QuotaforgePositioning According to April Dunford: Five Steps for B2B Providers
Visibility alone isn’t enough if it’s not clear what a company actually wants to be visible for. The most useful framework for this comes from April Dunford in her book *Obviously Awesome*: five steps that build on one another and are closely linked to qualification, even if that isn’t immediately obvious.
The Short Answer
If a positioning is vague, the qualification grid becomes vague as well, because no one can say exactly for whom an offering is truly the best fit and for whom it isn’t. April Dunford’s five-step approach from *Obviously Awesome* sharpens precisely this question, starting with a customer’s actual alternatives, not with your own features.
Step 1: Identify Competitive Alternatives
First, the customer’s actual alternatives are identified, and this explicitly includes the status quo—such as Excel spreadsheets, manual processes, or simply doing nothing. This is no trivial matter: A significant portion of all B2B deals isn’t lost to a competitor, but to a failure to decide.
Step 2: Define unique capabilities
Next, we define which capabilities or characteristics actually make an offering unique—in comparison to these very alternatives, not in a vacuum.
Step 3: Translate into concrete customer benefits
These characteristics are translated into concrete added value for the customer, because a feature is only valuable once it’s clear what specific benefits it brings to the customer.
Step 4: Identify the Right Target Audience
We identify which type of customer particularly values this added value, regardless of company characteristics and the role of decision-makers.
Step 5: Refine the market context
Finally, the market context in which this value becomes apparent is refined, because the same characteristic can be critical in one market context and irrelevant in another.
Why a Positioning Problem Is Often an Alignment Problem
What looks like a positioning problem at first glance is, in many cases, actually an alignment problem. Marketing positions the company differently on the website than sales does in conversations, and partners, in turn, tell a third story because they were never given a clear version to work with. Even the sharpest positioning is useless if three different teams communicate it differently. That’s why work on positioning belongs in the same project as work on a common qualification framework—not in a separate marketing project that ultimately ends up as a PDF in a drawer.
Practical tip: A positioning exercise conducted solely with the marketing team produces only one version of the truth. Sales and, if applicable, partner management must be at the table from the very beginning; otherwise, three stories will emerge instead of one.
Questions about Dunford’s positioning framework.
What is April Dunford’s positioning framework?
A five-step process from the book *Obviously Awesome*: identify competitive alternatives, define unique capabilities, translate these into concrete customer benefits, determine the appropriate target audience, and clarify the market context in which this value becomes visible.
What counts as competitive alternatives in positioning?
Explicitly, this includes the status quo—such as Excel spreadsheets, manual processes, or simply doing nothing. A significant portion of all B2B deals isn’t lost to a competitor but to a failure to make a decision.
Why is a positioning problem often an alignment problem?
Because marketing often positions a company differently on the website than sales does in conversations, and partners, in turn, tell a third story if they’ve never been given a clear version to work with. Even the sharpest positioning is useless if three teams convey it differently.
Do your marketing, sales, and partners all tell the same story?
15–30 min · Free · No sales pressure