The Marketing Expert: Sell Anything with this Trick | April Dunford

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Positioning is the foundation, not the tagline.

  April Dunford defines positioning as how your product is the best in the world at delivering some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. People confuse it with messaging, taglines or 'brand positioning,' but those are things you do with positioning once it exists. If marketing and sales are the house, positioning is the foundation. In practice, it's context-setting: what is this, what's it about, and why should I care?

• 02

  The category you choose triggers a whole set of assumptions.

  Positioning works like the opening scene of Apocalypse Now. Within three minutes you know it's Vietnam, Saigon, a traumatised lead and not a comedy, so you can settle into the story. Say 'CRM' and a tech buyer instantly assumes you compete with Salesforce, track a sales pipeline, sell to the VP of sales and charge less than Salesforce. When those assumptions are true, marketing and sales save huge effort. When they're false, sales spends every call undoing the damage.

• 03

  Most companies never position deliberately, because it feels obvious.

  A founder decides 'email sucks, we'll build better email.' Two years of customer feedback later, the product looks more like chat, but everyone inside still calls it email and customers are confused. Because nobody chose 'email' on purpose, nobody knows how to reposition. Most products could be positioned in a dozen markets if you looked with fresh eyes.

• 04

  Win an underserved slice, then push outward.

  Most successful tech companies dominate a subsegment too small for the leader to care about, then creep toward the leader. Salesforce started with small businesses that had no IT department, selling 'no software' cloud CRM. Dunford was at Siebel then, and Siebel shrugged: 'We sell great big million-dollar enterprise deals.' Investors want a billion-dollar addressable market. But to close your first five or ten deals you must be the best at something, so tell investors the long-term story and win the niche first.

• 05

  In B2B, the granddaddy of emotions is fear.

  The average B2B deal has five to 11 stakeholders. The buyer can't tell the boss 'I liked the vibe.' The case has to be made on making money or saving money. Fear of looking bad or being fired is why incumbents win: nobody gets fired for picking Salesforce, which has double the market share of its nearest rival. Advocating for something new has a huge downside and little upside — unless your job is transformation, as with today's 'figure out AI' mandates.

• 06

  The scariest competitor is 'no decision.'

  Matt Dixon's The JOLT Effect analysed 2.5 million recorded sales calls during COVID lockdowns. It found that 40–60% of B2B purchase processes end in no decision. These buyers didn't choose to stay with what they have. Everything looked the same and they couldn't decide confidently, so they told the boss 'let's look next year.' Vendors pitch 'why pick us' when the real question is 'why pick us over the other guys?'

• 07

  Talk about why the features matter.

  Dunford breaks positioning into components: competitive alternatives (what customers would do if you didn't exist), differentiated capabilities, the value those capabilities deliver, and who cares a lot about that value. Messaging comes last. Technical teams assume buyers can translate a feature into value, but they often can't. Even megapixels had to be taught once.

• 08

  Sales stories should map the whole market.

  The hero's-journey arc leaves out competitors. Dunford's pitches open with how the company sees the market differently. Then they lay out the alternative approaches with their pluses and minuses, and ask whether the product fits. Half of B2B buyers have never bought a product like yours before, and that's what helps them decide confidently. Postman did this with its 'API-first world' point of view and even a graphic novel on its homepage.