[00:00:00] April Dunford: Well, here’s the thing, not everything deserves a launch. And I think we need to be more disciplined about what’s attention-worthy and what isn’t.
[00:00:22] VO: This is Churn.fm, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world’s fastest-growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth. How do you build a habit-forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely boosts that profitable and growing. Strategies, tactics and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I’m your host, Andrew Michael, and here’s today’s episode.
[00:00:59] Andrew Michael: Hey, April, welcome to the show.
[00:01:01] ‍April Dunford: Hey, it’s good to be back.
[00:01:03] Andrew Michael: It’s great to have you. For the listeners, if you’re not already familiar with April’s work, she’s a leading expert on product positioning and the author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch. She helps companies figure out what makes their products stand out and turn that into a story that helps customers buy. So April actually joined us way back in 2019 for episode 15. So this reunion is long overdue. It’s great to have you back. What has been the biggest change in the last seven years since we last spoke? I think this is a fully loaded question.
[00:01:33] April Dunford: Oh my gosh. What a seven years we’ve had. Let’s talk about that, Andrew. We had COVID, then we had the post-COVID boom, and then we had the AI thing. Oh my gosh. I can’t even really remember what 2019 was like. So many things have happened. And what a time, just personally for me, what a time to be doing positioning work.
[00:02:02] April Dunford: When I was talking about positioning in 2019, people were kind of like, “I don’t even know what that is, man. Define that. What is it?” And then we went into COVID where a lot of companies had to reposition because, I’m thinking about the companies that I worked with back then. There was a moment, the first six or seven months of COVID, where a lot of companies had to thrash around. I worked with companies in the travel business and there was no travel happening. I worked with a company that did software for stadiums and stadiums were all closed.
[00:02:35] April Dunford: Oh my gosh. So there was all this thrashing around repositioning. And then we got into 2021 and all of a sudden there was the boom. There was technology getting adopted at a scale that we’ve never seen previously. And there was the great big boom and a lot of companies repositioned as a result of that. There were suddenly opportunities that simply weren’t there before, and companies are repositioning to take advantage of that.
[00:03:02] April Dunford: And then we had a lot of interesting stuff happen around 2021, 2022. This is when companies like Facebook renamed itself Meta because they were all in on the Metaverse, Square became Block because everything was going to be blockchain. We were all doing NFTs. You remember that? We were buying ape art. And then all of a sudden we had AI, which is rewriting the boundaries around a lot of different market categories. And so we’re seeing a lot of change and a lot of repositioning happening as a result of that. So it’s been really an amazing time to be a positioning expert in the middle of this great, great upheaval. So much has changed.
[00:03:48] Andrew Michael: I can only imagine. Just because as you’re walking through the examples, I vividly remember every company needing to try to figure out what is their blockchain strategy. Funny enough, actually, I was talking to a friend earlier, me and a friend did a stupid project back then with NFTs. We never launched it and I still feel bad we didn’t. But we had called it back then the Great Dictators.
[00:04:09] Andrew Michael: And the artwork he did is pretty good. I think maybe at some point I have to bring it up. It was just a tongue in cheek of the NFT era. And it was really satirical but–
[00:04:20] April Dunford: People forget that was only four years ago. It was only four years ago. It seemed like it was eternity. We talk like we know how to predict the future in tech, but the reality was four years ago, the smartest minds in tech were all in on things that we do very little talking about in 2026.
[00:04:41] Andrew Michael: I remember those days. You mentioned apes and stuff like those, which brought back memories. But yeah, so I think obviously from your side, it’s great for business because at this point everybody is trying to scramble and figure things out. And we were just chatting before the show as well. Now I think we’re definitely in a space where it was probably about 12 to 18 months ago, every board was going to the companies and saying, “What’s our AI strategy?”
[00:05:06] Andrew Michael: And I think we passed that stage now, where AI is the strategy and most companies have shifted to AI first, AI native businesses, the claims and the thing. In the beginning, I think it was mostly reckless stuff being done and not too much, but now I think we’re starting to see real value and things coming out from different products. But the thing we were talking about at the beginning was, I think now it feels like we’re at this moment in time where things have accelerated so much and for everybody. And you’re not only fighting for attention anymore against your competitors, but you’re just fighting for attention now more than ever. In the past, there wasn’t this, and I think you disagreed a little with that, so I wanted to get into this and get your take on it.
[00:05:49] April Dunford: Well, here’s what I think is really interesting about it being very easy to build product. In the past, development resources were very expensive resources. And so in the past, we were always development constrained. There were things we wanted to build, or if we had all the money in the world, there were always things we would be building that we couldn’t build. And so now we’ve got these tools that are enabling us to produce stuff way, way faster with way fewer resources. And so what we’re seeing is that it’s accelerating the pace of releases. So we can get stuff out faster, we can move way faster and things are way faster.
[00:06:34] April Dunford: And I think that’s interesting, but I don’t think that that means we now live in a world where all the products are the same and there is no differentiation because everybody can build everything and all the products are the same. I don’t believe in that. And I don’t believe that was true before. It certainly wasn’t true before that companies with more resources were winning because they were building products with more features. That’s not how we were winning in the market. If you looked at what’s really interesting in the market and where there is great disruption in the market, it’s where somebody has a different approach to the problem.
[00:07:18] April Dunford: All the solutions are taking this approach and somebody comes along and says, “What if we rethought the way we did that? What if we architected the solution in a completely different way? What if we came at it in a completely different way?” And so what I think is really going to be interesting in the next few years to see is that the barrier to building those kinds of things is going to come down. And what we’re going to see is that entrenched products that people were using, but everybody complained about them. They were clunky and whatever, but it does all the things and, “I have to buy it. I’ve got to buy it because everyone else buys it,” or there’s some other kind of a moat around it. Maybe they’ve got the best ecosystem or whatever.
[00:08:07] April Dunford: I think what we’re going to see, what I hope we see, is a proliferation of much more elegant products where people with really smart creative ideas can actually bring something to market really quickly that is a rethinking of a solution to a problem that has been around for a very long time, where there are existing products that have a ton of technical debt and they simply can’t architect their way out of that.
[00:08:38] April Dunford: And what we’re going to see are these new entrants come into the market and say, “We’ve thought about this problem. We don’t have any technical debt and we have the ability to build stuff really fast and get it out in the market really fast. And we’re going to approach this problem in a completely different way.” And that’s where I think things are going to get really, really interesting. I think it’s less about, “Oh, we can’t have any differentiation because any feature we have, somebody can copy it.” I don’t think copycat products have ever been interesting.
[00:09:06] April Dunford: If I look at all the companies that I work with that are doing something really, really cool, it’s because they have something that’s truly innovative where they’ve decided to take a completely different approach that, frankly, none of the other competitors could do unless they went completely back to the blank piece of paper and said, “We’re going to throw everything out and start over from scratch and build this thing in a completely different way,” which is very difficult to do. So I really think that where I hope this goes is that we can see these smart ideas that maybe we couldn’t raise the funding for, we couldn’t get the product out fast enough before, we couldn’t do it because it was just too expensive with too many developers required.
[00:09:51] April Dunford: What I’m hoping we see are these really innovative products that come where they’ve just taken a completely different approach to solving the problem, and those things I think are going to be really cool. I think that differentiation in the future is not going to be a little feature here, a little feature there. Little features are easier to copy. It’s much harder, I think, to copy a complete approach when that approach is different to how the rest of the market is actually looking at it. So I think we’re going to see a lot more of that, which I think is going to be cool.
[00:10:24] Andrew Michael: This is 100% of the time. I regularly have conversations with people on the team and even friends outside, when they sort of hit this block in their mind and it’s, “But that’s not possible. I’m not going to do it that way. Because this is how things have always been done.” And I was like, “No, this is the time now to challenge everything. Question the way we did everything before, because the game on the field has changed. The capabilities have changed. Just ask the question next time to Claude.”
[00:10:48] Andrew Michael: And my typical favorite framing is starting with, “I want to do this new product. I want you to think the most insane extreme experience as if we’re living in the future in 2050. I want you to come up with the scope of what this process is going to look like.” And it’ll come back with something. I was like, “No, you need to go more insane. You need to go more insane.”
[00:11:06] Andrew Michael: And then normally at least there’ll be typically one or two things that are actually very interesting. I haven’t thought of doing that in this way before, and maybe it wasn’t possible beforehand. But I do think as well, the constraints we had previously on building were actually good for building good products. And I think that’s also going to be a problem going forward, is that if everyone can just be building, we end up with a slop machine.
[00:11:29] April Dunford: Building a whole pile of crap. I think it’s very easy right now to run very, very quickly in the wrong direction. So it’s interesting when, if you hear some of the discourse around this, I think people have gotten over this now, but about a year ago, there was a lot of talk that the product management role was going away because anyone could build anything and what do we need product managers for anyway?
[00:11:59] April Dunford: I think we’re seeing the result of that right now, is we need product managers more than we ever have because we need to understand, are we building the right thing? Are we actually solving a problem? Are we building something that is truly differentiated that can help us sell more or not? Or are we just building something because it’s possible now and it wasn’t possible before and, “Hey, let’s just build it for yucks”?
[00:12:24] Andrew Michael: I’m definitely in the camp of the product manager role evolving completely from what it was in the past.
[00:12:31] April Dunford: It’s evolving for sure.
[00:12:34] Andrew Michael: The way we do products and the way we sort of ideate and validate things, I think has significantly changed. But the requirements and the customer empathy and being able to understand, having taste and judgment. And I think these things are so, so hard to find. And I think if anything, engineers now need to be figuring out how to get more of that because the commodity is no longer the execution. It really is that taste and judgment is the blocker now in the market.
[00:13:02] April Dunford: I think so. It’s interesting, there was a product management conference last week, Mind the Product in Chicago, great conference, give those guys a plug. But I had a lot of conversations with product managers and I think one of the things we really need now, we’ve always needed this, but I think in a world where it’s possible to move really quickly, we’re not as constrained by developer resources as we were before. This idea of really, really being able to crawl inside the customer’s head has gotten really important. And I think all the things that we did previously, but maybe paid lip service to, to get really close to customers are now actually super important.
[00:13:48] April Dunford: I know companies that have customer advisory boards. I know lots of companies that don’t have a customer advisory board, but man, what a great time to have a customer advisory board because it’s one thing to be building all this stuff and to be moving really quickly. It’s another for a company, particularly a larger company, potentially a company in a regulated industry, to be able to absorb this stuff. And we not only need to understand where the customer’s at right now, but we need to understand what pace they’re moving at and what are they ready to absorb and what are they not.
[00:14:22] April Dunford: There’s no other way to figure that out without having really regular contact with customers right now in the middle of this great upheaval, because whatever you knew about customers last year might not be true anymore. And so the idea of having a customer advisory board, the idea of having executive customer relationships, some of the companies that I’m working with, they’re assigning a handful of accounts to every executive and it’s the executive’s job to check in on them every quarter and ask them a bunch of questions like, “Hey, what are you guys doing with AI? Hey, are you vibe coding at all? Where are you vibe coding? What keeps you up at night? Are you really worried about the compliance stuff around this stuff? What conditions would need to be true for you to adopt something like this?”
[00:15:13] April Dunford: These conversations, we need to be having them regularly because things are changing. Everything’s changing and the customer’s attitude is changing. The other one is systematized win-loss analysis. The landscape is changing so quickly. And what you’ll find is inside tech companies, we have an opinion about who could compete with us, who should compete with us, but who actually competes with us? How do we know that? How do we know what’s landing on a short list? How do we know what the customer’s attitude is around who they actually see as an alternative to you?
[00:15:52] April Dunford: There’s no way to figure this out unless you are regularly checking in with customers. And this is not a once a year kind of a thing, man. It’s got to be ongoing. It’s got to be happening all the time. Lots of companies I work with, they think they should be doing win-loss analysis, but it’s hard and it takes resources. And I think even loss analysis, for example, is way harder than win analysis, because you lost the deal, man, nobody wants to talk to you. But win analysis is actually pretty easy because they’re your customer now.
[00:16:23] April Dunford: And so you’ve now transitioned them over to support. It’s very easy for your customer support team to do win analysis on the first opening call they have with a good account to say, “Okay, hey, before we get started, here’s what we need to do. Take me back. What were you doing before? What made you decide to switch? You put us on a short list. Who else was on the short list? And hey, you picked us. Why’d you pick us? Why not the other guys?”
[00:16:44] April Dunford: This is really easy stuff to do. Even if you just looked at win analysis, I think you would learn a lot of information about what’s actually going on in the minds of your customers right now. All this stuff is super, duper important when we are in the middle of great upheaval and coupled with our ability to just build a whole bunch of stuff and throw it out at the market and see what sticks.
[00:17:11] Andrew Michael: I think definitely those that can systemize this most effectively have an edge in the markets. And I think also you mentioned win-loss analysis. What I also like is renewal analysis. I think there was an episode, I can’t remember who mentioned this on the show, but the idea of actually not asking, actually no, it was from David Dorman. It was something unrelated, they were talking about conversion optimization. But I think the same thing applied for retention, is asking customers that have just renewed, “What almost stopped you from renewing?” because they’ve been with you for a year. They’re vested now, they’ve actually paid the subscription, they’ve renewed. They’re definitely going to be more motivated to give you the feedback than the person that’s just gone off and churned.
[00:17:54] Andrew Michael: And also probably the person that’s just gone off and churned, maybe they weren’t the good fit, but the person that has actually renewed is the better fit. So their feedback is higher weighted. And I think I’ve never heard many companies do this in the past. It’s normally the win-loss. It’s never, “Let’s see what nearly stopped the actual person who’s gotten ahead and renewed their contract with us,” and–
[00:18:14] April Dunford: Well, you make a good point there. When I have conversations about win-loss analysis, everybody gets really obsessed with the losses. Or if we’re talking about renewals, the ones that didn’t renew, everybody’s like, “Oh no, let’s find out what happened there.” But I actually think there’s a lot of really useful information that’s actionable on the win side. A lot of times you lost for a lot of reasons. Like you say, it was a bad fit in the first place. You probably shouldn’t have won that deal in the first place. But on the wins, we can actually learn a lot about what’s working and how do we double down on the stuff that’s working.
[00:18:50] Andrew Michael: And what you mentioned also resonates, I think, in terms of the way we work is fundamentally changing. You mentioned compliance and these sort of things. And I think especially working in the enterprise space, we have these really preconceived notions of compliance and how enterprises work. I’ve had several conversations speaking to people out here and I was like, “Oh, there’s no way an enterprise would adopt this or do that.” And then when you actually speak to people on the ground, they’re clawed pulled and they’re using every AI tool under the sun and they’re going full speed.
[00:19:20] Andrew Michael: But we have these assumptions, and you mentioned regulated industry is probably a little bit different, but I still think you can’t make assumptions anymore that you knew this is the way the business works and this is the way it operated. And this was the thing. You need to be doing the work to figure out how the interest is yours.
[00:19:37] April Dunford: That’s exactly it. I was at a workshop a couple of months ago and we were having this company that sells big enterprise solutions to insurance companies, and so the CIO is the big buyer in this case. And there’s a lot of AI stuff in this product. It’s not fully AI native, but it’s a very deeply AI-enabled product. And so we were having a conversation because it’s insurance, it’s a regulated industry. So there’s lots of compliance stuff. There’s lots of things that they have to worry about. And there was an argument between the head of product and the CEO about a compliance-related thing. And so the head of product said, “Look, a CIO is never going to do this because there’s this compliance issue and whatever. That’s not going to happen. Not this year, maybe not next year.”
[00:20:27] April Dunford: And the CEO was arguing on the other side of it. And he said, “Look, these people know that there’s a competitive advantage with AI. They know they can’t be late. They’re messing around with this stuff way more than you think. And there’s ways they can get around the compliance issue. And if they can, they’re going to use it.” So these two were having this big fight. And so I’m in the middle. And at one point, one of the guys said, “If I’m the CIO of Liberty Mutual, would I actually do this?” And the head of marketing was sitting there and she did this cool move where she reached over, picked up her phone and very performatively put it right in front of her face and started typing.
[00:21:09] April Dunford: And type, type, type, type away. And at one point the head of product looks over at her and says, “Are we keeping you from your email or something?” And she says, “No, I’m just texting with the CIO at Liberty Mutual.” So it turns out she’s got a relationship with this guy because she’s got a handful of customers in her pocket. And we ended up getting the guy on the phone, putting him on speakerphone and having this really detailed conversation about not just his attitude about this, but why. And there were nuances in the regulatory stuff that I think we did not fully understand.
[00:21:51] April Dunford: And so we were making an assumption based on a flawed understanding of how that specific regulation worked, that we ironed out live on a call with a customer. So again, imagine you had a customer advisory board or everybody on your team had a pocket full of relationships like that and could pull out their phone and say, “I don’t know, are we making the right assumptions here? Let’s get somebody on the phone and figure it out.”
[00:22:18] Andrew Michael: It’s funny because I literally just yesterday shared, I think there’s a good post from a First Round Capital head on customer advisory boards. I shared it with someone in the team and product. I was like, “Can we get on this ASAP? Let’s get things set up because–”
[00:22:31] April Dunford: It’s already too, they’re a trick to run, to be honest, because there’s lots of ways you can screw it up. What you don’t want is you don’t want the customer advisory board to turn into the complaints session, right? Where everybody comes in and says, “Here’s my wishlist of five features, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” You want the people on the advisory board to literally take off their customer hat and put on their advisor hat. And what you want them to be is stand-ins for the attitude of the entire market.
[00:23:02] April Dunford: And so you want to have an agenda that works like that, where you come in and say, “Okay, today we’re going to talk about vibe coding. We have an assumption that you folks are not using vibe coding on mission-critical stuff. Is that true? Where are you using vibe coding? Are you using vibe coding anywhere? Do you have a sandbox environment? Where does that work? Where do you see that landing in six months, in eight months, in a year?” And then again, let’s have a session on compliance and regulatory stuff. How worried are you about it? What are you doing to mitigate the risks of that? Could you ever see yourselves going into this?
[00:23:39] April Dunford: Maybe there’s other things that they’re doing that you don’t know anything about. And again, getting the nuance of that stuff so that you can make smarter product decisions in the company. I think this is what we want, not “What are the next three things we should build,” according to the dozen people sitting in front of us. So I think you need to think about what are we assuming about the market that we think might be changing and how do we figure that out by working with the advisory board. And then I think once you’ve got an advisory board that’s really functional and works really well, oh man, super valuable.
[00:24:14] Andrew Michael: It’s valuable. I think also to a point of select, it’s a positioning exercise in its own right of how you position it to the customer advisors as well. Because I’ve seen it work both ways in the past. And I think the way I found it most valuable, it really was treated like it was a role in the company almost to some degree. You could put it on your LinkedIn profile, advisor. You would fly out to a team meeting once a year where you would get together in person and you were actually treated as an advisor, not as sort of a feature request to get creative with the team.
[00:24:46] April Dunford: That’s right. And so I worked at a couple of companies where we took it really seriously and man, it was so good. One of the things that we thought worked really well too is having an outside moderator works really well. Somebody that can come in, and again, it feels more like a board meeting. And so you’ve got this chair of the board that is not part of the company, but also not one of the advisors, that can come in, that outside person can work with you on the agenda and make sure that you’re sticking to stuff that accomplishes the goals of the advisory board, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:25:22] April Dunford: I always had this thought, if I ever got sick of doing positioning work, it would be a neat thing to do, best practices stuff for advisory boards, because I think advisory boards are so interesting and valuable, and I don’t see a lot of companies doing it really well. And I think it would be a good example of a place where you might hire somebody who’s just really smart at doing advisory boards, come in, set it up, help you run it, maybe be the facilitator. It was a business idea for somebody there.
[00:25:50] Andrew Michael: For somebody there. Super, super valuable if it’s set up right. And also because I think from the advisors, it’s not only contributing to the company, but being around another 10 or 20 other people that are like-minded, that are trying to figure out the space together, the knowledge sharing you get from it.
[00:26:05] April Dunford: Totally. That’s what the advisors want, to know what everybody else is doing.
[00:26:10] Andrew Michael: [crosstalk] And so especially now, I think we’re in this space where nobody really knows what they’re doing if they’re extremely honest with themselves. We’re all trying to race at the speed of lightning to keep up with the latest five releases that happened in the last 20 minutes. And so I think having another touch point with others that are at that same stage is critical.
[00:26:32] Andrew Michael: And then going back to the start of the show, when I mentioned my belief as well in this is now anybody can build anything they want and can just clone and copy things. I totally agree with you, the fact that the copycats were never interesting. They never stood for something. I think though we’re getting to a point now where every one of the tools that you use today in any given week is launching something new and exciting and their competitors are launching something new and exciting.
[00:27:00] Andrew Michael: And then you’re trying to stand out when your new shiny thing is coming out to your customers. How do you see companies standing out today from this noise and grabbing the attention, whether it’s the 20 seconds of someone scrolling on X or how are we capturing that attention? Everybody has the tools now. Everybody can do the shiny new animated videos for their thing. I think animated videos used to be cool. They’ve almost just become banner blindness now, scrolling through an X feed.
[00:27:32] April Dunford: Well, here’s the thing, not everything deserves a launch. And I think we need to be more disciplined about what’s attention-worthy and what isn’t. When I worked at really big companies where we had big, big development teams and we were shipping a lot of stuff, we didn’t have a launch for every little thing we shipped. We might have released notes, but we weren’t trying to do PR on every little thing that we shipped. We metered that stuff out from a marketing perspective.
[00:28:09] April Dunford: And so I think there are companies out there that are not used to doing that because it was a big deal every time you shipped something. So every time you shipped something, you were trying to make noise about it in the market. I think now what you might go to is regular launches where, yeah, you’re shipping something every week, but we’re not doing the press around it or the big push around it. We’re going to store up all that stuff for six months. And then we’re going to do the six-month launch every six months because we cannot keep going back to our customers and say, “Hey, we changed this little button from red to green.” Who cares? Like you say, it’s so hard to get anybody’s attention.
[00:28:52] April Dunford: And so I think one, we’re going to have to have more discipline about packaging this stuff up together and carving a story around it that is attention-worthy. So there has to be a bigger story there beyond just the button change from green to red or, “Oh, you had a thing that wasn’t animated and now it’s animated.” Who cares?
[00:29:15] Andrew Michael: But I think those sort of small things aren’t the thing I’m talking about. I think people are shipping meaningful work on a regular basis, but I do agree that maybe the degree to what’s meaningful has changed now as well and where the bar is.
[00:29:30] April Dunford: I think this is it. I think the bar is higher now. I think what used to feel like a big deal is now maybe a small thing. And we’ve got to be a little bit careful with the customer’s time. We can’t expect them to be giving us their attention every week. Maybe we need to start staggering it out. Maybe we need to start thinking about how often we want to ask for their attention.
[00:29:49] April Dunford: A lot of this comes back to positioning. What is the story we’re trying to tell? It’s not just that we have this new functionality, it’s the “so what” of this new functionality. What is the story around that? What is the value we can deliver to customers now? Why should they pay attention to this thing? Why is this important for them and their goals? Again, is that different than it was six months ago or is this just a continuation of that and we’re actually just telling the same story over and over but we’re getting better and better and better at delivering on that story?
[00:30:23] April Dunford: In which case this is a constant drumbeat of marketing where we’re talking about, if our value is around efficiency, we’re going to make this thing that used to take four hours take one hour. Well, now we’ve launched five new features and now it’s down to 10 seconds. Okay. But it’s the same story. It’s the same value. So I don’t know. I think we have to get more discipline around this. I think we need tight positioning and then we need to be careful that we’re not trying to make every little thing its own big thing. I think we need to be more thoughtful about how we package this stuff up and when is it worth doing a public announcement that we expect everyone to pay attention to versus something we’re just saving up for the next announcement and it’ll be part of the next thing when we talk about that.
[00:31:10] Andrew Michael: Yeah, it needs to be more considerate now more than ever, I think, of consumers’ time and attention.
[00:31:15] April Dunford: Yeah, customers are overwhelmed.
[00:31:17] Andrew Michael: I mean, in the past, I think we moved to this world of continuous deployments and we needed to ship stuff fast, but the definition of fast changed entirely overnight over the last few months. So I think maybe that cadence was still good, but maybe now the more interesting approach is like the Apple and the larger sort of release cycles where you make more of a spectacle with everything together in its package. And it really is a shift in the product versus just the actual product capabilities now being enhanced. It’s more the story of how all the different capabilities come together and tell the story in the narrative.
[00:31:55] April Dunford: That’s right. And you hold it until you’ve got enough things that together the shift is worth your customers’ attention.
[00:32:02] Andrew Michael: I was in a relevant conversation as well recently just chatting about this because I think now more than ever as well, you mentioned at the beginning having a new way to solve an existing problem. I think there’s also a new way to position the existing problem. A lot of the time I don’t even think anymore differentiation would come down to features. Definitely not, but more around how you package and position the features themselves. I think there’s opportunities there.
[00:32:39] Andrew Michael: I don’t want to go into specific details, but I think there are different companies in the markets that everyone has the same feature sets. But if you position them in a different way from a different vantage point, and you maybe just need to change workflows, let’s say within those feature sets, they create new ways of solving the problem. But under the hood, features and functionality, we talked in the beginning of the show, an example of HubSpot and Salesforce where really under the hood, they have the same feature sets to a certain degree, but the workflows are different.
[00:33:16] April Dunford: I would argue they don’t, but the workflows are different. They absolutely don’t have the same feature set under the hood, but they’re serving different kinds of customers. And I think that’s the piece that’s missing in some of this. There’s a reason why they aren’t completely copycat products, is because they’re trying to serve different segments of the market. And so I think there’s a lot of room for innovation there to solve the problem in a different way, to meet the needs of an underserved segment in the market.
[00:33:50] April Dunford: So for example, if I look at Salesforce, I think they are meeting the needs of the very high end of the market better than anybody else. But the further you come down market, the more I think there’s a bit of wiggle room there, and I think there’s still a lot of opportunity to do things in particular sub-segments of the market, for specific verticals, for specific companies that have weird workflows or companies that do sales in a very non-traditional way or have different tiers of sales or do sales in a way that Salesforce’s architecture of looking at a lead and how a lead moves along through a pipeline just wouldn’t work.
[00:34:29] April Dunford: I think there’s lots of space for new companies to come in there. CRM is such a big, big, big business and there’s all kinds of companies in different segments that don’t use a CRM at all because there just isn’t a product that meets their needs.
[00:34:44] Andrew Michael: For sure. It’s definitely an exciting time now to see how people are approaching this and bringing new ideas to old workflows and old products. I see we’re running up on time there. I could probably continue talking to you about these topics for the next couple of hours. Ask a couple of questions then. I’m not sure if I asked this back in the day, but what’s one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?
[00:35:10] April Dunford: About churn and retention specifically. I’m going to turn this into answering a different question, which is a bit of a cheat, but that’s what they teach you in media training and marketing, is if you don’t have a good answer for that question, you just make up a different question. But maybe this relates, but one of the biggest things for me that’s changed in the way I think about positioning is I used to think that it was enough to get positioning really solid on the marketing side of things.
[00:35:41] April Dunford: And if it was really solid on the marketing side of things, the sales part would take care of itself. And this was a very incorrect assumption. And what I saw from working with companies is that even if I had the sales executives in the room and we got very tight agreement on, “This is who we compete with, this is how we’re different, this is the value we can deliver, this is what a good customer looks like, this is the market we’re going to win,” it didn’t mean that sales knew how to tell that story.
[00:36:12] April Dunford: And so if sales doesn’t know how to tell that story, they will invent a story that sounds good on the spot. And that story is often not representing the customer in the right way. And so the result of that is lost business, because the customer can’t figure out what it is. There’s this discrepancy between what they heard from marketing and what they heard in sales. This will result in churn too, because you will get customers that are like, “Oh, you’re that and you do this,” and they sign up.
[00:36:42] April Dunford: And then they get in and then they’re like, “Wait, this isn’t what I thought it was,” or the reps are trying to close deals that, maybe we can get them closed, but we’re not actually the best fit for this customer. So maybe we shouldn’t have been chasing them in the first place and they churn out. And that’s no surprise to anybody because this is a customer that we probably shouldn’t have closed in the first place, as they don’t actually meet our definition of what’s a best-fit customer.
[00:37:08] April Dunford: So I don’t know. I think having this positioning and then translating it into a story that makes that positioning clear in a sales conversation or a marketing conversation is super important. And I think I underestimated the importance of that back in 2018 or whatever.
[00:37:31] Andrew Michael: It resonates a lot. I’ve seen it many times where it’s not only, I think it even goes from product to marketing to sales. I think you’ll think you understand the problem deeply. The customer is, you’ll build something, you’ll go to marketing. Marketing will not get it entirely as you understood it. So then you have a little bit of broken telephone and then you get to sales and you have another level of broken telephone.
[00:37:53] Andrew Michael: If it’s not managed carefully and you don’t have good alignment between the team and good ways to train and educate and facilitate that, I think you end up having these issues with churn, misalignment and trust issues, I think, at the end of the customer as well. If you’re telling them one thing and then you’re delivering another, it’s like... Last question. What’s one thing that you wish more people would ask you about positioning, but they don’t?
[00:38:19] April Dunford: It’s interesting to me that I believe, having done a lot of these workshops and working with literally 300, 400 companies at this point, the first step in positioning, this idea of understanding how a customer makes comparisons, is really, really important. And we inside the company often assume that we understand that when we do not. So a lot of the time companies will come and the thing that everybody wants to talk about is market category. “Maybe we should make a new market category. Maybe we should do something with market category.”
[00:39:00] April Dunford: And I wish more people were focused upstream from that because what I see with a lot of companies, particularly right now where the competitive landscape for a lot of companies is shifting really quickly, is that there will be assumptions inside the team. If I were to walk to five people, five executives on the team, and say, “If you didn’t exist, what would a customer do?” I often get five different answers. I’ll get one person say, “Oh, they do it in Claude.” And another person say, “No, no, no, they could vibe code that.” Another person say, “Are you kidding me? They just do it in a spreadsheet.”
[00:39:32] April Dunford: These are really different answers. And if I’m trying to build positioning, positioning against a spreadsheet is nothing like positioning against Claude, which in turn is really not the same as positioning against a legacy solution or positioning against vibe coding. And so I don’t think people respect that first step enough, to the point where I think people are actually attempting to do that first step by just asking ChatGPT, “Who does my product compete with?” How the heck would ChatGPT know the answer? ChatGPT does not know the answer. They don’t know who ends up on a short list with your customers.
[00:40:14] April Dunford: Again, they have the same answer as a lot of people inside your company. They know who you should compete with. They know who could compete with you. What they don’t know is who actually ends up on a short list. Can we quantify that? So I think that’s actually way more important than market category in some ways. I think people ascribe way too much importance to market category and not enough importance to “Do we actually understand who we have to beat in order to win a deal?”
[00:40:46] Andrew Michael: I worked at Hotjar in the Lezlo, if you know. I think you must have maybe been on a show before, Louis Grenier from Everyone Hates Marketers. He would be smiling now saying the category is not the place to start because I’ve been used to drum that beat with us at Hotjar. But understanding sort of the comparisons is also interesting. You mentioned ChatGPT though. I would maybe push back a little bit on that because I think it’s probably the first time in history where 100% of pipeline is using an LLM at some point to find out something about your company. And so you understanding what ChatGPT is recommending to your customers when they’re going through, “What is the best CRM for a mid-market enterprise company?”
[00:41:28] April Dunford: Oh, but then you’d need to know what questions your customers are asking.
[00:41:31] Andrew Michael: Asking, yeah. So you need to know that but–
[00:41:34] April Dunford: I think that’s not a small thing because they’re for sure not saying, “What’s the best CRM?” They’re for sure not asking that.
[00:41:41] Andrew Michael: Yeah, it’s like, “I have an issue and I need to know how to manage my contacts. There’s too many of them and Outlook doesn’t–”
[00:41:47] April Dunford: And then depending on your customer, there is still only a very small percentage of buyers that are doing their research that way. And that is only one channel they’re doing the research with. They’re also using other channels.
[00:42:01] Andrew Michael: In the past, there was a lot more. I think now it’s narrowing in. But definitely understanding who you get compared to from the very start is something most people never go that step, I think.
[00:42:12] April Dunford: That’s right.
[00:42:13] Andrew Michael: It was an absolute pleasure chatting with you today. Is there any final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with or anything they should be aware of on your end?
[00:42:20] April Dunford: No, the only thing I will plug is the new version of my book. So the last time I was on here, which was whatever it was, six, seven years ago, I had released a book called Obviously Awesome, which was my attempt at capturing a system or a process for doing positioning. And earlier this year, I released a revised and expanded edition of that book that captures some of the stuff that I’ve learned in the five, six years since that book came out and the few hundred companies that I’ve worked with since then. So you can Google that or find it on Amazon or my website is aprildunford.com.
[00:42:59] Andrew Michael: We’ll make sure we add it in the show notes as well for the listeners so you can grab that there. I’m definitely going to grab a copy. I loved the first edition. So I think I definitely have it up on the shelf somewhere there. It’s one of the top books I recommend to anybody who’s asking. So I really appreciate the time today. For the listeners, everything we discussed today will be in the show notes so you can check that out. Highly recommended. Thank you so much for joining, April. And I wish you best of luck going forward.
[00:43:25] April Dunford: Okay. Thanks so much for having me again.
[00:43:27] Andrew Michael: Thanks. Pleasure.
[00:43:38] VO: And that’s a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.fm and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting churn.fm. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to andrew@churn.fm. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.

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