April Dunford's Five-Step Positioning Framework
Position a product by starting from what you must beat, not from a market category.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
A sequenced method for figuring out product positioning that deliberately starts with competitive alternatives and ends with market category, rather than the other way around. Each step supplies the raw material for the next, so the final market category is chosen because it makes your unique value obvious to the people who care most.
Origin
Articulated by April Dunford, author of 'Obviously Awesome', in her interview on Lenny's Podcast.
Core principles
- 01Never start with market category; you have no way to judge whether a category is good until you know your differentiated value.
- 02In B2B you compete against two things: the customer's status quo and the short list of alternatives they build.
- 03Don't discount status quo — a large share of deals are lost to 'no decision'.
- 04Features only matter once translated into value, and value only matters to the accounts that care about it.
How to run it
- 1
Identify competitive alternatives
Define what you must beat to win a deal — both the customer's status quo (spreadsheets, pen and paper, interns) and the short list of vendors they would consider. Put a stake in the ground on what you are positioning against.
Pro tip Treat 'competitive alternatives' as broader than direct competitors; it is anything that could solve the customer's problem.
Watch out Most people discount the status quo, but roughly 40% of B2B deals are lost to 'no decision' — losing to the spreadsheet.
- 2
List your differentiated capabilities
Given the alternatives, list the features and company capabilities (pricing, professional services, product features) you have that the alternatives do not.
Pro tip Include company-level capabilities, not just product features.
- 3
Translate capabilities into value themes
Go down the capability list and ask, for each, 'so what — why does the customer care?' Mapping features to value collapses into two or three differentiated value themes.
Pro tip This method surfaces value themes different from what you'd get by asking your team 'why does everyone love our stuff' — and guarantees they are differentiated, not generic.
Watch out Avoid value themes that any alternative could also claim; those aren't worth talking about.
- 4
Define the best-fit customer
Identify the characteristics of a target account that make them care a lot about your differentiated value. That definition is your best-fit customer.
Pro tip You could sell to anyone with the problem, but not everyone weights the value the same way — segment on who cares most.
- 5
Choose the market category
Pick the market category that acts as the context in which your differentiated value is obvious to your best-fit customers.
Pro tip Think of positioning as choosing the context you present the product in.
Watch out Starting here and backing up is 'crazy' — you have no yardstick for a category's goodness without the prior four steps.
In the wild
Dunford notes companies lose about 40% of deals to 'no decision' — meaning they lost to the spreadsheet, pen and paper, or interns, because they failed to position against the status quo.
→ If you can't position against status quo, you never pull the customer off it, so it must be treated as a real competitor in step one.
Common mistakes
Starting with market category
Choosing a category first and reverse-engineering everything else leaves you with no way to judge whether the category is right, because the judging criteria (unique value, who cares) haven't been established yet.
Discounting the status quo
Ignoring what the customer does today makes you blind to the biggest source of lost deals — 'no decision' — and you never move them off pen and paper.
Is it for you?
Best for
B2B founders and PMs who need to define or reset positioning for a product before building messaging.
Not ideal for
Situations where the product has no meaningful differentiated capability versus alternatives, where positioning cannot rescue it.
From the transcript
“I actually think the first step in a good positioning exercise is to really understand what do we have to position against”
“in B2B we lose about 40 percent of our deals to quote unquote no decision which actually means we lost to the spreadsheet we lost…”
“and then the last piece of positioning of course is Market category and so again a lot of people will just start with Market category…”
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