In this episode, Brian Anderson interviews April Dunford, a marketing and positioning guru and consultant who has managed large marketing teams at dozens of B2B tech startups in her career.
April shares all about her unique entry into the world of product positioning. She studied systems design and engineering at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
After graduation, she landed a job at a small startup in product marketing—making compilers and database products. The two requirements were that she be comfortable with SQL and public speaking—which she was.
Eventually April’s company was acquired by a large Silicon-Valley organization and, as she claims, she was “standing in the right place at the right time” when she was made Vice President of Marketing—in charge of more than 30 team members.
However, April’s story is much more nuanced than she jokingly gives herself credit for.
One of the first tasks she was assigned in her first job was to talk to 100 customers to determine whether or not to kill a database product. As she began making phone calls, she discovered something incredibly interesting. One out of every 20 people she spoke with simply raved about the product—but they were using it completely differently than her company’s intention.
Instead of using the software for personal productivity, this small sample of people were equipping their field salesmen with it for mobile use. Because of her intimate connections with customers, April was in a position to speak up to her superiors and make a case for re-positioning and re-launching the product, complete with new pricing and packaging strategies.
From there, April embarked on a long journey to discovery exactly what the real formula for product positioning looks like—and wrote a book about her findings!
You can find out more about April’s extraordinary career at aprildunford.com or order her book, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love it.
We thank April for her time on the Augusto Podcast and wish her the best of luck in all her consulting engagements!
Read, watch or listen to the podcast here!
