April Dunford’s 1 Killer Question to Expose Weak AI Product Positioning [Repeat]

April

That's cool.

Jeff

It's a really helpful, book that I do think anyone aspiring leaders, junior people leaders should read. You know, you're an author, you're a consultant, a speaker. You've done the startup thing for real. yeah, just really stoked to have you on this. This is like a legend in my mind here, so this is great. I'm stoked.

April

Well, it's great to be here and thanks for saying that about the book. Like that book was a pain in the butt. Right? And so I like it when people say that it was useful, you know, because that was the goal on that thing. Like I have a bit of a problem with books that are just too much ideas and not enough. How do we actually get it done? And I wanted to write a how do we get it done kind of book. So I feel really good when people say, Hey, we use your thing and we actually use it to get some stuff done. I'm like,

thank goodness. cause that thing was a pain to write.

Jeff

that's what I liked about it was, is it was, , functionally useful even for, you know, a senior person. And it was great 'cause it kinda gives a shared vocab to argue with, , other stakeholders about things you disagree on. Which, which is helpful. So sometimes you, you just need the shared context of what you're gonna talk about and then you can actually be functional. So thank you for that. 'cause that helped me a lot in my career. But, um,, I guess, I mean, you have a, a super deep background. You're not just an author. Maybe just for, for, you know, the three people who live under a rock who don't know who you're, who are listening. , Do you wanna give just that kind of, how did you get here?

Uh, and who was that sixth grade teacher who told you that you weren't gonna be an author? Because I think you proved them wrong.

April

Yeah, so I, uh, yeah, I took a bit of a circuitous route here, I studied engineering in university and when I came out I had a job in product marketing and in that first job we repositioned a product and we were very successful at it even though we didn't really know what we were doing, we were kind of just monkeying around with it. We didn't even know it was called positioning. We thought we were just fooling around with the product. , but we repositioned it. And then, , that company ended up getting acquired. And my boss quit. They made me the vice president of marketing, which was just one of those, you know, you're, you're standing in the right corner of the hallway when your boss quits and someone says, you, you, it's you now.

And I go, oh, okay. Anyway. And then, , we did a bunch of good work there and I sort of decided, well, this is, this is my jam. I'm the VP marketing now and then I spent 20 years as, , a repeat vice president of marketing at a series of venture-backed startups. So basically I would come in when the company was like, series A, series B, you know, you need to hire somebody, vice president style, grow the group, get the revenue going up to the right. And then in my case, you know, things just get going good. And then we get acquired. And then through acquisition you end up at the big company and you gotta do your earnout and all that stuff.

And then I would bounce back out to the next. Start up and do it again. So I did that for about 25 years and, , towards the end of that in particular positioning really became my jam. , You know, vice presidents of marketing, we, we come in all flavors. Like some folks are really good at lead generation, some folks are really good at calm, some folks are really good at whatever. , My thing was positioning and so I often got hired when the. Company thought they were in a bit of a positioning jam, and I could talk intelligently about that. So after the last company I was at, uh, you know, I had done seven of these, and I kind of thought, okay, maybe I need to go do something new. I decided I would, I would do consulting.

So I made the switch to consulting about 10 years ago, and now what I do is very, very narrow. So I only work with B2B technology companies and even more specifically, , folks that do enterprise software. So for the most part, there's a sales team involved somewhere in the sales motion. They might not be entirely sales led. There might be some PLG in there, but. I don't tend to do any pure PLG. All the companies I work with have a sales team in there. And what we do is, , positioning, basically, like we're trying to get really tight on defining how the company wins in the market and then also crafting a story around that.

And in particular, a sales pitch that the sales team can use to go out and clearly. Differentiate the offering from the other things that a customer could do. So that's what I've been doing for the last like, I don't know, 10 years and yeah, wrote a couple of books. Um.

Jeff

One or two.

April

Two, two. Um, that's enough. I think actually I get, you know, we could talk about, I do have one, one thing that I'm working on right now, technically not a new book, but I'm gonna do a second edition of the first book, so sort of expanded and revised version of the first book that sort of includes all the stuff I've learned in the last seven years since the first book came out.

Jeff

We were talking about this before, but I feel like the world has changed a little bit, , in the past seven years and, and so I think we kind of lost the path of, of positioning. , Leading up through maybe, you know, 20 20, 20 21, 20 22, where, where money was free and, you know, it's easy to be a genius when everything's growing, right. It's, it's the hard parts. When the, train stops. , And we kinda saw that in 2022,

April

Well, you know, things like, like what a bunch of years we've been through. Like, I put that book out in 2018 and so, you know, two years later we had COVID, so COVID hit and that was like a positioning catastrophe for. A lot of tech companies where, you know, like I worked with companies that were selling into the travel industry and there was no travel industry for like a year and a half. And I remember doing some work with a company that sold software for stadiums, like big stadiums. There were no stadiums open. And so it's like, how are you gonna survive through that? So there were, there was a lot of frantic repositioning going on 20 20, 20 21. And then post 2021, what we got was, you know, this big acceleration in tech and everybody had lots of money.

Everybody was growing like crazy and. You are right. Like it's, it's easier to do business when, when things are like that, but , it often leads to a bunch of interesting positioning challenges too. Like, you know, companies having the resources and the ability to get into new markets. They, they wouldn't have bothered trying to get in before. Lots of companies do in acquisitions, and so acquisitions are always hard from a positioning standpoint. Like, we've got this new thing now. How does the sales team talk about that? How do we position that with respect to everything else we've got in the portfolio? So lots of challenges there. And then in the last couple years, AI has really.

, Thrown a bunch of companies, a real curve ball in terms of, you know, what, what used to be very, very differentiating for them is now sometimes kind of commodity kind of table stakes. Everybody's trying to prove that they're serious about AI and they've got a serious perspective on ai. There's a lot of stuff that it's, it's differentiating for a week and then everybody else catches up. So how do you deal with that?

Jeff

as we talked earlier, , one of the things that, that just struck me that, that I hadn't thought enough about before was the whole like kind of pre, you know, the ERP period rollup, like you said, where everyone's just trying a lot of new things and trying positioning over here and, The downside of that is, when everything works, it's easy to look like a genius. But the the positive side is, I think we saw a lot of things, to your point, that ended up working that we wouldn't have known about before. 'cause no one would've been brave enough to try it in a, in

a down or, or like market. So

April

That's right. People didn't have the capital, they didn't have the resources, you know, the board's not sitting there going, yeah, let's try some crazy moonshot things, man. Let's just go and try it out. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. Like nobody's doing that right now.

Jeff

Right, but, but, but so we, you know, it giveth and taketh away and, and, but that was the positive. , But now we are in that tighter thing again where, you know, unless you are, , a few companies. In which case you can, you know, raise at a $500 billion valuation. And,

April

Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff

for most of us it's, it's, you know, how do you, how do you operate a little bit tighter? And I think it is, you know, I hope we're gonna see, , you know, another golden age of people really focusing and driving towards what is the tight market we do. And,

April

Well, it's weird, right? Like we have two things going on at once. On the one side we've got, everybody's really being cautious about how much money they spend, right? We're seeing everybody getting really tight on expenses. We're seeing lots of layoffs, not big layoffs, but small layoffs. We're seeing lots of that. We're just seeing belt tightening all over the place, and we're seeing belt tightening. With our customers as well. So the customers are not spending as much money and you know, not taking these, bigger chances on things that's happening. But at the same time, we've got this absolute AI arms race

Where the companies, you know, particularly the bigger companies that are in market right now, they have to show that they're not gonna get obliterated. By and become just a nothing burger because AI's gonna basically do the thing that they do and the thing they're really differentiated in. And there's big companies that, you know, up until now have been, you know, real strategic. Partner for their customers and their customers are now looking at them going, I don't know man.

Like I'm, I'm gonna have this AI stuff, and are you still really a strategic partner for me when we're in the age of AI and I'm gonna have one or two companies that I rely on to do AI stuff and then there's you and you are my provider for accounting or, you know, or whatever, or ERP in some ways or, or whatever. And it, it, you're not my AI provider. So what are you. And are you, is, is your stuff actually strategic anymore? This is the really hard thing that a lot of big companies are going

Jeff

right And then kind of on the other side, right? You have, if you are at a startup. Or, or mid or scale up or, or really anything that's not one of the, you know, gigantic , kind of table stakes, like you said, strategic partners. , You have a board or an executive team or, , both probably, at some level of telling you you have to have an AI story or what is your AI story or what's the AI strategy That ranges everywhere from . People who have, you know, a deep functional answer to this is how it's going to make, , the thing we saw better. And then you get the, you know, I call it the, the Salt Bay of AI on it where they just kinda sprinkle a little ai, it's like SEO back in the day.

Know, put the SEO magic on it? So that's, that's the biggest thing is like everyone now says they have ai. I guess that's the first thing I was curious about was. , How do you position in a world where everyone's saying the same thing or like, what, what does AI mean? Because that's, that's not new. That's always happened. People say the same thing. They grab each other's messaging. But like

April

right. That's right.

Jeff

But AI is the new thing,

April

So AI is, the, AI is the new thing. And so like, here's a way to think about it. you know, we are quickly approaching the point, like if I rolled the calendar back a couple years ago, , , a lot of these things were new, so. There was again, sort of this race like, well, we're the first ones to have AI in this thing and there might be five, five vendors in your space, but you were fast and on top of it or whatever.

And say, we got the AI and they don't, right. But now we've got this period where everybody's got the AI man, So, you know, it's been, it's been over a year, probably two since I've worked with a company where, you know, AI wasn't a significant part of what they were doing in the product. So we've got this thing now where everybody's got the ai. So what's differentiating, right? Really, it comes down to what is the value that we're unlocking with that ai. And interestingly, a lot of that comes down to what was differentiating about your product before.

And so how are you using AI to then unlock? The strategic asset that you had before. So some companies, for example, have data that nobody else has, and therefore they can apply AI in a way. That folks who don't have that data, they got the same ai, but they can't unlock the same things because they don't have the same access to data underneath it because they have some proprietary data, or, you know, their product did something in a way that the other thing didn't. Therefore, when they put the AI on top, the result for the customer is very, very different.

So we're now in this stage where, you know, just saying, oh, I got a, I got a chat interface for this thing. Who cares? Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Everybody's got one of those. I gotta say like last week I worked with a company and they had acquired another company . And you know, when I asked him, well what does this thing do? And he was like, well, it's kind of a chat interface on everything. And I was like, oh boy. But then when you looked at it, oh my goodness, it had a bunch of things way beyond that that was actually really, really impressive. , And so we spent a lot of time talking about the value of that, because you can't just say it's a chat interface on the front, it's like. No, it's a chat interface that could do a whole lot of other things, unlock a whole lot of other things.

It's all about what does that chat interface actually connect to? And because it can connect to all these things, what can you actually do that you couldn't do before? It's taken it that one more step to get to the nut of what's the value that you can deliver for a customer that the other guys can't. And that goes into. Yeah, I got a chat interface. But what does it have access to? Like what do you have underneath there

that the other guys didn't have?

Jeff

I always get in trouble for my tirade on chat interfaces. 'cause, 'cause we also have a chat interface for part of our product and, and my, you know, our CEO's always like, Jeff, come on. You cannot say that.

April

So hard on the.

Jeff

stop crapping on the chat interface. We have that, and I'm like, yeah, but ours does something cool and enables you to do something good.

April

But this is it, but this is it. You gotta, you've gotta be able to articulate that,

Jeff

right? No

April

You have

Jeff

the chat interface is what You can do with it. that

April

That's right.

Jeff

that is important. So that's

April

Well, and not just what you can do with it, what you can do with it. The other guys can't like, if you say you got a chat interface, everybody else is gonna go. Yeah, buddy. Me too. We got one of those too. So you gotta be able to go that extra step and say, what are we doing with the AI that's different? how does it unlock value? Which is fundamental positioning. Stuff like that was true, you know? Back when we were all in a big race to get everything on the cloud, and

that was a differentiator to be in the cloud and you weren't on the cloud, you know, and things like that. So that really isn't any different than what we've always wrestled with. I think it's actually good that we're, you know, we're pulling out of the early days of this where you could just say , we got the AI and that was differentiating. Now we actually have to think more about outcomes.

Jeff

Well, cause there was all this.

April

does the customer get? What's the outcome for the customer?

Jeff

There was all the like AI innovation budget, right? For a little while you could go to almost any company and just go, we have AI , and you could get a POC going and you could maybe get a small purchase because they had almost unlimited budget to just try things.

April

we still have a reasonable amount of that, right? With big clients, there's still a reasonable amount of this. Like you, you gotta say the AI words, because otherwise you can't tap into the AI budget. Um.

Jeff

have to say that magic word, to get in.

April

But that on its own, you know that on its own. Like when everybody's got it now, what do you say? Right? And what you have to get at is your differentiated value. What's the value we can deliver that the other guys can't? At the end of the day, that's what's gonna win you the business.

Jeff

. the. Genesis behind all this. And I started to tell you this earlier, , like one of the things we've done that's been really helpful for, for our own positioning actually, , is we've been building this community of product leaders kind of around the country where we will go and one of the things we do is host, , dinners about 30, you know, CPOs, VPs. . But like this. Is the number one topic that I hear no matter where I'm in the country, say in Francisco or Minneapolis or Denver or Chicago or Boston, New York. Everyone's saying like, how do we escape this?

Kind of either A, how do we escape this AI pilot trough? How do we differentiate in this world are just, what do I say? I'm expected to say ai, but like what comes after those two letters?

April

in my opinion, which is super biased 'cause I'm the positioning lady but in my opinion, like the problem we've had in tech since the beginning is. We don't have a lot of discipline about how we do positioning. And so when we're thinking about positioning, we wanna jump straight to value and say, this is the value we can deliver. You should pick us 'cause we can deliver this value. And that just doesn't win you a deal. Like it doesn't. What wins you a deal is this is the value that we could deliver that the other folks you're looking at can't. That's really different. Like those two things are really different. We can do this versus we can do this and no one else can.

These are two very, very different things, and so in order to get at this differentiated value, you first have to start with a really clear headed view on who do you actually compete with. Not, who could you compete with? Not who are you likely to compete with two years from now? Not who you used to compete with two years ago when the founder closed all the deals. It's who is showing up in a deal right now and what do you have to beat in order to win a deal? , Which by the way, includes the status quo of whatever it is they're doing right now. So what I find what you get in organizations is they'll say. We don't have anything differentiating. We got nothing.

We got nothing. We looked at it. There's nothing that we do that's unique. And then I'll say, okay, well how much revenue do you, the last time I had this conversation, the guy says 80 million. Like that's a lot of revenue. Are you growing? Yeah. 20, 30% year on year. Okay. So every day. Every day. Your customers. Do this comparison and they pick you. They're not idiots. They're picking you for a reason, right? There's gotta be something. Most of the time when I go in and work with companies, what you'll see is this cloudiness around the competitive landscape, And this is particularly bad on the product management side. I think because product management is used to living in the future. They're thinking about roadmaps, they're thinking about where we're gonna be two years from now, three years from now, five years from now. But when we think about positioning.

Positioning's all about how do I win business right now, this quarter, next quarter, the quarter after. What's a salesperson gotta do to land a deal right now against the competitors we got right now? So when we look at the competitive landscape, often product management will give me this list of competitors that is much, much longer than what we actually have to fight against in a deal. So when the product management team says, we don't have anything that's differentiating. It's like, yeah, okay. But these guys at the bottom here, these last four that do, the little cool thing that you do are three guys in a basement and they never land on a short list against you. So we can just put Xs through them.

As far as the customer is concerned, they don't exist. They're a ghosts.

Jeff

Right. And big companies are not gonna trust them right now or, or like

April

And so I don't have to worry about positioning against them until they start causing me some pain. They start popping up into sales deals. Okay, I'll worry about them and I'll worry how to position against them. But once you get that clarity and you say, well, who actually are we fighting against? It's usually like, you've got this tiny little list. Now all of a sudden you say, oh, well we've got these things that they don't have that. But you were including these, you know, cutting edge, whatever, whatever, you know, but we read their press release and they said they had this thing. It's like, yeah, but there's not a single customer out there using it,

So that's the first thing. It's like I really gotta understand who I need to position against. And then once I have that, then I can take this really rational look at what is the delta between me and the real competition. Not who could compete with me, who should compete with me, but who actually does. And when I get really tight on that, then I gotta take differentiators. And map it all the way out to value. Like, I can't just say, I've got this kind of AI thing, and they don't have that. So what, what does that mean for a customer's business? Like , how does that help a customer make money?

How does that help a customer save money? And I gotta draw the line all the way out to that. , But if I can do that, then I get at the real differentiation. Often what you'll get is people wanna jump straight to that value thing. And so they're like, they wanna answer, why does everybody love us so much? and that's the wrong question. The right question is why pick us over the three other people on the short list and the status quo thing? Why pick us over them?

What can we do for the business that they can't?

Jeff

I've kind of tried to look at it, and this is a lot from reading obviously Awesome. Obviously helped here. And But like, if we're replacing something, 'cause we are ultimately a software company, right? Like we, we have a big media team, which is a whole separate go to market conversation but. We are a software company at, at har is what we do. We sell software for, , understanding how users use your solutions, you know, session, replay and AI to help you understand that.

For us, the way I look at it is if we are replacing something, we have to be, not two x better, but like five, probably 10 x better than what we're replacing. 'cause there's, there's cost. Like what is the thing? Looking at who they have because that that's, at that point, that becomes a one-to-one, maybe a one to two. 'cause maybe there's someone else they're evaluating,

April

right. need to be 10 x better than the thing they already have. Yeah. It's such a pain to switch. It's, it's expensive to switch. , It's a pain in the butt. Everybody's gotta learn something new. There's the risk of failure, like if you look on the data on this in enterprise software, we lose about half of our deals to what we call no decision. And there's no decision when you scratch at the data under that, no decision usually, , it's not that we looked at all the other things that decided that the thing we're doing now is amazing and we don't need to switch. It's, we looked at everything else and we said, I don't know.

I don't know if I could make a confident choice here. I'm for sure, for sure gonna end up with something that's way better than what we have right now. And it's a risky choice to make. Like, what if I picked the wrong thing? What if the project fails? What if I personally end up looking stupid? What if my boss thinks I'm a dummy? 'cause I picked this thing it's so easy to just kick the can down the road and say. Go to your boss and say, Hey man, like now's not a good time.

I looked at the other things. They were okay. You know, they were okay, You know, the market's not so great right now. Maybe now's not a good time to invest in this thing. Like it's so, it's kind of like when you look at the data on this stuff, it's kind of remarkable that we ever sell anything, so if you come into it with that idea, right, like you need to come into it with that attitude, like why would anybody buy anything

Versus this thing that they've got that's been working just fine for the last three years. Do you gotta make this again, this really compelling case,

Jeff

I wanna go back to not today. You didn't, but I've read this from what you said, this stuck with me for a long, long time. Is . Like when you ultimately get down to it. You can paint the aspirational picture of vision and magic of where you're gonna take people, but what the thing's gonna be decided on is, can you solve, can you solve my pain? right now.

April

Because I'm giving you my right now dollars. This isn't like venture capital where I, you know, I'm taking a gamble on what's gonna happen in the future. Like it's, this is why it's so different than fundraising, right? Sales is a whole different thing. It's like, I'm gonna give you today's dollars. I'm not giving you tomorrow's dollars. I'm giving you today dollars. For the thing you can do today. Like, yeah, I care a bit about your vision and whatever. Like the more I'm spending, the more I care about that because I want you to stay in business. I want you to be around for the next five years. I wanna make sure I've made the right choice here and your roadmap aligns with mine.

But ultimately at the end of the day, it's like, I'm gonna give you this much money. What do I get back like.

Jeff

better? Or what's not gonna hurt tomorrow because I give you this money right now,

April

How am I gonna make more money?

Jeff

so is

April

more money? Like how does it, how does the money thing work over on my end, buddy? 'cause I'm giving you this money. I, I gotta see what's coming back from

Jeff

on the line here, like, we're changing something. I'm saying that this is a better idea than what we're doing. And so my, my ass is on the line. So in your mind is it, is the kind of path there, well there's almost dual positioning at some level or, or maybe that's wrong, but there's the right now context of what is the pain, what is the thing that, that tomorrow will be better because you bought us and signed with us today. And there is the company positioning of here's the new future you can have down the road. And that's how you keep people thinking about you, who maybe aren't evaluating an immediate

April

Yeah. Like, you know, it it, for me that's felt really different depending on the size of the deal you are selling. Like when I worked at IBM and we were doing a deal that was like 10 million bucks, like people cared a lot about the future because we're, we're not ripping out that 10 million bucks worth of stuff for the next 10 years. So we're looking at this like a 10 year commitment, whereas I'm selling you thing costs 20 grand, 30 grand. Dude, if it's not going so good, I'm gonna rip you out in six months and I'm not gonna feel too bad about that. And so, especially, you know, we're SaaS software in increasingly it's consumption based software pricing on this software.

So, you know, I can test you out for a little bit and if it's not so good, I just stop using it or doing whatever, And if it's conception based, I don't pay you if I'm not using it. So it really depends on the hurdle the company has to get over to get the initial adoption happening. Like so do I have to do a lot of integration work? Do I have to do a lot of training work? Do I have to do a lot of things? And so. If there's a lot of that and the company's really putting their neck on the line in terms of applying resources to all that, then they care a lot about the vision. 'cause they don't, you know, they're making a bet that they're not gonna have to rip you out in a few years.

If they don't have to make that big of a bet on it, then they don't care that much about the vision at all. They're just like, how, what's, how's this gonna fix my thing right now, like this month, next month, the month after that?

Jeff

I think this goes back to a thing now that I've run into at companies I've been at in the past. I've been, at a, one of the early companies kind of in ap, AP in, you know, application performance management way back in the day when that whole thing was launching. And the thing we ran into is we'd say something that resonated and immediately our competition would start saying the same thing, both the upstarts as well as like, , ca Wiley, you know,

back way back in the day.

April

The Dirty Liars. The dirty lying

Jeff

I think you call it like the dark art arts of competition. Right. But how do you, you know, no one wants to say we do this. That company doesn't in, in public how do you kind of balance this? Like we do this and they don't, but at the same time run into, they're gonna just gonna say they do it a anyway

April

I actually love it when a competitor is lying. And the worst the lie is, the better it is for you. And so here's how I like to deal with this. So usually when we look at it and say the competitor is lying, usually they're not lying, lying. And, and what they're saying could be true if the stars all align perfectly and in a certain situation, and you know, at two o'clock on a Thursday, third Thursday of the month, maybe so what it is, is an opportunity to teach your customer something. So if you're in a deal, you can do a thing and you absolutely do it, and you understand the value of that thing, and you're talking to the customer about the value of that thing, and then your competitor comes up and says, oh yeah, US two, usually what they mean is.

They do the thing, or at least they have a way of doing the thing, but they don't deliver the value. This is why the value is really important. So the first thing you have to teach the customer is, look, we do this thing. Here's the value of it. They could technically do the thing, but you're never gonna get to the value. Here's why. So I'll give you an example. So I worked with this company and, , they had started out as a solution for one particular thing in a business process. And then gradually the company had grown and they had expanded so that they had. A platform of solutions that could handle this entire business process.

Their big competition had grown through acquisition, and so they also had solutions for each of the steps in the business process. The problem was those solutions were all completely discreet because they had acquired them. All right, so. This company was going out and saying, we have a platform that handles the end-to-end solution. That's not value. That's just kind of the thing, So when we worked together, we had to get at the value. What was the value of that? Well, the value of that is all the things you're doing at the start. People at the end know when the minute that happens, people at the end know it's happening because there's this common data layer underneath.

So you can get this amazing efficiency in the process because at every step, people know what's happening upstream and downstream because it's all one connected nice platform now. The other guys come up and they're like, we got a platform two. We got a platform Two. Look at, look at all the things. We have all the things there. They are. But they can't do this efficiency on the process because each of those things are actually separate products. So if you do something over here, nothing over here knows anything about it. There's no common metadata layer, there's no common thing. So they would come up and say, oh yeah, we have a platform too.

Oh, yes, we can do this too. Oh, yes, yes. And so what we would do or what we, what we did with this, with this company was in even the first sales call, we would talk about this idea of getting this efficiency across. The process. And what's really cool is they, you know, so they're starting to add some AI stuff to that. And so what's neat about that is because it's common data all the way across, you could actually have an agent and automate the whole thing because it's common data all the way across. Never do it with the other guys. Every step is completely separate. It's a completely separate product. They don't even have the same data definitions like what's considered a product over here is not the same definition of a product over here, for example.

So we would teach the customer this thing. It's all one thing, it's all the same data. Look, this thing happens here and these guys know it. And so you, therefore you could get this great efficiency and if you wanted to, you could automate the entire thing. Great. Now. In the sales process, they would say, look, there are other companies out there that have piece parts that do this thing, but they're not a platform.

And so because they're not a platform, they can't share the data, they can't do this automation thing. So the next time you're talking to a company, ask them these questions. And the killer question was this, many logins are there?

Jeff

That right? I mean, right there. You're, you're just like,

April

And the customer would go, what do you mean how many logins? And they're like, yeah. They will literally say it's a platform, but you got five logins. So go ask them, how many logins are there? The salespeople love that one sale bunch, you know. So I did a call with them two, three weeks after they were using this new sales pitch where they were telling the customers like, Hey, do you know the other guys?

They say they do it, but it's not actually, it's, it's five things. It's just like if you bought it from five different companies, ask 'em how many logins. And then the customer would come back and they'd be like, those guys were lying to us. They were lying. Oh my gosh, I caught them in a lie. And this is, this is so dangerous for a company. And then the, the, the competitor stopped saying this platform

thing because it's so dangerous to get caught in a lie with a customer. It's the deal killer. It's the deal killer. So if there is an opportunity and you know your customer, your competitor is lying, then what you should really think about is what is the simple way for me to train my prospects? The difference between the outcome they get with us versus the outcome they get with the others and train them on the qualifying questions they should be asking to the other vendors on the short list to get through the live. Just call it out. You don't even have to call out the competitor's name. You just have to say, look, some folks out there will say this, but when they say that, what they actually mean is that's a team of professional services people.

It's a six month engagement. It looks like this. You're not gonna get it out till next Christmas anyway, so I, I love it when the competitor lies.

Jeff

That works even if they're not lying. But if you just know there's that deficiency, because on our end. I,

April

It's almost always that

Jeff

yeah, our big value prop is we are the session replay that the AI watches for you and tells you what's wrong and the, the magic is in and just pushes to you. And it was interesting because we started to say, okay, well go ask. Blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, other company, how they, how they want you to find things like this. And, 'cause we knew the answer was often going to be, get a bunch of people in a room, watch a whole bunch of sessions together,

April

you go.

Jeff

find some stuff and we're like, just go. We knew the answer. We're like, go ask that question. , And that, you know, that always worked.

April

That's exactly it. That's exactly how you handle it.

Jeff

, The, the last thing I was curious about is like, 'cause the genesis of all this was, I'm running into this from product people coast to coast, like San Francisco to Boston and everywhere in between. , But the other thing that comes up is, is, and I love that you. Spoken on this already because I think this is something people need to hear. Why is positioning so important for product and it's not? 'cause they're looking away and it, well, it's, you know, at some type point they can't just look away in the future. They have to look at the now for what we sell. But it's also, if you don't have this right. You have a very high risk of, of burning out engineering and product teams where

they're working hard. But if you're not driving the right thing forward, all they're going to hear is that's not good enough or that's not what we need. And you can, you can kill yourself nights and weekends , but if you're misaligned,

April

Yeah.

Jeff

all be for naugh and like, I thought

April

Yeah,

Jeff

a really prescient thing that you've brought up in the past.

April

yeah. I do think that we have to be really clear that. There's things we're worried about for the here and now, and then there's things we're worried about in the future. And so we might make a decision today that says, okay, today we're positioned around this, right? We're gonna go after these kinds of customers. The way we win is we're better at this particular thing. This is how we win in the market today. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that's the way we win forever, and all we're doing is building a roadmap that makes that value prop stronger and stronger. Sometimes we are. But it's perfectly okay to say, but you know what?

Two years from now our plan is we're gonna make an acquisition in this area that unlocks this thing. We're gonna be going after a completely different customer and doing a completely different thing. And that's amazing. And the hard thing in product management is you gotta hold both things in your head Gotta know where we're going and we're building this thing for the future, which might actually have completely different value proposition, different. Target customers, different way we win, different competitors, different everything, but we also cannot lose sight of the fact, like don't get to stay in business for that glorious future if we don't make the number this year.

And so we gotta kind of hold both things. And we can't get the two things muddled. We can't get out over our skis starting to worry about these competitors that don't actually cause us pain right now, even though we know, or we think they might cause us pain two years from now. we've gotta be able to have this really clear picture of here's the value we provide right now. For the competitors we're against right now for the customers we're trying to serve right now, while we're building this other thing where the those things might be completely

different, customers might be different value, might be different, competitors might be different, and we can never get the two things confused

Jeff

I think that's the key to product, right? And, and making sure you have that team. If you're not, if you're not communicating both of those things, like here's where we are, the path and where we need to be. you you run a big risk of, of some, or many people, , burnout, disillusionment, whatever the word you want to

April

That's exactly it. That's exactly it. Because the sales team is like, oh, you guys are building this thing, but that doesn't help me do a deal right now. Wha wha wha. Right. And it's 'cause they don't understand necessarily where you're going, where you're at Right. now. So again, you've gotta be able to

Jeff

close this one deal right? now, but it does, you know, and so that, but if you can explain all that clearly, , It's gonna help, help, everyone across the board understand why we're doing things at the same time, help you sell. all right, well, I think that that puts a great kind. Period at the end of the sentence for the whole message here is, is the world was crazy. It's still kind of crazy. AI is is but like at heart rate, AI is a tool we're using to still solve the same problems we were trying to solve before.

, You wanna focus on what you can do that others can't,

April

Right.

Jeff

you know, have the vision for the future. But you also gotta look at now and, and don't mix the two. Keep it very clear.

April

the two. That's the key. It's so hard to do, but it's actually the key.

Jeff

Well, April Dunford, thank you so much for

April

Awesome.

Jeff

if you guys haven't read, , obviously o actually, I, I guess it sounds like maybe wait a month or two and buy the new one when it

April

I know. I hate talking about it for exactly that reason, to cannibalize my own sales, So lemme tell you about it. So the original book, obviously awesome. , Describes a methodology for doom positioning. So if you're in a positioning jam and you're kind of like, how do I actually get this done? That book was written for that. I put it out in 2019. And since then I've worked with a couple hundred companies. .

My thinking on some of this stuff has changed. And some of the things in the book, I didn't think I did an awesome job explaining it. Like, for example, differentiated value I think is so important and the chapter on differentiated value in the first version of the book wasn't actually all that long. And so now what I'm seeing is people really getting stuck on that. And I'm like, man, I could have spent a, a bit more time explaining what I meant in there. there's also a bunch of stuff in there that I didn't cover in the first version, like. How do you handle positioning when you have multiple products or multiple divisions so there's a bunch of new stuff in the new book. It's sort of the expanded,

Jeff

Mm-hmm.

April

edition. So that's coming in February. So not long now.

Jeff

long at all. No, that's that's long enough. That's long enough to buy the original version, read it, take notes, and then buy the new

April

just by the audio book, man. You've got credits. It's free. But yeah, the new one's gonna be great. Like, in my opinion, the new one fixes all the problems of the first one. I'm like, put a bow on it. It's perfect. I will never go back to this book again. We're done.

Jeff

, But thank you so much for coming on, definitely a highlight of the year on my end, so I appreciate it. , Go buy the book, buy the new one when it comes out, buy. After you read that read sales pitch. 'cause it, it honestly helps a lot. And also we have seen more product, people more involved in go to market consistently over time. So like it,

April

yeah,

Jeff

you know, you're gonna end up involved in sales more and more, so just go get ahead of it. , You're on LinkedIn, you're, you're, is April done for.com?

April

April denver.com. Yep.

Jeff

of ways check it out. , And April, thank you so much. This was a blast. I appreciate you coming on and I had a lot of fun. I hope you did too.

April

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. This was great.

Jeff

Awesome.