Should you roadmap your positioning? | April Dunford

In episode 41 of Talking Roadmaps, April Dunford discusses the importance of integrating positioning into product roadmaps with Phil Hornby. She highlights her extensive experience in marketing and consulting, focusing on helping B2B tech companies refine their positioning and sales pitches. April shares insights on common positioning mistakes, the role of positioning in product management, and best practices for aligning positioning with strategic goals.

April Dunford is the world’s foremost authority on product positioning. As a consultant to fast-growing technology companies, April helps make complex products easy to understand and love. April is also the author of the bestselling book on positioning, “Obviously Awesome” and the soon-to-be sales classic, “Sales Pitch.”

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In the next episode we are talking to Jeff Gothelf, Coach, Author and Keynote Speaker. So watch out for Season 1 - Episode 42!

• Transcript

  - Welcome to "Talking Roadmaps", the channel where we talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of road mapping. Today I'm joined by April Dunford. April, you probably don't need to introduce yourself to our audience, but do it anyway.

  - Oh, I think I do! I disagree. So I'm April Dunford. My background is I spent 25-ish years as a repeat vice president of marketing at a series of venture-backed startups. I think I did seven. Six of those were acquired and so through acquisition I ended up at a big, a bunch of big companies. And then for the past seven, eight years I've been a consultant, so right now I'm really focused narrowly on positioning work. And specifically I work with B2B tech companies, helping them get really tight on their positioning and how to translate that positioning into a sales pitch that sells.

  - If you're enjoying the channel, subscribe, hit the bell, and give us a like. And, you know, behind that, I know that there are a couple of books. You know, I have a couple of copies here.

  - Oh, I love it!

  - "Obviously Awesome" I read many years ago, around the positioning space, and "Sales Pitch" a new one. You might spot the bookmark's still in, so I haven't quite got all the way through.

  - Oh, that's good. Oh, you're making your way.

  - Well it's actually, I think, maybe a really interesting element because if we look at all the noise in the last few months around Airbnb and products moving into that marketing space, I always thought it was in that space. I'm confused, and someone who, and positioning was always part of products to me. So I'm interested in your thought there.

  - Funny how much discussion that announcement whipped up. You know, I think that, I worry that product people have this kind of weird insecurity that, you know, maybe we're not needed or maybe at some point they're gonna come for our jobs. And, you know, when I was really in, I started in product marketing, and so when I was really a product person, I found that the question people ask the most is like, "Where does it report in and what exactly are we doing?"

  - Same with product management, right?

  - Of the role. And you just don't get that in marketing. Like when you're pure marketing, like the marketers are not so angsty about their role potentially going away. And so I don't know what it is about that Airbnb thing that got everybody really bent out of shape. And then what I thought was really interesting was he talked like the product managers had essentially been turned into product marketers, which I thought was really interesting. But then I listened to a quite long form podcast that he did with Lenny, and I didn't get that out of the longer conversation. What I got was that he wanted his product managers to be more concerned with the market. So he wanted them to be more concerned with what are customers doing and, you know, that sort of stuff. And I thought, "Well, why weren't they doing that before?"

  - That was precisely my point.

  - So I don't know, I don't know what actually changed there.

  - The reporting line.

  - Well this idea that everybody is going to have to, everything is gonna go up and there's gonna be these very frequent checkpoints with the CEO. It was an interesting idea. You know, I sympathise with this idea that at some point it's hard to be a big company and not have there be a lot of politics. And so I liked the way Chesney talked about that. That, you know, the next thing you know is you have these divisions and divisions are bad because then you're gonna have marketing here and marketing here and marketing here, and now nobody knows what's going on and these things become very disjointed. I worked at IBM at one point in my life and I'm like, yeah, that was bad. I agree with you, that would be something we'd like to avoid. I'm not sure avoiding it by having there be this one person and everything goes up to this person is the way I would do it. But I think that's one way to remove a lot of blocks. Like what do you think about that? Like I, my mind immediately went to, what if the CEO is not the founder and what if the CEO did not have good management skills so decided he wanted to dictate how the things got done, and not just what things had to get done. Then that would be terrible because, you know, someone who's not the founder maybe has different reward system or timelines potentially or something. And then, you know, and then this kind of really relies on somebody's ability to kind of stay out of the how and just stick to the what, which I thought, boy, I don't know, does that actually work in practise?

  - I mean I guess my view was it felt like we were taking a step back and evaluating products gone too far into the how and too far into the tech. And it was a pullback to the more strategic, more market-oriented and maybe positioning-oriented role that it was when I started.

  - What I think might be potentially something that wouldn't work in that system is that, you know, I did hear him say that, you know, now that these teams are having these meetings with me all the time, we can actually have the meetings less frequently because the teams know what I want. And I was like, oh boy, I've been in that meeting where there's somebody on the team says, "He didn't say it, but I know that the boss wants this because I know the boss better than you know the boss." And then you get this kind of thing and I was like, oh man, I don't know, is that gonna work?

  - And there's what the boss wants and what the boss wants, and if they're expressing it exactly you said, the how, which then gets forced onto the roadmap, I'm gonna bring us back full circle, then that's not really empowering the teams to deliver value and it just doesn't scale.

  - They're a big company so let's see how it works. You know what it reminded me of, and this is like completely off topic? But it reminded me of when Zappos announced they were doing that holacracy thing. You know, there were gonna be no managers. Do you remember that?

  - Vaguely remember it, yes.

  - But they had this like management system, it was called the holacracy. And so there were no managers, completely flat organisation, blah, blah, blah. And it was very similar set of reasons behind it. You know, we're trying to get rid of bureaucracy, we're trying to get rid of, you know, managers that are just managing and that's kind of useless and this idea. And there was a hot minute where all the companies were like, maybe we should do the holacracy thing, and everybody was, and then it turned out that it only ever worked for Zappos and then there was a question about whether or not it actually worked there. So I wonder if this structure is.

  - Yeah, I made a joke on LinkedIn the other day. I hope that in a few years time we're not talking about the Airbnb model in the same way so many people talk about the Spotify model.

  - Yeah, you know, from a positioning standpoint, you know, I looked at it and I thought, well would this work the same if we weren't essentially a consumer product? And so if this was an enterprise B2B, which is more the space where I work, could this work, you know, without having sales involved? And I wasn't sure how that would work. Like, I mean we rely a lot, in enterprise B2B, we rely a lot on the information we get from sales because sales are actually working with customers through a purchase process. So even something as basic in positioning as who do we compete with, we have theories about this, internally, but only sales really knows. We can't even survey our way around this 'cause customers are notoriously terrible at telling us who they actually looked at and what they were doing, status quo. Whereas sales reps know, they know exactly what's going on because like any good sales rep is trying to figure out what else is on the short list, what were you doing previously? If you have a good solid sales team, they know this stuff. And so I'm not sure how we would, you know, if you tried to have this all-seeing all-knowing CEO, unless they were doing an awful lot of customer stuff.

  - Yeah, it feels like a great way to get the hippo in the room, and an uninformed one at that.

  - You know, I've worked at some companies where they were very good at making sure that all the senior executives got a lot of time with customers. So, for example, when I was at IBM, they had a programme internally that every executive over a certain level, so if you were a very, very senior executive at IBM, you actually got assigned a set of accounts. And those, and you were like, they had a name for it, I forget what it was, but you were like the, you know, non-sales account liaison into IBM. And so you were expected to have regular meetings and check-ins with the team at that account, and the people in the account could call you and just say, "We got a problem and we need you to fix it." And so in my division, for example, the vice president of marketing, so we got a division with five billion revenue. We've got a vice president of marketing who's doing all the marketing for all of that. So imagine she has thousands of people report to her, whatever, whatever. But she's marketing, she's not product, she's not, she's marketing. She had a set of accounts. One of those accounts was a very, very big insurance company. And the CEO of that multi-billion dollar insurance company called her up and said, "I got a problem and you've got to fix it." And she had to figure out how to get it fixed.

  - You know, it'd create some accountability.

  - And so the neat thing about that is everybody had this, you know, you might not have a lot of customers, but we're talking giant enterprise deals here. So like all of IBM's named accounts is less than a hundred accounts. So you've got three or four of those and, you know, and you've got a deal and they're not calling you 'cause they're happy.

  - I happen to have been a former, I worked for a former company that was a strategic partner of IBM, as a 43 billion euro business. So maybe we were on one of those lists.

  - So you had one of those, you had one of those. So I thought that was one way to make sure that the senior people, you know, weren't getting so senior and so high up at a company that big that they lost all touch with customers. And so I thought it was neat and then I worked at a smaller company, like 20 billion revenue, and they hired an IBM executive in there to run marketing as the chief marketing officer. And she brought that process with her because she felt like the senior executive team didn't have enough customer, like customer gut feel is what she kept calling it, because they didn't do enough stuff with customers.

  - I mean, I can imagine applying the same thing to product people, right? You know, they need to really feel, to be almost a liaison to certain customer accounts and have that real deep understanding. You could see that happening actually at every function, or in many functions. Any customer-facing or value delivery function.

  - Well, marketing's terrible. Like most big marketing, most marketing teams at big companies don't have any customer interaction at all. And not only that, it's very hard for them to get it. Like even if you want it, you like, you would have to do it through your sales team and the sales team is like, "Don't be messing my accounts, man. Don't be talking to my people." I don't want you in there saying your marketing stuff.

  - So what I'm hearing is that marketing people and product people have exactly the same problem in-

  - The same things. Do you know what, one of the things I did that I thought worked really well for that, and the first time I did it was at this company, you know, the 20 billion revenue company. But the new CMO was very concerned that we didn't have enough customer juice. And so she implemented this programme, but another thing she did was she spun up a customer advisory board, and we had never had one before. And man, was that ever good. It was really good. And we spent an incredible amount of money on it, 'cause we did it in a very deluxe way. But after I saw how well that worked at that company, I had a customer advisory board at every company I worked at after that, because it was so good. And even when we didn't have any budget, we did it virtually, we found lots of ways to do it cheap 'cause we were small and we didn't have any money. But that was amazing. Like we had a sort of a, you know, a group of, I think the one we did, the first one we did, I think we had 30 chief information officers at big companies. And the first couple of meetings we did were rough 'cause we were a company in trouble. And these customers showed up and they were pissed. So it was like 12 angry men, you know. They showed up and they were like, "And another thing." But we had really good coaching on this in that we brought in a professional guy to help us make this thing a success who had done a lot of customer advisory boards. And so he gave us a lot of good coaching on this. And one was to kind of coach the members of the advisory board to like take off your customer hat and put on your advisor hat. So we're all on the same team here and how, you know, we actually want your help to make things better. So let's talk about solutions. And yes, there's problems, but how are we gonna solve them should be the focus of this group and we want your feedback on things, other things. Anyways, that advisory board worked so well, and then we had obviously representation from marketing and product and sales, whatever, in that room, but we would rotate it. And so it was a different cast of people every time. And sometimes if we had a big focus on marketing stuff, we'd bring a lot of people from the marketing team. Sometimes we had a big focus on product stuff. We'd bring a lot of people from the product team. And then it spawned a bunch of offshoots, so we were working on this new product and so we identified a subset of people from the customer advisory board that agreed to be beta customers for us and do things for us. And so we ended up doing a lot of cool stuff that got spawned from that advisory board. And I think there's some magic in having, you know, a more formal way of doing customer stuff that you can pull from if you've got exceptional things going on and you just need some customer voice in the room.

  - Yeah, I remember doing very similar things. So I, when I was at Trimble, I think it was, we used to have our own conference every two years in Vegas and we'd have say 2000 customers turn up. 200 for my division. 20 were the key customers for the business. And so we went in a back room and we had those sorts of conversations. And typically one of the things that went up on the wall was the roadmap to talk about our direction of travel.

  - Ha ha, we're finally getting to road mapping! Let's talk about road mapping.

  - It was, for us, it was a tool to facilitate the conversation and say, "Are we going in the right direction or the same direction as yourself?" Similarly with those big accounts, when I was at Continental, I remember going to General Motors. A four hour meeting one afternoon, I flew to Detroit just for the day and had 11 senior people in the room. And all we were talking about was their direction of travel, our direction of travel, are we aligned? Are we on a journey together? Can we help each other on that journey, in terms of the sort of technology and products that we were bringing, the problems that we were solving? So I guess it played a bit of a positioning activity, but it was also using road mapping.

  - So, you know, I could talk about a couple of examples where I did that, more in big companies than smaller companies. And maybe I'll talk a little bit about the difference between those two because I think there's a danger, sometimes, in the smaller companies. But in the bigger companies, I'm thinking about at IBM, we had an idea to create a new market category that didn't exist. And we had the idea internally and it was cooked up for all the wrong reasons. Like it was cooked up because there was a spot where we didn't play. And we had attempted twice to launch a product in that spot and failed. And then we had a couple of small products kind of around the edges of this space that were failures. So, you know, doing a little dribble of revenue, but nothing in the grand scheme of things. And what we wanted to do was redefine the space so that we could look like a leader in it. Because right now, the way the space was defined, we had a big zip in there. And so if customers were looking for that, they didn't come to us. And so what, you know, big company like IBM's all about share a wallet, we wanna get all your money. And we had this blank space in there. So we spent a bunch of time, you know, a bunch of us strategy people all getting together, and we kind of redrew the lines and said, ooh, what if we did this? Then it would overlap with us over here and it would minimise this thing where we had the gap and then we could stick these three or four failing things, all of a sudden looked important, 'cause we, you know, repositioned them in this way. And so we had this idea. And there was definitely a roadmap that went with that because we had nothing except a couple of kind of crappy products that weren't working out so good. And so there, so we made this whole roadmap and what we wanted to do was convince the industry analysts that this was a thing, because our buyers cared a lot about what the industry analysts thought. But before we did that, we had to make sure that customers thought it was a good thing. So we went and had a series of conversations with customers about, here's the idea, this is what the roadmap would look like, this is what we could do today. And this was very important because the what we could do today was not very exciting. So we could only get them excited about the future. So we'd say, look, and we drew this little staircase, you know, like phase one, we're gonna do this thing, and that's good, you know, we can do some stuff. But what's really cool is phase two, we do this, phase three, we do this, phase four, we have the all-singing, all-dancing, it's amazing thing. And we managed to get, you know, we got a lot of good feedback from customers on it. Things that we thought were a really good idea that were bad and vice-versa. And so eventually we got to something that a handful of our very big customers were excited about. And that's kind of when we knew we had it. And then we, but then we had to convince the analysts and that was a whole different thing. So we went to the analyst and said, you know, there's an emerging market category, it's called this, it looks like this, and, you know, we showed them the little roadmap thing and all this stuff. And we'd been working on this thing for like six months at this point. And the lead analyst at Gartner that was covering this space, you know, he's there, he listens to the whole thing. He's very quiet, he's not saying too much. We get to the end and we're like, "So what do you think?" And he did this thing where he leaned over the table and he went, stuck his finger out. This is where we knew we were in trouble. The finger came out and he said, "April, I've heard a lot of dumb things from IBM. This is the stupidest." And we're like, oh no! And we, but you know how we got him? So he gives this big speech, "It's the stupidest thing." And then he has this big long list of reasons why it's the stupidest thing, which we scribbled down. And then I said, "Well, I'm gonna convince you because you know who doesn't think it's the stupidest thing?" Choo-choo-choo-choo-choo. And I named my five multi-billion dollar accounts. And he said, "Really?" And I said, "Really!" And then we threw a whole bunch of money at them and just brought customers in and hit them over the head with it. We literally built, at one point we built a book and we literally built a book to impress analysts with thud factor. Like my VP literally called it thud factor, because it was all the customers saying how much they love this thing. And we'd get this pushback from the analyst, "That doesn't sound very, no, no, we don't like that." And we'd be like, "Oh yeah, you know who does like it?" Thunk. And we'd put this big thing on the table. Here's everybody. So I don't think we could have done that without, there's no way we could have done that without doing our homework on the customer side first. So, you know, maybe this is, I'm stretching for how road mapping and positioning come together, but in that way it really was an exercise of we built a thing internally that was very theoretical and then we worked with a set of customers to make that theory into something that actually worked. And then we had to go convince the analysts that we weren't idiots. It was terrible after that meeting, like, let me tell you. For three months after that, my team mocked me. Like every time I was in a group meeting, like at any moment I would present something, and there'd always be some guy sitting around the table and you would get that finger out. And then everybody would crack up. "I've heard a lot of things from IBM, April, but that is the stupidest." Anyway, that's my little road mapping. So I don't know if that's a road mapping story or what that is. But when you're doing new category creation, I think the roadmap matters a lot because generally what you have right now just isn't enough. Now the flip side of that is, in smaller companies I've worked at, we had to be very careful about how much roadmap we exposed to prospects because we were always fighting against a prospect's natural tendency to delay a deal. And so the, you know, the research on this is terrifying. So if you look at in B2B, typical B2B purchase process, 40 to 60% of B2B purchase processes end in no decision. And if you scratch at that data, the no decision is not because they looked at all the alternatives and decided, oh, the thing they're doing right now is fine and so we can just keep doing that. The majority of the time it's because they looked at the alternatives, could not figure out what decision to make 'cause everything kind of looks the same, and they're worried about making a bad choice and looking bad in front of their boss and bad in front of the team. And there might be some repercussions to that. So they just say, you know what, now's not a good time. Let's just kick the can down the road. So we have to be very careful that we're not exposing too much of the roadmap. Like we can't have the reps talking too much about road-mappy stuff, or marketing talking too much about road-mappy stuff in a new account. If it's an account we already own, that's different. But in a new account there's this tendency to try to sell too hard on the future. And the result of it is you'll just get this wave of no decision deals where the customer says, "Wow, I love it, that sounds amazing. Come back here when you have it."

  - One of my best practises is typically, in a sales view of the roadmap, is to show the current value. It's like, this is the stuff you can have right now. Yeah, there's some stuff coming later, but you can have this right now. Get all that value out of it. Why would you wait?

  - There's a very smart way to position it because if we position it in any other way, we get in trouble. We get in trouble. Like we get a little bit too far out over our skis and then what we'll have is a customer that's like, great, fantastic, come back next year.

  - There's obviously a really interesting interplay between kind of sales and marketing and kind of that external messaging of our direction of travel as an organisation. Like I've always kind of had the simple attitude of if I've shown it to a customer, I assume everybody, including my competitors, have seen it. And, you know, you get these safe harbour statements on the front saying, don't make any decisions, it's forward-facing information, you know. Don't decide based on this little chunk of the presentation. And I remember the days where people would say, can you leave the deck? And you say, yeah, fine, apart from the roadmap. And then people would take out their phone, hold it up, and go snap. It's like they've seen it, they've got a copy of it. Just assume that. You have to assume you can out-execute the competition.

  - That's absolutely true. If they've seen it, your competition's seen it. But you know, like we should be, if we're doing our jobs right, in positioning, in my opinion. This is kind of a, this is kind of me being a positioning lady. If we've got really good positioning, we should be able to sell on just what we've got right now. We should never have to actually tilt into the future because we're really tight on what our differentiated value is right now. We're really tight on who cares a lot about that. We're not trying to sell people who aren't our good fit prospects. And we're gonna lean into that. Occasionally we'll get on the back foot on some, you know, and it's more, it's less about value and more about objection handling, if you understand my meaning. Like they believe in the value of what we're doing. They're buying us for the value of what we're doing. But there's a little objection from somebody like, oh, you're not SOC 2 compliant. Oh, that's a deal-breaker. Oh, you can't integrate into with our thing, that's a deal-breaker. Oh, we made a big investment in this other thing, and your thing doesn't inter-operate with that thing. Mm, deal-breaker. And so sometimes if we've got something on the roadmap that can handle that objection, oh, well then we pull that out. We're like, oh dude, don't worry. By the time we get this deal done and we get you all implemented, we got that. But if we start leaning into value, which is the core reason why you pick us over the other guys, then we're in trouble. Then we're in the realm of, you know, that sounds great, but you don't do it now so why would I pick you now? Like, we gotta be very careful we're not doing that.

  - Yeah, but I think there's possibly, there's a subtle sort of segment here of if we're looking for our lead customer on something new, maybe as an early adopter, to then give us those case studies that we can then sell on the value once it's available.

  - Yeah, absolutely. And so, and again, like this works way better at bigger companies with bigger deals, bigger customers, we can do stuff like that. Particularly if it's something new. But we have to be very careful if it's, you know, we're out there selling 10K deals, we do a lot of them, we need frequency on that. We gotta be a little careful. But yeah, there's no, I do think that there's lots of places where you would wanna do that. We get this thing with positioning that people feel like we should carve positioning into the stone tablets and never touch it again. And that's wrong. So in my thinking around this, we have the positioning now, but we, it's very likely that we have a roadmap that includes, you know, we're gonna build a whole bunch of stuff and then we're no longer positioned as this. We're now gonna be this. And then later in the roadmap we're gonna be this and later we're gonna be this. And so we gotta be very careful that we're just selling what's on the truck right now. But be mindful of the fact that next year or the year after we expect to shift the positioning to match what we have then. So this is a thing where people get confused. So we have, positioning is all about right now. We've got a vision of where we wanna go. And often in tech companies there is a strategy that says we're this and then we're this and then we're this and then we're this, and then we're the all-singing, all-dancing thing. So I'll give you an example. I worked at this company and we were enterprise CRM, or at least that's what we thought at the beginning. And we lost all the time because we had this big, big multi-billion dollar company we were going up against, that was the kings of enterprise CRM back in the day, which was Siebel. We were positioned the same as them and so they creamed us every single time. We were like, they're enterprise CRM, we're enterprise CRM. People are like, "Why are you better than them?" And we're like, "We're not!" We're just cheaper 'cause we're desperate. And so we didn't win a lot of deals with that pitch. But eventually we had this feature that they didn't have, that they couldn't copy and we landed a deal in investment banking and what that taught us was that there was some value, in fact a very big value point, around what you could do with this feature that enabled investment bankers to make more money. And so now we have, now we're armed with this value statement like, hey, you know, we're gonna help you make more money and here's how and the other guys can't do it. So we shifted our positioning to say we're CRM for investment banks. Now we're a little wee company, like 30 people or something. But we had investors and the investors hated that. They're like, what? We didn't write you a check to be some niche-y little thing. You know, like how many investment banks are there? Like how are you gonna be a billion dollar business just selling to investment banks? And so we had to draw this roadmap of positioning that looked like this, where we said, look, we're not gonna be investment, CRM for investment banks forever. That's step one. Step one in world domination is we're CRM for investment banks and that's gonna be great 'cause it's the only place we can win. But we've proven we can win there. So we're gonna be CRM for investment banks. We're gonna be selling the heck out of that for the next year, and during that we're building a bunch of functionality that's gonna allow us to leverage what we've done in investment banking to get to retail banking. And so at that step, our positioning is gonna change. Once we release that stuff, our positioning is gonna be we're now CRM for banking, not investment banking, banking, retail and investment banking. And then we're gonna sell the heck out of that while we're building a bunch of things that enable us to go into insurance. And then third step on the ladder is insurance, that at that point we're gonna be positioned as CRM for financial services, because now we have the breadth of functionality to do that. So that was the third step. And then if we were successful in that, you know, that's a giant market segment, at that point, we're huge. If we're successful in that, then we're big enough to take out the market leader. And so then the next step would be we're enterprise CRM for anybody that's an enterprise that's big. And that was the plan. And so we drew this little thing on the board, and that's how we convinced the board members to let us go along with it. And we were hugely successful there. In fact, we never even made it to step three. We barely made it to step two and got acquired for like a billion and a half. But it really unlocked a lot of growth for us, getting really tight on the positioning and getting really focused on where can we win right now. Not where do we wanna be and what did we sell to the investors, but where are we gonna win right now? And let's not worry about what that positioning looks like two years from now. Like, I mean we had a roadmap, we had a plan for it, but as far as sales was concerned, we're just selling what's on the truck.

  - I mean, that reminds me a lot of one of the concepts in "The Alchemy of Growth." So the three horizons of growth are coming from there and there's like a stepped case, or staircase kind of concept of going segment to segment or kind of proposition to proposition.

  - [Paula] Yeah, yeah. But Geoffrey Moore calls this bowling pin strategy. You knock over the lead pin and the lead pin enables you to get to the adjacent market, and then those enable you to get where you are, and eventually you can take on the market leader 'cause you're big enough. We used to draw, we were big Geoffrey Moore people, so we used to draw that bowling pin thing like all the time. We literally drew it in the board meeting. We were trying to convince the investors. We're like, you know, my CEO's up there drawing the little bowling pin.

  - And then he's drawing a tornado probably as well then.

  - We never wanted to commit to any tornadoes. We were just about the bowling pins. We're like, let us knock over the first pin, buddy, then we'll talk about what happens after that.

  - Makes sense. And yeah, and I, so many different kind of models that come, can actually come at the same concept from a slightly different way.

  - It's the same thing. It's the same thing. It all comes from the same research, actually, both those things come from the same research, which is this diffusions of innovation stuff that, I forget the name of the guy that did that. But there were lots of-

  - Yeah, I mean, Porter did a lot of stuff on that and it, but it goes back even further, if I remember rightly. Interesting.

  - God knows what we're studying now. I don't know. It's like everybody stopped looking at that.

  - Yeah, I mean it's like, I see things that talk about, you know, in a kind of, tools get renamed back to somebody else. Like there's the important urgency thing that people talk about it being Stephen Covey. Well it was Eisenhower who used it a long time before Covey talked about it.

  - I have a, you know, I have a friend of mine, and we had this conversation and he's a very successful consultant. And his focus is jobs theory, like jobs to be done, and he'd be great on this podcast, you should have him on. And he talked about how, you know, big ideas, frameworks that are very successful have kind of a lifespan, and it's about 10 years. And then after that, even though they're still good, and even though they still work, people just get bored of it and they gotta get onto something else. And so, in order for them, for the model to continue to exist, it just needs to get rebranded, renamed, repackaged, and kind of relaunched as something new, even though it's not actually something new. And I, you know, at the time I was like, hmm, yeah, interesting. But I'm telling you, I keep coming back to that conversation. I think he's right on that. There's a bunch of things I bumped into recently that I'm like, what, that's just Geoffrey Moore, like just, you just put a new name on it. But I think we like that.

  - It's how I feel every time I go to a conference, to be honest these days. And I know for the new people going, it's kind of all new information, but I go and it's like, ah, so that's just a new name for that.

  - Yeah, like people came to me and they're like, we know all this stuff already because we read the Ries and Trout book on positioning. And I'm like, yeah, me too. I love the Ries and Trout book on positioning, but the deal with the Ries and Trout book is it didn't tell you how to do it. How to do it was a big secret. So that's my stuff. I'm not trying to reinvent positioning, I'm just trying to teach you how to do it, man. I don't have any original thoughts about positioning. You could just read their book. It's all in there. I'm just trying to get into the practical application of it. Like how do we actually do it? But when I started talking about positioning, nobody wanted to talk about it because it was like old news. People were like, oh, we know, we know that. Oh yeah, we've read that book. I went to publishers to talk about my book and they're like, we've already got a book on positioning. And I'm like, from 1982, before the internet! And even by pitching on hey, I'm gonna teach people how to do it, publishers didn't like that. They were like, no one cares about how to do stuff. They care about the idea. And I'm like, trust me, there's a lot of us that care how to do stuff.

  - I mean, you went into category design, right? You talked about that. I mean that, as you were talking about that and the work you did previously, it's like I'm thinking "Play Bigger" and all the work there, for example. And again, it's the same concepts.

  - Yeah, it's the same concepts. Although "Play Bigger", you know, I had a real problem with that book because the thing that really bothered me about "Play Bigger" is that they tried to pretend that category creation is the only way a successful company happens, which is completely demonstrably false. Like, I mean, most of the companies you know and love did not do category creation. Like Salesforce was not a category creation play until they were 400 million revenue. Like MySpace existed before Facebook. Like there were lots of search engines before Google did a search engine. Like they didn't create that category. But those guys I think are, I don't know, like sometimes I think consultants come and they have this, you know, they wanna make, they wanna be kind of controversial and say, "This is the only way to do it and everybody else is stupid." And you're like, oh, come on. Like, you know, it's not that it's a bad thing. Like in the work that I do with clients, I've done about 250 companies I've worked with on their positioning, and I'm running at about 10%. About 10% of them, we can't use an existing category, there's no way to do it. And the adjacent categories don't work. And so we are in a category design situation. But it's one out of 10. And so that tracks actually with the data that I've seen on this. So I did this analysis once, and then I saw another guy that did it. But the one I did was I looked at the last five years of people going public on the NASDAQ, and I looked at the time when they went public. So who knows what they did after or before. But at the time when they went public, were they creating a new category or were they positioning in an existing category? And it was the same number. It was about 92% were positioning in an existing category, and about the other, 7, 8% were doing category design. So category design, in my opinion, works really well when you have bowling pinned your way into taking out the leader in the space, you know, which is what Salesforce did to Siebel. So they started in SMB where Siebel didn't play and then gradually worked their way up. And by the time they got to enterprise, Siebel was dying of self-inflicted wounds and they managed to take over the whole market. Now you see what they're doing is essentially extending the borders of what we think of as CRM and this whole customer 360 thing, is CRM plus plus. Like, so how do we, you know, everything we do around customers, blah, blah, blah. Is that category creation? Yeah, it is, but it's more like category extension. So most of the examples that people use about category creation are not true category creation. It's more like extension, and then occasionally you'll get one where it's, like Eloqua is the example I use in my book, where they came right out of the gate, had a very different point of view about marketing and invented the category of marketing automation, that came out of a bunch of observations that the founders made, and that was really a new idea and a new thing. And then they managed to grow up and grow fast enough to not get swallowed up by a fast follower, which is what often happens when a small company tries to do category creation like MySpace. And so they managed to survive a significant threat from Marketo and a couple of other places to actually carry on to be the market leader for quite some time.

  - Funnily, I've just wrapped up a project with a company that's going through a category creation sort of activity at the moment. And I'm gonna be interested to see how it plays out.

  - Yeah, I've worked with a lot of companies that have failed at it, like, because there wasn't a need for a new category, and so attempting to build the new category was just confusing for customers. And they were just like, well, aren't you just this? And they're like, no, we're a flu flammer. And people are like, we don't know what a flu flammer is. They're like, oh no, let me tell you what a flu flammer is, oh, you know. And then they had a hard time growing. And so then what we did was just position them back as dominant player in an underserved market segment in an existing market. And then all of a sudden it was very clear what they are and who they were for, and then growth just went like this. So I don't think that, again, if some people have this religion about category creation and they're like, we can't be successful without doing that. And the opposite is in fact true for smaller companies. It's a very risky play and it's much easier. Like I say, 90% of the people on the NASDAQ did not get to the NASDAQ creating a new category. They did it by, you know, bowling pinning their way through successive segments to get bigger and bigger.

  - So I'm gonna, I'm thinking I'm gonna start bringing, I guess, this together to kinda wrap things, April. So that's, we've had a little bit of a discussion there. Maybe if you can kind of reflect briefly and think about, so how does positioning link to a roadmap in your thoughts, after you've had that, after we've had this dialogue?

  - I don't know man. I've been tap dancing all around it. Like again, I think it's, for most tech, if I think about B2B tech companies, growth stage, these are the folks that I work with, growth stage B2B tech companies, I think that we need to understand what the vision is, which is the ultimate destination where we wanna be. And we need to understand the roadmap that gets us from where we are now to where we want to be in the future. And then we need to be, from a positioning perspective, prepared to shift the positioning as we reach those various stages on the roadmap. So I think that, all that is very, very important. I think if we're a big, big, big established brand, then, you know, where maybe the horizon is different, I mean there might be different ways to use the roadmap that way. But if I think about the companies that I'm working with that are 50 to 200 million, growing, they've all got a vision and a strategy that takes them to that vision. And if you look at that, there are distinct positions that they will occupy in the market as they move along. And so I think marketing product sales needs to be in alignment on that, understand how that works, and be very careful not to get too far out in front of themselves in terms of what they're disclosing publicly about that, before they actually get to the steps.

  - Almost feels like we'd have a positioning roadmap.

  - I've actually used that expression.

  - My co-host and I do definitely, we find ourselves thinking, well, we could make a roadmap for that, on so many different aspects of business, like career, job, role, function. It's a tool for communication and alignment at the end of the day. April, it's been wonderful having you here today. Always like to give people a chance to just pitch themselves, their services, how they can help people and how they can get hold of you. So fire away.

  - Yeah, so if you, you know, best way to find me is my website, aprildunford.com. You know, if you think you need some help with positioning. But if you just wanna learn more about positioning 'cause you think it's an interesting topic, because it is, there's a couple of ways to do that. So one, I have a newsletter which you'll find on my website if you go to aprildunford.com/books. You can find out about the books, which are everything I know about positioning. And then you can sign up for the newsletter. We have a Substack and I'm talking about positioning stuff every week, or every two weeks-ish. So yeah, that's the best way to find me.

  - Perfect. I'm sure people, as they're exploring positioning, will get in touch or listen in. I know that I've read your books in the past, or I'm reading your latest one, and as a product person, well, it was always part of what I thought about. So it's a key part of that bigger thought process in terms of where we're developing our products to. So been a pleasure having you here today, April. Thanks for your time.

  - Awesome, well thanks so much for having me.