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

"Positioning seems to be important folks, if wrong everything sucks, if get it right we make a bunch of money "

It is hard to get - people always do not understand or they say they get it and it is totally wrong.. like you are salesforce! no. Or worse - yeah I understand but why would we pay for that! sign of weak positioning.

status quo: 30% of deals are lost due to indecision. excel sheets, interns, pen and paper you have to position towards those too. win against alternatives.

In B2B you segment the market on anything i.e folks have a creative system and use this particular packaging on regular use. there is no person, we are talking about a company.

Capabilities comparison (features, capabilities of the company, capabilities of the product )is important. the differentiator value ones, in which there will be two or three themes.

Example: Segway is archetypal wrong in positioning. He went on the next level of human transport, but then it comes to this thing on good morning America. everyone is disappointed. they can not place it.

Differentiated value. Competitive alternatives are not competiion in comparison. i.e statusquo

It is ok if your grandmother does not understand it. Does your buyer understand? Unless you are building for grandma, useless.

Messaging versus positioning: they are distinct, and positioning is the fundamental input to the messaging.

The way it starts - the founder has an idea, the marketing is a little bit different. Sales a little bit different and product managers are a little bit different. Duh! Not aligned! it is a group work - positioning exercise. The majority of the issues are misalignments.