April Dunford on product positioning, segmentation, and optimizing your sales process

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2022

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

April 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 consulting 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.com

Twitter: 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

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Thank you to our sponsors for making this episode possible:

• Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/

• Flatfile: https://flatfile.com/Lenny

• Productboard: https://Productboard.com/

Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	If your
0:05.0	position, positioning, and there's a chance that it may not be the product that's the problem.
0:09.0	It may be your positioning, and there's no one I've learned more from
0:12.0	about how to very practically and tactically think about your positioning than from April Dunford.
0:17.0	April is the best-selling author of the book Obviously Awesome, which many consider an industry Bible on product positioning.
0:23.7	She's also let teams at seven successful B2B startups worked with over 200 companies
0:28.9	helping them nail their positioning and has almost certainly done more positioning work than any human alive.
0:34.6	Also April's guest post in my newsletter, a quick start guide to positioning is still one of the
0:39.3	most popular posts of all time in my newsletter and one they share often with founders. I had a
0:44.5	total blast speaking with April and I hope you learn as much from this
0:47.6	conversation as I did. This episode is brought to you by Amplitude, the number one product analytics solution.
0:57.6	Amplitude helps product teams, growth teams, marketing and data teams,
1:02.0	build winning products faster faster and turn products into revenue.
1:05.6	Amplitude has everything you need including an integrated CDP, self-service analytics,
1:10.8	and even an experimentation platform to help you better understand your
1:14.2	users drive conversions and increase engagement, growth, and revenue.
1:18.4	Amplitude is built for teams that want to learn as fast as they ship and ship as fast as they learn.
1:23.5	Get your vanity metrics, trust your data, work smarter, and grow your business.
1:27.8	With over 1,700 customers like Atlassian, Instacart, and HBO,
1:32.2	amplitude is helping companies build better products.
1:35.0	Try amplitude for free.
1:37.0	Visit amplitude.com to get started.
	...

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