S5E18 – How to Position Your B2B SaaS for Explosive Growth with April Dunford

How do you position your B2B SaaS for explosive growth? In this exciting episode of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast, host Joran Hofman sits down with April Dunford, the founder of Ambient Strategy and a leading expert in brand positioning. April shares valuable insights on why positioning is crucial for success in the B2B SaaS world.

Positioning is often confused with branding and messaging, but it’s far more important and foundational. It’s about clearly defining why your product is the best at delivering value to a specific group of customers. Positioning helps you understand your competitors, highlight your unique features, and make it clear why your solution stands out in the market. Tune in to learn how effective positioning can drive massive growth for your SaaS business.

The Importance of Clear Positioning

April explains that clear positioning is very important because it shapes everything in marketing and sales. It helps create consistent messaging and sales pitches. When positioning is weak, the messaging and sales efforts will also be weak. Strong positioning, on the other hand, helps align all actions towards a common goal.

Distinguishing Positioning from Branding

Positioning and branding are often confused, but they are different. Branding involves visual elements like logos, colors, and communication style. Positioning, however, is about what makes the product unique and better than competitors. Positioning should guide branding, ensuring the brand connects with the target audience.

Common Mistakes in Positioning

Many companies, especially in SaaS, don’t think about their positioning enough. They often make wrong assumptions about competitors or forget that customers will compare them to other solutions. April gives examples of companies that misidentify their competitors or fail to explain their unique value clearly.

The Iterative Nature of Positioning

Positioning is not something you do once and forget. It is an ongoing process. Early-stage companies should start with an initial positioning idea and be ready to adjust as they learn more about their customers and market. Testing ideas and improving based on feedback is key to success.

A Step-by-Step Process for Finding Unique Value

April shares her approach to finding a company’s unique value. She breaks it into five parts: competitors, special features, value, ideal customers, and market category. These parts are all connected, and understanding them is crucial for good positioning.

Translating Positioning into a Sales Pitch

April talks about how to turn positioning into a sales pitch. This helps sales teams understand the positioning and provides a way to test if it works. A strong sales pitch can improve conversion rates, speed up deals, and help achieve sales goals.

Best Practices for Effective Positioning

To make positioning effective, a team from sales, product, and leadership should work together. A clear process based on data and insights (not just opinions) is important. Consistency in how positioning is applied in customer interactions is also crucial for success.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Positioning

Measuring the impact of positioning can be hard, but April suggests looking at metrics like lead quality, deal speed, and conversion rates. Feedback from experienced salespeople can also help assess if the positioning strategy is working.

The Future of Positioning in a Crowded Market

Even with new technologies and competition, the basic principles of positioning remain the same. It’s still essential to clearly explain why customers should choose your product over others, especially in crowded markets.

Advice for SaaS Founders

April gives advice for SaaS founders at different stages of growth. For those aiming for $10K in monthly recurring revenue, she suggests testing ideas about who loves the product and why. For those targeting $10 million in annual recurring revenue, it’s important to validate the positioning and scale efforts carefully.

Wrapping Up

April’s advice on positioning offers a valuable guide for SaaS companies wanting to improve their market strategy. Her focus on structured, ongoing work and team collaboration is helpful for businesses at any stage. For more resources, listeners can check out April’s books, newsletter, and podcast.

Key Timecodes

• (0:00) – Introduction: Understanding Competition and Positioning
• (0:58) – Guest Introduction: Featuring April Dunford
• (1:42) – Defining Positioning vs. Messaging and Branding
• (3:18) – Importance of Clear Positioning
• (4:18) – Positioning as a Foundation for Marketing and Sales
• (6:01) – Differentiating Positioning from Branding
• (6:59) – Positioning in Practice: Impact and Implementation
• (9:23) – Common Mistakes in SaaS Positioning
• (12:34) – Misunderstanding Competition: The Intern Analogy
• (14:28) – Importance of Positioning in B2B
• (20:18) – Sales Pitch and Positioning: April’s Process
• (24:08) – Testing Positioning with Sales Pitches
• (27:44) – Cross-functional Team Importance in Positioning
• (30:40) – Workshop Style for Positioning Process
• (34:32) – Challenges in Implementing Positioning
• (36:53) – Future of Positioning in Crowded Markets
• (39:07) – Advice for Early-stage SaaS Companies
• (41:39) – Advice for Scaling SaaS Companies
• (44:06) – How to Contact April Dunford

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – April

Companies don’t really understand who the competition is in the minds of customers. And so they do a bad job of positioning because they’ve got these poor assumptions. If you have a brand new thing and it’s not even in the market yet, you may have what I would call a positioning thesis. I think we compete with these guys, and I think this is the value we’re going to deliver, those guys can’t. And therefore, I think these are the customers that love me, and this is how I’m going to win. But you don’t know until you actually get out in the market And a lot of times, your assumptions prove to be incorrect. If I’m going to build messaging on the homepage, I need to understand, well, who’s my messaging for? So what does a best fit customer look like? And then I got to think about, well, what am I trying to communicate? I’m trying to communicate what’s the value that I can provide those customers that no other solution can. So I need to understand that positioning to go build messaging.

[00:00:58.180] – Joran

In today’s episode, we’re Today, we’re going to talk about how to position your B2B SaaS with the goal of achieving explosive growth. My guest today is April Dunford. April is the founder of the agency called MBM Strategy, where she advises over 200 plus tech companies on positioning, market strategy, and product marketing. She’s a board member to various startups and the other of the books, Obviously, Awesome and Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win. She’s been consulting over 10 years for companies like Google, IBM, Epic Games, Postman, and a lot of mid-size SAAS companies. I personally have seen her at all the major SaaS events as a speaker, so it’s really great to have her on the show today. Welcome to the show, April.

[00:01:39.210] – April

Hey, it’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

[00:01:42.310] – Joran

We’re going to dive right in. If we’re going to talk about positioning, how would you even explain positioning to somebody who doesn’t know what it is?

[00:01:50.930] – April

It’s an interesting question because as the positioning expert, when I started doing this work, there wasn’t a lot of people talking about positioning, and so I always had to start with a It’s the definition of it. People will get positioning confused with messaging, for example. I think positioning is an input to messaging, but it’s not the same thing as messaging. Same thing with branding. People will say, It’s like branding. They’ll even use the phrase brand positioning. That bugs me because I think there’s branding, there’s positioning, and those two things are separate. My definition looks like this. Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. It defines who are my competitors? What do I have that’s different from my competitors? What is the value that I can deliver that none of those other alternatives can? Then what customer is a really good fit for my value and what is the market that I intend to win? If you came to me and said, April, we need to do messaging, I’d say, Great. Who’s the message for? Who do we compete against?

[00:02:56.790] – April

And how do we win? I need all those things as an input before I could actually start crafting the copy for my homepage or anywhere else. That’s how I think about positioning.

[00:03:06.390] – Joran

Nice. Love it. I mean, it’s really important to have your positioning, right? I think that’s pretty clear. But why is it important to have a really clear positioning like you defined it just right now?

[00:03:18.700] – April

Well, a lot of things flow downstream from that. If you think about, if I’m going to build messaging on the homepage, I need to understand, well, who’s my messaging for? What does it best fit customer look like. Then I got to think about, well, what am I trying to communicate? I’m trying to communicate what’s the value that I can provide those customers that no other solution can. I need to understand that positioning to go build messaging. If I have a sales team for for example, I’m trying to build a sales pitch, well, what’s the job of a sales pitch? The job of the sales pitch is to answer the question, why pick me over the other things you could pick? Positioning is the definition for that. It’s the definition of who’s my competition? What have I got that’s What’s the value I can deliver the other guys can’t? Why is it a good fit for a particular customer? We really need to have this positioning as the foundation of everything we’re doing in marketing and sales. If we have weak positioning, then we’re going to have weak messaging. We’re going to have a weak sales pitch.

[00:04:18.120] – April

We need to start there. It’s the foundation for everything else.

[00:04:21.880] – Joran

You mentioned it’s not the same as brand, is not the same as messaging. You didn’t like the word brand positioning. How would you explain the difference between between positioning and branding?

[00:04:32.100] – April

I’m going to caveat this with, I’ve seen so many definitions of branding. I don’t know how people figure it out that aren’t marketers, because it feels to me like marketers come up with a new definition of branding every time we turn around. Sometimes that definition includes positioning. Then they say, Well, if I define it this way, what’s the difference between positioning and branding? I say, Well, if you define it that way, then the difference does not exist. But In my world, and I’ll clarify my world is big-ticket enterprise B2B stuff. In big-ticket enterprise B2B tech, when we talk about branding, branding includes a lot of things. It includes the iconography that we use. It includes things that sound simple that aren’t. What pictures are we going to use and what is the font we’re going to use and what’s the vibe we’re going for with our brand? What’s the tone of voice we’re going to use in our marketing communications. If you think about it, the branding in terms of the colors and the way we speak and the way we would do graphics and pictures for something like software for a daycare, for example, where you might want to be really playful and have things that feel childlike almost, and you have a bit of whimsy in the way you talk about stuff, and you can maybe be quite casual in the way you speak, versus what would my brand look like if I do security systems for a bank.

[00:06:01.220] – April

Well, I don’t want playful and whimsical man. This thing needs to convince me that we are trustworthy, we’re solid, we’re serious people doing a serious thing. The colors are going to be different. The iconography is going to be different. Our tone of voice is going to be much more directive and authoritative. In my opinion, that’s the branding stuff. It would make sense that I would figure out my positioning first and have that as an input to my brand. Who are my target customers? What What do they like? What do they want in a brand? And what are they looking for? Then how can we align with that from a branding perspective? So I think branding is really important, but it’s very separate from positioning. And I think, ideally, your positioning is an input to the brand stuff.

[00:06:46.640] – Joran

Yeah, makes sense. We’re going to talk about positioning, even if you do know something about branding or don’t. Is branding important for any business? Because you worked with a lot of mid-sized SaaS companies, you worked with a lot of enterprise companies.

[00:06:59.870] – April

Yeah. Positioning. Here’s the way I would look at this. Doing positioning now, whether you like it or not, and whether or not you’re doing it well. So is it important? You’re already doing it. The way it works, if you think it. Positioning is almost like the way we show up in the market in a lot of ways and what people think about our stuff. We might not have done a positioning exercise explicitly, but when we wrote our marketing copy or created created the sales deck, we had some stuff in our mind. We were thinking, we made some assumptions about who our competitor was. We made some assumptions about why people would pick us over anybody else. We made some assumptions about who would be on the receiving end of this and who would be a customer that we would be talking to. I think it’s very important for anybody. A lot of times, we’ll make those assumptions, but the assumptions are incorrect. Or worse and more common, the assumptions on the sales team are different from the assumptions on the marketing team, and they’re different from the assumptions in the product team. What we really want is really tight positioning that is consistent across the company that we deliver in a consistent way.

[00:08:12.000] – April

In the work I do with companies, the companies are all different sizes. The commonality is that they have a product in market. They have an idea of who loves their stuff and why. They’re just not doing a really great job of communicating in a way that is really easy for customers customers to understand. Great positioning makes your differentiated value or the why pick me versus the other guys really obvious to the customers you’re trying to sell to. Now, if you have a brand new thing and it’s not even in the market yet, you may have what I would call a positioning thesis. I think we compete with these guys, and I think this is the value we’re going to deliver, those guys can’t. Therefore, I think these are the customers that are going to love me, and this is how I’m going to win. But you don’t know until you actually get out in the market, and a lot of times your assumptions prove to be incorrect. I think really early stage company should have a thesis. They should write it down and test against that thesis. But I don’t think they should expect to have their positioning perfectly tightened up until they’ve gotten a first wave of customers and they know a bit more about how customers behave and how our stuff shows up in the market.

[00:09:23.370] – Joran

Yeah, because in the end, it’s going to be an iterative process where you keep reshaping it. What are some of the biggest mistakes you see, especially SaaS companies make while positioning their product?

[00:09:33.600] – April

The first mistake I see SaaS companies make is they just don’t think about positioning at all. They have this idea that, I got this thing and everybody’s going to love it. All I got to do is show you the stuff and everyone will just buy it. They almost think about their stuff as being alone in the market. They don’t think about the fact that a B2B buyer is going to put you on a shortlist and compare you to other things. They’re not specifically trying to highlight, Well, how are we different than the other things in the market? Or they’re not trying to specifically communicate to a certain customer that is a really good fit for their stuff. The number one thing is they just don’t think about positioning at all, and they’re just bumbling their way through it. Now, sometimes we get a product where the value is obvious, the segmentation is obvious, and the company comes out of the gate, and it just ain’t that hard. It is obviously hitting the mark, and the company just goes. The The problem is that often that happens when there’s not a lot of competition in the market.

[00:10:34.150] – April

The thing you have is truly innovative and amazing, and there’s a lot of market demand for it. Then what happens is you’ll get some competitors will catch up to you at some point, or maybe some competitors, now that you’ve proven the market exists, some competitors will come in and do things a little bit differently. Now you’ve got to do this positioning to say, Well, why me and not these other folks? Now I got other folks that I’m not just competing with Excel. Then the companies will be like, Well, shit, we don’t know how to do that because we never it in the first place. It was just instinctual. That’s the first problem. Second problem that I see a lot is companies don’t really understand who the competition is in the minds of customers, and so they do a bad job of positioning because they’ve got these poor assumptions. For example, it’s really common for me to get these earlier stage startups will call me and they’ll say, We got this thing. It’s amazing. I’ll say, Who do you compete with? They’ll give me a big long list of There’s a huge long list, and I’ll say, Okay, well, so how do you beat those guys?

[00:11:34.600] – April

They’ll say, Ease of use. We got this thing and we could do it in two clicks. All the other guys, it takes 59 clicks, and it’s really hard, and it’s ease of use, so that’s how we’re going to win. I say, okay, ease of use. That sounds good. Then I say, but, hey, I never heard any of these guys. Do you ever lose a deal to these guys? And they’ll say, well, no, actually, we don’t. I’ll say, well, does that mean you win every deal? Every customer you talk to, you win? And they say, no, no, no. We lose a lot of deals to just no decision. And I’ll say, well, okay, no decision. So what are the companies doing to solve the problem? If they’re not using you or any of your competitors, what are they doing? They say, oh, I’m just like, do you use pen and paper, Excel? Did you just hire an intern to do it? And I’m like, Oh, so your competition is the intern and your positioning is, you should pick me because of ease use. Do you know what’s really easy to use? The intern. The intern is really easy to use.

[00:12:34.280] – April

You’re like, Hey, Joey, give me a coffee. Fill it to Frenchie. Come back when you’re done. You’re never going to beat that guy. That guy’s super easy to use. If I do understand that my competition is actually Excel or the intern, well, the intern is bad at stuff. The intern quits on you. The intern makes mistakes in a way that software never would. The intern doesn’t understand the full history of everything you’ve done with this customer. There’s all kinds of stuff you’re What software can do that the intern can’t. But you have to recognize first that the intern is maybe your competition. That’s the second thing, is understanding how a customer does the comparison in their mind and then positioning against that. Love it.

[00:13:14.150] – Joran

In the end, a lot of the times you’re competing against something you don’t think, and often it’s Excel or it’s a real manual work.

[00:13:23.150] – April

Real manual work is often what we’re competing with in B2B. It’s manual work, it’s Excel spreadsheets, It’s piecing together a bunch of tools that were never built to solve this problem in the first place, but they’re good enough solution. Change is hard, and customers are going to have to make a real effort to stop doing what they’re doing today to do something else. It feels risky. We’re going to have to show up and show that there’s incredible value in making that change. Then wherever possible, we’re trying to take the risk out of it. How do we ensure that this change will be successful and everybody will adopt and the person picking isn’t going to get in trouble for suggesting that, Hey, we should do this thing in this different way.

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[00:14:28.640] – Joran

If SaaS companies now are thinking like, Hey, we definitely have to do something about our positioning. Do you have a step-by-step process for them to find their unique value prop?

[00:14:38.820] – April

I do. This is what I would consider my life’s work at this point. When I started out early in my career in tech, I was in product marketing, and I was learning about positioning by doing it. At the beginning, I was doing it, and I didn’t even know that’s what it was called. Eventually, I took some marketing classes and realized there was this thing called positioning, and that was the thing we were doing. What frustrated me is there didn’t seem to be an accepted methodology for doing positioning. That really bug me because it seemed like such a fundamental thing that we’re always worried about, that we’re always thinking about. But every time I talk to a senior Vice President of Marketing and say, How do you do positioning? Everybody’s doing it in a little bit different way. A lot of people were just doing trial and error. We’re just going to throw something out there, see if it sticks. If it doesn’t work, we’ll throw it out, we’ll try again. That bothered me. I decided to work through. If we had some a process to start with, this would be better than nothing, even if the process wasn’t perfect.

[00:15:37.040] – April

The way I look at it is I started this way. I said, Well, let’s break positioning down in its component pieces. We know what the component pieces are. We agree on that, even in marketing school, there’s five things. First of all, it’s competitive alternatives. If you didn’t exist, what would a customer do? The second thing is differentiated capabilities. These are the features of your product or your company the stuff you got that the other guys don’t have. The third thing is value. At the end of the day, customer doesn’t actually care that much about your features. They care what the features can do for their business. What’s the value you can deliver that the other guys can’t? I’m in B2B, and we care a lot about segmentation. The fourth thing is, who’s our best fit customer? Who are we actually trying to sell this thing to? The fifth thing is market category. Am I a database or a business intelligence tool? Am I a robot or a A self-driving vehicle? These things are all different. What’s the market category I’m going to position the product in? Those are the five things. My methodology is based on my observation that these five things have a relationship to each other.

[00:16:44.630] – April

If you think about things like, what’s my differentiated value I can deliver to a customer? Well, my differentiated value that I could deliver to a customer is completely dependent on my differentiated capabilities. I don’t get to just make it up from nothing. It comes from the stuff my product can do or my company can do that no one else can. But then when you think about it, it’s only differentiated if I compare it to a competitor. I can’t figure out value without understanding my differentiated capabilities. I can’t figure out differentiated capabilities until I figure out who I’m differentiated from. So these things are all connected. Then if you think about it, what’s my definition of a best fit customer? Best fit customer is a customer that really cares a lot about the value that only I can deliver. I can’t figure out best fit customer until I know value. Then market category is the same thing. It’s a bit like the context I’m going to position the product in such that this value is making sense to these folks I’m trying to target. But then, of course, I set market category, and that changes who my competition is.

[00:17:43.470] – April

Oh, no, everything relates to everything else. In my methodology, we start with competitive alternatives. We start there because what I found is that if we started anywhere else, we’d get some positioning that looked okay in the office, but it wouldn’t work when we took it out the market because it was insufficiently differentiated from the other things that a customer could do to solve the problem. We start with competitive alternatives. That’s our stake in the ground. We start there. This is what I have to position against or put another way This is what I got to beat in order to win a deal. Once I got that, then I can say, Okay, these are my competitors. What have I got that they don’t have? I can list my differentiated capabilities, and this is usually easy. I’ll fill up a whiteboard on this stuff. Then I can get to value. What I do is I go down that list of capabilities, and for every capability, I ask the question, so what? Okay, we got this Whiz-Bang AI feature. Why does the customer care? What is the value that that feature delivers for a customer’s business? Then when I’m doing that, I can look for the patterns that come out because I don’t want 59 points of value.

[00:18:51.680] – April

I want one, two, three maximum value themes or value buckets. At the end of that step, I can say, look, you want to pick me because I’m the only product on the market that can give you a combination of this plus this, and the features are tucked in underneath. Then once I got that, I can say, Okay, I can go sell this thing to anybody, but not everybody cares about those value points. What are the characteristics of a targeted I’ve got an account that make them really care a lot about the value they can only get from me? That’s how you get the fourth thing. Then the fifth thing is market category. Now I got value, I got best fit customers. What’s the best context to position this thing in that makes that value obvious to those folks. That’s how my methodology works. I wrote a book about this. It’s called Obviously Awesome that gets into the gory details of how to do it. But the idea is that’s how we figure out positioning. The second thing I think that’s really important is, and I’ve learned this from working with clients is once you have that positioning, if you’re B2B and you have a sales team, you’re going to really take that positioning and translate it into a sales pitch.

[00:19:55.260] – April

That’s for two reasons. One, your salespeople, just looking at your positioning, won’t know what to do with it. They need to know how to tell the story. Then second thing, it’s a really good way to test your positioning to just build a sales pitch out of it and let’s go test it on some real prospects and see if it lands. I wrote a second book about how to take that positioning and translate it into a sales pitch. That’s what my work is all about in two minutes.

[00:20:18.320] – Joran

We’re going to talk a bit longer about it because the second book you mentioned is Sales Switch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win. But that fully comes from positioning yourself first before you can craft that story, right?

[00:20:31.320] – April

Yeah. I never thought I would end up writing a sales book, but I got here for a few reasons. One is interesting. I started working with companies on positioning work, and we get done the positioning, and the marketers would be happy because they have differentiated value, and that’s the core of your messaging. So they go, great. We know who the competitors are, we know the differentiated value, we know the market category. We can go build messaging out of that. See you later. Everything’s good. But then you look at sales, and sales will be going, oh, yeah, we get this. That’s good. Then they go back and do the same pitch they always did. You’re like, hang up, people, we can’t have this positioning over here. And then sales tell them a totally different story. At first I thought, I’ll just take whatever the standard sales pitch structure and I’ll figure out how to translate positioning into that. What I discovered is there is no standard sales pitch structure, which surprised me a lot because salespeople do a lot of training. If you meet salespeople, they’ve all done training, not like marketers at all. Salespeople have done training on how to negotiate, handle objections, build a rapport with an account, how to ask for the sale, how to move a deal along.

[00:21:41.040] – April

There’s a lot of stuff that salespeople get trained on, but nowhere in that training is there, here’s what a good pitch looks like, because there’s this assumption that a pitch exists, and maybe it came from marketing. When you go into marketing, nobody in marketing knows. They don’t know anything about what’s going on in sales. They don’t know what a good pitch looks like. And so as a result, what you have are these pitches that are like the Wild West. The reps are just making stuff up because nobody’s given them anything good to work with. Anyways, I worked with a couple of companies that I thought did a good job on pitches. One of them was IBM. When I worked there, they had a pitch structure that had come from a consulting engagement with these really smart sales consultants called the Corporate Executive Board. This is like 20 years ago when that company still existed. They had created this customized pitch structure for IBM based on the stuff IBM was selling. So I got exposed to it there. When I left IBM and I went back to a startup, me and the VP sales pulled out some of the nuggets from that sales structure and used that as a pitch structure.

[00:22:45.380] – April

And then I’ve been using a modified version of that pitch structure ever since. So I don’t know if my sales pitch structure is the best thing out there. I highly suspect it is not. But I’ll tell you something, it’s way better than having Nothing. It’s way better than what I see in… And when I say 95%, I really mean it. 95% of the companies I’ve worked with don’t really have a structure at all. They’re just Wild Westing it. I started teaching that to my clients because they were like, Okay, we have this positioning, but we don’t know how to make it real for the salespeople. I started teaching that to my clients. And then after a while, I just thought, Well, I should write this down in a book, and then people have something other than nothing, which is what they have right now. I’ve been 10 years at this. It’s coming up to 300-ish companies that I’ve worked with, and all of them are using a modified version of that pitch structure they learned from me. I think it works, and I think it’s valuable for people. It certainly gets people thinking about what we should have a structure rather than just whatever the hell the reps are doing out there.

[00:23:51.300] – Joran

Nice. I think it’s also helping you and the companies, I guess, to measure results, because positioning is, I won’t say it’s fundamental, but you can’t really see the conversions changing or things like that. But when you turn it into an actual proper sales pitch, then you can already measure it pretty quickly.

[00:24:08.730] – April

Well, in my opinion, it’s the only way you can test positioning. Because without the sales pitch, what we’re left with is trying to test messaging. We take the positioning, we turn it into messaging, and then we’ll make a page out of it, and then we’re going to do A/B testing on the landing page. Well, now I’m not just testing positioning anymore. Now I’m testing copyright and page design and my ability to drive the right traffic. Are these even people I care about that I’m measuring this for? Then a lot of the companies I’m working with, they’re enterprise B2B. They don’t get tons and tons of traffic on their website. How long do we got to run this test before we get a pass fail. It’s just a bad way to test positioning. Whereas if I take the positioning and map it to a sales pitch, then what I’ve got, well, I have complete control over who I’m doing the pitch to. I can control for everything Am I pitching to the right people? So yes, I’m going to only pitch it to qualified prospects. Then we can go in there and get a lot of signal during that story.

[00:25:09.670] – April

We can see where is the customer squinting their eyes and going, I don’t understand this, versus where is the customer getting really excited? What are the questions that the customer is asking? And then we can actually say, Well, hey, why did you ask that? It seems obvious to us. How come you don’t get it, buddy? And all these things. And so it It gives us a lot of signal to tune the pitch. If we’re doing this pitch with an experienced sales rep, a very experienced sales rep knows when a pitch is good and when a pitch is bad. If I can train an experienced sales rep on it, get them comfortable with it, have them do a bunch of practice pitches, then I can just ask them, Is this a better pitch than the old pitch? You’re going to get a good answer there because who better to judge this than that person? I like to stay really practical on all this stuff. In my I think, We got this positioning. Let’s just turn into a sales pitch and test it out and see how it lands. If we know it lands in sales, now all we got to do is make the marketing copy tell the same story that we already know works in sales because we’ve tested it with real prospects.

[00:26:15.040] – April

In my opinion, it’s the best way to do it.

[00:26:17.240] – Joran

It’s a really quick but also cheap way to test it because in the end, you just have to train a couple of salespeople to get it out there.

[00:26:23.320] – April

That’s the idea.

[00:26:25.400] – Joran

If we’re going to dive deeper into positioning, I think we now have components to get it right for SaaS companies? Do you have some best practices for companies you’ve seen which have really good positioning?

[00:26:37.960] – April

Yeah, there’s a bunch of things that I think are important. One is, I don’t think positioning works very well if we build it and it’s just a little project in the marketing department for a lot of reasons. We really want to get sales involved because they know a lot about how customers buy and how they make decisions and what they like and what they don’t like. But if we’re building it in the marketing department without any of that input from sales, I think we’re really missing a trick. The second thing is, if we don’t get sales involved in creating the positioning, they’re not really going to understand it when we get it at the end, and they’re likely to just reject it and say, app, that’s stupid. I’m not using that. Forget it. So one way to get their buy-in is let’s get their opinions while we’re building it so that we can bake their opinions into it. So that’s sales. But I also think, ideally, we have product involved because product knows a lot about differentiated capabilities. They know a lot about how our product stacks up against the other products in the market and what’s differentiating and what isn’t.

[00:27:44.170] – April

Often marketing doesn’t understand that as deeply as product does. Getting product involved is, again, really valuable because they’ve got something really valuable to bring to the table. Ideally, they need to understand what the positioning is as well. Now I’ve got a cross-functional team. I’ve got marketing product product and sales. If you’re a smaller company, I think you need the CEO involved because the CEO has got opinions about this. If you come up with this positioning and say, Hey, guess what? We’re not a database anymore. We’re a business intelligence tool. Do you think the CEO wants to hear about that? If you don’t have the input and guidance from the CEO who is thinking about this at a bigger picture level than the team is, I think that’s a mistake, and the positioning might not stick because you’ll present it the CEO and they’ll say, No, I disagree. In my opinion, if we really want to do a good job of positioning, it’s a cross-functional team effort. I got marketing sales product, I got the CEO involved. Then if I’m going to do this cross-functional team effort, I need to come with a process. I can’t just go in there and Wild West wing it because then it’ll turn into a battle of opinions.

[00:28:50.690] – April

If we just get everybody in the room and go, Hey, why does everybody love our stuff? That’s just going to be people giving their random opinions. You know what sales always says when we ask that Why does everyone love our stuff? Sales says, Because our sales reps are so great. They just care so much. Or product will say, Because we have the best product. Marketing will say, Because we just do a great job marketing. Customer success will be in there and say, Are you kidding me? We are saving all these deals. We don’t want that. We need some a process that takes the opinions out of it. I think my process is one way you could do that. I’m sure there’s others. I think these are the best practices. I think it’s a cross-functional team effort. I think you need a process to follow. It It sounds self-serving, but when I did this stuff internally as the vice president of marketing, what really bug me is that I had to run a process, and that sucked because I couldn’t represent marketing and be the facilitator at the same time. I always wished I could bring in an outside facilitator to facilitate these things so that I didn’t have to do it.

[00:29:53.700] – April

When the work I do, I come as the outside facilitator so I can ask the question that is maybe uncomfortable politically for other people to ask and say, Oh, that’s interesting. Vp sales, CEO, you’re saying very different things. Both of these things cannot be true. Sometimes you need an outside perspective on that to be the tiebreaker on things or try to get consensus when things get contentious. I think that helps, too. But it is not a requirement. I used to do this stuff internally on my own without an outside facilitator. I think companies can absolutely do that. I think if you get stuck, an outside facilitator is one way to get on stuck.

[00:30:32.770] – Joran

And regarding the process, is it like a workshop style where you get everybody in the room and you work them to get the components of the positioning right?

[00:30:40.860] – April

That’s exactly it. In the work I do, we get everybody together in a room, we work through the process and we get that sucker done in a week.

[00:30:49.740] – Joran

So it doesn’t have to take a lot of time.

[00:30:51.990] – April

That’s right. The key to it is getting the right people in the room because we need folks that understand the customer, folks that understand the product, folks that understand the dynamics of the market, how customers buy all that stuff, we need to bring that expertise into the room. I need the right people in sales, the right people in product. I generally need the CEO. If it’s a big company, I’ll get the CEO of Google. But I probably need whoever owns P&L for the division in the room. People that have a stake in this or care a lot about it need to be in the room so we can have the fight and get agreement and alignment on whatever we come up with.

[00:31:25.780] – Joran

Yeah, nice. We talked about a little bit because if then that’s done, you turn it into real pitch, you start testing it. How do you measure product positioning effectiveness?

[00:31:37.970] – April

Positioning affects everything. It affects the quality of the leads we get. It affects the velocity of a lead going through the pipeline. It affects conversion rates at every single stage. Can I just pick one number and say, Oh, this number went up, and therefore the positioning is better? It’s hard to do. The way we test it is I’m going to translate it into a sales pitch, and then I’m going to test it with my sales folks. The first test is, does my best salesperson, once they’re comfortable with it and we’ve got a pitch that’s working, does that person subjectively think this pitch is better? Because they’re the expert on it. And generally, if they think it’s better, it is better. But then what we should see when we implement that pitch, we should immediately see some benefit to the pitch being approved from the point of that first call beyond. What it means is we would expect better conversion from first call to a real opportunity. We would expect there to be more velocity in that, so it’s quicker to get a deal cooking from first call to whatever. We should expect those deals to be bigger.

[00:32:47.790] – April

We should expect less discounting. We should expect a lot of things. But if we’re B2B and it takes us six months to close a deal, we might not actually see the impact on revenue for months. Then same thing, if we turn it into messaging and we put it on the homepage and stuff, assuming we don’t screw any of that up, assuming we’re good at messaging and we’re good at campaigns and we’re good at everything else, we should see a lot of those metrics turn up, too. But we often don’t know because it takes a long time for something to move through the pipeline. In my world, we’re like, Okay, what is the minimum to say we did something here? The minimum is my salespeople think this is a better sales pitch than the old pitch. If we can achieve that, which you think, Oh, how hard could that be? Let me tell you, it’s hard. People are used to the old pitch, even if it’s crap, even if they complain about it. They’ll be like, Oh, we don’t like this new pitch. I’m used to telling a joke on slide three. What happened to my slide 3?

[00:33:46.680] – April

I missed that slide. If you can convince your best salespeople that this is a better pitch, then probably it’s really a better pitch. But like I said, we should see immediate improvement in some of the metrics we have from first pitch forward, and then some of the other stuff is going to take longer.

[00:34:00.510] – Joran

I love how you phrase it because in the end, people are reluctant to change sometimes. So starting here is a great way. I think it’s also one challenge people encounter because the components of positioning sound really practical, really quick to do. You can do it in a week, you mentioned we make- Implementing the positioning does not take a week, unfortunately. Okay, we’re getting the proper positioning right, and then implementing will take longer. But still, it sounds- Much longer. Yeah, but I guess people are going to run into a lot of challenges along the way. What are some of the common challenges?

[00:34:32.520] – April

There’s a few things that I think companies have to really watch out for. One is we get everybody in agreement, alignment in the room. Then in some of the really big companies, they will go to build a pitch and get a lot of people involved in building the pitch that weren’t there in the workshop. They got their own opinions about how things… We get this nice clean pitch, but then it starts getting messy because people are trying to add stuff to it or take stuff away from it. Then we had the same thing on the messaging side. We’ll all get agreement on, here’s what the value themes are. But then the marketers will be like, Oh, well, I got my little pet thing. We’ve always said X, Y, Z, so that needs to stay. Or the opposite. We’ve always said that, and that’s boring, so we don’t want to say that anymore. I would say the biggest challenge is you got to pick it and stick it. You got to stop messing with it. You got to get agreement in the room and say, Look, this is what it is, and we’re going We’re going to move on to the execution of this, and we’re going to stop relitigating this positioning every week.

[00:35:36.650] – April

We shouldn’t be changing this positioning unless something significant happens in the market that requires us to change it. That would be a new competitor comes into the market, or maybe there’s an acquisition, or your competitors catch up to you on a couple of things, and that’s surprising, and now you got a thing that was differentiating, no longer is differentiating, so now you got to fix that. Or you put out your own new release, and there’s significant new functionality there that actually allows you to deliver some value you couldn’t before. Then we’re going to change the positioning, and then we’re going to change the pitch that goes with that, and then we’re going to change the messaging that goes with that. But if nothing has happened, why are we messing with it? We should not be messing with it. The hardest thing, I think, is to take the positioning, stick it, and then just relentlessly execute on it, consistently, consistently, consistently, over and over and over and over. Just don’t mess with it. It’ll just start working at the point where everybody’s getting bored of it. They want to do something different. I think consistency is really, really powerful.

[00:36:38.000] – April

You just got to just grind it.

[00:36:40.020] – Joran

Nice. We’re going to talk about the future of positioning. There’s a lot of things changing, especially in SaaS or markets getting more crowded with all the new AI tools coming out there. How do you see the future of positioning?

[00:36:53.790] – April

It’s interesting. If you go back and read the first book that talked about positioning, which is this book called Positioning: The Battle for your mind by these guys, Riesentraout. They have a whole chapter talking about why do we need positioning. The reason why we need positioning is because markets are incredibly crowded. Oh, my gosh, markets are so crowded. That was 1982. We’ve had a crowded market problem for a while. If you’re in a market, you’ve got competition. You’ve got a lot of competition. I don’t think that problem is new. Is it probably getting worse? Yes. Does that mean positioning is more important than it’s ever been, in my opinion? Yeah, it does. Now, I also believe that positioning is one of these fundamental things. It’s being able to succinctly describe why a customer should pick you versus anyone else. That’s a fundamental base-level marketing thing. I don’t think that’s something that changes because technology is changing or markets it. All those things change. But this thinking around how do we stand in the and how do we make sure a customer understands why they should pick us versus anyone else, I don’t think that’s actually too susceptible to trends.

[00:38:07.760] – April

If I look at positioning, our fundamental understanding of positioning is fairly consistent since the ’80s, which is when we first started seeing markets with many, many products, I don’t see this stuff changing a lot, at least conceptually, how we think about it. I don’t see it changing a lot, even in, again, a lot of ways that we execute on might change. This is the thing about marketing. Tactic change all the time, but fundamental underlying strategy doesn’t actually change all that much. It’s how we make it real in the market changes all the time. We used to do print ads all the time. Now we don’t do print ads so much. Tactic change. But the underlying fundamentals of marketing strategy do not actually change that much.

[00:38:51.960] – Joran

We’re going to start wrapping the podcast with the final two questions. When we talk about growing a B2B SaaS, what advice would give a SaaS round or just starting out and growing to 10K monthly recurring revenue? It’s a really early stage.

[00:39:07.060] – April

I would say they should really be thinking about who loves my stuff and why. Do I have assumptions about that? When I built this product, did I build it with certain assumptions in mind? And then how can I test those assumptions? Let’s say I built this product and I decided this is a product and it’s going to help quick serve restaurants do faster turnover on tables or something. And the competition is pen and paper or whatever. When you go and you sell some deals, is that true? Does it do what you thought it would do? Is it quick serve restaurants or does it turn out it’s actually more sit down restaurants or a different restaurant? Are you really competing with what you thought you were competing with, or are you seeing that people are doing something you didn’t actually anticipate? How can you use that information to get more effective in your go to market stuff in the future? So, hey, We learned that it’s not really quick serve restaurant to see the other guy, so we’re just going to target them. Hey, we learned the value was actually more this than that, and so we’re going to tighten that up.

[00:40:08.950] – April

Understanding what your fundamental go-to-market assumptions are and then trying to test those assumptions and build on that, I think is really important. If you do that effectively, then I think you get to a great product with really solid positioning in the market much quicker than if you’re just taking your victim as you find them. Yeah.

[00:40:27.920] – Joran

Then let’s assume now we passed the 10K MR, and we’re going to make a huge step towards 10 million ARR. But what advice would you give SaaS founders here? They did pass the initial threshold and now are moving all the way to 10 million.

[00:40:42.890] – April

In my opinion, the first wave of customers is all about validating your thesis. Are we competing against who we thought we were competing against? Are our differentiators what we thought they were? What is the value we can deliver that no one else can? And who’s a really good fit for that. Most companies go through a phase where they have a wave of customers where they’re trying to prove out those things. But once you’ve proven that out, then you’re looking at, Well, how can I really smash my foot on the gas and go after precisely these customers with precisely this message because I know I can beat these competitors all day with exactly that. Once you’ve gone through this first wave where we validated what I would call your positioning thesis, now we can really tighten up the positioning and just run right at that market and actually invest some money in marketing and sales resources to go get it because we know that it works. Nice.

[00:41:39.460] – Joran

Love it. We’re going to wrap up. I’m going to try to summarize. When we talk about positioning or how you define it, positioning defines how your product is the best in the world in delivering something. It’s not brand, it’s not messaging. A great positioning will help you to create differentiated value, and this is how you will win. Big mistakes, not thinking about positioning, not having sales and product and CEO involved. It needs to be a cross-functional team effort. Components of positioning, competitor not understanding the competition in the mind of the customers. How does the customer actually compares you? Different Differentshaling capabilities, what do you have versus the real competitor? Value, always ask, so what? We have X feature, try to limit the number of values you will list out. Who’s the best fit customer, which really cares about the value, and then define your market category, so who are you going to target? Have a proper process to create it. You can create it within a week. It will take a lot longer to implement. A quick way to do it is turn it into a real pitch to test it, because that is the quickest way to test your positioning.

[00:42:46.600] – Joran

You will have complete control with the right people, lots of signals, instant feedback within the calls. If you really want to get quick feedback, ask yourselves if they find it better. Do they have better conversions, quicker velocity? Challenges you run into, changing the components after your agreement, stick with it and start working with it consistently. For 10K MR, ask yourself who lost your stuff and why, and for 10 million AR, validate your positioning thesis. That’s it.

[00:43:15.820] – April

It’s pretty good, man. That’s the summary. You’re like a human ChatGPT, man. Let’s summarize that right there.

[00:43:23.500] – Joran

If you want to get in contact with you, April, how can they do so?

[00:43:26.980] – April

The best thing to do is look at my website. It’s aprildunfer. Com. There’s a bunch of stuff you’ll see there. I got a newsletter. If you sign up for the newsletter, you’ll get access to a bunch of templates that go with the books to help you work on this stuff if you want to work on your positioning on your own. There’s links to the books there if you can’t find the books, although I’m all over Amazon, so you shouldn’t have too hard of a time there. Then I also have a podcast. If you want to geek out on positioning and go deep on some of this stuff, I have a podcast where I pick particular topics related to positioning and we go deep on that. You can find the links for that on my website as well. That’s probably the best place to go look. It’s aprildunford. Com.

[00:44:06.540] – Joran

Can’t miss it, but we’ll make sure to link it. We’re going to link to your book. Obviously, awesome. Siel’s pitch, How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win, to the newsletter with the templates and then also to your podcast. Everybody can just click on the links wherever they’re listening. Great. Thanks for coming on. For people listening, please leave us a review. If you like this episode, we’re going to add a poll to this on Spotify, so let me know what you thought. It’s always great to hear. Thanks again for coming on, April.

[00:44:34.120] – April

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for having me.

[00:44:36.000] – Joran

Thank you for watching this show of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. You made it till the end, so I think we can assume you like this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you like this content, feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show, if you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about Reditus feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS.