April Dunford > Quotes

“Think of your competition as “approaches to the problem” rather than individual companies. The easiest way for prospects to make sense of a market is to stop thinking about it as an unorganized list of different independent vendors and products and start thinking of it as groups of vendors that share a particular approach to the problem. In a good sales pitch”
― April Dunford, Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win

“Trap 1: You are stuck on the idea of what you intended to build, and you don’t realize that your product has become something else.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“My overall recommendation for this step is that you do not spend too much time on it. In many companies I have worked with”
― April Dunford, Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win

“Moving from “features” to “benefits” and then to “value” often confuses people, particularly folks who come from a technical background. An engineer by training, I often viewed features and the benefits derived from those features as interchangeable early in my career. For many consumer technical products, features are presented as valuable in their own right—but only because we do the translation to value automatically in our heads. For example, phone makers have often represented the quality of their cameras by talking about the number of megapixels. Consumers have been trained to translate megapixels to photo quality and therefore believe that cameras with more megapixels take better photos. Digging a bit deeper, the value of “better photos” for most consumers means sharper, more detailed images when printed or zoomed in.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“We generally fail to consider other—potentially better—ways to position our products because we simply aren’t positioning them deliberately.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“If you choose your category wisely, all the assumptions are working for you. You don’t have to tell customers who your competitors are. It’s assumed! You don’t have to list every feature, because it’s assumed that all products in the category have basic category functions.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“Like Joshua Bell delivering a world-class performance in a context that didn’t ascribe value, lousy positioning makes your prospects work harder to figure out if you are worth paying attention to.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“Now, suppose that in your process of experimentation, you end up creating a cake that is actually quite small. It’s so small you could sell it as a self-contained, single-serving cake, so you put a little wrapper around it. You realize that you’ve actually made supreme chocolate muffins instead of better chocolate cake. At first it might not seem like this is much of a change. The product hasn’t changed much — it’s the same batter— but almost everything else about your business has. Why? Because we changed the mental frame of reference around the product from “cake” to “muffin.” That change in context changes everything about the business: Target buyers and where you sell. Unlike cakes, muffins are sold at coffee shops and diners. Competitive alternatives. You are now competing with donuts, Danishes and bagels. Pricing and margin. Muffins sell for a buck or two, and you will be looking to sell a lot of them. Key product features and roadmap. You are now fighting for the hearts and minds of a noble class of people who eat chocolate for breakfast. They’re likely not worried about gluten or the origin of the salt in your caramel. They might like your muffin larger or with more caramel or maybe they want it deep-fried like a hash brown (you might be laughing, but deep down I think you want to try one of those).”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“Positioning is a business strategy exercise—the person who owns the business strategy needs to fully support the positioning, or it’s unlikely to be adopted. In startups, the head is the CEO and/or the founders. In larger companies, the head is usually the division or business unit leader and occasionally the head of marketing or head of product.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“Great positioning takes into account all of the following: The customer’s point of view on the problem you solve and the alternative ways of solving that problem. The ways you are uniquely different from those alternatives and why that’s meaningful for customers. The characteristics of a potential customer that really values what you can uniquely deliver. The best market context for your product that makes your unique value obvious to those customers who are best suited to your product.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“It doesn’t give you any hints about what to do next. I’ve talked to dozens of companies that have gone through the exercise of documenting their positioning statement, and not one did anything”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“We broke out of this mess by changing our positioning. It started with a customer telling me he didn’t believe we were a database at all. “We aren’t?” I said, completely baffled. “What the heck are we?” He went on to explain that in his eyes we were more of a business intelligence tool, or even more specifically, a data warehouse (a specialized system used for data analysis). This wasn’t exactly true in our minds — we lacked some of the features associated with a data warehouse. We did, however, deliver value that was much more clearly aligned with that category of solutions than it was with databases.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“In the work I’ve done with startups, I’ve determined that it’s critical to start with understanding what the customer sees as a competitive alternative, and then working through the rest of the components—attributes, value, characteristics, market category, relevant trends—from there.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“How do you beat Bobby Fischer? You play him at any game but chess.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“It’s important to really understand what customers compare your solution with, because that’s the yardstick they use to define “better.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“If we fail at positioning, we fail at marketing and sales. If we fail at marketing and sales, the entire business fails.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“It’s no use of talking unless people understand what you say.” ZORA NEALE HURSTON”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“Attributes like “15-megapixel camera” or “all-metal construction” enable benefits for customers such as “sharper images” or “a stronger frame.” Articulating value takes the benefits one step further: putting benefits into the context of a goal the customer is trying to achieve. Value could be “photos that are sharp even when printed or zoomed in,” “a frame that saves you money on replacements,” “every level of the organization knows the status of key metrics” or “help is immediately available across every time zone.” Features enable benefits, which can be translated into value in unique customer terms.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“However, keep in mind that most of your target customers have never heard of you or your rival startups—they simply want to know how your product compares to what they use today. Customer-facing positioning must be centered on a customer frame of reference.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“We discovered that our philosophies were strikingly similar—we spent all our time looking for things that work, and then deciphering why.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“Our users were generally database administrators, and their answers were typically quite specific and technical: “We just want to run a fast query” or “We have to produce a report, so we need to retrieve data from a very large database very quickly.” From those answers, I could assume they viewed our database as one that can quickly execute queries. But when we asked them what they would use if our database didn’t exist, none of them named another database; instead, they suggested business intelligence tools or data warehouses. Understanding the customer’s problem wasn’t enough—to really understand how they perceived our strengths and weaknesses, we needed to understand the alternatives to which they compared us. Customers always group solutions in categories, but talking to them about problems doesn’t necessarily reveal those categories.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“However, keep in mind that most of your target customers have never heard of you or your rival startups—they simply want to know how your product compares to what they use today.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“Your target market is the customers who buy quickly, rarely ask for discounts and tell their friends about your offerings.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“The repositioning didn’t stop with marketing and sales — it changed the way we viewed ourselves. We looked at the features we were planning to build in the future and adjusted them to fit our vision of a warehousing platform.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“Group attributes that provide similar value so you can get down to a more reasonable number. The goal of this step is to see the patterns and shorten the list to one to four value clusters. It’s not uncommon for this exercise to produce just a single value point.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“For those of us who make and sell products, the frame of reference that potential customers build around our offerings is critical to staying in business”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“The common failure in both of these traps is not deliberately positioning the product. We stick with a “default” positioning, even when the product changes or the market changes. I believe this happens because we haven’t been taught that every product can be positioned in multiple ways and often the best position for a product is not the default. We have never been taught that positioning is a deliberate business choice that requires time, attention and, importantly, a systematic process.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“Understanding something new is challenging because we don’t yet have a frame of reference.”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

“I was marketing a database called DB2. DB2 was best known as the leading database platform on a mainframe (that’s what we used to call giant, powerful computers back in the olden days).”
― April Dunford, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It