Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - April Dunford on product positioning, segmentation, and optimizing your sales process
Episode Date: June 9, 2022April Dunford is the author of the best-selling book Obviously Awesome, a definitive guide to product positioning. She spent 25 years leading marketing, product, and sales teams and now runs her own c...onsulting firm, helping companies of all shapes and sizes nail their positioning. April has worked hands-on with over 200 companies on positioning, including Google, IBM, Postman, and Epic Games.In today’s episode, you’ll learn:1. How does April define positioning?2. How do you assess if your product’s positioning is weak? And strong?3. What are some examples of great products with weak positioning?4. What are the essential five steps to figuring out your product’s positioning?5. What is the difference between positioning vs. messaging vs. branding?6. What’s the difference between segmentation and persona? 7. When should you bring in a professional? 8. Is it essential for a company to always figure out a differentiator and be different?9. How does this concept help you nail sales for enterprise software?Where to find April:Website: https://aprildunford.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/aprildunford LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aprildunford Book: Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It April’s guest post: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/positioning—Thank you to our sponsors for making this episode possible:• Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/• Flatfile: https://flatfile.com/Lenny• Productboard: https://Productboard.com/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe
Transcript
Discussion (0)
If your product isn't doing well, there's a chance that it may not be the product that's the problem.
It may be your positioning.
And there's no one I've learned more from about how to very practically and tactically think about your positioning than from April Denver.
April is the best-selling author of the book Obviously Awesome, which many consider an industry Bible on product positioning.
She's also let teams at seven successful B2B startups worked with over 200 companies helping them nail their positioning and has almost certainly done.
done more positioning work than any human alive.
Also, April's guest post in my newsletter, a quick start guide to positioning, is still one of the
most popular post of all time in my newsletter and one they share often with founders.
I had a total blast speaking with April, and I hope you learn as much from this conversation
as I did.
This episode is brought to you by Amplitude, the number one product analytics solution.
Amplitude helps product teams, growth teams, marketing and data teams, build winning products
faster and turn products into revenue. Amplitude has everything you need including an integrated
CDP, self-service analytics, and even an experimentation platform to help you better understand your
users, drive conversions, and increase engagement, growth, and revenue. Amplitude is built for teams that
want to learn as fast as they ship and ship as fast as they learn. Ditch your vanity metrics,
trust your data, work smarter, and grow your business. With over 1,700 customers like Atlassian,
Instacart, and HBO, Amplitude is helping you.
companies build better products. Try Amplitude for free. Visit Amplitude.com to get started.
This episode is brought to you by FlatFile. Think the last time imported a spreadsheet. Did it
work the first time? Chances are it did not. You probably got some weird error. Had to try a bunch
of things like removing the blank title rows above your column headers or Googling how to save
with UTF8 encoding. What even is UTF? Who cares? You're just trying to get your file
where it needs to go so you can do your actual job. Your customers run in
to the same issues when it matters most,
right after signing up for your product.
Enter Flatfile.
Flatfile is the data onboarding platform.
Built to take the acute pain out of importing customer data
into your product so they can see the magic that you promised them.
Flat file is SOC Type 1 and 2 certified, GDPR compliant,
and even HIPAA compliant.
Ensuring your customers, no matter where in the world they're located,
are sharing their data securely and in compliance every step of the way.
No more emailing files back and forth,
No more help articles that just don't land.
Just clean data on day one, when it matters most.
Get started importing millions of rows of customer data in minutes at flatfile.com slash Lenny.
April, thank you so much for being here.
You're a legend.
I am humbled to chat with you and to learn from you.
And honestly, I am.
And your guest post.
Lenny, you're the legend around here.
No, no.
You're the guy.
You're like Madonna.
You're just like a one-name guy now.
You're like Lenny, the Lenny.
I don't know what to do with that.
I'm just going to move on.
I appreciate it.
Anyway, welcome to the podcast.
So good to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Of course.
I was also going to say that your guest post on positioning on my newsletter,
still in the top 20 most popular all-time posts.
I keep coming back to it.
People keep telling me how useful it is.
I keep sending it to founders.
And so I'm just excited to dive a lot deeper on this topic.
Cool.
All right.
Let's do it.
So for listeners who maybe aren't super familiar with your background,
and how you came to be such an expert on positioning.
Could you just kind of briefly share your journey to what you do today?
Yeah, sure.
So my background is I didn't study marketing in school.
I studied engineering straight out of engineering school.
I got a job, a product marketing job at a startup.
And I've been doing this a long time.
So this was back when startups weren't even cool,
and we just called them small companies.
So I got a job at a little company.
And then that company, I was assigned to a product that was kind of,
of a loser and we weren't selling very much. We ended up repositioning it and the thing took off.
It got hugely successful. That company got acquired. My boss quit and they made me the vice president
of marketing. I still have no idea why. And then I decided, well, this is my jam. This is what I do now.
And in particular, we had a handful of products there. The positioning also seemed kind of weak.
And so I kind of embarked on this journey of like, hey, like positioning seems to be really important
because when we get it wrong, everything sucks. And when we get it right, we all make all kinds of money.
So I should figure out how to do this properly. And so I read a bunch of books, took a bunch of courses.
And what I discovered is that positioning is this foundational marketing concept, but we didn't really have a
methodology for doing it. And so from that point forward, I became kind of a repeat vice president of
marketing at a series of startups. So I think I did seven and six of those got acquired. So I
repositioned a lot of products across that. And positioning became sort of my specialty. Like if you
basically, if you were looking for a vice president of marketing and I came into the interview,
like the reason you hired me is because your positioning was crappy and I could talk intelligently
about how we were going to fix that. And then about five, six years ago, I decided I wanted to go do
something different. And so I made the switch to consulting. And now that's all I do. So I basically do
positioning, even more specifically, though, I really focused on. I only do tech companies. I only do
B-to-B companies because my background is all really B-to-B and I don't really get consumer. And mainly,
I work with startups. For the most part, it's what I would call a growth stage startup, like kind of
post-series A, series B. But occasionally I do some really, really big companies that have weird
positioning stuff going on. Like they've acquired a bunch of things and they're trying to turn it into a
business unit or something and there's no story.
around that. But yeah, so that's how I got here.
Awesome. To set a little color, I guess, how many companies have you worked with at this point and
helped with positioning? It's around 200, I think. Yeah, like, I think I suspect that I have done
more positioning than anybody on the planet. That's my suspicion. I certainly have positioned
more B2B tech companies than anybody. Like, I don't know how anybody's going to get me on that one.
I would not be surprised. Okay, so I'm excited to learn a lot for more
conversation along those lines. I'm curious, what's kind of the most interesting or unusual company
that you've worked with around positioning and what happened there? Yeah. The fun part about positioning
is that when you do this kind of work, you get to kind of dive into a market that maybe you haven't
thought very much about. So it's like this week, I'm going to drop some names, but like this
week I'm working with Epic Games on a product that they have called Twin Motion, which is absolutely
mind-blowing tech. You should look at it. You know, I don't.
come from that world of doing three-dimensional graphic stuff. And so it's fun to just do a big,
deep dive on that and look at everything in the space and look at what's possible and what isn't
possible there. And so I've done everything from stuff like that to like I come from databases.
And so I have a lot of companies doing deep data stuff and data analytics stuff, which I find
really interesting and cool. But then occasionally you'll get one that like makes you think about
your life differently. Like I did one a year or so ago. And the company's
called blue light analytics. And what they do is like technology that gets for helping certain
kinds of dentistry instruments work better. And so I don't really think much about what happens
in the dentist office until I went to do this workshop. And then we spent the whole time talking
about like, it's terrifying actually. Like half the stuff that a dentist does in your mouth is very
likely to fail because the equipment is terrible. And the way they actually do things like
cure fillings is actually really terrible. And so
sometimes I learn things in these workshops that I wish I didn't know. Like I'm a little bit scared
going to the dentist now. Oh man. Sounds like the blue light guys, but yeah. I thought blue light was
going to be like not getting exposed to blue light when you're trying to go to sleep. No. No.
I wish. That would make me not make me so scared of the dentist. Also a problem. How do you know
that you have a positioning problem and that you should focus on positioning? So this is a thing that
People ask me this a lot. And I think what people want, and I want this to, like what I wish we had was like a metric, right, that I could say, hey, when you start seeing this metric go in this direction, then you know the positioning is bad. But unfortunately, weak positioning kind of gets you all the way across the pipeline. It's weak positioning hurts you in the early stages of the pipeline and that people don't really get what you are. So they're not responding to their marketing. You're marketing the way they should. And you'll get this sluggishness.
in the middle of your pipeline, like particularly if you have sales people, the light doesn't come on
until they've had three calls with the sales rep, and then the light comes on. And then sometimes what you'll
get is your sales team is actually really good at selling the stuff, but the positioning's wrong. So
you close a lot of deals, but then people get using the product. They're like, wait a minute, this isn't
the thing that I thought it was or it doesn't do what I expected it to do, and then they churn out on you.
So all your metrics look bad, and you can only tell they look bad by comparing them to your own
metrics, and so it's really hard to measure if the positioning isn't working or not.
When I was back when I used to be VP marketing, what I would do to assess this is I'd be the
brand new VP marketing.
I'd come on board and I'd say, well, I'm just going to go hang out with sales for a bit.
And you can really hear it in sales calls, like particularly in an initial sales call with a
client.
And what you'll hear is things like customer comes on, your sales rep comes on, and your
sales reps like doing a great job pitching the product like oh we got this thing and it does this
that and the other thing and they'll get certain way through the pitch and you can see the customers
just like yeah yeah yeah just back it up and pitch it to me again that's probably the most common
one I get is huh could you just say that again could you just back up at the beginning and do that thing
from the beginning so there's this confusion sometimes what you'll get is the even worse one is
customer thinks they know exactly what you are but you ain't that so you'll get people say yeah yeah I
you're just like Salesforce and you're like, oh, actually, no, we're nothing like Salesforce, sorry.
No, that's it.
Let me back up and start from the beginning.
Or you'll get this, and this one is actually terrible where people will say, well, I get it.
I mean, I totally get it.
I totally get what you do.
I just don't get why anyone would pay for that.
I can do that in a spreadsheet.
Like, why would I bought, like, I don't get.
So they think they get what you do, but they don't really understand the value.
And so if you start hearing stuff like that in an initial sales call, those are usually good
that the positioning is weak.
That is really helpful.
Backing up a little bit, we jumped right in.
I'm curious how you even describe positioning.
What the heck is positioning?
And broadly, just why is it important for people to think about?
Yeah.
In my opinion, it's really misunderstood, which is funny because it's not a new concept.
We've been talking about positioning since the 80s.
But like a lot of things in marketing, like people have stretched the definition or there's
different definitions.
Like, even among marketing people, like if I had a dozen vice president,
and some marketing together in a room and said, hey, define positioning. We get a dozen different
definitions. But I think about it this way. Positioning defines how your product is the best in the
world delivering some value that a well-defined set of companies care a lot about. So put another way
encompasses a lot of things. It defines what are the alternatives to what you do. How are you
different, what value can you deliver that no other product on the market can? And by the way,
who cares a lot about that value? So who is it that you're trying to target? And then it also encompasses
the definition of your market category or what market is it that you intend to win?
That is such a simple way of thinking about it. Something that I've been thinking about
is this isn't something just founders should care about. PMs on teams that are building a product
should think about this, leaders, GMs of business units, right? This applies across the board,
basically to any product, whether it's the entire company or just one feature.
Well, this is one of the things where I think people get into weak positioning.
Like one of the things that happens in companies, and I see this a lot, where the founder has an
idea what the positioning is, but then you go to the marketing department and it's a little bit
different, not a lot different, but a little bit different.
And then you sit in on the sales pitch and that's a little bit different again.
And then you walk over the product team and they're thinking about it slightly differently.
So I think a lot of weak positioning comes from the fact that we don't have perfect alignment
across the team on all these piece parts of positioning.
So in the work I do, and even back when I was a VP marketing, if we're going to fix this
thing, we can't just have the marketing department or just the product managers sit down and
cook up new positioning and then heave it over the wall to everybody else.
It actually needs to be a group effort.
It's a team sport.
So if we're going to do positioning well and then actually have that positioning stick and get
adopted the way we want it to across the company, if we're going to do a positioning exercise,
ideally we've got marketing, product, sales, customer success, and anybody else we need from the
executive team, particularly the CEO, together in a room when we're building it, so that we can all
kind of bring our expertise to the table, bring our understanding of what customers do and our
product to the table, thrash around on it a little bit until we get agreement on it. And then now
we've all got, you know, agreement and alignment around it, then we can all go execute on it and
we're all singing the same song. That's so interesting. How often do you find that the problem is
misalignment within the company versus just like they don't actually have the right positioning and
that's that's the problem? A lot of times it's misalignment. I would say the majority of the time
it's misalignment because what it is is like a piece of the company has it right. But the other piece
is don't. So I get one of two things are happening. So sometimes what I'll get is the founder comes to me
and the founder says, I know exactly how to tell this story. Like you put me in front of a customer,
I crush it every time. Like I know how to position this thing. I know how to do whatever. But we've
gotten kind of big now and I got a brand new VP marketing and I got a brand new VP sales and I just
hired somebody to do product. And they don't understand it the way I understand it. And when I listen
in on a sales call, what I hear is all wrong. That it's not it.
When I look at our marketing, what I see, that's not it.
And I've tried to get everybody in alignment and I can't.
And so I need you to come in here and facilitate a thing where we can all get in alignment.
That happens a lot.
The other one I get is kind of the opposite of that, where you've got a founder that used to run sales, used to do all the deals, used to do everything, had their arms around this market very tight at one point.
And then the company's grown often very quickly.
They've hired a bunch of very senior people to run pieces.
but at the same time, the market itself has shifted a lot.
And so I'll get approached then often by the head of product or the head of marketing that
comes in and says, I don't think we have this right.
I think we're actually positioned for what the market used to be.
And I'm having a hard time getting the founder having their heads around it and everybody
else on the team because we're all coming at it with different information.
And so sales sees what's happening in sales, marketing sees what's happening in marketing.
see the founders getting pulled into certain deals but not all the deals products seeing what's
happening in the thing and so again like there's pieces of it there but we're not all in alignment and
agreement and so we got to get everybody together and then work through it what does it look like
when you've nailed it when you like are maybe in a good place with positioning and also just
yeah like it's interesting because when it's working really well it feels like magic and really
great positioning feels obvious. Like you pitch to people and they're like, of course that's it.
Like, what else can it be? Like one of my favorite companies, this is a company I worked with a little bit,
a couple of years ago, is postman. You know these folks? So they basically have an API platform,
a platform for building and using APIs. And just how I described that right there is so simple.
It's so simple. Of course that's what it is. But it was not simple getting there. And that's not the way they
were always describing themselves. And if, you know, if you run that back three years ago,
that's not at all what you have gotten it as the pitch for Postman. But really, really great
positioning just feels like, yeah, it's so clear, it's so simple. Of course that's what it is. Of course.
Like, and of course we need one of those. If we're serious about APIs, why would we not have
a platform for building and managing APIs? Like, of course we need that. And so it's hard to judge
sometimes from the outside. The other thing is that positioning is,
somewhat like messaging in some ways in that it's not a static thing. Like it changes over time. Like your
product itself doesn't stay the same. The market doesn't stay the same. And so things will shift over time.
And so you can have good positioning that suddenly becomes bad positioning and it's not great positioning anymore or
good positioning that go sideways, whatever, then you got to come back. And so usually I think there's value in
checking in on your positioning because it's really hard. Again, I don't have a measurement to say
yes or no, the positioning's working. And so I think there's no harm in checking in on it,
going through a process to sort of walk through it and just check in and see, like, could it be
better? Maybe we could tighten this up. Maybe this could be a lot better than it is right now,
but we've never sat down and actually deliberately looked at it. Just to make it even a little more
concrete? What are just some examples of good positioning statements or just the positioned companies?
Yeah. So one thing is like a lot of times people will send me a link to their homepage and they'll say,
what do you think? Is this position good or not? And the problem with B2B tech companies is like,
well, unless I'm your buyer, I'm not the right person to ask, right? So you can have companies like,
people will say, well, I looked at the website and who knows what that is. And it's like, well, it doesn't
matter if I can understand what it is or not. If I'm selling a deeply technical thing to deeply
technical buyers, it's okay if your grandmother doesn't understand what it is when they get there.
What matters is, does it resonate for your buyers? And when they land there, do they go,
oh yeah, I get what this is. And that seems like a thing I should have. And so a lot of the
companies that I really love the positioning of, like you would go and look at it and say,
I don't know, man. I'm not even sure I really understand what that is. Like if you didn't have
anything to do with APIs and you don't know what the fuck an API was, whatever, you know,
like you might land on Postman's page and go, I don't, I honestly don't get that. But that's
okay. You're not a, you're not a person building API so you don't have to understand it. That's all right.
Particularly, like I've worked a lot with companies doing deep AI stuff, deep, deep, deep digital,
like analytics and deep data stuff. And you can't tell from looking at the website whether
it's working or not. The true test of whether the positioning is working or not is if I'm
sitting across from a qualified prospect, and I tell the story, does the prospect get excited and want to buy
something? That's the real test of it. Any other test, I think, is we're bringing our own baggage into it
and saying, like, I pick on these guys a little bit, but in Canada, there's a big startup conference.
It's great. It's called Startup Fest. It's in Montreal. I've been to that. But every year, they have this
thing, and it's called pitch the grannies. And you go in in your startup, and you pitch the grandmothers,
and the grandmothers decide whether or not your pitch was any good.
And this infuriates me because I'm like, this is a terrible judge of pitching.
Maybe if we're doing the VC pitch, in which case you're saying the VCs and the grandmothers are exactly the same, that's a little insulting.
But it's certainly if the pitch is like a customer-facing pitch, I don't care whether the grandmother understands it or not, unless I happen to be building the thing for grandmas.
I really don't think that matters at all.
So, yeah.
Hopefully no B2B startups are pitching to grandmas.
I don't think that would go well.
Yeah.
Okay, so say that you're a PM or founder that's ready to start figuring out their positioning for their product.
What's the first thing that you do?
So I've done a lot of thinking about like how should we actually do positioning.
And so kind of a critical piece of positioning is your differentiated value, right?
Like what's the value that you can deliver that no other company can deliver?
And so how companies get this wrong a lot is they'll say, okay, well, we want to look at our positioning.
So let's get everybody together. Or sometimes they'll say, let's just sit in the marketing department and think about the
value. But sometimes folks will get a team together. They'll get a team together. And then they'll say,
okay, so why does everybody love our stuff? And this is a terrible way to go about it because what you'll get is just a bunch
of opinions. And we don't really know how to measure is that good or not. So I actually think the first step in a good
positioning exercise is to really understand what do we have to position against. So put another way,
it's like saying, what do I have to beat in order to win a deal? So positioning work we call this
competitive alternatives. Now, how people mess up this first step is I say competitive alternatives
and they think competition. So things that look exactly like me. But in B2B, we kind of have two
sets of competitors. We have status quo, which is whatever the company is doing to attempt to solve,
the problem right now, even if it's crappy and not great. And then there's, if the company does decide
they're going to buy something different, they usually make a short list. So it's whoever else lands
on the short list. So I need to be able to put a stake in the ground and say, I got to beat all that
in order to win a deal. Now, most folks will discount the status quo, but they shouldn't because in B2B,
we lose about 40% of our deals to, quote unquote, no decision, which actually means we lost to the
spreadsheet.
We lost to pen and paper.
We lost to interns.
And if we're not positioning well against that,
we're never going to get the customer to come off of that.
So I got a win against status quo,
but I also have to win if it's most of the time,
if it's B2B, you don't just buy the first thing you come across.
You make a short list of alternatives,
and I got to win against those as well.
So step number one, what am I positioning against?
Once I have that stake in the ground,
then I can start thinking about what makes us different.
So the easiest way to do this is, okay, this is what I have to position against.
What have I got capabilities-wise that the alternatives don't have?
So feature function or even capabilities of the company, which could be pricing or professional
services or other things that you've got, but also capabilities of the product.
What have I got that the alternatives don't have?
And I can make a giant list of these things.
And then I can translate that stuff into value by going down the list and saying,
okay, we have this great feature. So what? Like, why does a customer care about it? What is the value that
feature enables? And when I do that mapping over to value, what generally happens is I end up with two or
three value buckets or value themes. And quite often those value buckets or value themes are different
than what I would have gotten if I got all the smart people in my company together and said,
hey, why does everybody love our stuff? When I do it this way, I'm ensured that those values,
themes are differentiated and not just things that are generally valuable, but any alternative could
get it done. So why are we even talking about it? So in my mind, that's kind of how we do it.
Once I've got differentiated value, then I can start thinking about, well, look, I could sell
this product to any company that has this problem, but not everybody cares about this value the same
way. And so what are the characteristics of a target account that make them really, really
care a lot about that value? If I do some deep thinking about that, that's going to be.
my definition of a really best fit customer. And then the last piece of positioning, of course,
is market category. And so, again, a lot of people will just start with market category and then
try to back up, which I think is crazy because then we don't have any way to judge the goodness of a
market category. But if I've got, look, this is the value only I can deliver. These are the
kind of people that really care a lot about that value. If I start thinking about positioning as like
the context I position my product in, then the best market category,
is the context I positioned my product in such that this value is kind of obvious to these people.
This is my long-winded way of doing it. But this is the only way I know how to get positioning done.
Can you just say you just basically went through like the steps and the bullet point of things you've got to figure out your position?
Could you just briefly summarize that just for people to have that in their brain?
Yeah, yeah. So it works like this. I start with competitive alternatives. What do I got to beat in order to win a deal?
Status quo things on the short list. Once I've got that, then I can make a list of,
differentiated capabilities. What capabilities do I have that the alternatives do not? I can then
translate those capabilities into value, like the so what for the customer? And while I'm doing that,
these things will theme out. So I'll end up with two, three value themes, value buckets. Once I have
that, then I can ask myself the question, well, okay, what are the characteristics of a target account that
make them care a lot about that value so that that next piece is best fit customers or target customers,
whom am I going after for this thing?
And then the last bits market category.
So what's the context?
I position this thing in that makes my value kind of obvious to the people I'm going after.
Super helpful.
What if we pick a company, either that you worked with or that is just out there
and think through what they would do for each of these steps to make this super real?
Sure.
I'm going to do Help Scout because I like these guys.
And I was just talking to CEO not too long ago.
So Help Scout's a good example in that their startup,
sort of, I would call them a growth stage startup.
They're not super big, but they're not teeny ween either.
And therein would appear to be a terrible market, which is they sell software for customer
success.
So their competitor is like Zendesk.
You know, there's lots of, there's like actually a million companies in this space,
but the gorilla in the market is Zendesk.
And so if I put the stake in the ground and say, well, what do I got to replace?
Well, their customers, a lot of small, medium businesses, a lot of direct-to-consum
e-commerce businesses.
And so they obviously have to beat Zendesk and the other folks that are out there.
But sometimes they're replacing like just email or even like a kind of rudimentary sort
of shared inbox.
That's who they got to be.
And so when you look through what Helpscout has as differentiating, they've got a whole
bunch of features that are really around delivering really amazing service to the customer.
So they do a shared inbox.
They were the first ones to do it.
like a proper services oriented shared inbox to make sure that nobody gets missed and the right
people get signed to the right thing and you don't get conflicts. But they do a lot of other things
like their whole philosophy about how they treat a customer in the service process is really
different from Zendesk. So get assigned a ticket number. You get assigned a person and things like
that. And so they do all sort of neat integrated things like they'll do a chat bot thing,
but it only appears when there's an actual person to chat with you. Like they don't try to pretend
or machine, things like that. So they want to guarantee really high level of service. So when you
map that to value, the value is, one, I'm delivering this extra amazing service for customers, right?
I'm not trying to push customers to a low cost channel. I'm treating them like a person.
So their value is really around delivering amazing customer services, service that's going to
deepen your relationship with the customer. That's the value. And then you say, well, who cares a lot
about that? Well, not everybody, right? So there are businesses out there, like I would say, I would argue
maybe your phone company doesn't really care. They have a giant call center and all they care
about is reducing the cost in their call center and driving you to low-cast channels. They don't actually
see customer service as a way to build a relationship with you versus a lot of direct-to-consumer brands
or e-commerce brands. This is almost the only way that they can interact with their customer. So they
actually see customer service as a way to really drive growth through customer loyalty.
And so those are the kind of companies that are a really good fit for Help Scout.
So I go through that process, that's my positioning.
Then the next thing you've got to do is like, okay, like now that I understand all that,
how do I weave a story around that?
So how do I tell the story about that if a customer comes to me?
And so we want to do with our positioning is turn it into a sales narrative that clicks
with the kind of customers we know we can sell to. So the way Helpscout delivers the story,
if you come in, you're a qualified prospect. It starts with this idea that customer success is a
growth driver, like modern e-commerce companies, see customer success as a way to deepen customer
relationships, increase repeat buying, show it as a growth driver. And they have a bunch of great
stats that prove that this is true. And then they go, look, look at all your other alternatives.
All your other alternatives treat your people like a number.
They give them a number.
They try to drive them to low-cost channels.
They try to do these things.
They are not treating this like a growth driver.
They're treating it like a cost center.
And so being able to tell that story that takes your differentiated value and puts it into context
is kind of the way all this stuff comes together and the rubber meets the road.
I don't know if that's a good example.
That's an amazing example.
That makes it so real.
Is the output of this process a dock with kind of these bullet points plus this story that you kind of train sales on?
Or how does that look?
Yeah.
So we do two things.
Like in the workshops that I do, so we work through.
So first we get the gang together, right?
So I want representation from sales marketing product, customer success, CEO, everybody in the room together.
And then we're going to work through the five piece parts.
So once we've got, here's what we compete with.
Here's how we're different.
This is the value we can deliver.
No one else can.
These are the kind of people that really love our stuff.
So here's who we're going after.
This is the market we're going to win.
Then we can document that in a document.
And for the marketing people, that's a good starting place to then go and build messaging
because we've got an idea what our value props are.
But if we end there and we just stop there, then what usually happens is the rest of the
team goes back to normal and they go, yeah, we did this thing.
And they just conceptually they get it, but they don't know how to tell a story.
it's super important in sales because if sales can't tell the story, they can't pitch it.
If they can't pitch it, they're going to make shit up.
So what we want to do then is, okay, we've got this positioning.
Now let's put it together into a sales narrative that we can then take a test with qualified
prospects and make sure it works.
But we've also got something that the sales team can pitch.
And oh, by the way, everybody else knows how to tell the story too.
So product knows how to tell the story.
Customer tests knows how to tell the story.
The CEO knows how to tell the story.
So the last thing we do is we map this positioning to sales narrative.
So what we do in the workshop is we storyboard it out.
And then after the workshop is done, the teams go and usually it's marketing and sales together.
They take that storyboard and then turn it into an actual pitch, which is like a deck, a demo, a script.
And then they can use that to test the positioning as well.
This episode is brought to you by Product Board.
Product Leaders Trust Product Board to help their teams build product that matter.
From startups to industry titans, over 6,000 companies rely on product board to get the right products to market faster,
including companies like Zoom, Volkswagen, UiPath, and Vanguard.
Product board can help you create a scalable, transparent, and standardized process,
so your PMs understand what their customers really need and then prioritize the right features to build next.
Stakeholders feel the left, too, with an easy-to-view roadmap that automatically updates
so everyone knows what you're building and why.
Make data-driven product decisions that result in higher revenue and user adoption and empower your product teams to create delightful customer experiences.
Visit productboard.com to learn more.
Got it. So the output ends up being an actual pitch or story they tell on sales calls forms the way they're marketing position or talks about the company.
There's two questions I want to ask. I want to make sure I don't forget.
One is about messaging versus positioning, but maybe before that.
It's interesting that positioning starts with focusing on your differentiator.
Is that essential for a company to always figure out a differentiator and be different?
Or are there examples where maybe you don't need to focus on that?
Well, what you want to do is you want to take a customer's viewpoint on this, right?
So let's think about how customers buy.
We don't talk about this a lot, right?
But let's think about how customers buy.
Typical B2B buying process, that's what it looks like.
Somebody VP sales wakes up in the morning and says, you know what sucks?
The way we track our pipeline sucks.
It's stupid.
I can't deal with this anymore.
We need to get a tool in here.
We should have a CRM, man.
And they go to the office, and they don't actually go look for the new tool.
They find some sucker in the office like, John, you, get out there, manager of sales ops or whatever.
Find us a CRM.
And John's panic.
John's like, oh, my God, you're kidding me.
I don't, like, maybe John's used some CRMs, but he's not an expert on the CRM market.
He doesn't know what's possible, what isn't possible.
So John's like, oh, God, like, I don't even know.
And then he Googles. And what does he get? A fire hose of information. Like he goes on a G2 crowd and
software advice and all these places. There's 9,000 companies listed. They're all in the top right quadrant.
There's like a thousand of them. Some of them are for big companies. Some of them are small companies.
I have no idea how to make a short list. Ah, freaking out. Right. And so somehow they figure out how to make a
short list. And that person has got to justify this choice to their boss. So there better be something there.
Like, I'm not allowed to just throw the dart at it.
I'm not allowed to just go back to my VP and say,
I just like the rep better, man.
I just, you know, they're all the same.
I picked this one by spinning the wheel.
No, you got to go back and tell your boss why you made a smart choice.
And so we have to be able to give customers that when they get on the sales call with us.
The best thing we could do is say, look, buddy, there's lots of CRMs out there.
And let me tell you how this market shakes out.
These ones are really good for big enterprises.
These ones are really good if you got this.
These ones are really good if you got this.
But look, if you're this, this, and this,
you really need these four things and we got that.
That's why you should pick us.
Because we need to make that customer feel comfortable.
They've made a good decision.
Otherwise, what happens?
No decision.
That's what happens.
If they can't figure that out,
they go back to the boss and say,
you know what, all the CRMs are shit.
We should just keep using the spreadsheet.
It's fine.
Let's just delay this.
And 40% of the time, that's what happened.
So if you can't help the customer figure out how to justify this decision and make this decision and basically come back and say,
I decided this was the right approach to the problem and I picked this one for this reason, then you're not going to get the deal.
Nobody's going to get the deal.
And in your experience, the fact that here's why it's different from maybe the incumbent or other options ends up being really important.
Like basically, it's really hard to win by just saying we're like better, say better than Slack or better than Zoom.
It needs to be.
But better how?
Yeah. Like you've got to be able to articulate better, right? So sometimes it's like, they have more bells and whistles, but we're simpler and you don't actually need all those bells and whistles. So we're better because we're easier and it's less training, easier to get stood up, whatever. Or you might say the opposite of that. Like we have all the bells and whistles. It's super customizable. You can do whatever you want. Those other things are Mickey Mouse play things. You're a big mature company. You need all the bells and whistles. We're better.
Great. And so that better has two pieces to it, right? What's the value?
and who cares about that value?
Because better means something different, the different segments in the market, right?
So better for a small company is not the same thing as better for a large enterprise.
Your trick in the positioning is to be able to articulate why are we the best kind of solution
for this particular type of customer.
That's it.
And if you can nail that, then you sell lots of stuff.
You beat the other guys.
You win deals all the time.
I love that.
That's going to be our soundbite from this episode maybe.
Oh, I'm great.
I want to go back to the messaging versus positioning.
That's the difference between those two concepts.
Yeah, so they get confused a lot.
Like, and a lot of people will say, well, I don't like our messaging.
So can you come in and help do messaging?
I think they're really distinct because I see positioning as a fundamental input to messaging.
So messaging is really just kind of like most of the time when people say messaging,
what they mean is this is the text on the homepage, which is really different.
from what is my definition of competitive alternative?
How do we win in the market?
Where do we win in the market?
So positioning is all about defining that,
and then things flow out of that.
So I can't write the messaging until I understand,
well, who's the message for?
And what's our value against who?
And so once I understand all of that,
then I can understand how to write messaging.
A lot of people get confused
between positioning and branding as well.
And folks will sometimes use those words interchangeably,
or they'll talk about brand positioning, which really bugs me.
I mean, there's positioning and there's branding.
Those two things are different.
But if I was going to work on branding, like, again, I can't figure out what I want the brand
to stand for until I understand, well, who's my target buyer?
And what's my differentiation from the other alternatives in the market?
Because I want that brand to be distinct.
So I need to have positioning figured out first.
And then practically everything I do in marketing and sales flows downstream.
from that. Are there any companies out there that you think need help with their positioning that
maybe have an opportunity to work with something like you? There's some companies that I think
just have, you can tell they've not really thought about it. And a lot of times you'll see it in
companies where they're brand new and the tech is really spectacular. But you can tell they
haven't quite figured out, well, so what, right? So when Magic Leap first launched, like that stuff
was so mind-blowing. And it was like, oh my gosh, you know, and all their demonstrations,
you know, the thing with the elephant and the guy's hand and all that stuff. And you're like,
well, that's amazing. And I read this really in-depth interview with the founder. And he was talking
about the tech and this guy's view on the market was so interesting. But it was like, so what?
What am I actually going to do with that? Like, who's your target market for this? What's just the value of this?
Like, we all get it's cool, right?
But what is the actual value of this?
And you can see now, like, which, you know, I don't know if people know this, but if you go to the
Magic Leap site, and I do because I'm interested in Magic Leap, because I've been following their
story since the beginning.
But they've now gotten much tighter on their positioning.
And they're actually selling B2B now, like into manufacturing, and they're talking about
wide frame of view and all this stuff you can do that's really differentiated than you could
with other types of traditional VR things.
So if you look at their positioning now,
it's getting much, much tighter.
But at the beginning, it was like, what?
And I felt the same thing about Google Glass when it first came out.
It was like, I get why people get excited about it.
I just don't get like why anybody would buy.
Like I get what it is, but why do we need one of those?
Like, I don't see the value in this thing at all.
And then again, if you see the applications for Google Glass now,
there's a lot of very specific B2B use cases that they're now doubling down on.
And, you know, they're coming back to the consumer use case a little bit now for some augmented reality stuff that actually sounds like it's useful.
But a lot of times what we'll get is the initial launch of something will be this like, gee whiz, you know, it's so amazing.
Like the archetype of this is where is the launch of the Segway.
So there's been a couple of books written about it.
But it's fascinating.
Like the original founder of the Segway was like the Elon Musk of his day.
Like he had done three or four other companies.
They were all wildly successful.
when he got the idea for the Segway, he literally lifted his little pinky and raised 100 million from like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos and a who's who of Silicon Valley Venture.
And then he kept positioning the thing as a revolution in human transport.
But he didn't want to let the cat out of the bag what it was.
So he just kept saying that.
And he was in the news all over and he's like, Revolution and Human Transport.
And people were getting so excited because they were like, what's a revolution in human transport?
It's a flying car, man.
We're finally getting flying car.
So everybody's like studying his patent filings and all this stuff.
And they're like, oh my God, we're getting flying cars.
It's going to be amazing.
And there was such hype around this thing when they launched it that he actually got invited
to Good Morning America.
I was watching that.
I was watching that live.
Yeah.
Come on Good Morning America.
Like do the thing.
And everyone's like, oh my God, we're getting flying cars.
And then, you know, he comes out, you know, on this segue.
And everyone's like, what the fuck?
That's not what we were promised, man.
And the interesting thing about the segue was that refurb.
was that refusal to position it at a micro level, left it up to the customers to decide what it was.
So even when we saw it, it was like, okay, so it's human transport. We get that.
But like, what should I compare it to? Should I compare it to a car or a bicycle?
And so, like, a lot of the early users were saying there was the worst thing to have a segue
because nobody knew where you were supposed to drive it because they didn't know what it was.
So if you were driving on the road, cars were honking at you, and they're like, get that stupid thing off the road.
But if you try to drive it on the sidewalk, then, you know, the ladies with the baby strollers are like, get that stupid thing off the sidewalk.
And the thing was a colossal failure.
Like, eventually, like, the patents are still amazing.
Like, the patents just got sold last year or the year before to some company that does these, like, hoverboard things.
But the tech was way, way ahead of its time.
But there wasn't good positioning to sort of answer the question, like, who's this for?
Why do they care? So what?
That's a really good segue to a question I wanted to ask you is when?
Segway.
Oh.
Wow.
Yeah.
Unintentionally intended.
When does it make sense for a company to bring in someone like you to kind of go deep on
positioning?
Yeah.
Like, I think most companies can do positioning on their own.
Like, that's kind of my belief.
Some companies, I think, lack of methodology to follow to go do it.
So I wrote a book called Obviously Awesome.
And that was the purpose of that book.
Like, if you want to do positioning,
and you kind of just want to start a little exercise and do it yourself in-house.
You can use my methodology and my way to do it.
And I think most companies can get it done that way.
But most of the ones that come to me have attempted to do that and it hasn't worked out for one
reason or another.
So sometimes it's because this is not unusual in startups.
We got an executive team full of A-type people and we're all pretty opinionated and we just
can't get to agreement on stuff.
And it makes a lot of sense to bring an outside person in to help.
facilitate that conversation, particularly one that's got a lot of experience in positioning.
So sometimes I get brought in for that reason. Other times I get brought in as companies just feel
like they really got to nail it because there's a lot at stake. Like I've done a lot of work with
companies that they're about to hire 10, 15 people in sales or they're about to make a really big
investment in marketing and they just want to make sure they really nail it and not have to maybe
do a not so great version and then redo it and then redo it again. If you bring me in and we're
to nail it. Like there's no way we're going to get to something that isn't good. So sometimes people
bring me in because they feel like there's a lot at stake. And those are generally the companies that
bring me in. Some bigger companies, I think, bring me in, again, like a bit more of a security
blanket. Like, we know we could do it ourselves. We kind of got it ourselves, but we'd feel better
if we had the expert in here just to make sure we nail it once and we don't have to come back and
do this again right away. So those are the kind of companies typically I work with. But I think a lot of
companies could get it done with my book or some methodology, get the gang together and just
bang it out themselves. I think everybody should start there. That's awesome. How long should it
take to do this kind of process, either on their own or, and then with you? How long do these things
sort of take? Well, so the work that I do, we do it as a week-long sprint. Now, there's a bunch of
prep that happens before that and there's some stuff we do afterwards, but the actual exercise
itself is kind of a series of sessions spread out over a week. I've seen companies do it on their
own and they do it in a couple of days. They, you know, they trap everybody in the room over a couple of
days, assuming you've got the right information to go and start with it, like, it shouldn't take you
too long. And it really depends on how contentious things are. Because, again, what you're trying to
get to is agreement and alignment across the team. You're not done until everybody thinks what we've
come up with is good. So it sounds like you work mostly with larger companies and later stage companies.
I mentioned this to you before we. Yes and no. Okay. Yes and no. Like, it depends on how you define that,
really. Like, I've done a lot of companies that are around 5 million revenue, 10 million revenue in there.
Like, so they're beyond what I would, like, beyond seed stage. But I wouldn't call them a large
company quite yet. But I will say this. Like, I do get a lot of calls from companies that are super
early stage and where I don't think they're ready to actually really, well, they're not ready
to bring in someone like me. And I think in general, they're not ready to really over-tighten
their positioning. So I kind of think about it this way. So I've got this new thing. I'm either about
to launch it into market or I've got it in market. I've got a handful of customers. At that stage,
what I think you've got is a positioning thesis. And so the best thing you can do is deliberately go
through a positioning exercise and document the thesis. And so the thesis says, we think we compete with
these folks. We think this is differentiating. This is the value. We think we can deliver that no one
else can. These are the people we think going to get really excited about that. Therefore,
this is the market we're going to win. But it's just a thesis. And so internally, it's good for
us all to be in alignment internally. But when I go to launch that externally, if I don't have
any customers yet, it's very likely, and in my experience, 100% of the time, the thesis is
partially incorrect. It's based on a bunch of assumptions and our best guess at it, based on what
we did in customer discovery or all our research we did before we built the thing. But we always, we're
never 100% correct. And so in these cases, I actually think it's better in the early days of a product
to keep the positioning a little bit loose and allow the market to pull you maybe in a direction that
you didn't think it was going to. So here's my terrible analogy I use all the time, but I'm going to
use it here. But it's like I designed a fishing net. And my thesis is this thing's amazing for tuna.
It's a tuna fishing net. It's a world's greatest tuna fishing net. So I could launch that and say,
It's just for tuna, only tuna.
Don't use it if it's not tuna.
And maybe it works for tuna.
Maybe it doesn't, right?
And I don't really know.
And if it fails, it fails hard.
A better way I think is we know internally that it's the tuna fishing net.
That's why we built it.
That's what it is.
But let's just, you know, at the beginning, let's put it out there and keep it a little loose.
We say, you know, it's a net for fish, big fish, all kinds of big fish, any kind of big fish.
And then let's just see.
Let's let the fishermen try it out.
Let's see what they pull up.
And maybe what we discover is, you know what, this thing actually amazing for grouper.
And we just didn't know because we're not grouper people.
You know, we didn't really think about grouper.
And then once we've got enough of that signal and we start seeing the pattern and who loves our stuff and why,
then we can really tighten it up and run at that market.
But at the beginning, I think it's actually okay if your positioning is a little bit loose.
And so I think you can worry too much about positioning in the super early days of a product
when it's impossible to tighten it up because you just don't have the data to do it.
I know that you touched on this a bit, but what does that transition look like between like, okay, it's okay to keep it loose and see where the market pulls to like, okay, we got to start taking the seriously.
Is there kind of like a trigger that's like, okay, let's get into this?
Yeah, like it's one of those things that usually like you know when you know.
But what you want is you want to start feeling comfortable that there's a pattern.
And it isn't just like, hey, I got one customer in this segment and one customer in this segment and one customer in this segment and I don't really know.
Like what it usually starts at the beginning is it starts with, you'll say,
gosh, all kinds of people like our stuff.
Like all kinds of people like our stuff for all kinds of different reasons.
And if you're saying that, you don't see the pattern yet.
And eventually what happens is you start, the pattern starts becoming clear that it's like,
oh, they, all those customers look differently, but there's actually this thread through them.
Like, look, they all have the same marketing automation tool.
Isn't that interesting?
Or they all have the same number of salespeople on their team.
Isn't that interesting?
Or I've done enough of these pitches now to know if you've got this, this and this,
this pitch is going to go good.
And if you don't, it is not going to go good.
So once you start feeling like I got the pattern here, it's starting to come into focus,
then I think you're ready to really tighten things up, smash your foot on the gas,
and say, we're just going to run at that because we know we can sell here.
We know we win pretty much every time when we meet these conditions.
let's go do that.
I'm really glad we touched on this topic.
I mentioned to you earlier that I was in a meetup last night,
and I was talking about this podcast that I'm starting,
and I asked who they'd love to hear on this podcast,
and your name was the first name this guy brought up.
And so he's a huge fan boy,
and I asked him what question he would ask you.
I have fans.
They're out there at meetups.
And this was what he wanted to know, actually,
is around just like,
how do you think about this for startups and early stage stuff?
So I'm glad we touched on it.
Yeah.
A last topic I want to make sure we chat about, and this is kind of what led to our conversation.
We had a Twitter exchange about this, was around segmentation versus personas and just how people
confuse these things and how to think about these topics.
And so I guess I'd love to get your take on just what's the difference between, say,
segmentation and personas.
Right.
So you know how I said earlier like marketers, we're really bad with definitions on things.
And so everything in marketing is poorly defined and the marketers are always fighting over,
What do we mean when we say brand, right?
Things like this.
So personas and segments, oh my gosh, terrible.
So now, this I think stems from, if you go to marketing school, a lot of what you learn
in marketing school is very consumer oriented, like consumer product oriented.
And so if you're selling to consumers, a lot of the ways a consumer market gets segmented.
So the segmentation is the way you split up a market, right?
So the way you would segment a consumer market.
market is you might say, well, I've got this toothpaste and this toothpaste is for men under the age of
16 that you don't want to get a date or something like that. And that would be how you would segment
to the market, which coincidentally sounds a lot like a persona. So personas are about people and it's
characteristics of a particular buyer, a particular type of buyer. And so we'll do personas to try to get really
deep understanding of who is this buyer? What do they care about? What are their hopes and dreams?
What makes them scared? What makes them excited? What are they trying to get done? This kind of stuff.
Now, we go to B2B, and that's not how we segment a market, right? We're not talking about 25-year-old
done to the age of whatever, whatever. We're segmented the market on different things. And in fact,
in B2B, we can segment a market on almost anything. So, but typically there would be what we call
firmographics, like how big is the company, how many employees, how much revenue, what geography
is it in? But then we often do segmentations on things that are nothing to do with that. So if we
really want to target a set of customers, like often we'll say, you know what, my product is
really good for folks that have a creative team with more than three people and a budget of this
and they use this particular software package.
We went all day if we have that.
And that's a very actionable segmentation.
Like I can go find companies that have that.
I can make a list of companies that have that.
And that's who my marketing and sales is going to go after.
Like if sales needs to make a list of companies to go chase, that's that.
And so in my mind, this is super important.
Like coming back to the previous question when we were talking about,
I'm starting to see the patterns and who loves my stuff and why.
I'm not talking about the person there.
I'm talking about the kind of company.
Like what is common amongst the companies that love us that I can segment the market and
say, look, if your company is this size, you have this software package, you have this and this,
I'm going to win all day.
And so I need to understand that deeply in order to build my whole go-to-market strategy,
in order to have marketing campaigns that resonate with those kinds of companies, in order to make
a list if my salespeople are doing outbound or if I'm doing target account selling or ABM,
how do I make that list of who I'm going after, that kind of stuff.
Then we have personas.
Now, again, if I'm selling a consumer thing, maybe all I care about is personas, right?
All I care about is who's this person who's this buyer.
B2B, everything's a little bit more complicated than that.
So in a typical B2B purchase process, particularly if it's what we would call enterprise software,
even if it's not very expensive enterprise software, typically we have between five and seven people
are involved in what we call making the decision for what gets bought.
So if I come back to my example earlier where the VP sales decides they need a CRM
and they pick on poor John and then John's got to go figure it out,
John, that persona, let's say he's the sales ops manager.
We would make a sales ops manager persona that would capture that person.
But there's other people involved in this deal.
So he, as part of figuring out which CRM to buy,
when he got in the later stages of the deal, he probably consult some of the sales reps because
they're going to be the end users of this thing. And so he doesn't want to pick something that they're
all going to hate. He's probably got an IT department. And IT probably gets to say about, you know,
well, does it meet our security and compliance stuff? And we're going to have to take care of it.
Does it integrate with what we need to integrate with? Can it suck in data or push out data to
our data warehouse or whatever? So that person has a say. There might be a purchasing department. There
might be legal involved. There might be hit security at all. There might be chief security officers.
Somebody gets their nose in there, gets involved in that. So five to seven people involved in this deal.
Ah. And so here's where I think we go off the rails in marketing. So what I see marketing teams doing
is they'll do personas for all those people. So they'll have this sheet and the sheet will say,
Eric the IT person, doesn't like talking on the phone. Really likes video games. And,
and they'll have this stereotype of Eric, the IT person, and then they'll say,
Janet, the sales rep, really outgoing, loves talking to people on the phone,
doesn't know what a video game is, that sort of thing.
So for positioning work, I'm going to say something that is contentious, but I don't think it is
at all.
Think about how the deal gets done.
Here's how this actually happens.
Vice President says to John, go figure it out.
John then does all this research and figures out how to get a short list, right?
And then John might actually go all the way through to having calls with salespeople and all the sort of stuff with all the vendors.
And then John's really getting down to, okay, I'm going to pick this thing over this thing.
And then starts bringing in the other people, right?
So by far, the most important persona that matters is that one.
We call this the champion in the account because this person, their job is to get consensus and champion.
the deal across everybody, including their boss, who's the actual economic buyer, the person
that writes the check. And so if our positioning doesn't resonate for that champion, we're dead
in water. We don't even get on a short list. We don't even get to care about all the other personas
if we don't nail it with John because John's a gatekeeper, right? So my positioning needs to
crush it with John. And at some point, way down the road, I need to arm John to be able to sell
IT, to be able to sell purchasing, to be able to make sure everybody is cool on the user side,
and to be able to sell their boss, who's the economic buyer.
And so I think there's really only one persona that really, really matters in this,
which is the champion in the account.
And we should be very thoughtful, and we should really have our arms around that persona.
And then later in the deal cycle, we need to figure out how to arm that persona to go sell
to all the other constituents in the deal.
But if we don't nail that champion persona, we got nothing.
So I think it is an utter waste of time for marketing to build these stupid little one-page
of persona things for these 17 million personas and treat them like they're the same as the champion
when the champion matters times a thousand.
And all we really need to do is figure out how to arm the champion because the champion's
going to do this to heavy lifting of selling IT.
We're likely not even going to get all that involved.
Dude, that's my rent.
That was amazing.
I've never heard of describe so directly and clearly.
And so I think that's actually a good way to just kind of wrap things up.
I feel like I've sucked up enough of your time.
Where can folks find your book, contact you if they want to work with you, anything like that?
Sure.
The book's called Obviously Awesome, and you can Google me and find that wherever books are sold.
And then there's an audiobook, if that's your jam or an ebook or whatever.
And then my website is April Dunford.com, so you can find me there.
I'm on LinkedIn.
I'm on Twitter.
I'm at April Dunford on social media, but I don't really do any social media except Twitter
and occasionally, and a little bit of LinkedIn these days because I'm feeling less certain
about the future of Twitter.
But yeah.
Your tweets are great, by the way.
I highly recommend following April on Twitter.
Oh, good.
Yeah.
Follow me on Twitter.
How can listeners be useful to you?
That's a great question.
I don't know.
Well, like one thing I will say that I really love about Twitter.
is I use Twitter a lot to kind of clarify my thinking on things.
And so I really appreciate smart interactions with people on Twitter
because sometimes I'll have sort of a half-baked idea.
And one of the things that I really like about Twitter versus LinkedIn,
like if I have a half-baked idea, I throw it out on LinkedIn and everyone goes,
that's great, April, and that's it.
Whereas if I have a half-baked idea and I throw it out on Twitter,
people aren't shy about telling me I'm wrong.
And I appreciate it because I kind of think that's how you're thinking,
can get clearer. Like, I mean, I'd like you to be nice about it if possible. But I like it when
people jump in and they go, well, that doesn't actually, that doesn't really work if it's this,
this, and this. And you're like, well, yeah, actually, right, never really thought about that
before. So people that follow me on Twitter are really useful that way and that I think I have this
really engaged, thoughtful bunch of people following me on Twitter, like people that are really
interested in this stuff. And so I think it's kind of fun to be able to bat some deeper ideas around on
stuff and not just have everybody go thumbs up, yay, April. Like, that's kind of boring to me.
Radical candor. I mean, I appreciate the thumbs up. Give me the thumbs up. But if that's all I was
trying to do, then I wouldn't be throwing out as much a half-baked sort of controversial hot takes
as Twitter as I do. I use Twitter in a very similar way. And so I completely understand that.
Yeah, it's great for that. It's amazing for that. April, thank you so much for making time.
I learned a ton and I really appreciate your time. All right. Well, thanks.
Thanks so much for having me and congratulations on the new podcast.
I'm so excited for it.
Me too.
That was awesome.
Thank you for listening.
If you enjoy the chat, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast.
You could also learn more at lenniespodcast.com.
I'll see in the next episode.
