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

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:04)
If your product isn't doing well, there's a chance that it may not be the product that's the problem. It may be your positioning, and there's no one I've learned more from about how to very practically and tactically think about your positioning than from April Dunford. April is the bestselling author of the book Obviously Awesome, which many consider an industry Bible on product positioning. She's also led teams at seven successful B2B startups, worked with over 200 companies, helping them nail their positioning and has almost certainly done more positioning work than any human alive. Also, April's guest post in my newsletter, A Quick Start Guide to Positioning, is still one of the most popular posts of all time in my newsletter and one they share often with founders.
I had a total blast speaking with April, and I hope you learn as much from this conversation as I did.
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April, thank you so much for being here. You're a legend. I am humbled to chat with you and to learn from you. And honestly, I am. And your guest post...

**April Dunford** (3:00)
Lenny, you're the legend around here, not me. No, no, no. You're the guy. You're like Madonna. You're just like a one-name guy now. You're like Lenny, the Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:09)
I don't know what to do with that. I'm just gonna move on.
Anyway, welcome to the podcast.

**April Dunford** (3:17)
So good to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:19)
Of course. I was also gonna say that your guest post on positioning on my newsletter is still in the top 20 most popular all-time posts. I keep coming back to it. People keep telling me how useful it is. I keep sending it to founders. And so I'm just excited to dive a lot deeper on this topic. Cool. All right, let's do it. So for listeners who maybe aren't super familiar with your background and how you came to be such an expert on positioning, could you just kind of briefly share your journey to what you do today?

**April Dunford** (3:44)
Yeah, sure. So my background is I didn't study marketing in school. I studied engineering straight out of engineering school. I got a job, a product marketing job at a startup. And I've been doing this a long time. So this was back when startups weren't even cool. And we just called them small companies. So I got a job at a little company. And then that company, I was assigned to a product that was kind of a loser.
And we weren't selling very much. We ended up repositioning it and the thing took off. It got hugely successful. That company got acquired. My boss quit and they made me the vice president of marketing. I still have no idea why. And then I decided, well, this is my jam. This is what I do now. And in particular, we had a handful of products there. The positioning also seemed kind of weak. And so I kind of embarked on this journey of like, hey, like positioning seems to be really important because when we get it wrong, everything sucks. And when we get it right, we all make all kinds of money. So I should figure out how to do this properly. And so I read a bunch of books, took a bunch of courses. And what I discovered is that positioning is this foundational marketing concept, but we didn't really have a methodology for doing it. And so from that point forward, I became kind of a repeat vice president of marketing at a series of startups. So I think I did seven and six of those got acquired. So I repositioned a lot of products across that and positioning became sort of my specialty. Like if you basically, if you were looking for a vice president of marketing and I came into the interview, like the reason you hired me is because your positioning was crappy and I could talk intelligently about how we were gonna fix that. And then about five, six years ago, I decided I wanted to go do something different. And so I made the switch to consulting and now that's all I do. So I basically do positioning. Even more specifically though, I really focused on, I only do tech companies. I only do B2B companies because my background is all really B2B and I don't really get consumer.