Are you ‘Obviously Awesome’?
‘I was there, the day Horus slew the Emperor.’
One of the great opening lines of a book series. Even without knowing where this is from, you know something big happened; you know an Emperor has died, and who is ‘I’? Who is Horus?
Simply a work of art in context setting and positioning.
April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome book helps us understand this from a business and product perspective. In this short article, I run through my key takeaways and thoughts after having run through the process outlined in the book.
Some background first. Starting out with Userlot, we knew we were playing in a huge and growing market. So finding our niche was something we knew we would have to do.
And for some reason, I hadn’t yet gotten around to reading April Dunford’s book, commonly held up as the bible for positioning.
So why did it take so long to? Jeez, I bought it in 2019!! But I guess who cares about the past? The important part is using these processes now and in the future.
Positioning is really about setting the context in the minds of your buyer and placing your product right in the center of that.
It starts with being deliberate.
Deliberate Positioning
Positioning your product or service is not something to be taken lightly or ad-hoc.
It’s tempting to try and be everything for everyone or to let the market try and tell you, but this is super dangerous.
Positioning your product is a deliberate process whereby you choose to place yourself in a specific place and time. Importantly, you also choose not to place yourself in others.
A recent example of this is what Brian Casel has done with ZipMessage. Pivoting to a coaching-focused position and rebranding with https://clarityflow.com/.
Look through his new site if you want an awesome example of a well-positioned product.
Knowing you need to do this and doing it is another thing entirely.
I know I have struggled to do this in past businesses, and we’ve ended up with a scattergun approach to marketing and positioning.
And that’s what April has provided to us here. A simple, repeatable process to find your position.
The process is a simple 6-step process comprising 5 core components and 1 optional one.
These are
- Competitors
- Unique Features
- Value
- Target Market
- Market Category
- Trends
Here’s what I took away from each component. It’s not an exhaustive list, but hopefully a different take on what is already out there.
Competitors — What are your customer’s alternatives
The key part here is really understanding what your customers would actually use as an alternative to you.
The reality is we spend so much of our time thinking about our direct competitors. Obsessing over their new features, worrying they will take our clients, and the list goes on. While we’re doing that, our customer has only been thinking if they’re better off doing it the old way, with a spreadsheet!
Most of the time, your real competitor is NOTHING.
It’s apathy; it’s status quo; it’s doing what they’ve always done.
It’s not buying from your competitor.
Our customers spend so much less time investigating our market than we do.
Remember that.
For Userlot, that could mean customers who are just making do with a handful of tools to help them do their job — helpdesk software, a CRM, and a spreadsheet to track renewals.
Your unique features
This is probably the best part of April’s process.
Because we often hear so much about ‘Don’t talk about your features!!’ that we leave them to last and don’t use them to discover our real value.
So April turns it on the head here, and we start with features.
This is the time you can really talk about yourself. At least, to yourself 😊.
We don’t want to discuss just any features but list the real unique features.
List them out and get crazy with it. What features are truly unique to you, and sometimes, these can even be seen as a negative. Are you small, and is your software still a bit clunky? Then maybe one of your features is free in-person onboarding! No competitor would dream of doing that!
If you have customers, ask them! Really double and triple-check that the uniqueness of your features are in fact unique.
Also, focus on the features that hook a new user. Don’t worry about retention-based features, like the awesome end-of-year reporting or things a user might use down the track. We are concentrating on features that will end up as good ways to position our product remember.
For Userlot, that could mean true multi-product support. Identifying what products clients use clearly, and the cross-sell opportunities that exist.
Values and Value Themes
So we weren’t really focused on features, but we needed to do the above to work through the process of finding value themes.
This is where we go into feature, benefit, and value thinking.
We want to take the features above and ask ourselves, ‘What is the benefit?’ of having that feature? This benefit will then help us determine a value, or who would hold that value, to see the benefit and untimely want that feature.
I hope you can see the process here and how starting with the feature has really made it easy to drive through to value.
We aim for 1–4 value themes to help us determine our marketing and customers.
For a product like Userlot, that might mean values like caring about revenue or, at a glance understanding a customer’s progress through their journey.
Target Market
Now we have an idea of the value themes we’re interested in, we think about ‘who’ would actually care about these values. What are the characteristics of a buyer that would hold those values?
We’re not looking at specific roles here but the buyer’s characteristics.
As you start to niche down here, also consider how big that segment is compared to your short-term sales objectives. You need to ensure these are in alignment as it’s no use niching down too small if you can’t hit the objectives you need to.
For Userlot, this could mean a real revenue-focused CEO or founder who thinks every day and week about growing Net Revenue Retention or who needs to bring these numbers monthly to a growth-focused board.
Market Category
Humans can only understand things if they can compare them to something else.
That’s why everything has an opposite.
- Good ↔ Bad
- Happy ↔ Sad
- Rich ↔ Poor
You don’t know what it feels to be rich unless you have felt what it feels like to be poor.
Our buyers do the same with our positioning.
If we choose to look like a sales CRM, we will be compared to Salesforce.
If we choose to look like a support tool, we will be compared to Zendesk or Intercom.
Choosing to sit in a category is a choice. So you need to be prepared to embrace that category.
These categories bring ‘Powerful Assumptions’ about values, features, and costs.
If you’re unprepared to embrace those assumptions, you must consider moving categories.
Again, this is what Brian did above with Clarify Flow.
She also talks about three possible positioning strategies, Head to Head, Big Fish Small Pond and Create a new game.
We will no doubt sit in Big Fish Small Pond, where we reduce the pond (target market) to ensure we are the big fish in that small pond.
For Userlot, this could mean we sit in a niche CRM market or sit alongside dashboard and reporting tools in a given vertical.
“How do you beat Bobby Fischer? You play him at any game but chess. I try to stay in games where I have an edge.” — Warren Buffett
Trends
Finally, the optional component is embracing a trend.
This is optional but highly recommended.
Obviously, at the time of writing this, AI (Artificial Intelligence) is all the rage. It’s almost unheard of to try to place yourself as a new product without embracing AI in some form.
For Userlot, although AI is the rage and we’re on it, we also view revenue as a refocusing point for Customer Success. That Customer Success driven companies are the new norm, and realizing that Customer Success own recurring revenue.
The final Position ;)
After running through this process, it’s much easier to understand where you will position your product, including the market and category.
It’s important to remember you are positioning for your customer, and that means thinking about what you do for them RIGHT NOW, not in the future. You can’t sell your clients on your vision. That’s for investors or your staff to worry about.
And this process is repeatable and should be repeated at least yearly.
As we saw with trends, time changes, and so will your positioning.
These have just been my takes from reading through April’s process. Getting the book if you haven’t already is well worth the purchase.
Here templates on the website also have a really good framework around building out the assets for your broader team so that when you have your positioning in place, it can be executed and broadcast consistently and easily — https://www.aprildunford.com/books
If you’ve used this process before, how did you find it? How did it change your product’s positioning? I’d love to hear from you.
For more content like this, I always welcome new followers over on my newsletter — The Itchy Mind and you can follow along with our company Userlot here — https://www.linkedin.com/company/userlot
