How to Make Your Product Positioning Impossible to Ignore with April Dunford (Founder, Ambient Strategy)

#309 Product Positioning | This episode is from a Drive 2025 (our annual Exit Five event) session with April Dunford (Founder, Ambient Strategy). April pulls from working with 300+ tech companies to unpack the real patterns behind winning positioning from calling out competitors’ nonsense to teaching buyers what actually matters, avoiding category-creation traps, and fixing the sales messes that weak positioning creates. It’s sharp, funny, brutally honest, and basically a crash course in how to make your product unmistakably different in a market full of noise.

PS. Want to join us at Drive 2026?

Head over to exitfive.com/drive to join the waitlist for Drive 2026 and be the first to know when tickets go on sale.

Timestamps

• (00:00) - – Why Positioning Breaks
• (03:30) - – Teaching Buyers to Spot Competitor BS
• (06:58) - – Turning Differentiators into Real Value
• (10:36) - – The Trap of Overthinking Categories
• (14:23) - – Choosing Your Go-To-Market Before Your Positioning
• (19:00) - – Building a Story Only You Can Tell
• (23:28) - – When Great Storytelling Backfires
• (30:17) - – Positioning Multi-Product Companies
• (33:58) - – When and Why to Reposition
• (37:46) - – Bringing It All Together in Sales

Join 50,0000 people who get Dave's Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletter
Learn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/

***

Brought to you by:

AirOps - The content engineering platform that helps marketers create and maintain high-quality, on-brand content that wins AI search. Go to airops.com/exitfive to start creating content that reflects your expertise, stays true to your brand, and is engineered for performance across human and AI discovery.

Customer.io - An AI powered customer engagement platform that help marketers turn first-party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS, and push. Learn more at customer.io/exitfive.

Convertr - The enterprise lead data management platform that sits between your lead sources and your CRM, automatically validating, enriching, and standardizing every lead before it touches your systems. Check them out at convertr.io/exitfive.

Compound Growth Marketing - A full-funnel demand generation agency that helps high-growth cybersecurity, DevOps, and enterprise software companies drive more pipeline through AI SEO, paid media, and go-to-market engineering. Visit compoundgrowthmarketing.com and tell them Dave sent you.

***

Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.

• They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.
• Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.
• Visit hatch.fm to learn more