How to Make Your Product Positioning Impossible to Ignore with April Dunford (Founder, Ambient Strategy)
Timestamps are as accurate as they can be but may be slightly off. We encourage you to listen to the full context.
Podcast Summary
Product positioning expert April Dunford shares five counterintuitive insights from working with 300+ tech companies in this engaging session from Drive 2025. Drawing from her extensive consulting experience, she reveals why most companies shy away from their strongest differentiators, how technical buyers can still be baffled by advanced features, and why creating new market categories often backfires. (04:00) Dunford emphasizes that positioning problems are actually sales problems in disguise, and demonstrates how teaching customers to identify competitors' weak spots can become a powerful competitive advantage.
- Core themes include practical positioning strategies, the relationship between positioning and sales effectiveness, and common pitfalls that even experienced marketers make when trying to differentiate their products in crowded markets.
Speakers
April Dunford
April Dunford is the world's foremost authority on product positioning and founder of Ambient Strategy. After a 25-year career as VP of Marketing at seven venture-backed startups, she transitioned to consulting and has worked with over 300 tech companies including Google, Epic Games, IBM, and Postman. She's the author of the bestselling book "Obviously Awesome" and "Sales Pitch," helping companies make complex products easy to understand and love.
Key Takeaways
Don't Shy Away From Truth-Based Differentiation
Many companies avoid messaging around their legitimate differentiators because competitors claim similar capabilities. (10:42) However, when competitors make false claims, this creates an opportunity to teach customers how to identify the lies. One company successfully positioned their true platform integration by teaching prospects to ask competitors specific questions like "How many logins are there?" and "Will professional services be required?" This approach led them to win every competitive deal by helping customers call vendors on their misleading claims.
Translate Technical Differentiators Into Understandable Value
Even highly technical buyers don't understand the value of unique features they've never encountered before. (17:05) A company with a "fuzzy logic algorithm" was losing deals because they only listed technical features without explaining their value. The solution was finding the sweet spot between pure technical features and generic value propositions - explaining that their algorithm enabled "really fast queries on mountains of data without rollup functions," which translated to answering customer questions while they're still on the phone rather than calling back in two days.
Avoid Category Creation Traps
Creating new market categories isn't necessary for success - 92% of tech companies that went public were playing in existing categories. (22:17) A small sales enablement company with only $1M in funding competed successfully against billion-dollar competitors by staying in the established category but focusing on differentiated value. Their unique integration with Salesforce allowed them to tie enablement data to actual sales performance, providing measurable ROI that larger competitors couldn't offer.
Solve Go-to-Market Strategy Before Positioning
Multi-product companies must decide their go-to-market approach before tackling positioning. (28:34) This involves choosing between having one lead product with everything else as cross-sells (like Salesforce historically did with Sales Cloud), or positioning everything as an integrated platform. These decisions require CEO and sales input and directly impact how products should be positioned in the market.
Build Stories Only You Can Tell
Great storytelling with weak positioning advantages your competition by creating narratives that anyone can adopt. (36:39) IBM's "e-business" campaign was considered a failure internally because while the story was compelling, it didn't specifically advantage IBM - any company could tell the same internet transformation story. Effective positioning requires building narratives that are inherently tied to your unique capabilities and differentiators.
Statistics & Facts
- 92% of tech companies that went public on NASDAQ were playing in existing market categories rather than creating new ones, according to April's analysis of public company data. (22:17) This challenges the popular belief that category creation is necessary for success.
- One client company improved process efficiency from 4 weeks to 4 hours per day through their platform integration approach. (11:01) This dramatic time savings became a key differentiator against competitors who required extensive professional services.
- A small sales enablement company with only $1M in funding successfully competed against competitors who had raised $300M-$1B by focusing on measurable ROI and differentiated capabilities. (23:29)
