April Dunford on product positioning, segmentation, and optimizing your sales process

April Dunford, author of Obviously Awesome and a positioning consultant who has worked with roughly 200 B2B tech companies, walks through how to think about product positioning. The conversation covers how to recognize weak positioning, her step-by-step method (competitive alternatives, differentiated value, best-fit customers, market category), how to run it as a cross-functional exercise, and the difference between segmentation and personas.

01Key learnings

• Weak positioning shows up across the funnel: confused prospects, sluggish middle-of-pipeline deals, and churn after the sale, so watch sales calls for signs of confusion.
• Start positioning by identifying competitive alternatives, including the status quo, since roughly 40% of B2B deals are lost to 'no decision' rather than a competitor.
• Turn a list of differentiated capabilities into customer value, then group them into two or three value themes that only you can credibly claim.
• Define best-fit customers as the company characteristics that make them care most about your differentiated value, rather than starting from a generic buyer profile.
• Choose market category last, as the context that makes your value obvious to your best-fit customers.
• Run positioning as a team sport with marketing, product, sales, customer success and the CEO, so the output is aligned rather than handed over the wall.
• Turn positioning into a sales narrative and storyboard it, so every team member can tell the same story and sales doesn't improvise.
• Early-stage products should keep positioning as a loose thesis and let early customers reveal the pattern before tightening it.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.