On the TechTO stage ×6
April Dunford of Sprint.ly presents Leaky Buckets, Death Stink & True Love
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April Dunford of Sprint.ly presents New Product, New Thinking
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How To Nail Product Positioning | April Dunford
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How To Nail Product Positioning | April Dunford
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The Recap: How To Nail Product Positioning With April Dunford - March 17, 2022
Watch on YouTube ↗How To Craft a Winning Sales Pitch, Every Time | April Dunford
Watch on YouTube ↗First seen on a TechTO stage in 2016. Every TechTO talk is searchable — ask the archive about April ↗
In their words
I actually think buying is hard. Now when I say this, a lot of people look at me and they go, 'Buying is hard? No, it's not, April. That's called shopping.' And that's not hard at all — people do that for recreation and for fun.
We repositioned it as an embedded database for mobile devices and the thing took off like crazy. So that twigged me to the idea that positioning is actually kind of an important, cool thing — but at the time I had no idea what it was, because I had an engineering degree and I literally couldn't spell marketing.
We're in the business of delivering impossible things. We're in the business of delivering things that nobody's ever seen before. And the problem with things that nobody's ever seen before is they're often very hard to understand.
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Quick answers
Who is April Dunford?
A Toronto-based positioning consultant, speaker and author. Her own site describes 25 years as a startup executive leading marketing, product and sales teams at seven B2B technology startups — most of them acquired, including DataMirror to IBM, Janna Systems to Siebel, and Watcom to Sybase — followed by consulting work on positioning with more than 200 companies.
What books has April Dunford written?
Two: Obviously Awesome, on how to nail product positioning, and Sales Pitch, which lays out a step-by-step structure for building a sales pitch off the back of that positioning. She also hosts a podcast on positioning.
What does April Dunford say about selling?
That the hard part is buying, not selling. On the TechTO stage in May 2025 she argued most business purchases are genuinely difficult to make, so a pitch should help a buyer make a decision rather than just describe the product. She studied engineering at the University of Waterloo and has said she 'literally couldn't spell marketing' when she started.