Positioning for tech companies. Author of the best-selling books Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch.

April Dunford is the world's foremost authority on product positioning for B2B technology companies. As a consultant, April helps companies make complex products easy to understand and love. After a 25-year career as a VP of Marketing at various fast-growing technology firms, she has consulted with 300 technology companies, including Google, Epic Games, Postman, and others. April is the acclaimed author of the best-selling book, "Obviously Awesome," which delves into the art of positioning, and the newly released, "Sales Pitch," which unveils the secrets to crafting a winning sales narrative in the market.

April Dunford

Can you use my positioning methodology to get yourself a date? I had a fun conversation with Brent Adamson and Shari Levitin on the Selling Isn't Everything podcast, where we talked about a bunch of things like:
♥️ Can you use my book, Obviously Awesome, to position yourself for romance (spoiler - I don't think it's a great idea, but hey, your mileage may vary!)
♥️ "Fractional CMO" is not great positioning (I mean, it's fine in the short term, but let's be honest, marketers can do better)
♥️ Why it's important to think about value and best-fit customers as a matching set
♥️ Why the "insight" step in a sales pitch is so hard to get right, but also critically important. 
This was a fun one!
Episode link in the comments

Mark Bakker

Coho Growth

Co-Founder & Managing Director

Montfort

Responsible for extending and further developing the online demand generation systems and successful sales funnels I developed for TIMIA Capital to its new parent company Montfort (see details below)

• Led the creation of the Montfort brand, including positioning, voice and tone, visuals, etc
• Designed, implemented and facilitated Montfort's brand strategy resulting in Michael Walkinshaw winning Executive of the Year by the Canadian Lender's Association.

VP of Marketing

TIMIA Capital

• Developed online demand generation systems and successful sales funnels increasing originated loan facilities from $20M to over $250M and an average Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) of 8x
• Designed and developed the front end of our SaaS Assessment Tool that integrates into Salesforce
• Managed a team of employees and service providers responsible for the development of our proprietary SaaS Score Assessment Tool
• Managed a budget of $1.3m
• Created a sales methodology to quickly identify and accelerate high-quality prospects through to revenue which improved efficiencies by over 161%
• Re-positioned go-to-market strategy and product offering, improving the close rate from 4.5% to 11%.
• Designed, implemented, and delegated numerous playbooks that turned loan origination from human-intensive to a simple replicable machine.

• 2nd employee
• Facilitated the systemization of a credit-scoring automation process
• Hired and grew a team of 7 including Sales, Marketing, Product, Content and Salesforce developers using the Top Grading methodologies.
• Developed an online demand generation system resulting in an increase in loan facilities of 25x 
• Responsible for Inbound business generation accounting for over 70% of TIMIA's revenue

TIMIA Capital offers flexible debt solutions to capital-efficient B2B SaaS companies generating $2 to $20 million in annual recurring revenue. Our non-dilutive financing solutions complement or replace an equity round and provide access to a large amount of capital to help companies accelerate growth while retaining ownership and control of their business. For more information visit timiacapital.com.

Director of Marketing

Thinkific

• 24th employee
• 50k MRR to 600k MRR in 2 years
• Led the performance marketing team in charge of $2m budget
• In charge of the Special Projects team where all new growth initiatives started

Working directly with the business owner, I facilitated Ryan Leech's career transition from professional mountain biker, to online course creator. 
• From 0 online revenue to 30k MRR and ~500k annual revenue in about one year
• Generated over 1000+ paid active monthly users in 4 months from launch
• Increased YoY revenue by 300+%
• FB page likes from 4,000 to 20,000.
• Email marketing list from 2,500 to 18,000.
• Created, implemented and managed marketing campaigns that have an ROI of 455%.

Growth Consultant

Filestack

Took over the company with $24k MRR and grew it to $174k MRR in 9 months. The business was sold to Scaleworks doing north of $200k MRR ~16 months from purchase.

Lead all go-to-market strategies and initiatives. Reported directly to Jonathan Siegel, owner and investor. 

LEADER: Implemented and managed the full scale sales and marketing methodology. Facilitated and developed a new business plan across all departments. Created a business dashboard that investors relied upon daily. 

CUSTOMER ACQUISITION: Led our inbound and paid marketing efforts. Managed retargeting, PPC, display, and social media advertising. Negotiated ad buys with small and large networks.

CONTENT: Conceptualized, wrote, managed, and delivered a new Filepicker website. Wrote or managed 2 posts per week on the blog. Wrote and sent monthly newsletters. 

GROWTH: Continuous optimization of organic and paid marketing channels, including SEO, landing pages, nurture emails and more. Built full funnel analytics and reported on them weekly.

SALES: Built sales decks from scratch for enterprise deals.

EVENTS: Plan, facilitate and attend various industry events, conferences and meetups, including Box Dev, NAB, API World, and more.

OTHER: Organized, filmed, and produced a short video testimonial for Amazon Cloud Drive that was featured on their launch day. 

RESULTS: Revenue grew by 500% in one year. Created and optimized onboarding process that increased signup to install by 75%. Created ad campaigns that had 14%+ CTR. 

Relocated to Las Vegas for 16 months, and San Antonio, Texas for 2 months.

Head Of Marketing

Xenon Ventures

Cloud App - getcloudapp.com
- Increased user base by 1 million in three months.
- Oversaw 3.0 launch with PR being the key driver.
FollowUp - followup.cc
- Attended and spoke at various events. 
- Hosted various webinars often featuring guests such as Steli Efti from Close.io
Copper - (Panda, PointDNS, StatusHub, StillAlive)
- Rebuilt two key sites including brand positioning and onboarding processes.
- Closed Mozilla on their status site.

Inbox Communications

- Account manager for a local client. 
- Leading a team to conceptualize and implement the online strategy for B2B clients.
- Business development including client prospecting and pitching.

Online Marketing Consultant

Canada Wide Media

- Assisted direction and development of lifestyle brand website. Implemented responsive framework.
- Social media management for a lifestyle brand.
- Email marketing for B2B and B2C
- SEO: stopped a significant steady decline and boosted organic search traffic by 125%.
- Ran two different lifestyle contest that brought in over 10,000, and 15,000 entries respectively.

Online Marketing Manager

Kashoo Online Accounting

- In charge of marketing site including redesign, development, and SEO. Increased traffic by 400%.
- Worked closely with VP Marketing to conceive, test, and implement new initiatives and strategies including conversion rate optimization, PPC, content, and social. Increased sales by 250%. Increased trials by 420%.
- Designed and implemented new customer support systems including website, phone, live chat, and social media. Managed support team and increased customer satisfaction to 95% or higher.
- Redesigned and implemented new UI for existing web app.

Online Marketing Manager / Support Manager

Growth Debt for Software Companies | Co-Founder & Managing Director

Mark is an experienced marketing leader with a proven track record of driving success in the B2B SaaS and technology financing space.

Graduating from BCIT in 2006, Mark quickly discovered his passion for startups working for various companies, including bootstrapped, private equity, and venture backed companies. Previous to Coho Growth, Mark was one of the early TIMIA employees and created a demand generation system that drove the origination team for 5 years.

With a web development background, Mark takes a technical and holistic approach to marketing. Mark is obsessed about building systems that help companies grow though product-market fit to the growth stage.

Mark recharges outside, usually with his Vizsla, mountain biking, water skiing, hiking, canoeing, and camping.

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April Dunford

Mark Bakker

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taplio

The Battle

April Dunford

Mark Bakker

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}April Dunford's LinkedIn Performance

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