April Dunford author photo

April Dunford

April Dunford is a positioning consultant, speaker, and author focused on B2B technology marketing, product strategy, and sales messaging. She is best known for Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch, books that popularized practical frameworks for product positioning and customer-centric storytelling among startups, product marketers, and SaaS companies.

Biographie et Parcours de l'Auteur

April Dunford is a Canadian business writer and consultant whose path to authorship began in engineering rather than publishing. She studied engineering at the University of Waterloo, specifically systems design engineering, and then spent roughly the first 25 years of her career inside B2B technology companies, leading marketing, product, and sales teams. Over that stretch she worked across seven startups, launched 16 products, and later ran larger teams inside companies such as IBM, Siebel, and Sybase after a series of acquisitions that, by her account, totaled more than $2 billion. Those operating years gave her the raw material for the work she would later become known for: explaining why strong products often struggle when their value is poorly framed. ((https://www.aprildunford.com/about?utm_source=openai))

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Citations

quote
Put simply, positioning defines what market you intend to win and why you deserve to win it
-An Introduction to Positioning
quote
You can brainstorm ideas inside the office and use a structured process, and the resulting story can be very compelling – but also absolute bullcrap
-Storytelling vs Positioning
quote
Advertising-saturated, noisy markets mean that positioning a product so that customers can understand it quickly is more important than ever
-Positioning Is Not A Marketing Exercise
quote
For new products, this represents a huge opportunity to work with prospects to re-draw the boundaries of the market
-Everything You Know About Positioning Is Wrong
quote
The goal is to come up with a way to position our offerings that makes our awesomeness obvious
-A Product Positioning Exercise
quote
Worse than that, they let customers position their products for them
-Don't let Customers Decide What Your Product Is

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Voix de la Communauté

"April Dunford is the master at positioning and bringing B2B tech to market"

Rich Mironov

"You won't meet anyone who understands the art of positioning as deeply as April Dunford"

Georgiana Laudi

"Working with April Dunford taught our company why positioning is important and how to actually do it"

Abhinav Asthana

"April Dunford is the thought leader across the country and beyond when it comes to marketing and positioning for start-ups"

Sunil Sharma

"April Dunford's trademark wit and entertaining style make Obviously Awesome easily the best business book of the year"

Ashley Greene

"In Obviously Awesome, April Dunford offered a new way to think about positioning and the tools to do it yourself"

Paul Doyle

"April Dunford may know more about product positioning than any person alive"

Rich Emrich

"April Dunford is the best of what is out there-and adding her special sauce"

Lindsey Padrino

"If you're a B2B marketer and you haven't read April Dunford's books, where have you been?"

Bryan Sise

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