to to understand how this works from a from a professional's perspective right, someone that's doing this for a living. I usually end with three flash questions.
Speaker 2:Oh no, these are the worst. Yes, these are the worst. I hate these People, are like what's your favorite fruit?
Speaker 1:And I'm like oh, yeah, exactly so it's going to be as cheesy as that. So a quote that you live by somebody asked me this one recently.
Speaker 2:I should have this at the tip of my tongue, a quote that I live by whatever comes into your mind too late in the day for that? No, I don't think I have a quote that I live by, to be honest, Okay. I don't think I have a quote that I live by. I probably think of it.
Speaker 1:That's perfectly fine.
Speaker 2:I don't think I'm a quote-less person.
Speaker 1:If you ask.
Speaker 2:I have lots of good positioning quotes that I love, though that I use a lot. So Dolly Parton, famous country singer, said find out what you are and do it on purpose. This is the perfect quote about positioning and I love it so much.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, that sounds like a quote. Your customers definitely do.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Second question a book that impacted your life, be it your professional or your personal life.
Speaker 2:Well, there have been a few books that have really impacted my professional life. So the original positioning book, positioning the Battle for your Mind by Reason Trout, is such a good book. I read it like 100 times and I dump on that book a little bit because it frustrated me that it didn't teach me how to do positioning. But you know, but it was the original book on positioning and it was. It was more about the idea of positioning what is it? Why do we care that kind of thing. But that book had a big impact on me.
Speaker 2:And then, um, getting more over on the sales side of things, Um, I read the challenger sale when it first came out, which was 2011,. 2012 in there at some point, and that really shifted my ideas about how we take positioning and translate that into sales. Like it's fundamentally a book about selling, but as a marketer reading it, I really thought it was a book about positioning. Book about positioning. Like it was a book about selling but it was, at its heart, about how do we help customers understand why our value matters is really what that book is about. And so that changed my thinking, both on positioning and how we take positioning and translate it in a sales pitch, so that one had a big impact on me too.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, so you'll recommend those books I would recommend those books.
Speaker 2:One of the co-authors of the Challenger Sale is Matt Dixon. He has a new book out called the Jolt Effect, and so if I were to recommend a book that you read right now, maybe not go all the way back to Challenger Sale, but go to the Jolt Effect. Great book, super book.
Speaker 1:Okay, perfect, thank you. Perfect answers. And last question, there were three A good habit that you advocate for?
Speaker 2:A good habit that I advocate for. Well, I've been a runner my whole life and I think that it's important that people be active. Like you know, I see a lot of people in tech like don't work out at all and I think that's bad. You're sitting on your computer like this all day. I think it's important that people have some kind of fitness habit. For me, it's running Like running's easy, even if you're traveling, like I got up and ran this morning and you know one you get to do if there's a gym in your hotel, or there isn't a gym in your hotel, whatever you can still get out for a run. So I advocate for running.
Speaker 2:I've heard that Austin is really nice for you know marathoning and running it is, except it's really humid, and let me tell you that is some sweaty weather to be running in today. It's like 100% humidity out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very true. Well, thank you so much for putting up with my cringe um flash questions. But you, you get a, you get a gift for it, so let me give you, let me give you your gift oh, that's great.
Speaker 2:That makes it all worth it there you go.
Speaker 1:So, oh, you are the 40th, 44th guest on my podcast and you get a medal for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, my god, I'll add it to my collection of medals. No, I mean, I never get a medal.
Speaker 1:That's amazing I was about to say who else gave you as a podcast?
Speaker 2:yes, wow, that's really great. No, that's, that's great.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you being part of this. It still surprises me, pleasantly surprises me every single time someone comes to me and says I watched that conversation with X and man I resonate, or man that really helped me figure out things for myself internally. So it's the least I can do for your troubles and for making you lose your voice today.
