Intro: Welcome to the Forget the Funnel podcast, where we help SaaS and recurring revenue businesses stop guessing and start making more customer-led and data-backed decisions about how to grow. We're a product marketing and growth consultancy that helps teams learn from their best customers, map and measure their experiences to unlock your most effective levers for growth. If you're ready to evolve past best practices and other people's playbooks, because you know that what got you here won't get you there, then this show is for you. With that, let's dive into the episode.
April: Hey, Gia. Good to see you.
Gia: Hey, April.
April: Hello. Gia and I were having a conversation earlier about, you know, what are some big topics that we think would be fun to talk about together? And one of the things that came up was this topic that sounds really simple, but it turns out is actually quite complicated, which is what is the difference between messaging and positioning? So we thought we would riff on that today. Yeah. Yes.
Gia: Yeah, totally. And who better, obviously. So, okay. I think the best place to start, obviously. Well, I mean, maybe a little bit of context, too, because, I mean, you probably see this as much as I do. People have no idea what the difference between these two things are. There's a lot of terminology and marketing that people conflate together and think of as the same thing or don't really actually even understand why they're important to sort of pull apart and Evernote understand independently of each other. I know I'm on a lot of calls with founders that just use the two. They're always together. They're never thought of separately.
April: Oh, branding, too. We could throw branding in the middle of that, too.
Gia: And copy. Yeah. And copywriting, right?
April: Yes, and copywriting.
Gia: There's a lot we could tack in. But these two in particular, positioning and messaging, are often paired. You rarely see one without the other, honestly, particularly when you're talking to a founder as an example.
April: Absolutely.
Gia: So you tell me. Give me your, I know you've done this a good jillion times, but I'm going to ask you to do it again. Give me the definition of what is positioning.
April: Well, so better than that, let me give you my, you know, so usually when I talk about positioning, I've got this definition that I feel like I've said nine million times. So positioning defines how our product is the best in the world at delivering something—some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. But if we think about positioning, particularly in the context of how is that different from messaging? How is that different from branding or anything else? Positioning, in my opinion, defines a bunch of the critical underlying piece parts that we need to really deeply understand in order to do a lot of downstream things. And so in my world, positioning consists of a set of components. It's the definition of who are the alternatives that we compete against. So that includes what's the status quo thing that we're replacing and what else lands on a short list. Like, what do we have to position against or who do we have to beat in order to win a deal? How are we different in terms of what are the capabilities of the product and the company that are different from the other alternatives? And then that translates into differentiated value, meaning what is the value we can deliver for customers that the other alternatives cannot? And then we're talking about B2B, so we're never talking about everybody when we say customers. So what is our definition of the audience for this thing? Like, who is a best-fit customer? And then the last thing is market category, which is just kind of like what is the mental bucket that we want customers to put us in or the context that we use to kind of help those customers understand this differentiated value. So in my mind, that's what positioning is. It defines that stuff. Messaging in my mind is really different in that it is more concerned with the way we express that positioning in all the different ways that positioning manifests itself across marketing and sales. So it is an input. Like if you come to me and you say, hey, April, come write the messaging for the homepage. I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions and I'm going to say, well, who's the homepage for, man? And you're going to say, well, we're targeting these people. And then I need to understand the differentiated value, which means I need to understand who am I competing against and how do I win against those folks..
Gia: For those particular people?
April: Well, so here's the thing. If you come to me, if there's no difference between messaging and positioning, then if you come to me and say, do the messaging, then where do we start? Do we just make up value? And how good is that value going to be if I'm not clear who the competitor is and what we've got that's different that actually delivers on some value that's different. So I think this is the main thing that people don't understand about messaging versus positioning. I need to have these other things defined so that my messaging can be good. If I skip that step, then what often happens is we go straight to the messaging part and we get a bunch of people together in the room and then we say, why does everyone love our stuff? And the answers are often what I would call table stakes. They're not differentiating in the market at all. And then you build this nice homepage that looks great and it says a bunch of good things that your customers really love you for, but it doesn't answer the question, why pick us versus the other guys?
Gia: Yeah. And I also see a lot of teams make a lot of assumptions about what their customers care about and not really understand the differences and do the whole like inside the jar, what they think is important to their market. And the same thing happens with competition too, right? Like the product team has an understanding of who they're competing against, which is completely different from the sales team, which is completely different from the marketing team, which is often completely different from the customer.
April: I mean, this is so much of what I deal with in my clients. If you get a cross-functional team together and you say, if you didn't exist, what would a customer do? You get some wildly different opinions.
Gia: Yes. Yes. Yeah, totally.
April: And what's funny is it comes from, we just have different lenses on the market. Like the product team lives in the future a little bit. So they're thinking about the product roadmap and where's this thing got to be in 10 years. And so they're worried about what I would call a horizon competitor. Like somebody, we might not see them in deals much, but we might. And if we do, they could cause us some serious pain. Yeah. So they're often looking at competitors that sales never sees and then marketing and founders sit there too. What's that? Founders sit there too, right?
Gia: Oh, absolutely. Because they're working on vision stuff. Which is why, in my experience, there's a lot of butting heads between even like marketing and the leadership team, because the leadership team and the founding team is often future-facing and the marketing team is living in today. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
April: And that's two different. And then you know where the marketing team often gets; the marketing team will often get really blinded by their competitors marketing because they're really studying it. And so what you'll see is often a well-funded VC-backed startup will enter the market. And the marketing teams of all the competitors will go; oh my gosh, they're doing so good. They're everywhere. Like I see their marketing everywhere, and we got to watch out for them. We got to position against them because they're everywhere. And oh my gosh, they're saying the same thing we're saying or whatever. But then you walk over to the sales and you say, Have we ever seen them in a deal? And sales is like, who? I've never even heard of these guys. And so in my work, it's like, well, I don't have to worry about positioning against that ghost man. Like if a customer doesn't know they exist, then we don't have to position against them. And so, you know, often we'll get this, but you're right. Like if we jump straight to messaging without getting clear on this positioning thing, then, you know, we can make a perfectly nice-looking homepage or, you know, build some perfectly good messaging, but there might be a lot of assumptions baked into that that are just incorrect. And then, in the end of the day, does the messaging work? No, it doesn't.
Gia: Yeah, totally. And often gets used for, you know, a while and can even support sometimes teams through, you know, the first few months or potentially, you know, even a year. And then eventually it stops working. And then it starts to get like really stale. And then the marketing team.
April: If you've got a hotshot sales team, like a hotshot sales team can cover up for a lot of shitty marketing.
Gia: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Well, one thing that I wanted to call out about what you just said in the differences between positioning and messaging, one of the biggest differences in messaging that I think is really important to lean into a little bit, and it's related to homepages is like context and the context in which that messaging appears. And, you know, positioning is a little bit more, and correct me if I'm wrong here, I think of positioning as a little bit more like omnipresent. And then messaging is the articulation of that in multitude of different contexts. So you can come up with a high level messaging guide. And often for the teams that we work with, that's what we're doing. We're producing a high level messaging. But when it actually comes time to like put that into practice and put it into the market, it changes depending on what you're doing, what you're writing, what, you know, asset you're producing. And the homepage is only one articulation of that. And there's like potentially a bajillion others. So that sort of maybe tees up the conversation I have about like these...
April: Well, so let's stay on this one for a second because what I've had is, you know, I've learned this the hard way. And I think people that don't believe in building a messaging document are telling on themselves a little bit. Because I think the only people that think they don't need that are people that have not been a vice president of marketing at multiple different companies and have had that fight them in the butt. So let me tell you what happens if we decide that the homepage is going to be where messaging lives. Here's what happens. I got the homepage and I make a tagline and I write a bunch of stuff. And like you say, the context for the homepage is whatever it is you want the homepage to do. So sometimes the context for the homepage is we want you to come in and sign up for a free trial. Sometimes the context for the homepage is we think you're going to come in and click on the button that says give me a demo or contact us and then you're going to get into a sales funnel. Other times the context for the homepage is very different. Like, let's say I have a PLG motion and then I sell over top. Sometimes the context for the homepage is just to speak to the end user. And there are deeper pages on the webpage that speak to the actual buyer, which is a totally different positioning with totally different messaging and totally different everything. But the job of the homepage isn't to speak to that. The job of the homepage is to speak to the thing. Or sometimes it's the opposite where I have some kind of PLG motion where you're getting in in some other way and it has nothing to do with my homepage and my homepage is just about the sales motion over top. So I'm just talking about the value for managers or senior executives and I'm not talking about that little free thing at all. And so this idea that we're going to write messaging for the homepage and that's our messaging is kind of overly simplistic because I got messaging for all these other things. So let's say I don't build the messaging document. I've just, you know, I've got my positioning. I think it's pretty good. I'm going to write this messaging and I'm going to put it on the homepage. Right. And then what happens? All right. Well, then someone says, hey, we got a trade show coming up. And what we'd like to have is some banners for the booth. And we'd like to have a one pager, you know, that we could give people out and maybe we're going to have a build a landing page. And we're going to put some messaging on that landing page of the leads that come from this thing. You know, we're going to send them to this landing page because we're running a little campaign or whatever. OK, fine. So then so then people are going to build these things. And when they build them, they will build them. They'lllook at the homepage because that's the only thing we got. And they'll build a version that is specific for this trade show in the context of this trade show that has only these kinds of attendees that were only, you know, so the message is going to change a little. bit cause now we've got this different context. It's a trade show, it's a one pager or it's whatever. And then something comes up a couple of weeks later where it's like, Hey, we're running a campaign. We're going to do some email campaign and there's been some thing that's happened in the news and we want to take advantage of that. And so we're running a campaign around that. And then we've got to write some messaging for that. So what goes in the email sequence and what's in the thing and maybe we're going to create some content that's click through stuff or that came great. And then everyone says, well, you know, we got to build that stuff. So they might look at the homepage, but they're also going to look at that thing you built for the trade show because it's newer and they like that better. And so they like, Oh, let's take the one-pager and we'll start from that. And then two weeks later we got something else. So there's another thing. And all the sales reps wish they had a thing like this they could send the customer. So you build one of those. And again, they'll look at the stuff from the campaign cause that's newer. And two months later you'll look at the stuff your team is building and it is like broken telephoned itself in a completely different message. And you're like, what the heck is going on? And then you have to try to get it all, whatever. So the messaging document, in my opinion, if we're going to do messaging, we do positioning first, that's the input. Then we're going to write messaging and we are going to write what we think of as boilerplate or all purpose messaging that is used as a starting point for whatever we're going to do in marketing. And so we're going to say, we got a tagline. Here's what it is. We got a 50 word description, a hundred word description, a 200 word description. We got three points of value and this is the approved messaging that goes around that. We got five or six big features that we talk about. Here's the approved way of talking about them. We have graphics and there's the approved graphics and you should not be making up your own graphic when you go to do something. And we have customers quotes and these are the approved ones. And we shove all this stuff in the messaging document. And then every time someone wants to build something, they go to the messaging document and we are always one degree of separation from that thing.
Now if you're a super early stage startup and you're not running any campaigns and you're not building any content and you don't have anything going on, maybe it's okay to just have this stuff live on the homepage and just leave it there. And, and that's fine. But if you are anything more complicated than that, then you can do that. But trust me, you don't want to because and no experienced marketer would ever tell you to do that. But there are some very inexperienced marketers out there saying, Oh yeah, we'll just do the whole thing. That'll be the thing. And I'll be like, I'm all me in six months and tell me how that worked out.
Gia: Yeah, exactly. As soon as you're any level of complexity and layering in any other types of marketing, there's also segmentation, which we haven't talked about yet, which is a whole other thing to incorporate into this. What I was going to mention before when you were talking about like how the messaging morphs over time, depending on like recency and things like that. I've seen that with like partnership campaigns and stuff, like trying to rely on this, you know, messaging that worked in, you know, an ad campaign when you're bringing it to a partner's audience, right? When you're doing like co-marketing or partnership marketing or I think it's called, I think the latest it's called the ecosystem marketing. Well, that's great.
April: I think that makes it sound very sophisticated. Like we make this hard on ourselves in marketing because I think we keep making up new names for old things.
Gia: But I know, but what I was going to say is just, you know, the it's, it ends up being like the blind leading the blind a little bit, especially as teams start to grow and they start to tack on event marketing and content marketing and ads and partnerships. And you know, like the teams start to sort of grow to the point where they've all kind of lost the plot and they're all like kind of starving for this like source of truth. And the helpful way to think about their messaging. I know that that's what we get. We get the teams of like, we just, we've lost the plot a little bit. It feels scatterbrained. The team doesn't know how to make good decisions. They feel like they're, I just had a conversation two days ago with somebody talking about how like the, the go to market team feels like a little bit like they're being held hostage. Like they can't put anything out into the market because the positioning and messaging hasn't been green lit. And so they're like stuck not being able to actually market and like, I like,
April: so I see this a lot in the companiesI work with and what it is is that, you know, and it, it often feels at the lower levels of the organization. Like the team is having a fight about value propositions or messaging, but what's really happening, I think that the underlying root causes often, we don't agree on positioning. Like it's, you know, because the value proposition is different depending on what competitor you have in your head. And so, and then the lower level people are like, well, I don't know, these guys are saying this and these guys are saying this. And when we write it this way, then the founder comes and yells at us, but, you know, it feels like my boss wants it this way and I don't know what to do. And so, which is why, you know, for the work I do, why we're, you know, we're always working with this cross-functional team because if I can't get agreement and alignment across the team, we're gonna have this fight forever.
Gia: Totally.
April: And we're never gonna be able to do anything.
Gia: I think that's the biggest problem with positioning is exactly that, is the, not the infighting, but like the lack of alignment across the organization on what it is. And then the, you know, the marketing team feels like they just have to do the market and they're just like crossing their fingers and doing the best they can with what they have, even though they are like waiting for this, like they're waiting for the gods to tell them what the positioning is. They're just like hanging out, waiting for it so that they know what to do and how to actually produce messaging around it.
April: But the other thing, the other thing I will tell you is like the death of good positioning is a lack of consistency in the execution on it, right? So, you know once we're all getting toget an agreement on it we have to kind of pick know, once were all getting to get an agreement on it, we have to kind of pick it and stick it. And the problem with, again, not having a messaging document or something written down to say, this is what we've all agreed on. This is gonna be our starting point for building this stuff. Then it's very easy for people to start messing with it and saying like, one of the things I found when I was in-house VP marketing is we come up with this positioning, we get everybody in agreement on it, everybody be good. We make some messagings, that'd be good. So we get this messaging document, we're all ready for that. And then, you know, and then we update the homepage and we got that going and things are going good. And we're like two, three months into it. And then one day I'll come into the office and pull up the old homepage and I'll be like, what is that? And I'll be like some new messaging on there. And I'll be like, what? And then I walk out the hall and I'm like, oh, someone wanna let me know what's going on? And what I'll get is the team going, oh, we just did a little, you know, we're just doing some tweaks. Like, we've been saying this forever, forever. And it's been three months, but it feels like forever because it's so repetitive. They're like, we're just saying the same thing and the same thing and the same thing. And so what you'll get is your team will get bored of it. Yes. Just like website design. It's the same thing, right? It's the moment where it starts to work. And what you actually have to do is be super consistent about things across all the channels, across all the ways you're doing it. You have to be wickedly consistent and just say it again and again and again and again and again. And this is how you start building a reputation in the market for something. But that is work. And it takes time and energy and effort to be that consistent, and you can't just wing it. Like, again, you have these little wee companies and I've got a one-page homepage and I'm not running any campaigns and I'm super early stage and I just need to get something up there to get the job done. Like, I'm not saying that's not the thing to do. Like, if that's what you gotta do, then do it, right? But if you're big enough that you have a head of marketing, your head of marketing is not gonna wanna do that for smart reasons.
Gia: One of the questions that I think is really interesting and you and I go about this in a very different way because we work with teams that have a different center of gravity.
April: That's right. So for people listening, a lot of the folks that Gia works with are pure product-led growth. So they don't necessarily have salespeople that are working with a prospect through the purchase process. Whereas I have some companies that have a product-led growth thing in there, but the positioning that we're working on specifically is the positioning for the sales team that comes in over top. And then a lot of my companies are just purely sales. Like, they might have a free trial or something, but nothing gets sold without talking to a salesperson somewhere in there. And so they're really different contexts. Like, for the companies that I work with, because the products tend to be kind of complicated, that's the reason why you have a salesperson assisting through the purchase process. Stuff is kind of complicated. It's a bigger ticket item. It's a lot harder to work it through the purchase team to get a deal happening. That has to be like a POC and like, there's all kinds of—Exactly. Sometimes we're doing proof of concept. Sometimes we're doing all kinds of things that are complicated. But, because we have a salesperson working through this kind of, you know, somewhat drawn-out complicated purchase process, the salespeople actually know a lot about what's going on in that account. So they would always know what we're displacing. So they know what the status quo is because, you know, it's a basic qualifying question that you would ask. And then they generally know who else is on the short list and by the time they get towards the end of the deal, they know how the customer is making a comparison versus us. You know, if we get chosen, they always know why we got picked. If we don't get chosen, sometimes we have some idea why we lost, sometimes we don't know perfectly why we lost, but we usually have some ideas about what the big objections are. Yeah. And this is very, very different if it's a zero-touch sales model, like we don't know anything.
Gia: Like we got to go get that information somewhere. That's it. And teams show up asking, like, we don't know why our customers chose us and we don't have enough context. They don't always articulate it this way, but typically this is what happens is, you know, I ask questions like, what led to them seeking out a solution like yours? And they're like, I don't know. They have hypotheses. They sort of throw a couple of things out, but they don't really 100% know. And all of a sudden they realize their blind spot. So a lot of what we're doing is helping them understand the context of somebody sort of, you know, landing in the problem space, what process they go through to, again, and all self-serve here, go through that, like, sort of evaluation period. What is it that convinces them on the website typically to give this thing a try? And then, like, what's that early product experience that gets them to the aha moment that actually convinces them to actually put, you know, money down kind of thing? And then what is, like, value realization? We do a lot of, like, product usage. We rely on a lot of product usage to tell us that a customer has gotten to a certain amount of value.
April: That's right. And you know what? And that's a lot of the companies that I work with that do have a PLG motion. The sales team is looking at usage and what's happening on the PLG side to try to qualify who's an account that we should call into or not.
Gia: Which is amazing, and many companies don't do that, right? Like a lot of companies, especially on the smaller end, they don't have those mechanisms in place. There's no line of communication there in many, many cases. So anyway, that's the difference is when we're helping teams do this type of work, we're looking to have customers tell us what matters to them, what's that context, what stood out, what their deal breakers would have been. We're having those conversations, looking for the patterns that emerge, and then we bring those value themes, quote unquote, back to the team to say like, okay, now let's talk about all these things that customer said mattered to them. How does that map to the product? And we help to sort of figure out the messaging from there. I mean, we go a lot of directions from there, but one of the directions that we go in is in the direction of messaging, because we have that voice of customer. We know what the hierarchy of messaging needs to be, and we can map that to the product itself. So I think that was maybe helpful context to sort of tee up. And I'm always interested in your way of going about positioning and messaging, because it does come from a sort of different center of gravity, so to speak, than we do it. So I find it really, really interesting to talk to you about this stuff.
April: Well, you know, I keep telling people, lots of companies call me and they're pure PLG with no salesperson at all, and I'll be like, I'm not the person to talk to. And I think this is really important for people to understand is that different companies do things different ways, right? And so I have this way of doing positioning and a process and a methodology to get, let's get the positioning and let's translate that positioning into a story. We'll turn that into a sales pitch, and then we can test it in a sales pitch and blah, blah, blah. But it depends on a whole bunch of things, like it doesn't work for everybody. And so if there's no sales team involved, then my process is not the way you want to do it, because it makes an assumption that there's a sales person there. And then there's other things like, you know, I don't do any consumer because I don't understand consumer. I don't have a good gut feel for consumer. But a lot of times in consumer, you know, again, we don't, you know, we're selling through distribution or we're selling in a way that we don't necessarily know how the 2/11/25, 10:36 AM Notes - Evernote customer is making a decision. Yeah.
Gia: You have to validate in a completely different way.
April: The other thing that I think is really important is, is we have to understand that, you know, if we have, you know, a free trial or, or some kind of product growth thing, and then we have a sales team, often what we have is the free trial is positioned very different thanthe paid offering because they're different people. So usually we've got an end user, the PLG thing is aimed at an end user, and we want to get a certain amount of end-user adoption. But then the sales motion is coming in over top with a value proposition for the management side of things. Yeah.
Gia: A hundred percent. Yeah.
April: And that value proposition is very different. Right. It's often much broader. It's often more about, you know, visibility and control and things that the end-users don't care about at all. That's right. At all. Yeah. You know, which then brings us back to, so I got the homepage. Uh-huh. Yeah. And so let's say I've got this homepage. You need to decide what the job of the homepage is before you build it. Like is the job of the homepage to speak to these end-users so that they can get into this PLG motion? Or is the job of the homepage, is it really focused on these buyers that are more management level that have a completely different value proposition, a completely different thing, a completely different whatever?
Gia: Seems like a really hard time with this. This is a really important point.
April: It's so important. And any companies that are reasonably mature and have a reasonably mature product-led motion, but that there's sales on the back end, they've had to figure this out. But folks that are at the very early stages of this journey often get confused on this. And then the worst part is marketers will show up and say, hey, hey, look at their stupid homepage. It's so bad. Which brings us back to this topic of homepage teardowns or bull crap.
Gia: You said it. I mean, and I kind of disagree with you, which I mean, I agree that without that context, you can't make good decisions about the homepage or you're sort of running blind. But I think that homepage teardowns are useful in articulating that point. I think if your homepage teardown is helping teams figure out that they're not actually targeting the right audience with their homepage, then it's a useful exercise. But that's got to be part of it, right?
April: Yeah. And you're making the very smart assumption that you're doing a homepage teardown with the people in the room that actually know about this business and can answer the questions. What I have a problem with is this kind of let's pick on marketers theater that happens on social media where it's like, well, let's pick a random homepage and tell them why they're doing it wrong. And this drives me absolutely crazy. Like it is so wrong in so many ways, I don't even know where to start. But I think it's really, really unfair to the team who's on the receiving end of this unsolicited advice because, let's say, I sell an advanced security platform and I'm selling it to government buyers. And then you come in and say, Oh my God, I can't understand a thing they're talking about here. This is a bad homepage. And you're like, you're not; it's not for you. You are not the buyer. You are not the buyer. You don't know what assumptions we can make about the buyers and what assumptions we cannot make about the buyers. You don't know who the competition is, so you don't know how the customer is making a comparison. You don't know what the status quo is. Against the other thing they already do. So how would you know whether this messaging is good messaging or bad messaging? You know absolutely nothing. So unless you are the potential buyer and even then, how would you know you're really the potential buyer? Because you may not be, you just think you are. But unless you're the potential buyer, then who are you to assess the goodness of this or not? So that's one thing. Second thing is you know nothing about the market, so you don't know who they're trying to differentiate against and what the point is that they're trying to get across. You don't know that, so you don't know how to assess it. You don't know the job of the homepage. So I don't know if the homepage was designed to get me to sign up for a trial or designed to be. Like if I'm selling a big enterprise thing, often what the teams are doing is very targeted account selling. And so thing, often what the teams are doing is very targeted account selling. And so they have a list of target accounts they're trying to go after. They have campaigns running and things, but none of those campaigns are pushing people to the homepage. They're all pushing people to very specialized landing pages. And the job of the homepage is often to answer the question, is this anything? Are you two guys in a basement? Should I buy 100K versus software off you? And that homepage is going to look very different from a homepage that is trying to get me to sign up for a free trial. Or trying to do.
Gia: About pages on these softwares are like the second most visited page. People are going to the about page because they want to know about the company.
April: It bothers me. And most visited page. People are going to the about page because they want to know about the company. It bothers me, I think, when people, and I get it a lot, where companies will come to me and they'll send me a link to their homepage and they'll say, can you just have a quick look and tell us whether our positioning's good or not? And I'm like, Mike, dude, there's no way. All I have is questions. All I have is questions. And they'll say, oh, don't look at our homepage. It's bad. We know it's bad. You know, we may be able to have an argument about copywriting, right? Like we may look at the homepage and say, you know what, dude, there's a spelling mistake. That's not so great. Or I could imagine what it is you're trying to say here, and maybe there's a better way to say it. But I don't even know if that's the thing they want to say. And so I think at best, what we're looking at is just surface level copywriting stuff. But even then, if we had a smart copywriter sitting here talking to us, I bet they would say, well, hang on. We can't judge the goodness of the copywriting until we know who it's for and what it's trying to communicate and all that stuff. And how can we judge it by just by not knowing any of those things? I just think it's arrogance is what it is. It's arrogance that, you know, we think we're such smart marketers. We figure out. I had a guy on the call the other day and he's just starting out consulting and he's done a few jobs. He's a fairly experienced guy. And he said, well, I'm going to do messaging. That's going to be my offering. But it was interesting because most of his background was a little bit more consumer oriented, but he had decided he was going to go do enterprise company selling enterprise software. And I said, well, that's not your background. Why did you pick that? And he said, well, because they need it the most. And I said, what do you mean they need it the most? And he said, because they're all their web pages are terrible. I look at them and I don't understand anything they're saying. And I said, well, but they're not for you. Oh, they're not for you.
Gia: Oh, oh, that's what I said. Oh, but the scenario that you were describing with the homepage is very different, right? Getting somebody's opinion when you're, you know, very early stage is fine. But as soon as you've reached any level of sort of traction or growth or team, really importantly, right, a team depending on these as inputs and like to make good decisions, you can't just rely on people's opinions who are not in your target market, who don't know your customer base, don't know enough about your model, right? Like, or like I said, who's who is the website even who's the homepage even for, then you're really just still in like throwing spaghetti at the wall mode. And many times, that's where they hit this, like, what got us here isn't going to get us there. It's got to stop listening to the opinions of like, you know, the best practices and what the quote unquote experts are telling you to do.
April: You know, again, and I don't think like I don't think real experts fall into this trap. Anybody with good, anybody with good experience on this stuff does not fall into this trap. Totally. But I do think that there are, you know, less experienced people, you know, again, like this, I'm talking to this guy that all of his experience is, is a bit more consumerish, right? Who then wants to go to enterprise and says, Well, why doesn't this enterprise stuff look the same as where I'm seeing in consumer stuff? And I'm like, buddy, because it's different, right? Totally, which is, which is why experience matters in some of this stuff.Yeah, right. Like it's, you can't take the same lessons you learned on a selling $100 product to the masses, and then go and say, Well, all those lessons are gonna apply the same when I'm selling a $500,000 security system to a bank. No, it's different.
Gia: I think in the defense of people who do homepage teardowns, and I have done them, I think that part of the goal is helping a founder get from like, problem-aware to solution aware.
April: I am not against doing a homepage teardown with a founder in the room. I'm against doing a homepage teardown on a random thing you know nothing about. Yeah.
Gia: And saying, Hey, yeah, we do them live. And we would ask a bunch of questions; we would take a homepage, but we'd also ask a bunch of questions. Okay, this is this is more fair game. And then and the person who wrote the homepage would be in the room, like the person, sorry, I shouldn't say wrote, the person responsible for the homepage would be not in the room, but like on a live, I used to do these like live teardowns. So they would be there and be able to, you know, we'd be able to have a dialogue a little bit. And they were very, very valuable discussions. Because by the end of the of the discussion, the person became very aware, acutely aware of what they didn't know. And they knew, oh, we got to go get the answers to these questions. Otherwise, we're just guessing. And I think that is a useful exercise. So anyway, that's my little like, on the defensive.
April: I do think there's a lot of things that we end up that then it kind of comes back to this positioning versus messaging thing. If I don't think about positioning and I jump straight to messaging, then what are my inputs? What am I starting with? And what it means is I'm starting with a bunch of opinions. In the early days of me doing positioning work, I got really frustrated with this idea that it was really hard to get everybody on the same page. So I got the idea, okay, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to have to get a cross-functional team together. So this is back when I'm in-house, right? So I'm like, okay, we're going to get the cross-functional team together. But this is before I had a methodology. So we get the cross-functional team together and we're like, okay, we're going to work on this positioning stuff. And usually what you'd get is the founder would say, well, it's easy. Everyone buys us for these three reasons. Fight me. Basically. And then it just became the battle of opinions, right? And sales would pop up and say, well, I agree with reason number one, but I'm not so sure about reason number two, because everybody else in the market does that too. And then someone would say, no, that's not right. When I talk to a customer and I ask them why they bought, they always say it's this. And then product would say, well, it can't be that because we all do that. So there must've been some other reason they picked us. It can't be just, and then we would, you know, so then what we're having is a battle of opinions. And so for having a battle of opinions, marketing doesn't win. Product doesn't win. It's the founder generally wins. Sometimes the VP sales, if we're, if we're, you know, really sales at organization, sometimes the head of sales gets to win that fight. And then you're back where you started. Which got me thinking, well, we have to think about other things before we get to value. And, and, and in the reality is the first thing we have to think about is, well, how's a customer making a comparison, right? So who are they comparing us to? And so I need to know what they're doing now. What's the status quo. So how, you know, how do we stack up against that? And then I need to understand who else is on the shortlist and how we stack up against that. So we actually have to crawl inside the customer's head and look at ourselves in the context of customers putting us in, which is never just looking at us. It's looking at us in the context of the other choices that they could make, which is, which is kind of the foundation for the way I do positioning. But I think this is the problem you get. If you don't do positioning first, then it's just a battle of opinions. Now if I'm a super, super early stage company and there's no buddy senior on the team and the CEO is doing everything like the founder is the sales department and they are the head of marketing and they are the head of product and they are whatever, then maybe I can do this with just the founder, right? But if I have, you know, I'm a little bit bigger and now I got a head of marketing and now I got a head of sales and now I got a head of product. If those people are not all in alignment, then we're all going to be telling different stories and things going to get ugly.
Gia: Yeah. I, we just delivered yesterday basically the insights of a little research project where we did 12 jobs to be done interviews and we presented it back to the team yesterday and all of them were just like so relieved because they didn't have to sort of battle it out anymore or have these discussions about, or the ambiguity is what a lot of times sort of, you know, I don't want to say it kills teams, but that that's a lot of the time that's the struggle is the ambiguity between not really knowing who's right or, or whatever. So there's a, you know, we get these big sort of size of relief on these calls when we're, when we're bringing the customer insights back to these teams, they, they just feel so good that they have the clarity and now they know and they don't have to guess anymore. And nobody's happier than the founder in that situation. And yeah, so I think it's, you know, there's a couple of different ways to get to it, but the cross-functional alignment is critical. And then from there, then the messaging comes within whatever the content messaging comes out for that.
April: Like, if we can all agree, like in the stuff I do, like again, that the disagreement usually comes back to, we are not aligned about who we're competing with. A lot of it's that it's just so surprising. Like we, we can't get to differentiated value because it's differentiated against what. Yeah. And then, and then because we can't, you know, because different people have different opinions about that. And then again, what's usually happening is product is putting too many names on the list of folks that don't cause us any pain that we don't have to differentiate against now. And sure. Maybe at some point they start causing us pain later. We'll adjust for them later when and if they start showing up in accounts and, and, and causing us pain, we'll worry about it then.
Gia: Our version of that, by the way, it's so interesting. That's why I was sayinglike, it's so interesting to talk to you about this topic because our, again, our sent the teams that we work with, their center of gravity is in a different place. For us, it tends to end up being centered around this sort of struggle moment. That's why we love Jobs to be Done, because it really helps you understand the context in which somebody is in when they're in the problem space, when they're evaluating your solution, what are they comparing you against is often the old way, the habits they have built up in their life. Yes, there's other products that get mentioned, or competitors that get mentioned, but in general, what you're competing against is like the old way.
April: Well, because they've already decided to sign up.
Gia: Yeah. Well, that's exactly. So because that's who we're learning from. We're kind of reverse engineering the people who have made that decision and we're like, hey, well, what was going on? What was that difference maker for you? What was the context? So we often, and this is back to the segmentation thing, which is a whole other topic, but the context that we're often asking teams, sorry, not the context, we're often asking teams to draw lines between that context. So like, what are they firing? What's the problem that they're solving? What's that context that they're in? Because you can't solve for all of those things at the same time. And generally, we learn that like, oh, there's this whole set of customers that like let's just put them over here and not worry about them for now and maybe like, lets just put them over here and not worry about them for now, and maybe even forget about them altogether. And let's really focus in on this problem space and help them communicate value to them and demonstrate value very quickly in a self-serve programmatic sort of one-to-many way, which again, is like a different way of looking at it and sort of approaching this, the same problem, but just from a different sort of perspective. So I think it's very interesting. Okay, so April, for anybody who wants to learn more about your sort of take at positioning, where do you recommend they go?
April: Oh, well, you know, I got a website. It's called aprildumford.com. You could go there. Most people start with my books. So I have a book called Obviously Awesome, and that describes my way of doing positioning and about positioning. I have a follow-up book that's more focused on how to take that positioning and turn it into sales pitch, but I would always recommend that you start with Obviously Awesome. And then if you want to kind of geek out on this positioning stuff, I have two things: 1. A newsletter. It's a sub-sac. You can get there from my website. 2. A podcast, and you're listening to it now, so maybe you already know about it, but it's called Positioning with April Dunford, and it's for positioning geeks as well. So you can find me there.
Gia: Awesome.
April: How about you? Do you have people who want to work with you? What do they do? Definitely, obviously, the website, forgetthefunnel.com. Our approach to doing this kind of stuff is obviously centered more around PLG motion, self-serve, leveraging customers, leveraging what customers know, getting inside your best customers' heads and having them sort of repeat it back to you and help you make better decisions about your positioning and your messaging strategy. And we obviously also do product marketing-level stuff, so we'll do customer experience mapping. And we really loved the work of matching what customers say to the specific mapping. And we really love the work of tying what customers say to the specific parts of the product so that we can help teams figure out how can you actually even measure your ability to help customers get to value in a way that doesn't necessarily require a high touch. And you can do programmatically and at scale and also high converting. So it's like where all those things sort of intersect and that's what we love to do. So yeah, forgetthefunnel.com definitely.
We also have a book about our process and we talk a lot about how to talk to customers, why it's so valuable, how you don't have to guess. Stop guessing is a big theme for us. So yeah, I think with that, we'll wrap it up and see y'all next time.
Outro: And that's it for this episode of the Forget the Funnel podcast. Thanks for tuning in. If you have any questions about the topic that we covered, don't hesitate to reach out on LinkedIn or you can visit our website at forgetthefunnel.com. Also, if you found this episode helpful, don't forget to subscribe and help spread the word by leaving a rating or a review. Okay, see you next time!
