April Dunford - Obviously Awesome 2.0 : What's New With Product Positioning? (with April Dunford, Author “Obviously Awesome“ and “Sales Pitch“)

Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering something, some value that a very well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. You can think of it a little bit like context setting for products, like it kind of takes a customer that doesn't know too much about your stuff and kind of orients them towards your values so that they can figure out what it's all about. At a very fundamental level, it's the answer to the question, why pick us over the other guys? Why pick us over anything else you could do? April is now cannibalizing her own book sales with her new book, Obviously Awesome, a new and updated edition which I'm sure promises to make all this stuff easy, and now there's only five steps to the process I'm sure will all be done by tea time. April, thanks for coming and welcome back. Wow, okay, thanks for having me. I didn't realize it was the third time, I thought this was the second time, oh boy. We did Obviously Awesome one and then we did Sales Pitch and here we are again. Well, this will be the last time then because I ain't writing no more books, so that's the end of that. But anyway, well, let's talk about that. So obviously, as I say, we've spoken a couple of times on a podcast, we've obviously caught up a couple of times in person in town, but you've got the book, that's out and new and definitely something we'll talk about. But other than that, what's keeping you busy these days? What's on April Dunford's agenda these days? Oh, well, you know, I'm busy with clients, obviously. And yeah, I just put this new version of the book out. So there's been I've been in the middle of book launch stuff lately. But then I don't know, I got lots of personal stuff going on too. Like, I'm building a new cabin in the woods. This is my side project that's going on right now. And yeah, and I'm really sick of the weather. I'm in Toronto, we've had the worst winter ever. And so next week, I'm going to the beach. Like, yeah, what's going on with me? Well, these are all good things. And I'm looking forward to seeing pictures of the cabin when it's done as well. I mean, I just assume that everyone is... This is not stuff I post on social media at all. So you're gonna have to come to Canada to see how that is. But yeah, but it's a fun project. Yeah, no, I mean, something that I would fail to do. I don't think we get away with cabins in the UK anyway. I mean, we don't have the climate for it, or the big forests, or the wolves, or anything like that. That's right, you need wilderness, man. One day, one day. Right, as discussed, you do have a new version of the book out. And of course, the first version of the book was incredibly popular. Everyone loved it. And you've, you know, been kind of working the process for that with clients for a few years now. And then obviously, SalesPitch came out. But whenever someone comes out with the second edition of a new book, or a popular second edition of an old book, like a popular book that's done the rounds, and probably a lot of people already read, there's always kind of this question in the back of your mind, like, why is there a second edition? Like, what was the reason? What spurred it? So I guess that's the first question to you. Like, what was it that caused you to think, hey, it's time to write book, version two of this book? Yeah, a handful of things. Like, so the first one is it's been six, seven years. And I've worked with a lot of companies since the first book came out. And, you know, and one of the side effects of working lots of companies on a thing is that your thinking evolves on it. And so a handful of things. So one was, there were a set of sticky situations that I could see the pattern in once I'd done 200 companies, 300 companies, that I didn't see the pattern in when it was 60 companies, 70 companies. So there was that. So there were things that I wish I had included in the book that I didn't include in the book, because I, frankly, I just didn't see that stuff. That was one thing. Second thing was, there were a handful of things in the book that my thinking evolved. Like, I wouldn't say it totally changed my mind about anything, because this stuff is kind of fundamental. But there's some things that I, you know, my thinking on it evolved. And I thought, man, if I was writing that now, I would write that differently, or I would put a slightly different spin on it. And then the last thing was that, you know, the book sold a lot of copies. And so what you get when the book sells a lot of copies is you get a lot of feedback. And a lot of it is like, what the hell were you talking about there, April? And so I would get emails about particular parts of the book where people were very annoyed or confused. So for example, and maybe it's because I'm dealing with tech people, you know, more numbers people. But people were very annoyed that I had five components of positioning, but there were 10 steps. And they were like, no, it's five things. It should be five steps. And at first I was like, dude, it could be as many steps as I want. And after a while, I started to think, you know what, the steps that came before the, the steps that come before the first component are actually set up. And the things you do after are sort of things you do post. So it could be five steps. So I changed that. And then there were a handful of things that I just didn't explain enough. Like, for example, there's a chapter on differentiated value that did not have nearly enough meat on it. And I got loads of questions about that specific step. And I could see people that were trying to do the, the positioning stuff without me. If they emailed me, that was always the step where they got stuck. So I thought, you know what, if I was to do this again, I would rework that chapter and, and spend more time on explaining exactly what that is, exactly how you do it. And then there were a couple of things that I just did a bad job explaining, like just straight up bad job explaining. Like, and there's a particular one that I got lots of email about. And I, you know, and I had this kind of canned response that was like, I know that on page 112, I said this, but what I actually meant was this completely different thing. And why weren't you reading my mind properly? Anyways, so, so, you know, so the book was still selling a lot. And I kind of thought, you know what? And, you know, after I wrote Sales Pidge, I didn't think that I had another book in me. And I had this thought, well, maybe I go back and I fix all that stuff in the old one. I add the stuff I wanted to add. I fixed the things where I felt I didn't do a perfect job on it the first time and just do a do-over. So here we are. So you could almost argue, then, this is like the Blade Runner director's cut of the book, then. This is, you know, you've come back, you've taken out the narration, you've fixed up the ending and stuff, and you've tried to make it as kind of perfect as possible. Like, this is the definitive, obviously, awesome. Maybe that's it. Maybe that's it. Like, I mean, you don't get a do-over mostly. But if the book wasn't selling, I'd just left it, let it go, you know? But when the book is still selling, you're sort of like, oh, man, for every hundred books I sell, I'm going to get two emails that say, on page whatever, you said whatever. And I'm like, let's just fix that. So hopefully, I don't add a bunch of stuff that also confuses people. Because, I mean, you can't control for that. But I feel like this book is better than the first edition in a lot of ways. Well, actually, you're the publisher yourself. I was going to say your publisher would be on your back if you didn't say that. But would you say that people then who have read the first edition are going to get a lot of value out of the new version? Or is that something that's more of a future-proofing thing? Yeah, it depends. Like, the answer to that is it depends. Like, I think if you wanted to... If you read the book because you wanted to get kind of a basic education, like positioning 101, how would I actually do it? You probably don't need to go buy the book again. But if you are rolling your sleeves up, and you're actually going to get a cross-functional team together and work through this thing on your own, then I would say, yeah, the new edition is going to help you more than the old edition. There's also a handful of things like... I added some stuff that was very specific to multi-product companies. When I wrote the first book, I wasn't working with a lot of multi-product companies. Most of the companies I worked with only had one product. We were just worried about one thing. Since then, almost every company I work with now is a multi-product company. And so I added a bunch of stuff specific to that. So I would also say if you're a multi-product company, then the second edition is probably... You're going to see more of you in that book than the first one, probably. But other than that, like, yeah, I think you don't have to buy the second one. There you go. Come on, everyone should buy the second one. Get two copies. You don't have to buy the second one. But yeah. But anybody new coming at it gets the second one, and that makes me happy. Absolutely. And I was very excited to see also that you put out a hardcover edition, which I don't think you had the first time around. So you've got a certain gravitas that you can put on your bookshelf behind you. But is it also kind of... Was that kind of a temptation so you could kind of hit people over the head when they got the positioning process? Let me tell you, there's a few reasons for doing the hardcover edition, and they're all bad. So the first one was, there was a bootleg hardcover edition going around, a really bad bootleg hardcover edition, where somebody had literally photocopied the paperback and then created a hardcover. And it was so bad, like the type was running off the edges and things like that. Part of the reason they could get... And then they would list it on Amazon as the hardcover edition. And it had nothing to do with me. But it had my name on it and everything else. And Amazon's usually pretty good about taking these things down when you report it. But it just kept popping up and kept popping up. And this would never have happened if I had a hardcover edition myself. So that was one reason to do it. The second reason, which is just get rid of this bad bootleg copy, which of course people email me about and say, why is your hardcover so shitty? And I'm like, uh, because I don't have one? I don't know. So then the second reason was some people, you know, especially if they're in-house and they're doing a positioning exercise, and they're coming back to the book a lot. People would come up to me at conferences with these beat up copies of this paperback that just looked like they'd pulled it out of the river. Things all thing and it's all beat up. And I was like, whoa, some people really need a hardcover because this thing is not good. So I put it there. I don't expect to sell a lot of hardcover editions, but it's there for the hardcore. And then also to just get rid of this. Again, I'm trying to minimize complaints around here. Then I was getting a lot of complaints about this bootleg hardcover version that was out there. And so now I don't have that. Okay. So no hitting people around the head for doing the process. No, not yet. Not yet. Never say never. Right. Then for the record, and I know obviously you've had to do this 150 million times, including at least once with me. For people that maybe haven't read the book the first time around, maybe coming into it the second time around, maybe thinking about positioning for the first time, but don't really know what's going on or what it is. How, April, sorry to do this to you, how would you define positioning to the uninformed? Sure. So positioning, it's, you know, it's amazing. It's a concept that's been around a really long time, right? So it's kind of amazing that we do have to go back to the 101 a lot, but we do. I mean, it's not something that you do every day. Like you don't reposition a product every day. So it, and I will say that in marketing in general, we like to change the definitions of things a lot. And so, you know, if I say branding, for example, like that could be in almost anything, like depending on how you define branding. So positioning is kind of the same thing. So I define positioning this way. Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering something, some value that a very well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. You can think of it a little bit like context setting for products. Like it kind of takes a customer that doesn't know too much about your stuff and kind of orients them towards your values so that they can figure out what it's all about. At a very fundamental level, it's the answer to the question, like why pick us over the other guys? Like why pick us over anything else you could do? In my work, I've taken positioning and sort of broken it out into five component pieces. So positioning defines like, you know, who exactly is the competition for you? So if you didn't exist, what would a customer do? Like, you know, and sometimes that's products that don't look anything like you, like I would use an Excel spreadsheet or I'd just do it manually or I'd hire an intern to do it. They define it. So that's the first thing. Second thing, it defines what have I got that the other guys don't have? First, from a capabilities perspective, but then also we get to the third component, which is what's the value we can deliver to customers that no one else can. And then we got to define, well, who exactly are these customers? A really good fit for our stuff. And then lastly, what's the market category we intend to win? So it is distinctly different from people will say, well, isn't positioning and messaging just the same thing? And it's like, well, no, it's not. Like positioning is kind of the definition of the stuff that you provide as an input into messaging. Like if you came to me and said, hey, write messaging for my, you know, homepage or something. And I'd say, great, there's a whole bunch of stuff we need to find first. So I have all these questions. Like, so, you know, who do you compete against? And how do you win against those folks? What is the market you want to be positioned in? And all these things. So positioning is that it's kind of the foundation underneath a lot of the stuff we do in marketing and sales. It's interesting because I've been talking to a lot of people around strategy these days, like product strategy, company strategy, business strategy, and all the different frameworks and models and stuff for that. And it feels like there's a lot of crossover there between the things that you're talking about, like the kind of fundamental underpinnings of the strategic context that you're in. And it almost feels like, to your point, about sort of messaging and positioning, sort of positioning is the strategic version and messaging is potentially the tactical version that you might change more. But positioning underneath stays the same. I will tell you something, though. Like, not everything is strategy. Strategy is another word that I think everybody, you know, they define it however they want. Oh, yeah. But sometimes I've seen companies that'll say, well, we'll do our positioning and that's going to tell product what they should go build. And I don't believe that. Like, I would disagree with that. So particularly when we're talking about tech companies, like normally what we have is we got the product we have right now, right? And then we have the product that we're building towards, the five-year-out, the 10-year-out product. And that's probably the version that we sold to the investors, right? We said, hey, you should invest in us because in 10 years, we're going to be this thing. It's all singing, all dancing. It's amazing. And then you got the thing that you are right now, which ain't that. And then we have a strategy that gets us from A to B, right? So we're going to, you know, once we conquer this market, then we're going to go into the next market. And then we're going to make an acquisition. And then we're going to build this. And then we'll have this kind of data, which will enable us to do this. And so we're going to go from here to step two, to step three, step four. And then we get to, you know, all singing, all dancing thing. So we could have positioning in the market right now that looks nothing like the positioning we've positioned to investors, for example. And that's okay. Those two things are different. And we could have a product strategy that says, you know, in two years, we're going to be in a completely different market selling a completely different thing with completely different positioning. And that's also okay. So I think the strategy should drive positioning. And the, sorry, the strategy should drive your product and what you're building in the product. Positioning is something you do at every step of the way that answers the question, well, why pick us now? Okay, and that's different. Okay, now we're here. Okay, why pick us now? And it's a thing that evolves over time. So having the positioning drive product strategy, I think is a bit of tail wagging the dog. Like the positioning is very oriented in, you know, we got the product we got right now against the competitors we have right now in the market landscape and the way customers behave right now, why pick us over everybody else? And that might look completely different when our product comes in the next release or the release after that, or we've done an acquisition and then the answer to all those questions are different. So, you know, if we were just building product to win the thing right now, I'd say, well, you don't have much of a product strategy. Well, that's something that sadly happens in a lot of companies, but also a lot of companies, you know, to the point that you're raising around, like, well, people need to potentially go through a positioning exercise in the first place, kind of suggest that maybe either their positioning is out of date or maybe they never even properly did it. And they've kind of just blundered into something, you know, through a series of kind of deals and happenstance that's happened along the way. But things also change, right? Things change. Like sometimes you've got great positioning and it stops working for things that are entirely out of your control. Like, you know, you're operating a market, everything's going good. And then all of a sudden your big competitor acquires somebody and whoops, all the things you had that were differentiating yesterday are no longer differentiating today. And like, you got to react to that. Or, you know, sometimes we have big thing that happens out of nowhere, like COVID. And, you know, you're selling into a market and all of a sudden those companies just aren't buying anything. And so you're going to have to figure out a way to sell into some other market. Or maybe you've got a thing and it's really differentiating and that's all great, but then there's some little upstart raises a hundred million dollars and does an acquisition or something, but catches up to you and closes the gap. Well, now what do you do? So you're not necessarily in a bad situation positioning-wise because you screwed up. Like the world changes, your product changes, your competitors don't stand still, your customers are changing all the time. And so often you've got positioning that works really well one day, but then, you know, fast forward a year or so and it ain't working that good. Something about AI probably in there as well, but we'll talk about AI in a bit. I mean, AI is another one, right? Like, so we're in a situation right now that, you know, three, four years ago, if you didn't have an AI strategy, I think that was okay. Customers aren't asking you about it and whatever. But now, I mean, I don't know how you do any sales conversations, you know, it depends on the market. But if you're selling some big enterprise software to a buyer, like you're going to have to be able to articulate the AI strategy, why us and not the other guys? And, you know, should you buy our AI or somebody else's AI? And how is this thing all going to work? Like, you're going to have to answer those questions. And again, that wasn't such a big deal three, four years ago. But it is fair to say that a lot of companies out there these days, whether this is something that they've done through any kind of structured positioning exercise or any kind of marketing at all, but they've kind of just taken an old product that existed for a while and they just pop AI on the front of it or co-pilot at the end of it. And they think that that's now, that's enough. And, you know, I don't know if you've ever used like Office 365 and seen what's, the horrors that have happened to that, like they've murdered the hell out of that one. And it just doesn't even really feel like it's a coherent product anymore. Do you feel there's a risk though, from, you know, based on what you know, obviously you have to have an answer. But like, if you don't have a proper answer, you do run the risk then of just almost, just popping AI at the beginning of the words that you already had. And somehow that's your new position. And it kind of feels like it really isn't. Like, I think the good thing about where we're at right now is, you know, we've been a couple of years now with this AI stuff being the thing that everybody wants to talk about. And I think in the very early days of that, companies were kind of in a panic in some situations. And they and you're right, they were just slapping AI on it or doing just some minor AI thing and say, yeah, yeah, the AI, we got that to, you know, in the same way, in the early days of the cloud, people just took their on prem stuff and popped it in the cloud and said, hey, yep, we got the cloud, man, we're here. That was very different from architecting something natively for the cloud. Now, here we are. We're a couple of years into it. And I think companies are more mature. The buyers are more mature. People know more about this stuff. And I don't think this kind of just, you know, slapping it on for the sake of slapping it on. But there isn't really any any material value related to AI. I don't think customers want that. And I don't think that works. And I don't see so many companies trying to do that right now, as I did, you know, two years ago, it was kind of bananas. So I think we're out of that woods. But we still have, you know, depending on the kind of customers you're selling to. There's a certain amount of, well, how is this different? Like you guys got an AI story, they got an AI story, the other guys I'm talking to have an AI story, like what's the difference between these three stories? Like, why pick your thing versus someone else? There's that. And then I think customers right now are really kind of demanding, like, how is this real? Like, show me how this is real. Like, because everybody's talking about what AI can do and it will do. And oh, my goodness, like, it's, you know, all the things are going to be amazing. But I'm going to give you today's dollar for today's stuff. So show me what I can do with this thing right now. And how is this going to make money or save money for me right now? And I want real proof of that. It's not going to be enough to just kind of hand wave about it and say, trust me, it'll all be great in five years, it'll be amazing. Well, that's what a lot of people are trying to do, certainly on the AI provider side at the moment. But, you know, fingers crossed they'll get there in the end. But you talk, obviously, you've talked about the, or you talk in the book, you talked in the previous version of the book around the kind of the five different concepts or components that kind of underpin positioning. So those themselves appear to have been repositioned. I think you've renamed some of them. Some of them stayed the same. Some of them have got kind of different names. So, for example. Oh, yeah. Oh, like, can I tell you about that? Yeah, please. So I'm curious. I forget in the old book. You got an old book around. You can look it up. But there. Oh, I know it. So the second component to the first one is competitive alternatives. I don't think that changed. That's the second one. I called it unique capabilities. Yeah, or unique attributes, I think, was in the first. Unique attributes. I think that was it, because I didn't want to use capabilities. It's not always a capability. It could be the way you do pricing or something else, which people don't think is a capability. So I called it an attribute and I called it unique attribute. Oh, man, this caused me a lot of pain. And it's because people were calling me up and going, well, I I I thought we were unique. Because none of our competitors have this thing. But you know what? I Googled and there's three guys in a basement that haven't sold anything, but they have it. So it's not unique. So we can't talk about it. And I'm like, oh, boy. So. So I wrestled with I guess so I had this word unique. People got really hung up on that. And and, you know. And it wasn't what I meant to what I meant, so I changed it to. Distinct capabilities, is that what I called it? In the end, I know I changed it because that word unique was driving everybody crazy. So what I actually meant there is that let's say you're in a market and you compete with some folks that sell big enterprise stuff and some folks that are sort of mid market folks and you have a capability that the little guys don't have, but the big guys do. And then you have another capability where it's the opposite. The little guys have it, but the big guys don't. Both those things are distinct capabilities depending on who you're getting compared to. But are either of those things unique? No, they're not. And so this is where everybody got really hung up. And I thought I described it, what I meant in the words. But, oh, you know, you stick a label on something and people are going to take that literally. So I changed the name of that one because I I. People really got hung up on this idea, they're like, but, you know, what we have is it's really and I did have one guy come to me and he said, it's really distinct, but I wouldn't call it unique. And I was like, oh, OK, you're right, I'm giving this the wrong name. So I changed that one. Yeah. You also changed the value and proof to differentiated value and target market characteristics to best fit accounts. So it kind of feels like they're talking about the same thing, but they're almost just refinements of the of the name and the concepts are the same, right? Yeah. Same thing. I'm just trying to be clear about it. Trying to be clear about it, like what like Target accounts was more like I deal mainly with B2B, right? Yep. And. All the companies I work with are B2B, and so, but, you know, I in the original book, I think I called it customers that care or something like that, which is I'm basically what I'm trying to get at is like best fit account. But when I say customer, people would think I'm talking about a person rather than an account. And I'm not so so customer is one of these generic words that we use, you know, and sometimes we're talking about accounts and sometimes we're talking about an actual person like a persona buyer. And so that was confusing to people. And I thought, well, it'd be better to just call it accounts because then it would be clear that we're talking about characteristics of an account as opposed to characteristics of the person who is the champion inside the account, which we are not talking about at that step. So those things are the same. I'm just trying to get clear about the labels, because again, like you wouldn't see it so much if you did 50, 60 workshops, but after you've done like 300 of them and you've had enough people say, so we're talking about the persona and I'm like, oh God, no. But I wouldn't say anything's really changed in those steps other than, you know, again, I'm trying to be clear about stuff. I think one thing has changed, though, unless I missed it when I was reading through the second edition, which is you used to have a bonus sixth component, which was relevant trends. And I couldn't seem to see that anymore. So I wondered if trends are not relevant anymore or if people are maybe misusing them or if you're worried about trends in some other way. Like what's the story with trends? So originally I had this idea and it was mainly because people didn't understand positioning. So because people, and that's really changed in my opinion, I think that the base level knowledge of what positioning is, I think has improved from six years ago. In particular, if I talk about a market category, I think the concept of a market category is much better understood now than it was six, seven years ago. But if I rolled it back six, seven years ago, people were very confused about the difference between a market category and what I referred to in the book as a trend. But it could be like, you know, cloud computing, right? Cloud computing is not a market category. It's a trend. It's a technology. It's a thing, you know, and it applies to multiple market categories. And so I had this whole chapter explaining what the difference of that is. And in the early days of the work I was doing with companies, it was a good distinction to make because people were confused about that. But then they stopped being confused about it. And I never got any questions about it again. And not only that, in some cases it is confusing and it can be both a trend and a market category, AI, for example. So if you said, if you started talking about AI, I mean, you know, you could say, well, there are the model providers and then there are, you know, like when I say AI, it means a thousand different things. Some of those are market categories and some are not. Very confusing. And so I thought, you know what? I actually get zero questions about this in workshops anymore. Nobody ever comes to me and says, you know, is our category this? And I thought, hmm, and I was looking for stuff to cut because I don't want this book to be super long. And I thought, you know what? I don't think I actually need this trends bit because I don't get any questions about it. People seem to get it now. It's not solving a problem anymore. It's just complication for complication's sake. So I took it out. Fair enough. You know, you've got to be brutal and, you know, prioritize what stays in and out. But again, I'm trying to make the thing clearer, right? Like I'm not trying to be, I'm not trying to put a bunch of stuff in, like, I mean, let's face it, positioning is a complicated concept and I could probably write seven books worth of material on positioning if I wanted to say every single thing that you might encounter. And that is not the job of this book, right? The job of this book is to arm you with a process that you don't even have to follow the process exactly. It's just giving you a bunch of stuff that you could use to do this thing on your own. And so it is not the complete, you know, Encyclopedia Britannica of positioning. It's not covering every edge case. It's not covering every single concept that you might encounter. What I'm trying to do is give you the big stuff. And so this trends thing just didn't feel like it belonged there anymore. It was just like, nope, I'm going to nuke that. Well, fair enough. And may it rest in peace. But obviously you talked about the fact that you've kind of simplified stuff. And part of that simplification was condensing the 10-step plan down to a five-step plan. Although I understand, well, yeah, because you've kind of moved some steps before. You've, exactly. You've repositioned. There's a lot of positioning jokes that we haven't made on this podcast that we probably could have done, like the positioning of the text on the page, on the hardback and stuff, but so you've got this kind of now pre-section, then you've got the five-step plan, and then you've got a post-section, but many of, or most or some of, well, I'd say the majority of the concepts are at least mentioned in passing, I know you've expanded on some of them since in the new book as well. But obviously that first part, the kind of the pre-stage where you're kind of trying to sort of line everything up and get people ready and able to do this stuff, one of the things I liked in there, and I'm not sure if it was in the first one or if it was just written in a different way, was it kind of around this positioning readiness check and this kind of like, this is what you need to do or have to get started. So I guess a really important question that people might ask is, well, what do they need? What are the kind of the preconditions for them to get going with the five steps? Yeah. Yeah. So I think there's a bunch of things. And again, like a lot of this stuff I touched on in the, in the old book, but it was just kind of sprinkled around and it wasn't kind of set up with like, look, before you even get going, there's a set of, there's a set of decisions you got to make. Right. So one of them is, is now the right time to even do this? Like, are we ready to do positioning or are we not? Because if we're pre-launch and we don't have any customers yet, like my process assumes that you've got customers, you can use the process to develop what I would call a positioning thesis, but you should be aware that that's what you're doing instead of saying, well, we're doing positioning and we're going to dial it right in and that's it. And, you know, so, so that's one of the things. But there's a handful of other things like people, like a lot of the companies that call me, they'll call me and they're a multi-product company. So I've got a company and I've got three products and they'd say, we'd like to do some positioning work. And I say, okay. And they describe it, you know, we've got the company and we've got these three products and I'll say, okay, so exactly what are we going to position? Right. Are we doing the company? Are we doing an individual product? And some of that depends on your go-to-market strategy, for example. So, uh, like if I sold one product to everybody and then the other two products were just add-on products or cross-sell upsell products, then maybe I would start with the lead product and position that instead of doing company positioning, which would be a little bit more confusing. And so there's some, you know, as opposed to if I have three products, but the customer could buy any one of the three products, well, maybe I need company positioning that allows me to talk about all three and then the customer can say, okay, I want one and two, but I don't necessarily need three, that kind of thing. So figuring out what exactly you got to position, I think, is another thing that's, you know, a decision to make before you get in there and there's some other stuff, but I think these are the big ones, right? Are we ready to do this right now? What exactly are we going to position? Like, do we, you know, like, are we ready to even start this? Which I think is a good conversation for anybody to have before they get into it. Because if you don't settle on that stuff, then what happens is you get halfway through and then somebody says, well, wait a second, why aren't we just positioning this thing or that thing, or don't we really need the company positioning first before we do this other thing? And I've seen positioning efforts get kind of derailed halfway through because people weren't clear on the decisions before they came in. And so it's better to just handle that stuff first. So in that sort of situation, are you talking about maybe a company that probably shouldn't have been doing any repositioning at that point because they had other priorities, or is it more that they started to position the wrong thing or the wrong level? Well, sometimes I think what they have is a kind of a go-to-market question, right, that hadn't ever really been surfaced. So I did have a company call me and they said, we want you to position the whole company. And I said, okay. And I said, well, you know, what are the products? And then we went through all the products, but then it was clear there was a lead product. Like, and I was like, well, hang on. Like, do you always sell this one first? And they're like, yeah, we always sell that one first. Oh, and then you would sell the other thing is cross selling that upsell. And they're like, yeah. And I'm like, why don't we just do the lead product? And they had to go away and think about that a little bit, right? Like, is that actually the way they want to go to market or is that just how the sales team is selling it? Yep. And so they had to make that decision. Do we want to do that or do we actually wish that people were buying more things from us in the first purchase? And then in their case, they came back and said, no, the most efficient way to sell this thing is to land and expand. So then we, we backed up and positioned the land product so that we could do that. But I've had other ones where the people come in, they're like, look, we've been doing this land and expand thing, but we now have products that, you know, we would actually like them to be attached when the product gets bought, or they could even start in a different place than this typical land thing, in which case, well, okay, now we're going to back up and we're going to position the whole thing as a suite of products, which is different, um, underneath an umbrella. So there's some of these things that are like kind of go to market strategy things that have evolved over time. And yeah, nobody's really rationalized it necessarily. You know, sometimes it's an acquisition triggers this. And so it's not like the people are being stupid about it, but it's like everything's changed, right? And, and it's probably a good time to lean back and think about it. But the time to think about it is before you go into the positioning exercise, not when you're at step four and then someone puts up their hand and says, well, wait a second, why are we doing it this way? It's way better to make the decision beforehand and then we'll go through and everybody's on the same page. There was an interesting part of your, of that section where you, I think you were talking about, for example, if you've got, if you're a company that maybe sells into different verticals, like I think you called out banking and insurance, for example, as, as examples there, uh, and this kind of idea that maybe they need to come kind of come up with completely different positioning for each of the verticals that they're selling into, even though they're selling, maybe even the same product into the same configurations of the same product into, into both of those verticals. I think you called out in the book that you probably still just need one position there, right? Rather than just like multiple positions, maybe that conflict with each other. So why would you say it's a mistake then to kind of come up with sub positions per segment, for example? Well, often, often the companies come to me and there just be an assumption that the assumption is, look, we couldn't possibly have the same positioning for banking as we do for retail, for example, you know, we just couldn't, they're totally different industries, they're totally different thing, but, you know, I, I come from this with the, with the idea, like, look, if they're buying the exact same product, the exact same product, it, the, it, it wouldn't surprise me if the positioning weren't the same. And in fact, in my experience, um, the positioning is the same. We might use, we would definitely use different customer examples to talk about it. We might use different terminology when we talk about the value proposition. Um, but the actual value that we could deliver is, is likely the same. So I give you an example. So I work for this company and I came in as the VP marketing. We did this and I was new and a lot of the previous VP marketing's have been fired. So I was a little bit worried about getting fired because I was like number eight or something. Anyways, I came in, we did this big analysis of the customers. Two big, um, two big pockets. We had, we had retail and we had utilities and these are really different. So we got retails, utilities. And so if you looked at what the sales people were doing, they had completely different pitch decks, completely different positioning on the website, on the, the website basically was a fork in the road. You came and it was like, tell me first, are you utilities or whatever that we would send you down your path? Um, but when you went and talked to customers, the thing that we had was like infrastructure, right? And it was, it was data infrastructure. And the use case was the same for different purposes. So in, in retail, we had this thing that, that was essentially this hot backup swap over thing so that if something failed, it would automatically switch over to something else, even if you had a really heterogeneous environment, really complex backend stuff. And so basically the problem we were solving is we don't ever want the cash registers to stop working, bad for business and then exact same thing in utilities, we don't want the lights to go out, so same, so you would think it was different, but in the end, our core value proposition about, you know, making sure stuff is always running and you're never down was the same, you know, if, and so eventually what we had was one homepage that talked about that in an, at a high level, making sure, you know, business continuity and blah, blah, blah. And then, yeah, sure. We had specific pages for each of those, but if you, if you had a conversation with our sales reps, the sales, the, the pitch deck for those two segments was the same, like we were like talking about the same value props, we used a different customer example, there were a couple of places we had slightly different wording, but otherwise it was exactly the same. So most of the companies I go into, you know, you would think, okay, like maybe the competitors are different, so you would say, well, we have different competitors, therefore there'll be different, you know, distinct capabilities, therefore different value, but what usually happens is we may have different competitors, distinct capabilities are pretty much the same, and then we translate it to value and it's the same. We might have two points of value and it's A and B in one segment, but in the other segment, you would actually rank it the opposite where it's B and A, but it's kind of the same. And so I've seen very few examples, you know, one of them was when I was at IBM and we had this product, we were selling it globally, and we had a competitor that only existed in China, and when we sold into China, we had slightly different positioning there, but I've only seen that happen a handful of times. The vast majority of the companies I've worked with, like, we go into it saying, okay, well, let's just see. Let's just see whether we get to different value, because the reality is, if we did get to different value, let's say that other company, we did it, and the value for the retail people was completely different than the value for utilities, then I got way bigger problems than positioning, right? The problem is that what these people want from my product is fundamentally different, so how do I build a product roadmap for that? Like, at some point, we're forking the product, or we're building modules that add on, or we're doing something because, you know, what the customers want is totally different, and so I've seen lots of that, where we've gotten to a fork in the road, and it's like, oh, dear, the use cases are totally different. We're gonna have to decide, are we chasing both these segments, or are we gonna pick one or the other? Are we gonna fork the product? Are we gonna have a core product with modules, and we sell these modules to these guys, and there's other modules to these guys? So it's not surprising to me that most of the time, when a company comes to me, and they're successful, and they're growing, and they're out there doing stuff across multiple segments, that our positioning would be the same. If it wasn't, then they'd be five products and not one. Well, you know, I've seen some things. I'm sure you've seen some things where, you know, they kind of just try and just do their best, and don't really pick any of those options, but, you know, let's not name and shame. But you also taught in the book about identifying your champion persona. Starts to make me think a little bit of our mutual buddies, Matt and Brent, and all of their work with the Challenger sale, and kind of, you know, building the advocacy within organizations, and kind of almost having people that can almost help you sell it within the organization. And you're talking very specifically in the book about how the champion persona, that's the person that you're positioning for, right? You're not positioning for the five, six, 10 other people that might be involved in the sales process as well. You're laser focused on that champion persona. On the other hand, you sit there and say, well, those other five, 10, whatever people that are gonna be involved in a deal, and as you put in the book, could kill the deal at any point if they really had a CIO, or the head of this, or the head of that. They all kind of have their own needs and desires, and they've only got their own sort of mental models and stuff too, so how come we don't need to create positions for them? Is it something that sort of goes above whatever you do for them, or like, do we just ignore them? Like, why don't they get a position too? Yeah, we don't get to just ignore them, unfortunately, much as we would like to, but here's the way this works, at least, you know, most of the time, and I'm sure there's exceptions to this, but most of the time what we've got is, if I'm selling an enterprise B2B deal, and it's a big deal, like, so let's say I'm selling a deal that's 100K. How does a 100K deal get done inside an organization? Usually what happens is, there's a big boss, who's what we would call the financial buyer, like, they are gonna write the check, it comes out of their budget, whatever, but that person is senior, and busy, and can't be bothered, and says, and they pick someone to go figure it out, so, you know, the head of sales says, the CRM sucks, go get us a new CRM, and they go down the chain, and maybe they've got, you know, sales ops person, or something, and they say, you, go figure it out, go come back here and tell us which CRM we should buy, and then we'll go figure it out. So now I'm the sales ops person, and my job is to make a short list, but my other job is to make sure that all the, whatever I pick, the constituents that care, are all okay with it. And so in that case, if we say it's a CRM, well, I don't wanna pick a CRM that the sales people hate, and won't use, because that would suck, right? And I can't pick a CRM that doesn't meet our compliance stuff, and our security stuff, and I probably gonna have, IT is gonna babysit this thing, so I gotta make sure IT is on board. So if you think about it, my positioning really needs to work for the champion, because otherwise I don't even make it onto the short list, right? I don't even, I don't get anywhere near these other people, but I also have to arm that person to handle the potential objections of these other constituents. So if we think about the concept of value, for example, like in that scenario, there's no value for IT, like this thing isn't for IT, IT is getting foist upon IT, and IT is like, oh great, you come here with this thing, and so all they have is their list of potential complaints. Can I manage this thing? How hard is it to integrate in the thing we got? Is it gonna play nice with my thing? Oh gee, we're a Microsoft shop, is this a Microsoft thing? Because otherwise I don't wanna touch it. So there's no value for these guys, but there's a whole bunch of objections. Often, end users might be a little bit different, but often the end users are just, is this a pain? Like, you know, am I gonna hate this? Is it too hard for me to learn? Is it all this other stuff? Like there might be, the end user's not looking at it like the champion's looking at it, like is this gonna help us make money or save money? And all the rest of the constituents are sort of like, does this meet the basic requirements? Cause you know, we're gonna have to deal with this thing. Now, when you go up the chain, up the chain, the economic buyer might have a slightly different version of value than the champion does, but I don't have to worry about that until he has to go up to the chain. And then at that point, I'm way into the detail, right? So I have to arm the champion to go have that conversation. But that's very different than the messaging positioning I'm dealing with to get on the shortlist in the first place, to get a deal cooking. That's really what we wanna nail because if we don't get on the shortlist and we don't make it past call one, then we don't even get to worry about any of these other people. That's my thing. Like when I first started in this stuff, people were weird about personas. Like I, so I remember doing a persona exercise in the second company I ever worked for when I was junior. And they said, look, we have a deal team and the deal team includes all these people and we need to do persona work on each of them. So we would be sitting there trying to figure out what is the value of our CRM to the CISO? And guess what? There isn't any. Like there isn't. All we need to do is prove to the CISO that it ticks the boxes, right? Are you shocked too? Yes, we are. Like, you know, will we pass the pen test? Yes, we've got one. Here it is. There's no value. It's just objections. And so it took me a long time to get my head around that because I don't think anybody really understood it at the time. And people were so nuts about personas that they thought we had to do these big personas. And what I found was we had one persona that mattered was the champion and the rest of them stayed in the binder and we never looked at it again. So then to replay that, it's all about good objection handling, which obviously is then something again, going back to Brent and Matt and the challenge of customer, I think specifically where you're going in there and you're kind of arming the people that, you know, I think when I had Brent on a podcast, you're kind of arming people to kind of, as you put it, sort of diffuse the objections internally so that you don't have to do it for them. Which is a bit of a ninja move there. Yeah, yeah. But it's, and it's usually happens later in the deal. Now, sometimes what you have, like, for example, sometimes you'll have a particular kind of software where it's the business person who is the champion, but that business person knows that they're not gonna, this thing is not gonna fly if it doesn't meet IT's requirement. So they may have some of that baked into, that they wanna just tick off in the first call. Like, is it SOC 2? Is it this? Is it that? Will it, you know, is it a Microsoft thing? Cause we're a Microsoft shop. Like there might be some stuff like that, but again, it's objection handling. So some of that objection handling, you might have to do very early in the deal cycle, but it's still objection handling, it's not value. Fair enough. Well, one of the things that you say, touching and keeping with the sales topic is one of the things you should do after you've gone through the whole positioning process, which is obviously mapped out the five steps in your book, is you then obviously need to go and test that the positioning works. And you kind of sort of start this example of what a lot of people do at that point, which is, you know, just kind of update the website, put some new messaging up or whatnot, which obviously is an important part of it, but at the same time, that's kind of how they do their next step of validation. But you have a different approach in mind as to kind of the first best step that you can take, which is actually kind of getting this out into the sales deck or into sales conversations early and sort of see how it lands. So why is that a better idea than doing the kind of, you know, the messaging and updating the website and starting to see how it looks? Yeah, this comes from, and again, you know, yeah, I'll take all of this from my perspective. So everybody I'm dealing with is B2B software and has a sales team. So what I found is that if I did messaging or if I did messaging for my positioning and just put it up on a website and then just tried to go from there, nothing would change over in sales. So it never survived the jump over to sales. And this was very annoying to me. So, you know, we'd have this mess, this positioning, we think it's beautiful, we're running these campaigns and all this stuff. People go to the website and then they're converting and then they're whatever. And then they go over to sales and then we get this first call and the sales is saying like something totally different. And you're like, man, that sucks. And so I thought, well, okay, we're gonna have to make this thing work for sales. Now, if you think about positioning, if we really wanted to test positioning, it would make a lot of sense for us to test it live with a customer as opposed to just doing like, for example, AB landing page test on it. And let's say, let's do the old positioning, new positioning, we'll do AB landing page test and then we'll see which one works better. And, you know, it might be possible to do that, but you're testing a lot more than just the positioning. You're testing by translation of the positioning into messaging, we're testing the design of the landing pages and all that stuff. We're testing, like we don't know, like can we control for who the people are that are actually seeing the two different tests and are they even customers that we care about or are they just like, you know, folks getting there just doing random searches and things like that. So there's so much I can't control for if I'm doing a test like that. Whereas if I take the positioning, turn it into a sales pitch, then now I'm having a conversation with the customer and not only do I get to see whether or not it lands, but I also get to understand why. So if the customer comes in and the customer's like, hey, yeah, that sounds great, you guys are just like Salesforce. And you're like, no, we're nothing like Salesforce. So we know, oh my gosh, they're making the wrong comparison. They don't get who to compare us to. You know, there's something not working in our market category. Or if the people are like, you know, making a face like, oh, that's confusing. Or if they're getting really excited and asking a lot of questions, we know that's working. And so it kind of kills two birds with one stone to take the positioning, turn it into a good solid sales pitch, train one or two reps on it, and then let's get it in front of qualified prospects. Now I've controlled for, am I pitching to the right person? Yes, I am. Can I tell whether it's working or not? Yes, I can. Can I see exactly the parts of the pitch that are working and the parts that aren't? You'll get a flavor for that. And so I think it's, you just get a lot more signal if you test the thing with the sales team. At the same time, what you're doing is I'm getting a couple of sales reps really comfortable with this pitch. And when I'm ready to say, okay, the pitch is done and we've tuned it, I've got a couple of sales reps that are really good at it. And I can then use those reps to build the script for it, do a video of those folks doing that stuff. And I can have those reps train the rest of the sales team. And now I got sales training sales instead of marketing training sales, which has never worked in the history of anything. And so that just has worked way better for me than treating it like a little marketing thing and marketing is gonna go test it over in the marketing department and sales doesn't have to concern themselves with it. And so if I can get the thing working in sales, then I know that it works. Now all I gotta do is have messaging on the front end that makes that story consistent and I got control over that. So if I can make it work for sales, then I can back into making it work for marketing, that's way easier. Isn't there a potential risk, depending obviously on the company and the type of people they sell to that you could accidentally, like if you did a really bad job at the positioning stage, whatever, you can kind of almost start burning prospects at that point because they'll be like, oh, hey, throw their hands up and go off to a competitor because actually whatever came out of the back of it was so off target that they start to doubt you or do you think that there are ways to mitigate that as well? Yeah, that's the risk. I mean, you're probably burning prospects right now because you're positioning such right now. Right? Yeah. Like what's the alternative? I'm burning my whole upstream pipeline and I don't know it's burnt for six months because it takes that long for it to get all the way through to close when it was lost. Might as well do it right at the source. Fair enough, if you're going to burn it, burn it quickly, I guess. I mean, do it quickly, right? And like, here's the thing, when we're doing that test, we're pitching and then we're caucusing and then we're adjusting. So if the first pitch is a disaster, like the customer's like, what? That's stupid, I hate it. Slam the door and then we're like, we ain't pitching the same pitch twice. We're going back and we're adjusting it. I've never had that happen, but I have had ones where we had, a word, like I had ones where we were using a word that the customer just had an allergic reaction to that we did not anticipate them having that reaction, that word. So we had one where we did the thing, whatever, we did the test pitch and we said the word and the customer was like, oh, don't say that. And we're like, why not, right? Then you get to ask the question, why not? Oh, well in our industry, that word has very specific meaning and it means this. And we didn't know because we'd never used that word before. And we're like, okay, that word is dead to us now, man. We're gonna go back, fix the deck, come back. I've had other ones where, we've got a graphic that kind of explains, here's what the whole company does and here's how it's whatever. And I've had ones where first time we did the pitch, the customer's looking at that graphic going, what the heck is that? Why are you saying that? You guys don't do that. You do this and we're like, no, no, no, it doesn't mean that. And then it's like, okay, we're chucking the graphic, right? So it's not like we're gonna have 50, it's not like we're gonna do 10 pitches where we're like, everyone's like, wait, I hate you. There's something that people have a real reaction to, it's out of there instantly. And then we're back to whatever. We're trying not to pivot for every single pitch because different prospects are gonna be different. But if there's something that's obviously off and we could lean back and objectively look at it and say, well, that guy thinks that, probably everybody else is gonna think that too, we should fix that, then we fix it. So we get a chance to iterate on it before we let it go live, which is much more contained than me put on a homepage where everyone's gonna see it and go, oh my God, that word. What the hell is that, I've got to say. What the hell, what is wrong with those people? Yeah. Now, I hate to bring it up as we come to a close, but AI is obviously on everyone's lips at the moment. So I guess we have to go there and I guess- No, we can't talk about anything else, it's a rule now. No, it's okay, we're gonna compress this into a few short minutes just to kind of get some hot takes. But like, obviously people are saying that AI is killing just about every job. Some people are saying that AI is killing just about every job, product managers, product marketing, developers, everyone's under threat from- Have you seen that? Like, have you met anybody? I see it all over the place, yeah. No, no, but have you met anybody that got fired specifically because they got replaced by an AI? Not that I could mention, no, not that I could kind of come up with off the top of my head. I know people that have gotten fired, but not replaced by the machine. Like, they've been- Most of the times I see people getting fired- Their job has gone to a different person who's not as expensive. Or because they're downsizing or because like we all know companies overhyed in a pandemic or whatever. I yet, as of yet, have not seen people like specifically, or AI specifically being the explicit cause for that. But of course, as we discussed before we started recording, it's quite clear that a lot of people are using it as excuse, like Jack Dorsey, for example, kind of classically bad at running companies once they get past the startup stage, overhiring, having to fire people. But saying it's AI, so that means that- It could be that, or it could be, I mean, there's a lot of things I think happening. It's not only that people got overhired, it's that people got hired for really high salaries. And I think salaries are coming down, and so there's a bit of that going on. And then we're certainly being, in tech companies specifically, we're certainly being more productive with AI. Like there's certainly things that people are doing that they can move faster and do more things. But I also think in tech companies, there's always more things to do. That's exactly it, open up more avenues and stuff. We're never done with the things. And so if we can move faster, then why wouldn't we do that? Like, why wouldn't we just move faster and do more things? Instead of say, oh, wow, we have these people, now we can do the same number of things with half the number of people. I think the thinking would be more like, we can do double the things with the same people. But, so I think there's that happening. But I don't know, I think we also have weird things going on on the buyer side right now that companies are- They're all themselves apparently. Yeah, and they're worried about making big commitments to software that might be out of date in a couple of years. And so I think the buyers of software are being a lot more discerning now. I think they're slowing their role on purchases. I think they're doing shorter commitments because they don't wanna commit to things because there's so much uncertainty about what AI can and can't do two years out. Like not so much right now, but two years out, is this gonna look like a bad purchase? And that's gotta impact everybody. But, yeah. But one thing that it could impact very specifically in this context is people could sit there and say, oh, hey, I can just crank some stuff into an LLM and get my positioning out the back and I don't have to talk to anyone or do any of this stuff. Like, I don't know if you've seen anyone try to do that, but I wondered if you had any thoughts. Everybody, I get lots of these emails and they're like, oh, I just asked, you know, Chatty G what my positioning should be. Here's the thing though, and I think the thing you gotta think about, like, I do think there might be some value in having a conversation with Clode or ChatGBT about aspects of your positioning to maybe expand your thinking on it. But there's some things that, you know, because those models are trained on publicly available data, a lot of the positioning, a lot of the inputs into your positioning are things that no one would know except people inside your company. So even something as simple as who do you compete with? Like, I think ChatGBT is gonna give you a pretty bad answer on that. I think Clode's gonna give you a really bad answer on that. And I think nobody really knows that. Like, I mean, I think those tools, like a search engine, tools like a search engine could tell you who you could compete with, who you should compete with, it doesn't tell you who ends up on a shortlist and deals. And that is often really surprising. Like often who we see on a shortlist is really surprising. We're like, why the hell would customers put these stuff up against us? But here we are. Um, often it doesn't understand very well what the status quo is, like the specifics around the status quo. Is it just a spreadsheet? Is it a spreadsheet, manual processes? Are they doing part of it with their old accounting program? Because they consider that to be accounting, like the nuances of that stuff and that competitive landscape thing is really important. It is our stake in the ground where we start and we say, what do we got a position against? And, you know, only your internal team knows what your loss rate looks like versus any one of these potential competitors, only your internal team knows who sends up on a shortlist, only your internal team knows the proportion of companies you sell to that have this as a status quo versus this as a status quo. So I think we have to be very careful there. The other one is, um, uh, people will, you know, there's this idea of a synthetic customer and that I could, you know, I could create a synthetic customer and then kind of use that, um, to simulate something. And I think in certain cases that could be interesting to do, but I think it's very hard for, to build a synthetic customer that knows how a company buys. Because that is usually something that's a secret. Like, so, you know, and every company has a different rule. So for example, you know, lots of companies, if the, like, if you're selling to a big company and the purchase is less than 200K, it doesn't have to go to purchasing, but if it's over 200K, it does have to go to purchasing and if it goes to purchasing, here's the process, right. Or, you know, does this company care, you know, is there a security review before you do a purchase? Yes or no. Some companies do it and some companies don't. Like, I don't know, like in some cases that your synthetic customer might be able to flag that, in other cases, no. Um, I don't know if you can make generalizations about the risk tolerance or, you know, how many companies they put on a short list and then how they do that, or does the company want to do a proof of concept or not want to do a proof of concept and all these kinds of things are very specific to how a customer buys, not the customer's attitude or preferences or whatever. And so now we might get really smart about this stuff and there's, there's some things that I think are promising. So for example, Gong has some pretty sophisticated stuff in their stuff. And if you were good at setting up Gong and having Gong record every first call with every prospect and then track that through to who was successful, like who did you successfully close versus not successfully close and then go back and look at the patterns around that stuff. Ooh, like that'd be actually really cool. Um, I, I have not seen anybody doing anything that sophisticated yet. Although I've seen some flavors of it. I have seen some companies doing things like tracking competitors, like who gets mentioned and who doesn't in calls. Unfortunately, they're not taking it all the way through to who closed and who didn't. So, you know, I don't care if they get mentioned and then we never got a deal cooking in the first place because we were a shitty fit or they got mentioned and we immediately disqualified them. So they never made it past the first call and therefore they're not really, you know, and again, if I had three smart salespeople sitting in the room, I could figure this out way faster. So I think there's potential there in all these stuff to have, um, AI be a good augment to this kind of work. But I think folks should be pretty careful about, you know, if, if you're just handing the work over to AI, I think you're going to get a pretty lousy result today. Um, you don't know, but you know, maybe what you do is you take the thing, you prime it with all your information, you put in everything, you know, and then you can do things and talk to it and all that kind of stuff. And could you do that? Yeah. But I mean, it's like, if you look at the way I'm doing positioning now, we're getting a cross-functional team together and we're getting it done in three days. So, you know, it's not like the thing is super inefficient and we're trying to like drive some efficiency. What I see more often is people don't want the, don't want to do the work of getting the cross-functional team together. And that is a mistake because you can, you might come up with positioning. You will not make it stick. You will not. And so if you're, if you're doing the AI thing to avoid talking to people, I think that's wrong. I think that's wrong, but it, you know, are there things you can do with it to augment what you're doing? Yeah. Yeah. I, I do think there's things, but you know, I said the same thing about CRM. Like I, if we had great tracking in CRM, then I would know a lot of this stuff and I wouldn't have to have sales people sitting in these meetings, but we do a terrible job of tracking it. So I don't think that's going to, you know, so again, like until we get really good tools that can track this stuff automatically so that people don't have to track it and, uh, then, then, you know, the fastest, the most efficient, effective way to do it is give me three, four, two or three experienced sales reps and I, and I know how to get it out of them. And that's pretty efficient. I didn't have to train anything. I just had to ask the right questions. So just to clarify then, no April bot on the horizon anytime soon. I mean, oh my God, there's thousands of them. Like, you know, like. No official April bot. Yeah. Well, I mean, there could be, I mean, people send me one of these every week. They say, oh, great news April. You're never going to have to talk to anyone again. You just put this thing on your website and it'll go. And, uh, and, and so far they've been, um, you know, I'm surprised at how bad they are to be honest, like I expected, I expected them to be better by now. Like the early ones were really, really bad. Like I would say, how would you like the early ones? People would send it to me and say, look, I trained this thing on all your stuff. I, you know, I put all 9,000 podcasts in there and blah, blah, blah. And then I just ask you a question. I'd say, how would April Dunford position HubSpot? Like, what is the process she would use? And I would say, April Dunford will do, would use a positioning statement. I'm like, oh my God, dude, I've, I've talked about how positioning statements suck in every single podcast. How'd you miss that? But the training data was like, how does the world do positioning? Well, the world does positioning using a positioning statement. And that's been a long way around, way longer than April Dunford. So it just assumes that April Dunford, like the rest of the world would do it that way. Now it's better now in that, in that it will, for the most part, you say, April Dunford has this thing and it's X number of steps and she would break it into, you know, cause a lot of my stuff is out there. Um, but almost every time it, it, it messes up something really, really basic, that's kind of stupid. Like it'll make up a step and say like, there's a, there's a, it'll say there's seven components to positioning. And I'm like, well, I can't wait to find out what the other two components are. And it'll just be something random, like something random stuck in there. And I'm like, because you should be able to at least learn, right? You should be able to at least go in and say, okay, how does April Dunford do this? Like that should be easy question to answer. Like, my God, I've, I've made all this content, people like that should be easy question to answer. But it does still get some really fundamental things wrong. And I find that disappointing, but then, you know, April bot. Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe some point. I'm surprised it isn't better, isn't better than, than it is right now, to be honest, but eventually I think some of this stuff feels really easy to me. Like, I don't know why you can't do it now, but I don't think you're going to be able to, like, I think there, there might be value in April bot that understands all my stuff and has listened to every podcast and can answer questions. That should be easy. We should be able to do that now, although I haven't seen a good one yet. But, um, but being able to actually say, how should we position this and get a good answer, um, for the amount of information you would have to put into it to get that. It would be more efficient to just get the cross-functional team together and get everybody's buy-in while you're at it, because getting everyone's buy-in is actually the hard part. So what's about the humans? Now, this is the point where I normally ask my guests on the podcast where people can find them. They always say LinkedIn, but the last time you and I had a drink, we were talking about LinkedIn and how much you hate it, exactly, and how you don't go there anymore, so I guess, you know, you can put the boot into LinkedIn if you want, but where can people come and find you? I'm kind of down on LinkedIn at the moment. I think LinkedIn is, um, consultants talking to consultants that I don't really need to talk to other consultants. So I, but, uh, but I do post stuff on LinkedIn now and then, so you can follow me on LinkedIn if you'd like to do that. You might, you know, occasionally if there's, if I got something big going on, like a new book coming out or something, I'll post about that on LinkedIn, but I don't, but I don't sit around thinking, oh, I have to post every day on LinkedIn. I'm not one of those people, but, uh, if you go to aprildunford.com, you can see there's a podcast, there's a newsletter, there's some stuff, occasionally I get motivated to create a bunch of content and if I do, it's there, um, but that's the best place to find me. Fair enough. Well, I'll make sure to link all that into the show notes, including LinkedIn, just in case people want to go and kind of submit themselves to the torture there. Yeah, I feel bad that way. I'm like, I don't want, I like, nobody should actually be spending any time there. I don't think it's a good use of your time. You can go other places. AI posts are being replied to by AI comments. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. They really get, they're really going to need to figure that out. Well, if only someone at LinkedIn was still listening, but, uh, in any case, that's not our job and that's not our responsibility. April, it's always a pleasure to catch up. Uh, shame it's going to be our last time on the podcast based on your earlier comments, but, uh, we can still stay in touch and kind of watch each other bouncing around on Strava like we have been, um, obviously, uh, as for now, thanks for taking the time. Okay, great. Thanks for having me.