Most professionals assume great work speaks for itself, but solid Product Positioning proves that value never communicates automatically. When competitors offer flashy feature checklists or when crowded markets blur real differentiation, buyers and hiring managers get confused quickly. Host JR Lowry sits down with April Dunford, leading positioning expert and bestselling author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch, to unpack why building something valuable is only half the battle. They walk through actionable frameworks to move past surface features, clarify unique value themes, and align internal teams before ever pitching external buyers. Together, they break down how individuals can treat their career journeys like high-stakes B2B products by narrowing focus, embracing natural strengths, and knowing exactly when to walk away from poor-fit opportunities. Finally, they tackle the rise of artificial intelligence, outlining why automated tools raise the bar for genuine business strategy rather than replacing it.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/april-dunford/.

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Why You? How To Stand Out In A Crowded Market, With April Dunford

One of the biggest frustrations that exists in business is watching what we would perceive as an objectively good product struggle against a competitor that’s inferior. We’ve all seen it happen in a company we’ve worked for, or a product we’ve bought, or even in our own work. We assume, perhaps naively, that if something is genuinely better, people are going to recognize it, but that’s often not how markets or even careers work. My guest, April Dunford, argues that success is much more than about building something valuable. It’s also about helping people understand why it’s valuable and why it’s different.

That’s the discipline of positioning. Few people have really shaped this field more than April. She’s helped hundreds of technology companies sharpen their positioning, accelerate their growth, and tell a story that customers actually understand. She’s the author of Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It and Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win, two books that have become essential reading for founders, marketers, and sales leaders around the world.

In this conversation, we’re also going to go beyond products and companies and talk a little bit about what positioning can teach us about our own careers, why talented people are sometimes overlooked despite doing great work, and how AI is changing the way organizations and people need to differentiate themselves. Whether you’re leading a business or building a product or simply trying to stand out in an increasingly crowded world, I think you’re going to find plenty here to think about. Here’s my conversation with April.

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April, thanks for joining me.

It’s great to be here.

I’m glad to have you on the show as well. Let’s start in an area that I know you have focused a lot on, and that is product positioning. A lot of people think of that as a marketing exercise. Positioning is one of the classic four Ps of marketing, after all, but you would argue that it is much more fundamental than that. Tell us why so many of us have it wrong.

Here’s the thing. Positioning impacts marketing a lot, but it doesn’t impact just marketing. It impacts products. It certainly impacts sales. What I have found in my experience is that if we treat positioning like a little exercise that belongs in the marketing department and only the marketing department works on it, then what I’ve found is that whatever positioning we come up with, sales doesn’t like it, product doesn’t like it, the CEO founder doesn’t like it, and then there’s always a big fight. Because a shift in positioning really impacts all these other groups, it would make sense to me that we would need a cross-functional team to work on it.

Part of the reason why we want a cross-functional team to work on it is that sales knows a lot about what’s happening with customers, particularly early stages of deals where our positioning matters a lot. Product management knows something else. The founder knows something else. It’s actually good to pull in the information that the other parts of the organization know to actually develop your positioning. Let’s say, for example, we were going to shift the positioning. I work at a company, and it’s a business intelligence tool.

We were going to shift the positioning and say, “No, we’re not a business intelligence tool. We’re a data warehouse.” Imagine me in the marketing department trying to make that decision. I just show up and say to the CEO, “By the way, we’re not a business intelligence tool anymore. We’re a data warehouse.” Do you not think the CEO is going to have an opinion about that? Do you not think the sales team is going to have an opinion about that or the product or anybody else? They would. We cannot treat this as just a little marketing thing.

Although even though it may be marketing’s job to be the steward of positioning once we have it locked down, it may be marketing that if we feel that the positioning is getting weak or off track or something, it may be marketing that puts their hand up and says, “I think we got to pause game here for a second and fix this.” The actual work of doing the positioning and then even the work of making it real out of the market is not just a marketing thing.

You’ve worked with a ton of companies over the years on go-to-market topics. What are they getting wrong when it comes to talking about why their product is different?

There’s a bunch of things. I work specifically with technology companies and, even more specifically, all the companies I work with are B2B. The product is complicated enough that there is a salesperson involved somewhere in the sales process. There might be some product-led growth or zero-touch part of the sales process, but there’s a sales team that gets involved somewhere to actually close the deal. If you look at those kinds of companies, there’s a handful of things that are really common.

Escaping The Speeds And Feeds Trap

One is we’ve got a fairly technical product that we’re selling to sometimes a fairly technical audience or fairly sophisticated audience that understands the product a little bit and what it can do. There’s a tendency for those companies to sell on what my old boss would call speeds and feeds, which is features. You come in and say, “We have this feature, that feature, this feature, that feature.” We’re just going to tell you what all the features are, and you, as the buyer, are going to look at that set of features, understand what the features are, understand why those features are important or not important to your business, and make a purchase decision based on that.

Good positioning doesn’t operate at that level. Good positioning is really trying to answer the question, why should you pick our solution over anybody else’s? To answer that question succinctly, we really need to get at what value these features can deliver for your business. How is this product going to help you make money? How is this product going to help you save money? How is this product going to reduce risk in the business? The features are just how we get that done.

In order to sell this stuff well, we really have to get up to that value level. A lot of tech companies do not do a good job of getting it all the way up to that value level. Occasionally you will see companies that do, but then the problem is, they’ve just got too many points of value. They’ve got like eight points of value or ten points of value. They’ll say, “Look, here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to save you time, we’re going to save you money, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that. Everything with the kitchen sink.”

The customer is left to figure out, “Hang on, there’s a competitor, and they do some of that.” There’s another competitor that does this. There are ten things. I’m not sure I can remember all ten. They’re not getting tight enough on the bigger, higher picture of why pick us versus the other guys. Getting that down to 1, 2, maybe 3 value themes that a customer can really understand, “Your approach looks like this, and the value is this,” versus a competitor’s approach, which looks like this and the value is something different.

What’s fascinating to me is this idea of selling the value or selling the solution. It’s not a new idea. It certainly predates this modern rise of the technology company. Yet so many companies still want to go out and sell features.

What you get sometimes is, and I get it. The sales team will come and say to me, “Value, that’s good, April.” You do not understand. These customers are educated. They come, and they have a checklist of features. We have to show them that we meet this checklist of features. That’s a reasonable thing to say, but then I ask the question, where did the checklist of features come from? They did their research, and somehow, in this research, they decided these are the features that they need to have.

Now, if you look at what makes your product different and special, it’s the features and capabilities that the other guys do not have. Is your key secret sauce on the checklist? Probably not, because they haven’t talked to you yet. If it’s there, great, then you can tell them something. If it isn’t, it’s your job to educate them on what the checklist of features should be and in order to do that, what I’m going to have to do is I’m going to have to tell you a story. I’m going to have to paint a picture where I say, “Look, traditionally every other solution in the market looks like this.”

When we founded our company, we looked at that, and we decided that wasn’t good enough. We took a different approach to the problem. That different approach means we have a different set of features. Why should you care? This different set of features can deliver this value that the other guys cannot, and so I’m going to have to take you on that journey if I’ve got a hope and a heck of a chance of landing this deal.

If I’m the leader in the market, no problem. Their checklist of features probably looks like mine, because I’m the biggest one in the market, where maybe we can get away with that to a certain extent. Until I got a hotshot little AI native startup thing nipping at my heels that comes in and does exactly what I told you right there. They come in, and they say, “Feature Schumacher.” That’s the old way of doing it. Let me talk to you about the new way of doing it.

Different values, therefore different sets of features. Throw that checklist out. If we’re doing a good job of selling this stuff, we get to be able to talk about the differentiated stuff that we do. We cannot just assume that a customer is going to understand that because our differentiated stuff, by definition, is only something we can do.

Certainly, you’ve got the influence of a procurement function, sometimes even a third-party consultant who’s running the process, who comes with RFPs with thousands of questions on them, literally thousands of questions you have to answer, which is the equivalent of the feature checklist. It’s easy to get distracted by all of that. I would argue a consultant community has created a cottage industry for themselves just in running RFPs.

It’s hard when you’ve got that level of, “If we do not have an answer to this question, we’re going to get knocked out of the process. You get so focused on the details. You get so stuck in the weeds that it’s really hard to come up to the bigger picture level and sell the value or the overall solution or the overall differentiation. I cannot understand it.

Especially if you’re not the incumbent. If you’re not the biggie in the industry, chances are if we’re going to RFP, the biggie in the industry, this is the first call they made. They probably built the RFP based on the conversation they had with the biggie in the industry. If you’re not the biggie in the industry, then you have to decide how we are going to change this conversation. Do we have an opportunity to change this conversation? If we do not, maybe we’re not going to respond to them. A lot of the rps that cross our desk because the fix is in, man, the RFP has been built with somebody else, and we’re just never going to run that thing.

Same deal with consultants, right? I’ve worked in businesses where the consultants are really influential and really drove a lot of the purchase behavior. That being the case, we had to go figure out how we were going to get a bunch of these consultants on our side before we went and started wasting our time trying to sell directly to customers because the customer is just going to ask a consultant, and no consultants know anything about us, and no consultants are sold on us. Now we got another constituency we got to focus our sales energy on.

That was certainly true in the world that I’ve been in over the last twenty years.

It’s not uncommon.

If you’re a leader in one of these companies, how can you tell whether you have a positioning problem or a product problem?

Back when I was in-house, I spent 25 years as a vice president of marketing. I was very worried about joining a company where the product was the problem because it’s really hard to change a product if you come in and you’re vice president of marketing and the product is no good. You do not want that job. If I were doing the interview, what I’d be looking for is there traction? Are you selling stuff? Is the churn fairly low? Are the customers fairly happy? Does the growth look okay? If you’ve got a thing in market and it’s selling and there’s growth and the churn’s not too bad, I would run on the assumption that the product’s good enough.

Good enough to do some deals. If we’re doing that and the marketing looks average or not very good, I can come in as the vice president of marketing, and I’ve got something to work with here. We can make it grow because the thing looks good enough. I would always run on that assumption. Now, the harder one is when the company comes to you and says, “Look, it’s not growing as fast as we’d like it to.” We got happy customers. The churn is low. We got some growth, but the growth isn’t as high as we’d like it to be. There could be lots of different problems.

That could be a positioning problem. That could be a lead generation problem. It could be an awareness problem. Nobody knows you exist in the market. I’d be looking at things like what happens when a lead gets to sales and sales does their magic and sales closes every deal, and it’s all good. That’s unlikely to be a positioning problem. You just need more leads coming into sales. That’s a lead generation problem. Now, if the lead comes to sales and maybe a lot of them drop off there, that might be a positioning problem.

Diagnosing Weak Positioning On The Front Lines

It might not. What I would do is, if I took the job when I’m brand new vice president of marketing, I would go down and listen to what happens on a first sales call. The inside sales reps have got a deal hooked, and the customer decides, “Yes, I’ll give you an hour with an AE, and we’re going to go have a conversation.” I’d listen to what happens in that conversation, and weak positioning sounds very specific in that conversation. Often what you’ll get is a customer comes in, and the rep is there, and they’re doing a pitch, and the customer is just confused.

You can see it right from the beginning of the pitch, where the customer is making this confused face. They’re like squinting their eyes. You can see there often is this thing, and I used to see it a lot in sales calls where the positioning was weak, where the salesperson would be telling this story and it sounds pretty good, but they get to like slide 3 or 4 and the customer’s like, “Wait. Just go back and start it again. I missed something. Nothing you’re saying is making any sense.” There’s some missing piece to the puzzle where the customer cannot quite figure out what bucket to put you in.

You’d hear a lot of that where the rep thinks it’s pretty obvious, but they’re going to go back to the end. That’s one. You’d hear this other one where, and this would come up a lot, where the customer would go, “We get it.” You’re exactly like, pick your poison, Salesforce. You’re not, and then the rep is like, “No. Let me go back to the beginning.” You’re getting compared to something that you shouldn’t be getting compared to. That’s generally a positioning problem. The third one, which is actually the worst one, is when the rep gets to the end of the pitch.

The customer is, “I get it. I get who you compete with. I get what I would replace in order to bring your stuff on. I get the value of this thing.” I do not get why anyone would pay for that. Can I just do this in Excel? Can I just have a couple of interns do this thing? They get it, what you’re trying to do. They just do not think it’s all that valuable. The value is not really hitting them in the gut. If I heard things like that, then I would generally take the head of sales out for lunch and say, “Look, this is what I’m hearing in these calls. Is that common? Is it typical? Am I just cherry-picking bad calls?”

If the vice president of sales says, “We actually hear that a lot in first calls.” Even then, I wouldn’t know for sure that the positioning is bad, but I got a pretty good inkling at that point. I’d be like, “Look, dude, we call this positioning. This is how it works. When was the last time we looked at the positioning?” The answer’s like, “Positioning, what’s that?” I do not even know what that is. I’d say, maybe we need to get the gang together, marketing, sales, product, and get the CEO in here. Maybe we spend a couple of days on it and see if we cannot tighten it up.

You get everybody in the room, and you work on it. What everybody wants is a metric. If this metric from this stage of the deal to that stage of the deal looks bad, it’s probably a positioning thing. The problem is weak positioning gets you out the whole way through the purchase funnel. It’s hard to nail that down, but you can hear it in these early customer conversations, customer confusion, putting you in the wrong market category, not understanding the value. This is what I’m usually listening for.

Certainly, it makes it important, if you’re a leader, to participate in some of those sales calls, because what’s hard to tell.

A lot of times, we have gone now. They’re all recorded. You can pull them up. You can listen to it. You do not necessarily have to show up live for the call. This is getting easier and easier to do.

It is getting easier, and you do not even have to get in the car and go to the meeting. You could just listen to the recording afterwards or get the AI summarization of how the meeting went.

You’ve got to be a little careful with the AI summary. The AI summary will sometimes summarize exactly the clues that you’re looking for, so you’ve got to be really careful about that. A lot of the companies that I’ve worked with that are looking for these clues in the call recordings are actually looking at the raw transcript because it’s these little comments where the customer comes in and says, “Wait a second, is that just like Salesforce?” Or “Wait a second, why wouldn’t I just hire an intern to do that?” That might get edited right out of the call notes if you have something summarizing that. You’ve got to be careful.

Fair enough. Those things are probably picked up by most AI tools as being inconsequential to the real outcomes of the meeting. Yet there was information in those moments. Let’s shift gears and talk a little bit about the idea of positioning beyond products and take it to the idea of how you position yourself in the job market, in the job you’re in, the company that you’re working for. A lot of people go through life feeling overlooked. They work hard, they feel like they’re delivering good results, but they do not seem to get the recognition or the opportunities that they deserve. How could they apply positioning principles to help themselves?

I’m going to caveat this by saying I do know nothing about this. To be honest, I wrote a book on positioning called Obviously Awesome. It’s very specifically the methodology I’m describing in there for a B2B tech company to figure out how to do their positioning. When I first took this book to publishers, I had a publisher suggest, “Why don’t you make this like positioning your life or positioning yourself? You’d like to get a job or a date or something.” I was like, “I do not want to be a self-help guru, buddy.”

Treating Your Career Like A B2B Product

No, not interested in that. I can tell you a bit about my own personal experience and how I think this works. Early in my career, I was trying to figure out how to position myself for work, and I think it helps to look at this the same way you would a product, which would be like if they did not hire me, who else would they hire? Who’s my competition? If you look at all the other people that are out there applying to the same job as you, or maybe interviewing for the same job as you, you have to be able to answer the question why should the hiring manager pick you versus anyone else, like what do you have that’s different and special?

A lot of times, I think people aren’t thinking about this when they’re applying to the job or even when they’re coming in to interview for the job. They’re trying to convince a hiring manager that they can do the job. Everybody who’s getting interviewed could probably do the job. How are you going to do the job better? Sometimes it’s not even better. How are you going to do that differently than someone else? Why should the hiring manager care about that? Sometimes it has nothing to do with doing the job.

Sometimes it’s like, “I work really well independently. I take feedback really well. Here’s how I’m going to prove that.” It could be the proof that you could do the job. I’ve actually done a job very similar to this 5, or 6 times. Early in my career, I had an engineering background, and I landed in marketing. At the beginning, that wasn’t all that weird. As time moved on, it got to be more and more of an advantage for me that I knew how to program. I knew what a SQL query was, so I could go in and say, “Look, I’m going to work better with the product management team than people that do not have that because we speak the same language. We come from the same background.”

The developers are not going to be annoyed to work with me and be credible and say, “I’m going to work with the technical side of the business better because I have that. If we were selling to a technical buyer, I could make a case that because I had this technical background.” This was in the early days of people moving from brand marketing to doing some measurement on stuff. I would say, “Look, I know my way around a spreadsheet. The numbers do not scare me.”

That was a thing. As my career went on, I learned different things, and there were different things that I was good at. I had worked at two or three database companies, so I knew a lot about databases. I could come in and make the case for that for some companies. I had done positioning work 2 or 3 times, which is actually a lot of times if you’re an in-house person. You do not do positioning every day. It’s not a thing that every job requires. I could come in and talk intelligently about positioning and how we might fix that positioning in a way that other people couldn’t.

What I found when I was a hiring manager is that the people coming in and interviewing with me often did not really understand what made them special. They’d come in and say, like, all my jobs are B2C, but I really want to do B2B. It’s like, I do not care. I do not care what you want. You’re up against a whole bunch of people that have all this B2B stuff already. You’ve got to answer the question for me, why should I hire you? The answer cannot be because you want to work here. Everybody wants to work here.

I get a lot of that, like people would come in, very almost self-centered that would come in and say, “This is what I want.” I’d be like, “That’s nice, but let me tell you what I want.” By the way, I’m the boss. Here’s what I want. What I want matters more in this specific situation. People need to think about what makes them stand out, what makes them special. Maybe they want to focus their energy on getting in front of people and applying to the types of jobs where they’re a better fit than other people who might be applying. I had this once.

At one point I had done lots of B2B stuff, and there was a period where B2B wasn’t cool anymore in tech. Everybody was doing apps, and B2C was cool, and B2B was no good. I thought, “Man, maybe I should make the switch to B2C.” I applied for some jobs, and everybody gave me an interview. I do not know why, but I’d show up to the interview, and I’d be tap dancing. Maybe like, “How does this experience apply if you’re going to be over here as a consumer?” I did not have very good answers for that. Needless to say, I did not get the job.

In the end, I just did not make the jump. I was like, “Look, B2B isn’t hot right now, but that’s my jam. I compete pretty well over on the B2B side. The pool is smaller, but I think I’m going to have to stay over there.” I did. It was smart for me to do that because two years later B2B was all hot again, and there I was right in the middle of it. I see a lot of people coming in, and they’re not really thinking about the person who’s doing the hiring, and they’re not really thinking about answering that question why me versus the other five people you’re interviewing.

There are a couple of things I want to pick up on in what you just said, April. One is this idea that they’re not putting themselves in the shoes of the hiring manager. I think tied to that is the idea that people forget that when they’re interviewing for a job, they’re selling themselves. That concept feels really foreign and probably even uncomfortable to a lot of people. It really does come down to that. There are multiple people interviewing for this job. Why should I hire you instead of all of the other people? It’s a product differentiation thing. What makes you better than the others? If you’re not thinking that way, you’re missing the essence of the conversation.

A lot of people, I think, just really struggle with that. The other thing is just this idea of repositioning yourself. You were a B2B person, thought about trying to get into a B2C world. That’s a repositioning in essence. Those are always hard conversations because you’ve got to convince that hiring manager, in the case of a job, that what you’ve learned in this other space is actually relevant in the space that they’re in. What are some of the lessons that you can think of from how companies reposition themselves in different markets that would be applicable to how somebody could do that more effectively if they’re trying to reinvent themselves from a career perspective?

Selling Internal Stakeholders First

I can give you some examples. One is, I found that when you’re going to reposition a company, and you see we used to be a database, but now we’re a business intelligence tool. The first thing you had to do was make sure everybody inside the company believed the new position before you took it outside. Everybody inside the company had to get their heads around this shift. I had to sell everyone inside the company before we could attempt to sell anybody outside the company. The analogy to that is, let’s go back to my case. I do not think I fully believed I was a B2C person. Yet it did not stop me from applying to the B2B jobs and going out and having these interviews.

The reason I wasn’t getting the job was that I wasn’t making a very good case for me to be a B2C person. If you want to make this shift, you’re going to have to believe it. The only way you’re going to be able to get your arms around it and believe it is if you’ve got facts to back you up. If you can convince yourself and look in the mirror and say, “I’d actually be great at this. This is why I’m great at this. This is how it applies. This is how I’m going to pitch it.” You’ve got to believe it first before you can go sell anybody else. This is true inside companies. It’s way harder to convince the people inside than it is to convince the people outside.

The other thing is that it cannot just be like, I’ve worked at companies where I’ve gone in, and they said, “Look, we made all our money selling into the mid-market, but we do not like selling to the mid-market anymore. What we want to do is sell to the big companies. Let’s just reposition billion-dollar companies because we’re sick of selling to these little guys.” We’d like to sell fewer deals, but at higher prices and whatever. This is what I call aspirational positioning, which is like we wish we could position up there, but often when we have that, we look at the product, and we’re like, “Does it actually work up there?”

It’s not just the product. It’s the pricing. It’s the go-to-market motion. Do we have services? Can we support these customers? The big guys want 24/7 multilingual support. They want a professional services team. They want somebody to come on site. We’re not going to be able to sell them off the website anymore. We might have to hire a sales team to go and do that. Everything changes. That’s not just a little shift in positioning. Again, if I use my case, I had this little aspirational idea. Maybe I should go to B2C because B2C is hot. The reality was, it was the wrong product. I was trying to sell this B2B thing. Everybody liked me.

Narrowing Scope To Multiply Leverage

I was good at interviews. They’d bring me back for a second, third interview, but they’d all be scratching their heads. They’d be like, “We do not really get it.” We do not know how anything you’ve done applies. I’d be like, “Trust me, I’ll figure it out.” When I gave up on it and I went back, I ended up taking a job at a B2B company, and just the whole tone and everything else of these interviews, I was like, “What was I thinking? I’m a B2B person. I need to stay over here where I’m good.” I knew that thing. This has also been a guiding thing in my consulting business too. B2C companies come to me all the time, and they’re like, “Can you help us with the positioning, April?”

I just say no. These are companies that are literally like, “Take my money. Here it is. We believe in you, April.” I say, “No, I do not know anything about B2C.” They’re like, “We’ll be the first. It’ll be fine. Just take our money. We’ll do it.” The reason I say no is because I do not know if I can do it, and so I do not know if it’s going to be worth it. It is better for me to just say no and stick to the companies where I know we’re going to smash it. That’s my little box outside of my little box. I do not know. Maybe it’s going to work out. Maybe not.

That’s the essence of positioning yourself.

That’s it. You say yes to what you say no to because it just ain’t a fit over there.

We would be remiss if we did not talk at least a little bit about how AI is affecting the types of things that you’re doing. Do you think that AI is changing the way that positioning is occurring or needs to occur in the B2B tech world? Does it simply make execution of that positioning faster?

It’s interesting. There’s a whole bunch of levels to it. The first and most obvious level is that competition is coming from all sorts of corners that we did not expect it to come from in a lot of market areas. There have been companies that have been coasting along. Things have been good. They have competition, but it’s competition that looks just like them. Now all of a sudden they got an AI native company in there that’s taking a completely different approach to the problem. Because they’re taking a completely different approach to the problem, they can deliver value in a different way. In some market spaces, that has really thrown the cards up in the air.

Companies are having to react to that in terms of a shift in their positioning to account for this new type of competitor that can do these things in a different way and that. That’s one thing. Almost everybody in every market is wrestling with this right now. It’s the reason why I’m busy right now. The competitive landscape looks totally different than it did 2 or 3 years ago. The second thing is that not only does the competitive landscape look different, but it’s also harder to get your arms around it. It’s harder to know what’s real competition versus potential competition, but not quite competition yet. Who knows, maybe never competition, but we do not know quite yet.

A lot of companies are in a space where people talk about vibe coding and vibe coding a product. A lot of companies are in a space where theoretically a little dedicated team could maybe vibe code a thing that looks like this. A customer could do it, potentially. I’m working with a handful of companies where, if you ask them, “Who’s the competition, who should you be positioning against?” Folks on the product team will say vibe coding. We’re in big trouble with this vibe coding thing. Now, sometimes that’s true, and sometimes it isn’t, so sometimes customers come, and they’re saying, we’re looking at vibe coding things, but what you got. Maybe we’ll buy you, maybe not.

Maybe we’ll go inside. In which case, they are competing directly with a build-it-your-own vibe coding tool solution. They’re going to have to account for that in their positioning. What is the stuff they’ve got that the vibe coders just ain’t going to get right? Sometimes that isn’t the case. Zero customers are actually doing that right now. Now you’ve got to decide. If you believe that is coming down the track, if you believe we haven’t seen it yet, but it’s coming next year or the year after, then you’ve got a product roadmap problem.

What am I going to put in my product roadmap so that when that happens, we’re ready? At the same time, I do not have to position myself against the ghost. I only have to position against things that my prospects consider competitive. If my prospect’s not looking at vibe coding and I show up and say, “Let me tell you why we’re better than vibe coding, that is dumb.” What you’ve done is you’ve now taught your prospect that they should be looking at a thing that they haven’t looked at. You do not want to be doing that.

You have to be careful that your positioning is meeting your customers where they’re at right now. Now, that doesn’t mean you ignore what you believe to be true or what you think is going to happen in the future. You cannot ignore that. This is a product roadmap problem. Are we getting ready behind the scenes? It doesn’t necessarily show up on your external stuff. It doesn’t necessarily factor into your positioning yet. It’s very hard for customers to determine the line on that. These same companies are probably talking to their investors about the vibe coding thing and the AI stuff they’re doing.

They’re probably going crazy when they’re talking to investors about that. We need to tell that story with customers, yes or no. Right now it has never been so important because there’s so much upheaval and uncertainty in the market. It has never been more important. To really have your finger on the pulse of where your buyers are at, what they’re looking at, what they’re taking seriously, and what they aren’t taking seriously.

Honestly, the difference between what you’re reading on Hacker News and LinkedIn and Reddit or wherever you hang out, where the techie people hang out, what you’re selling to manufacturers, like the difference between those two things has never been starker. You got to be careful not to get so hyped up and so caught up in, like, “Everything’s happening. It’s all happening next week.” If your customers are not there yet, now in some cases, maybe your customers are, but you really got to know where your customers are, and you really got to have this positioning that meets the customer where they’re at, and that right now is really hard.

Customers are all over the map in terms of their level of understanding. I would think, though, that this makes differentiation a lot harder because there are a lot of things that you could vibe code or recreate using some AI tool that may have been secret sauce in the past that now feel like, “I could do that myself.”

Yes and no. I’ve heard this argument that people come and say, “Features do not matter anymore because anybody can add a feature because it could just vibe code it.” It’s like, that’s not how code works. I have an existing product with existing customers. It might speed up my delivery of a feature for me and my competition. We had competition before. We could code things, and they could code things. Now we could both code things faster. What’s the difference? There is no difference. We’re all just moving faster. We have differentiation in the market now. Now everybody has AI.

Confronting Artificial Intelligence Without The Hype

This is not a competitive differentiator. If you could vibe code it, they could vibe code it. They can vibe code a thing that’s different from yours and better than yours. You can vibe code a thing that’s different than theirs and better than theirs. It’s just a matter of speed. We’re all moving, and now we’re all moving faster. I’ve never worked with a company that’s in the market and successful that doesn’t have any differentiation. You have it. A lot of times, that differentiation is that the company has made a deliberate choice to approach the problem in a different way.

It’s not about a feature. The complete architecture of the thing is different. Everybody’s doing it like this, but we came in, and we’re doing it this way. There are very few markets I could point to where the number one, number two, and number three are taking the exact same approach to the problem. It’s just not how markets work. There’s an incumbent in a space, and you come in, and you’re getting any traction at all?

You’ve got serious differentiation. Otherwise, you wouldn’t sell anything. When people have this theoretical thought that anybody can build a feature, anybody, whatever, I’m like, “Tell me the two companies you’re thinking about in your brain.” Like, “Are you thinking that we’re going to vibe code Salesforce?” Now, if I was a little weak company and you said, “Can we vibe code a little CRM?” “You can.” Is it going to look anything like Salesforce?

No, it’s not going to look anything like Salesforce. Salesforce would probably be overkill for that company anyway. Can we vibe code little things? We can. Can we vibe code big things? We can vibe code big things too, but I do not think if someone’s going to come in and challenge Salesforce, it’s going to be somebody that’s taken a completely different approach to solving the problem of CRM.

That’s who’s going to beat Salesforce. Not somebody that comes in and says, I got a copycat Salesforce. It’s just like them. Except none of our people have any experience, and we do not have a professional services team, and we do not have any of the partnerships. We do not have any of the integrations. We do not have any support either, but otherwise the features are exactly the same. That’s not how this is going to play out.

Using that example, part of their competitive moat is all of those things. It’s not just the code base.

That’s right. It’s not just the features. It’s everything else. We have the whole issue, too, of there being existing code bases and existing customers and how people switch from one thing to another thing. A lot of these traditional SaaS businesses are now trying to figure out how to compete with themselves. They’re taking a big lean back and saying, “Should we just rewrite this whole thing to make it AI native? How fast could we do that? If we did, what would that look like? What do we do with the existing customer base? How do we move them over?”

All these things, these are big questions. It goes beyond positioning. What is going to win? It’s building a thing in a way that it’s different. It’s building a thing that can deliver something that’s unique. The other guys cannot have this new set of tools that operate in a different way. That should give me the ability to approach the problem in a completely different way. If you see the AI companies that are doing a really great job out there, the ones that are growing really fast, they’ve come into a market, and they’re like, with this new set of tools and this new set of capabilities, we can start from the ground up and build something completely different. They’re winning because they’re telling that story.

There’s got to be a certain element of reinvention of how the product works and is conceived. To recreate Salesforce, to recreate any incumbent SaaS product, would be the wrong way to think about it.

Whatever beats Salesforce is not going to be a thing that’s set out to copy Salesforce. It’s going to be a thing that said, what if we had the opportunity to start from scratch and build everything new, knowing what we know now? When Salesforce was built, our concept of what we wanted to do with CRM was completely different. Knowing what we know, you would approach it completely differently. You would redefine what CRM even means at this stage.

I’m sure people at companies, traditional SaaS businesses, most of the ones that I talk to, are having this conversation internally with themselves. They’re like, “What if we started from scratch and built this? What would it look like? What would we do differently?” Knowing what we know now, because when we built the original thing, it was. However, many years back. We thought about these things differently. I think these are the more interesting things that are happening with AI and any big shift in technology.

These architectural shifts have been going on for decades, and the people who succeed in these new errors are the ones, to your point, who rethink the business model, the delivery model, the value model, not just, “We’re going to take our on-prem software and dump it into Microsoft’s public cloud or Amazon Web Services and say, ‘Now we’re a cloud product. Everybody sees through that.’” The same will be true here. Having an AI chatbot that sits on top of your crummy software product that needs to be rethought is probably not selling an AI-powered product. It’s a lot different.

I’m telling you, two years ago, that was everybody’s gut reaction to it. We’re going to take a chatbot. I got a chatbot on it now. We’re AI. I think two years down the road, now we think very differently about that. Now it’s like, that ain’t it. Now we’re talking about agents. What can we do with agents? It’s very different. I do not think we’ve seen, and I do not think we’ve seen the end of that evolution yet. We’ll know a lot more about how this all shakes out and winners and losers and what this really looks like in the next year, two years, three years. A lot of what people are predicting is going to happen just ain’t going to happen. Some of it is, but a lot of it isn’t. We just do not know the difference between the two right now.

We’re definitely in that in-between era right now. With all this said, what would you want to leave our audience with in terms of the lesson that you would want them to take away on positioning their companies, their products, or themselves?

Replacing Gut Instinct With Repeatable Process

Here’s the big thing, and this has been my life’s work. The big thing with positioning is that positioning is very hard to do well if you are trying to do it from gut instinct. Now, not impossible, but if we can do positioning using a process, a structured process, like step one, step two, step three, step four, it just makes your whole life easier. If you are really good at this stuff, and maybe you think, I can feel this, Having a process so that everybody understands how you got to where you got to, and it wasn’t just your genius thought in the middle of the night.

It’s going to help everybody understand what the positioning is. The other thing is that when you do this gut-feel positioning, sometimes it works. When it works, it’s amazing, but it generally doesn’t work forever. At some point you’re going to have to shift that positioning. You got a new competitor, something changed, you changed, you did an acquisition, something changed. It’s very hard to shift that positioning because you did not use a process to get to the positioning in the first place.

If you really want to tame positioning and you really want to feel comfortable with your positioning, the number one thing you can do is use some process to say, “This is how we got to where we got to.” Doing that is going to help you in the long run. It’s going to help you when you need to shift. It’s going to help you even figure out, do I need to shift this right now or not? It’s going to have to get the whole team on board. That’s the last thing I would leave you with is that having a structured process to do this stuff is going to save you in lots of situations.

Thank you. It’s been a fun conversation. We won’t be able to vibe code our way through all of that for sure. I appreciate your time, April.

Thanks so much for having me on.

—

What should we take away from the discussion just now with April? The first thing is that being better isn’t enough if people cannot see why you’re better. Whether you’re launching a product or growing a business or trying to advance your career, value doesn’t speak for itself. You have to help people understand what makes you different, why that difference matters, and who benefits most from it. Positioning isn’t spin, and it’s certainly not the purview of marketing alone. It’s something that everybody in a company needs to be clear on, and it’s something that you need to continue to work on by putting yourself in your client’s shoes.

The same is true if you are looking for a job or trying to convey your value in the job that you’re in second, and we did not talk a lot about this, but it’s an important thing that April mentioned at the end. She’s not out there trying to support everybody. She wasn’t the right fit for B2C jobs. Many times you can actually grow better by narrowing your focus as opposed to broadening it. When you go too broad, it’s harder for customers to understand who you really are, and the same is true for you individually.

You have to make it clear where your depth is and what types of circumstances you would be good in a company. That means being clear where your product fits and where it doesn’t, and when you do that, things often just come together much more naturally because you are focused on your strongest points, not trying to be everything to everybody. Third is that in an AI-enabled world, differentiation is going to become even more important. AI is making it easier to create content, build products, and automate routine work.

Those capabilities, therefore, are becoming less distinctive. The competitive advantage shifts to understanding customers, making sound strategic choices, communicating a compelling story, building trust, and ultimately solving problems. Technology can help you execute all those things faster, whether it’s AI or anything else, but it cannot decide what truly makes you worth choosing.

Those same lessons, again, can be applied to individuals. As always, I invite you to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or YouTube or whatever your favorite platform is, and if you found this discussion enlightening, you can sign up for my membership community, which is called Pathwise, or our newsletter, Path Wisdom. Thanks. See you next time.

Important Links

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About April Dunford

April Dunford is a globally recognized expert on positioning and one of the leading voices on helping companies stand out in crowded markets. Over a 25-year career as a marketing executive, entrepreneur, and consultant, she has helped hundreds of technology companies sharpen their positioning, accelerate growth, and communicate their value more effectively. April is the bestselling author of Obviously Awesome, a practical guide to product positioning, and Sales Pitch, which focuses on turning positioning into a compelling sales story. Today, she advises primarily B2B technology companies, helping leaders understand their competitive alternatives, identify differentiated value, and give customers a clear reason to choose them.