- Hey there, I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur,
investor and creator of SaaS Academy,
and in this episode I'm gonna share with you
the six components for you to consider
when positioning your product in an obviously awesome way.
I'm gonna share why I call it that in a second.
And because maybe you're frustrated
with the fact that people think
that you're just like everybody else,
or it's not distinct or unique in the market.
Or you feel like, some people love it
and a lot of people don't.
I'm gonna break down exactly how to think
about your products, share some stories about mine,
and give you some specific things
that you need to do to improve that positioning.
Be sure to stay to the end,
where I'm gonna share with you
an exclusive resource called The Trial Converter.
It is a framework that my clients use
to improve their trial conversions,
to get the right people to show up,
walk them through the set up flow.
And most importantly, get to their aha moment.
So let's dive in.
(hip hop beat)
One of the hardest things that you can do
is position your product.
It means the message that you go to the market,
how you describe what you do, what you describe,
what you front load, what do you expose first
so that people understand the value in your solution?
And if you've ever felt frustrated with this,
I totally feel the pain.
I had the problem when I built Clarity.fm, my last company.
A lot of people see it today,
we got acquired in 2014, huge success.
But you didn't see the struggles along the way.
When I launched it, it was a tool
'cause I wanted a system to allow
people to get on my call list.
And that morphed slowly into a marketplace
and our growth was very slow,
because we didn't have a public directory for a long time.
And slowly we understood the customers use case
and why they used it,
and eventually launched it as a more broad
publicly available marketplace.
The idea is if LinkedIn had a call button,
that's what Clarity is, it still exists today.
It's extremely successful, it continues to grow
because of the marketplace dynamics.
And it was while I was building that,
where I saw a user do about
9,000 dollars in calls in one day.
Kay, this guy names Omar from Miami.
And I decided to call Omar 'cause I had his number,
'cause it's in our platform.
And I said, "Omar, I need to understand
"what did you believe to be true?"
You obviously spent,
it was an irrational amount of money,
no other user had spent that much money in a day.
And he did about six or seven calls.
And I say, "What was it that you believed
"to be true that made you wanna use our product
"that obviously you thought there was a lot of value?"
And he said, "Dude, I can't even believe
"more people aren't usin' this.
"It's the best kept secret, it's amazing."
I said, "Why's that?"
He said, "In the past when I've wanted
"to connect with those people to get their advice
"I'd have to find out if they we're speakin'
"at an event, go to the event,
"wait in line for the Q and A time,
"ask the question to get a watered down
"response to my challenge.
"Now, you've got those same speakers
"on your platform able to reach out to them,
"schedule a time, get 30 minutes to an hour.
"Contextually specific to my world,
"for a fraction of the cost because I used to
"have to spend the time on the ticket for the event,
"to the flights, to the hotel, et cetera.
"The time away from the business."
He goes, "This is amazing."
And that's when I went to the team,
and I said, "Look I know we wanted to build
"this like global call thing,
"and any person with a Twitter account could use it,
"but we need to focus on entrepreneurs."
And not just any entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs that were growth minded,
that believed that investing in information was important.
But most importantly, if we had to get down
to the specific positioning.
Is entrepreneurs that go to events.
Why?
Because they are willin' to spend
the appropriate amount of capital
to solve their problems faster
from the experts they were seeking.
And once we change the positioning,
our growth almost tripled overnight.
Now, everything I'm gonna share with you in this video
is 100% from April Dunford's book, "Obviously Awesome".
It just came out recently, it's amazing.
I read the whole thing.
It's very rare that I've done kind of a book review,
and this is not a good detail book review.
The last time I think was Victor Cheng's book,
"Extreme Revenue Growth".
But it is that important,
these five core components and then a bonus component
she calls it in the books, that's why it's six.
I'm gonna go through and explain my perspective
on why I think you need to consider
these when you're doing your positions
so you can have a product that the market absolutely loves.
Product market fit.
Sometimes the messaging and the positioning
is what you need to tweak to make that happen.
Let's get into it.
The first component is competitive alternatives.
I think it's really important
that you ask your customers,
what would they use if they couldn't use your product?
Most entrepreneurs actually don't know
what the competitive set looks fully.
Sometimes yes it's well, if we didn't exist
they'd have to do it manually.
I get that.
But there's many times that I discover
when I ask the client,
"Hey what would people use if they couldn't use you?"
They didn't have the full list, right,
what I'm lookin' for is well, depends on the customer,
if they're this they'd probably use this product,
this product or this product.
They'd do this, this and this.
If we don't know what the competitive alternative
looks like, then we don't know how to differentiate
our product and how to position it properly.
Number two, unique attributes.
What are the features or capabilities
that make you different or that your competitors lack?
Understanding clearly, kind of what differentiates you.
You might think well it's this, this and this.
But when you look at the market they also have this.
You wanna find the opportunities,
the holes in the competitive set
that they lack that you've got because that'll give you
some indications of how you can properly position things.
Number three, value and really proof, right.
What are the benefits from the features
that add a tonne of value for your customers?
This is where we're looking for,
ideally you have customers, or early beta testers.
That you've got examples of customers
that have gotten real value from your product.
Like, that's it's solved a problem.
Kay, we need to figure out what value
does our product derive and not what we hope it to say
but asking our customers how they explain the value
that our product solves for them, or delivers for them.
Number four, target market characteristics.
Here's what you wanna find out.
Maybe you think if you have a thousand customers
within your customers there is a group of buyers,
that absolutely love what you've built
and you gotta find out what's true about those buyers,
just like in my example when I reached out
to Omar around clarity.
What's true about those buyers,
that creates some concept, some ideation around
the target market that you want to serve.
You've gotta look at the customer base,
or your idea and say what is it that's true,
what do they look like, what do they share,
what are their characteristics, their buying process,
the pain point maybe.
But you gotta figure out what's true about that group.
Number five, market category.
Every product should focus on a specific category
that you serve because in describing that market,
what you're doing is you're helping
your customers decide faster on how to buy.
Kay, and April has this really great story
about a CRM solution that they were building,
and it was like a database CRM solution,
and it was pretty broad in the markets
they were goin' after, essentially the category.
And when they discovered that for private equity firms,
that this was the ultimate solution
because the specific unique feature that they had
that made it exclusively valuable,
they started competing against
the existing CRM solutions out there.
And that's what you wanna kinda figure out
is when we describe the category we're in,
it helps the customer decide is this for me
and make them buy faster.
Number six, bonus round, relevant trends.
This, what you wanna think about,
I think too often entrepreneurs start with this,
and they're like "There's a trend in the market,
"that's what we're gonna say we are for why."
Look, if all the other things,
the other components that you need to evaluate
to build obviously awesome positioning, are true,
you go through that exercise and finally
if there's a trend, now here's the kicker.
It has to be a trend that your customer is aware of,
because for you to say,
somethin' around like Bitcoin and cryptocurrency
and your customers in broadly speaking
don't really care or know about it,
and it has to be relevant to them.
So broadly, they need to be aware of it
and it has to be relevant to them
in the industry and their trend.
So look at the Gartner Report's,
the quadrants, the accentures.
Look at where the thought leaders
are saying the market's going,
is there a specific trend that you can latch on to,
you'll have that drafting effect,
and it'll really help the positioning
and make it more potent.
But that is not a primary thing that you should be doing,
you should be starting with the other five first.
This is a bonus if it's true, take it and run with it.
So quick recap, the six components to consider
when you're positioning your product
for obviously awesome outcomes as per April Dunford.
Number one, competitive alternatives.
Number two, unique attributes.
Number three, value, in brackets, proof.
Number four, target market characteristics.
Five, market category.
And we got a bonus, relevant trends in the industry.
So that is how we position our product
in an obviously awesome way,
so you can create traction in your market.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode
I wanna share with you an exclusive resource
called The Trial Converter.
It's my process for taking a sign up
and converting them into a paying customer,
getting that aha moment.
You can click the link, download that below.
And if you know anybody that you think
this video can support feel free to share
it with them directly.
Smash that like button, subscribe to my channel.
And as per usual, I wanna challenge you
to live a bigger life and a bigger business,
and I'll see ya next Monday.
Number s--
(laughs) Number six.