April has spent the first 25 years of her career as a startup executive, running marketing, product, and sales teams. She’s led teams at seven successful B2B technology startups. Most of those startups were acquired (DataMirror to IBM, Janna Systems to Siebel Systems, then SAP, Watcom to Sybase via Powersoft, to name a few), and she also ran big teams at IBM, Siebel, Sybase, and others. The total of those acquisitions is more than two billion dollars. Across that journey, April has positioned, re-positioned, and launched 16 products.
April has a deep curiosity about what makes the difference between a winning product and a loser. Developing a systematic way of positioning technology products and companies has become her life’s work.
As a consultant, she has had the privilege of working with more than 100 companies, allowing April to go even deeper and broaden her positioning expertise. The bulk of April’s work is with early and growth-stage startups. Companies where the stakes are high – and weak positioning can mean the difference between success or failure. April also works with large global companies, helping them develop deeper positioning expertise in their product and marketing teams.
April’s book, Obviously Awesome, captures her ideas about positioning and a methodology for doing it, that any startup can follow. It’s become a best-seller and popular among entrepreneurs, product, and marketing folk.
Forget everything you thought you knew about positioning. Successfully connecting your product with consumers isn’t a matter of filling in the blanks on an old-school positioning statement. Positioning is the foundation of everything we do in marketing and sales. It forms the backbone of our go-to-market strategy. Yet we don’t have a defined methodology for DOING it. At least we didn’t until now.
In this keynote, April goes beyond teaching you what positioning is and why you should care. It gives you a step-by-step process that any organization can follow to position their product, service or company. This talk will teach you how to find your product’s “secret sauce” and then sell that sauce to those who crave it.