Buckle up. You’re about to read an 8,000-word article about positioning.
All content is TikTok, people have no attention spans, and AI killed writing.
So why am I doing this?
Because thinking isn’t dead. And as many wise people have said, good writing is good thinking.
Apart from a few tiny copy edits, every word in this piece came through the compression algorithm between my brain and my fingertips. It took forever.
We live in a time of upheaval, uncertainty, confusion, and more than a little chaos. Because you’re a person who reads 8,000-word articles about strategy, you know that moments like this present tremendous risks and rare opportunities.
The hole in the universe might swallow you whole. Or you might walk through it and emerge transformed.
Either way, it won’t be open for very long.
That’s why I started In The Kitchen. I saw too many companies miss their moment and their market because they didn’t take a position.
In The Kitchen launched in November 2023. I published the original version of this article not long after that.
Since then, my consultancy has run more than 36 positioning exercises and found a niche with growth-stage and at-scale companies.
This article is a top-to-bottom account for how I think about positioning. I’m sharing it to help you think about how you will do positioning.
It was updated in 2025 to reflect what I’ve learned after nearly 40 deep dives into scaling B2B tech companies.
Here’s what’s covered:
Yes, because of AI. But also because of humans.
Positioning is a foundational act of marketing, where a company projects a clear and easily understood message to the entire market, declaring what it is, who it’s for, and why it’s uniquely valuable.
Positioning is also how the participants in a market make sense of their options. In the original book on the subject, Ries and Trout talk about “owning a position in the mind of the buyer,” as if a person’s brain is physical real estate.
That might be a bridge too far, but there’s plenty of evidence showing that in B2B technology purchases, the vast majority of buyers buy one of a shortlist of options they had in mind before they started looking.
In other words, what your potential buyers know about you off the top of their head is a huge influence on whether they ultimately buy from you.
But let’s talk about AI, too.
I just jumped over to Perplexity, wrote a long prompt pretending to be a global insurance company, and ran a Pro Search asking it to recommend a CRM.
Guess what was first on the list. Yup, Salesforce.
Yes, it’s the early days of AI, but I think Perplexity does a good job of breaking down what users are looking for and parsing a lot of (mostly) useful information to help them find it.
(Remember that AI does hallucinate and can be wildly, epically wrong, so please check sources and keep your brain engage when using AI tools.)
I submit that if a company is authentically positioned to win its ideal buyers, the more likely an AI search or agent is to recommend that company to those buyers.
I’d hope the logic behind that is obvious, but let’s break it down.
The guts of positioning (as I suggest practicing it) break down into a bunch of elements:
Category > Market > Segment > Company Type > Buyer > Problem > Alternatives > Differences > Value.
When you do great positioning work, you line up these elements, connect them with tight, clear logic, then reinforce them with market-facing messaging, and, of course, the product itself.
A well-positioned product knows where it plays, who it helps, and how it wins. And because the positioning is authentic, it works. Prospects see the value, buy the product, and realize the value. Ecosystem players, such as analysts, channel partners, SIs, consultants, and adjacent technology companies, get it too. Users discuss the product on review sites, Reddit, community forums, and social media.
And, therefore, there’s a ton of evidence for an AI tool to find that leads it to conclude “Yes, this is the right pick for you,” when your ideal buyer comes looking for a recommendation.
On the flipside, if your positioning is unclear, and your product is trying to be too many things to too many people, it’s unlikely that you’ll build the depth of reputation any AI search tool worth its salt will be looking for.
So yes, you should take a clear position.
And when you do, the human and AI participants in your market will follow.
This is an article about how my consultancy does positioning work.
I’m going to break it down step by step, but I want to start with the ending.
Positioning work doesn’t truly begin until your message hits the market. This is an obvious fact that many of the most experienced and credentialed practitioners in the space somehow overlook.
Yes, you can work out your positioning idea in a conference room.
But the actual act of positioning—teaching all market participants what you are, who you’re for, and why you’re uniquely valuable—happens in the market.
In The Kitchen does a lot of work in conference rooms. But we also help our clients translate that work into concrete, market-facing assets delivered with fidelity and punch.
In my experience, the transition from conference room to market is challenging and a major point of failure.
If you’re using this article to run your own positioning exercise, fair warning.
There’s a perception that positioning is a copywriting exercise.
I recommend thinking of it as a decision-making exercise. Yes, of course, you’ll update your messaging after doing positioning work, but I think conflating positioning and messaging is a mistake.
Positioning leads to messaging.
Before you can carve out and polish words and phrases, you need to make commitments about precisely how you’re going to position your company or product.
Each element of positioning is a unique decision point. Some will be easier than others. But all of them require crystal clarity.
Again, the decision points are: Category > Market > Segment > Company Type > Buyer > Problem > Alternatives > Differences> Value.
That amounts to a lot of decisions.
In The Kitchen is built for post-product-market-fit, growth-stage, and at-scale companies with millions in revenue, sales-driven go-to-market strategies, and relatively high ACV.
In those circumstances, it’s safer, easier (and much more necessary) to make lasting decisions.
If you’re an early-stage startup still trying to learn what that market wants from you, bear that in mind. You’re on a shorter timetable, and the process in this article might be too much for you.
There’s a good chance that you’re a marketing or product marketing individual contributor or director thinking about how to do positioning work for your company.
Or you might be a Marketing VP, CMO, or CEO.
This message is for all of you. Yes, there are many people inside and outside an organization who can effectively design and run a positioning process.
But the decisions and commitments required for coherent, effective positioning work belong to the senior-most person in the org chart. Much of the time, that’s the CEO. In larger companies, it could be a VP or Senior Director who owns a portfolio product.
Regardless of the specifics, my point of view couldn’t be simpler.
If you’re in charge, you own the positioning. Never forget this.
I often talk to project marketing managers who want to grab the positioning ball and run with it. They feel that they have a strong grasp on the elements of positioning, they’re under pressure to deliver, and they want to just do it.
In an early-stage company, I think that’s fine. An empowered small team should work out positioning quickly, get it in market, test it, improve it, and scale it.
But in a mature business, it’s a recipe for failure. Too many people have a stake in positioning and a role in executing on it. There’s a longer fact pattern to consider and more downstream implications.
And we all need to remember that human beings are naturally biased in favor of their own creations.
If you’re a product marketer or marketing leader trying to deliver fully baked positioning entirely on your own, taking feedback will be hard. And even if your work is objectively great, the people you need to sign off on it are going to want to make their mark on it.
It gets political and messy. Better, in my experience, to bring the core stakeholders along with you as co-creators and work just a bit slower than you might like.
But that doesn’t mean positioning should be done by a 30-person committee, either.
This is how I suggest building your team. You only need three roles.
The executive sponsor elevates positioning as an organizational priority, participates in the process, and makes the final decisions.
They don’t have to lead the work, design the process, or even initiate it. (Most of the positioning exercises we run at In The Kitchen start with a CMO or VP Marketing, who then pulls in the CEO as we finalize the project plan and get rolling.)
But the executive sponsor has to take responsibility for positioning decisions, champion the work, and make sure it sticks.
Other than successful translation into market-facing messaging, this is the crucial success factor for positioning work.
Proceed with care.
In theory, the cross-functional core positioning team is straightforward in a B2B technology company. In addition to executive leadership, you want representation from product, sales, and marketing. Generally speaking, these people will be the leaders of each respective area.
If your company is on the larger side, there may be a few additional participants. I’ve had clients pull in product marketing leaders, heads of customer success, CTOs, Heads of Engineering, and others. Or in very large companies with multiple business units, there may be general managers (GMs) or regional leaders.
I think that’s great.
Just don’t crowd the room. Generally speaking, I like a two-pizza conference room. Six to eight participants is ideal.
And yes, I’m biased, but I think the role of facilitator is important to doing positioning work well.
So that one’s getting a whole section.
B2B technology companies live in an information hurricane.
I am astonished by the torrent of messages, meetings, dashboards, data, and content people inside tech companies are supposed to absorb every day.
And when you’re inside a product company, your product becomes your vantage on the world.
The people I work with tend to see the world through their pipeline, roadmap, marketing funnel, product metrics, and company KPIs. Which makes perfect sense because that’s what they care for every day.
Good positioning work, though, requires an outside-in view on the product. You need a strong command of the context around the product and an ability to look at it from the eyes of the market, not an insider.
It’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle.
So yes, a third-party point of view is useful.
Also, despite what you might read on LinkedIn, positioning isn’t easy. I’ve done it every day for close to three years straight, I still think it’s very hard.
It’s also not something most of us do often.
“Positioning” isn’t part of many job descriptions, and it’s not a muscle motion most of us have experienced very much.
Even if you have, and you’re good at it, politics and interpersonal dynamics do get in the way.
I’m biased, but I’ve seen that In The Kitchen clients are grateful to have an experienced, non-Kool-Aid-drinking, apolitical person guide them through the positioning process and take responsibility for getting it done.
With internal projects, deadlines slip and priorities shift.
But if you make the commitment and bring in help, you'll face deadline pressure. That’s good.
Anyone facilitating positioning should take on responsbilty for the entire process. Designing it, gathering and synthesizing inputs, leading the conversation, working through the debate, and making sure the plane lands.
Let’s talk about that now.
I don’t think there’s a single right way to do positioning. But I do think it’s very helpful to have a process, and that you should tailor yours to fit your organization and circumstances.
I’m obviously writing this to take you through my entire process, but it’s helpful to start by considering the key ingredients of an effective positioning effort first.
This is my preferred mise en place.
Goals
Great positioning work is a lot easier to do when you know what you’re trying to accomplish. Amazingly, much of the literature about positioning says nothing about this.
I think there’s an art to setting intentions for positioning, and I’ll show you how I do it. The big question: Where is the organization going, and how can the next iteration of positioning help you get there faster?
Information
As I mentioned, tech companies are drowning in information and struggling to make sense of it. And yet, when I ask for relatively basic facts to prepare for a positioning project, they can be hard to get.
I want to know:
…and I want to answer the big question: Do we have enough information to define the next version of ICP and target buyer, and authentically understand who those companies and people are, what they need, and how they think?
I ask this question point-blank during my own sales process. It’s not always so simple to answer. Because when you’re moving upmarket or shifting your focus to a different buyer, you won’t know those companies and people as well as your current customer base.
Sometimes, you make big bets based on a hunch and a few nuggets of information.
I often refer to the Colin Powell rule. The legendary four-star general and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had a rule that to make a significant decision, he needed a minimum of 40% of the required information and a maximum of 70%. This kept him from getting bogged down in small details and reacting too slowly to developing situations.
Many tech marketing professionals are fanatical about being data-driven. I suggest being like General Powell. Get enough information to have a strong factual basis, but trust your judgment and ACT.
Convergence
Positioning work should feel like a grand coming together, where the right people synthesize the right information, have a great conversation, and walk away with a new sense of direction. For me, this is usually a workshop. It doesn’t have to be. But you want to orchestrate a moment when leaders with a stake in positioning get together and work it out.
Outputs
Good positioning needs a deliverable. Something that clearly and simply describes the decisions made during the positioning process and the positioning itself. I like a memo for this. Two to three pages of plain English that say what the positioning will be.
Execution
As I’ve written, positioning happens in the market. My recommendation is to attach market-facing deliverables, such as website updates and sales materials, to the positioning effort itself. Don't consider the work done until a new message is published, along with a plan to test and scale it.
Positioning is a big swing. I suggest considering it as a minimum 12-month investment. So please take the time to think it through and talk it over.
You’re reading this, so you’re probably inclined that way.
Just like April Dunford, to whom this article owes a debt, I think of positioning as a process. But rather than a series of linear steps, I consider it a set of conversations.
Other than the first conversation about setting goals and objectives, I also think you can play with the order of operations here.
The heart of my suggestion here is to say, “Here are your bases. Make sure you’ve got them covered.”
And remember, these are conversations. Not recitations. We gather data to fuel our conversations and give us evidence to support or refute our ideas. Not to pre-ordain the solution to the problem.
Data helps.
But solving the positioning problem is people stuff.
These are the conversations I like to have:
The rest of this article will dig into each of the conversations and how I like to go about them.
Positioning work is a lot more likely to stick if it’s rooted in the company's business strategy.
I like to think of this as “the corporate trajectory.”
Every company (even your cool startup) is a corporation, and it’s on a path from a starting point toward a destination.
I want to know what that path is, where it leads, what the key milestones are, and where you are along the way, right now.
One of the first things I like to do after kicking off a positioning project is to get the executive team together and ask two basic questions:
“Where are you now?”
Where are you going?”
This leads to many productive sub-conversations. I want to learn:
Ultimately, this is all in service of painting a vivid picture of what positioning success looks like.
And in the process of conducting this conversation, it definitely helps to have data. Here’s what l Iike to have handy:
This is basic and minimal. For me, it’s enough. I’ve had clients provide me with in-depth analyses of their customer base, marketing performance, and detailed product metrics. All information is good.
But ultimately, our goal here is to get to the heart of fundamental questions that will drive the company’s GTM for at least a year.
So we’re talking in bold strokes, and we need to think thematically.
This is about understanding the headlines, not diving into the weeds.
…and this is a major point in my process where I’ve found AI to be incredibly helpful.
I use AI to do things like:
There’s a lot of room to be creative. But, generally speaking, I find AI to be an astoundingly helpful learning tool that helps give structure to unstructured data in ways that previously would have been impossible to do without weeks of work.
Positioning requires synthesizing a lot of information from a number of different sources, very quickly.
I find AI to be a massive boost to this process. Just remember that it does make mistakes. Verify, then trust.
When you do positioning work, you should know why you’re doing it and what you’re trying to accomplish.
You should have a business problem to solve.
A goal.
And whatever it is, that goal needs to be honest.
For decades now, there has been a quiet crisis in corporate strategy. It’s a pandemic of magical thinking.
Just because high-paid people sit in a room, write a number on a whiteboard, and then nod solemnly, does not mean that number is realistic.
This is why it’s so crucial to understand the corporate trajectory. The connection between where you’ve been and where you’re going is a sloping line, not a magic elevator.
Every positioning effort will have unique goals, but the macro-level job will always be the same: to advance the company another step along the path to realizing its vision.
When we do positioning work, our job is to set ourselves up for success right now while also putting ourselves on a track for even more success in the future.
In my experience, that requires a bit of nuance when we set our goals for positioning.
Positioning is honest, practical, and realistic. Aim for targets you can hit. But don’t aim too low or set a goal that gets in the way of future success
I like to have a list of no more than three.
In B2B, category is a major variable that can have a big impact on positioning work.
I find that it’s best to talk about category upfront, and then revisit the conversation again at the end of the process when you’re polishing your final thoughts on positioning.
A lot’s been said about category strategy, category creation, etc., and I admit I’m mostly annoyed by it. So I’m going to take a bit of extra time with this section to share more perspective.
Most of the chatter about category advocates for niching or creating a category, passionately arguing why either of those approaches is better (and why the other is stupid.)
It’s all or nothing, black or white.
You find a niche and settle in, or you bet it all on black and go big with a category play.
I think this entire argument is myopic and misses the truth about category plays.
Instead of just two polar opposites, I think there are four basic category strategies, and they fall along a natural continuum.
Niching involves finding an existing category and carving out a niche, either vertically (by industry) or horizontally (by business function).
Category expansion involves playing in an established category, but bringing in new customers and use cases.
Category consolidation involves bringing fragmented use cases together into a single platform.
Category creation involves pioneering a new product category by reframing the problem or defining a new solution.
Each of these approaches has natural drawbacks and advantages.
Niching is a good way to get off the ground, but it can limit growth if your slice of the pie is too small.
Category expansion is a good way to break out of a niche, but can also be limiting if you’re ambitiously broadening the scope of what you offer and who you serve.
Category consolidation is a great way to make the jump from single to multi-product, but doesn’t always lend itself to a big, juicy narrative.
Category creation can lead to epic victories and supports attention-grabbing marketing tactics, but is incredibly risky and expensive.
None of these approaches is inherently better or worse than the others.
But they are different.
Many In The Kitchen clients come to me with a preconceived notion about their category strategy. Sometimes, that notion shifts during the course of our work together.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
But at the very least, we’re going to interrogate it and deeply understand the nuances associated with it.
I like to start positioning work by discussing the implications of different approaches to category and developing at least a basic understanding of the market where the product will be sold and the category label that will be assigned to it.
We will check back on this, but it should be a significant point of discussion from the jump.
You won’t have any ability to narrow down your perspective on who your best buyer is if you don’t have a strong command over the category context where you’ll play.
Once you're clear on your category context, you can zero in on who your best buyers are within that space.
At this point, we’ve had a healthy dose of introspection. We’ve thought hard about where we are and where we want to go.
Now, it’s time to take a deep breath and set all of that aside.
Because from here on, the entire positioning thought process needs to revolve around the customer, not us. We need to understand who the best customers are, in as much detail as possible.
By “best,” I mean customers who you want, who are primed to realize the full value of your product.
I recommend defining this group of people at both the company and the persona level. This is cut-and-dried stuff. No big mystery.
You define your best-fit company by factors such as size, industry, location, buyer market segment, technology preferences, maturity, go-to-market strategy, business model, funding type, or structure.
I suggest sticking to the simple, basic details that you can use to target a paid media campaign. That means concrete, knowable facts about a company. We just want to answer the question, “What types of businesses are the very best to buy from us?”
Once you have that, discuss specific personas.
In doing this, people often trip over the concept of the buying committee. If you’re not careful, your “target persona” can multiply and become a small crowd.
A simple way to overcome that problem is to focus on your champion. Yes, you need messaging that works for the committee. But you won't get very far without a passionate, engaged champion behind you.
In some cases, we need to position a platform or multi-product company that serves different buyers and users. That’s the only case when I would recommend having more than one champion in the frame.
Keep it clean and focused.
This is a great point to ask (again) one of the most crucial questions involved in positioning.
Do you really know how your best buyers think?
Most of the companies I’ve worked with know who their best buyers are and already sell to them. They have a small minority of customers who fit the profile they want, they just need more of them.
I’m a giant proponent of talking to customers, and this can be a great moment to do it. Have a handful of interviews with “golden customers,” customers you won recently who understand your value, are excited about the product, and resemble the customers you truly want.
You can also pay a third-party firm or hire a qualitative researcher to interview best-customer lookalikes. This can also be hugely valuable.
Or if your sellers and CSMs truly understand how these people think, then you can download insights from them.
Analyzing your own sales calls with an AI tool can also be helpful, too. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve gotten useful information from this. Just check the outputs, please.
The goal is to have a vivid and accurate portrayal of real human beings that you can discuss, agree on, and use to keep yourself honest.
We want to know who they are, what their responsibilities and motivations are, what triggers them to enter the market for what you’re selling, and how they prefer to buy.
This is less obvious than it sounds. There are many ways to name the problem your product solves for your ideal buyer, even in the most straightforward situations.
This gets especially tricky for multi-product companies, platform products that serve multiple use cases, and products with different buyers and users.
But if you’re going to have a clear, simple articulation of your positioning, you need to concisely explain the problem you solve for your buyers in a way that they agree is both true and compelling.
Sometimes this is a slam dunk, but usually it isn’t. So I typically spend some time here.
The first big clarification goes back to my point in the previous conversation about positioning for your champion, not the entire buying committee. If we can distill things down to the point where we can focus on one persona, it helps enormously.
The second clarification comes by considering the full hierarchy of problems you help solve.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a good reference here. As I’m sure you remember from Psych 101, the bottom of the hierarchy has physiological needs (air, water, food), and the top is self-actualization.
For a tech product, the basic functional purpose is at the bottom, and a person or company becoming the best version of themselves is at the top.
The articulation of the problem you solve will probably fall somewhere in the middle.
Most of the companies I work with gravitate toward language that is either too lofty or too low-level. They want to barrel into features or speak to big business benefits.
My suggestion is to think about the problem people are literally trying to solve the moment they actively enter the market for your product.
The raw source of the pain. Not the KPI they’ll move when they fix it.
So we’re looking for a problem that a lot of people agree is a problem, want to solve right now, and have money to spend on solving it.
How do we figure out what that is? By knowing our ideal customers and what drives them to our product….
…and again, this is why qualitative insights matter enormously.
We should be able to capture this in a few sentences.
Once you’ve done this, it’s much easier to develop a useful and accurate perspective on who and what you’re really competing against.
Ask somebody inside tech company X who they compete with, and you’ll probably get a list of other tech companies.
Potentially a very long list.
Ask one of the tech company X’s customers what they would be using if they didn’t have the company’s product, and you’ll probably hear “a spreadsheet,” or “a consultant,” or “We’d just figure it out, I guess.”
Matthew Dixon (the guy who wrote The Challenger Sale) published a helpful book recently called The Jolt Effect, based on a detailed analysis of thousands of deals. The transition to remote work and the emergence of call-recording technology allowed Dixon’s team to get deeper into the weeds than ever before to learn why deals do and don’t close.
His big takeaway: As much as 60% of deals end up in “no decision,” as in the buyer chose to do nothing—after selecting a winning vendor.
And of those no-decision deals, a majority of them petered out not because the status quo was better but because the buyer got cold feet.
The companies I work with are usually challengers. They have traction but aren’t yet the top players in their categories.
That means they’re up against something big.
But as Dixon’s research confirms, the big thing usually isn’t another company. It’s inertia. Or “Good enough is good enough,” or “That’s how we’ve always done it.”
Or if the category is mature, it’s “Those two big companies everybody knows about.”
Whatever it is, we need to figure it out. And there’s a simple way to do that. We ask our best-fit potential buyers how they solve the problem right now. And then we listen while they tell us.
Here’s what we don’t do:
(I realize number three might be a little controversial. But Gartner makes a lot of money by making tech companies feel insecure about other tech companies. Meanwhile, the sum total of the market share of all the players in a typical quadrant is often very small.)
This is another case where customer insight is critical. When I do qualitative research, I spend a good chunk of every interview trying to figure out what the customer had been or would be doing without the product.
Of course, the competing alternatives aren’t monolithic. But I almost always find that they can be categorized and understood simply.
If you’re up against a single big, bad, competing alternative, great. Name it and understand it. If you’re up against a number of competing alternatives, sort them into buckets and name the buckets.
After sorting, it’s time to ask what is probably the least fun question during any positioning exercise.
“Why do the alternatives win?”
That means allowing yourself to accept the fact that for many people you want to sell to, your competition is winning for a reason. Maybe a pretty good reason. Maybe more than one.
We need to let that sink in.
Only then can we truly understand how to fight back and win.
To summarize this conversation, we want a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive—but still simple—list of the top competing alternatives, with a short summary of how our buyer feels about them.
If you’re ready to do positioning work, you have customers who love you. You just need more of them.
Positioning converges on a clear, honest understanding of what it is about your product that your best-fit customers value the most and struggle to get from competing alternatives.
Value is an important word here. It’s also a tricky word.
My suggestion is to be open-minded about it. This is another case where I strongly disagree with much of the typical literature about positioning B2B technology companies.
The typical approach is to focus on just one source of difference: product capabilities.
There’s an underlying assumption that capabilities alone are the reason why products win and lose. After interviewing hundreds of people about buying B2B technology and studying the dynamics of more markets than I can remember, I see it differently.
I think people choose one product over all the rest based on four factors, not one.
I like to start by understanding the first “c,” the unique capabilities associated with your product that help you win your buyers’ business.
First, I want to define “capabilities.”
Capabilities are the unique things your product does and allows buyers and users to do. My favorite way to look at capabilities is to ask, “What are the superpowers people gain when they buy our product?”.
This is different from the features and benefits framework people have been using for the past 50 years.
Features make superpowers possible, but aren’t superpowers themselves.
If a lot of people love your product, it’s probably because different subsets of your features add up to create superpowers they value. We need to know what those are.
We want to have a short list of the unique capabilities the product unlocks. An easy way to start generating it is to write the words “Now you can….” and complete the statement with the juiciest, most unique, most desirable superpowers your product makes possible.
When I do this, there’s a simple heuristic I find helpful.
If you’re struggling to fully define your most important and compelling capabilities, this little trick can help.
Think of all the ways your product allows people to….
This is a great way to make sure you leave no stone unturned.
Remember, though, the goal isn’t to create a giant list. It should be prioritized by what matters most to your best-fit buyer.
Which is yet another reason why research and genuine buyer insight matter.
Once you’ve understood your strongest product capabilities, I recommend moving on to the other three Cs, credibility, convenience, and cost.
This will be quicker.
The goal is to isolate meaningful competitive advantages that are hard to copy, that you already have or could create, beyond the capabilities of the product.
Credibility encompasses anything that makes you more trustworthy than your competitors. Your reputation, history, IP, famous founder, well-established presence among a community, preexisting brand awareness, raw marketing power, and depth of content all impact your credibility.
Convenience considers anything that makes your product notably easier to buy. A huge user base, a powerful distribution advantage, or a super-low-friction buying experience are all examples of convenience.
Cost is bigger than price. Think in terms of a cost-to-value ratio. Does your product offer significantly more value relative to the financial and time investment that goes into it? Does it offer a meaningfully lower cost of ownership? Does it eliminate the need for other products?
Cost advantages are hard to create and maintain. But they’re powerful when you have them.
Wrap up your conversation about winning differences by isolating your most meaningful, distinctive credibility, convenience, and cost advantages.
There might be very few of them. Or none.
But ask the question.
I’ve seen companies completely ignore the reason why the majority of their customers buy from them by skipping past this question.
Once you’ve developed a complete view of your winning differences, you’ll probably have a list that’s too long.
You need to make it simpler and shorter.
I use a simple, two-step process to do this.
First, gut-check that your differences really matter for your buyer. Eliminate those that don’t get a resounding yes.
Then, sift the list again, identifying the differences that are most important to your buyers and hardest for your competitors to copy.
The goal is to come away with a concise but rich, three-dimensional picture of the things that make you different and cause your best buyers to want to buy from you.
This list should feel mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive, and brutally honest. If a difference doesn’t move the needle, kill it. This will make your articulation of value much more powerful.
Your winning differences are greater than the sum of their parts.
Taken together, they create value for your buyers that they would find hard to get anywhere else.
At this point, your job is to figure out exactly what that value is and capture it in a sentence or two.
This is a funny part of the process. “Value” is a weird word, as April Dunford rightly calls out in Obviously Awesome.
If the unique value isn’t obvious, I like to take a step back and review all the positioning decision points made about the category, buyer, problem, alternatives, and winning differences, and think of them as a story.
The unique value is the resolution, when your buyers overcome the problem and win.
This is a moment in the process where it can be tempting to get lofty. Try to stay grounded in concrete results made possible by your winning differences.
In Ries and Trout’s Positoning, they talk about “owning a word in the prospect’s mind.”
Volvo “owns” “safety,” etc.
I don’t think unique value can or should come down to a single word, but I think it definitely can come down to a single concept.
Salesforce’s “Customer 360” is a great example. When it came out (around 2019), a complete view of the customer was hard to get, valuable, and the solution to many painful problems driving buyers into the market for CRM, marketing automation, customer support software, and everything else Salesforce sold.
“Customer 360” was what I call a “glue concept.” A single idea that holds the whole product together.
Your unique value should feel like a glue concept.
Which also means it should be sticky. Not a throwaway. Not a marketing headline. We’re talking about a foundational truth about the value you create, which is going to be the basis of how you position your product for at least a year.
Think it through.
The climax of positioning work is the moment we summarize our thinking in as few words as possible.
It’s important to do an excellent job of this. The best strategic thinking in the world is useless if you can’t remember it, communicate it, and explain it effortlessly off the top of your head.
So we need a crystal clear, simple summation.
In my experience, the standard positioning statement template (the run-on sentence “For….our product is a….that…unlike…so…”) is too clunky and ponderous.
It’s got too many arms and legs on it. It’s hard to remember. It feels stiff.
We want an articulation of our positioning that sticks in people’s minds. I’m not dogmatic about how to write it.
But I do think the positioning language itself needs to answer three essential questions.
And ideally, the answers to those questions should correlate with the conversations you’ve had across the positioning process.
“What is it?” addreses category.
“Who is it for?” ecompasses the ICP, champion, and problem to be solved.
“What is it different” summarizes unique value and easily extends into winning differences.
If you’re a positioning buff, you might ask why I didn’t directly address competing alternatives with an “unlike” statement.
After personally interviewing hundreds of technology buyers, I’ve learned that competing alternatives vary a lot from person to person.
I do think we as technology marketer can and should categorize alternatives and position ourselves as distinctly different from them.
But at foundational positioning statement level, I think grasping unique value is more important than listing off competing alternatives.
And because unique value was defined based on a clear-eyed definition of what buyers get from us that they can’t easily get elsewhere, answering the question “why is it different?” ought to be enough.
…but there are no rules in marketing, only options.
Do what works for you.
As I’ve said, I really don’t have religion about writing positioning statements. But I do come back to a few basic formulas.
The “How We Win” statement
We will win [best-fit buyers] of [product category] by [delivering our unique value].
Starting with “We will win” creates built-in competitive discipline and inoculates us against wishful thinking. Because the object of any positioning discussion is to figure out how we can put ourselves in position to win, this is a go-to for me. It’s very hard to kid yourself when you write the summary this way.
The “Category/Value/Buyer” statement
[Product name] is a [product category] that [delivers unique value] to [target market].
This one is a close cousin to the Geoffrey Moore version most people use. But it’s much less clunky and more conversational.
In tech, it’s shockingly typical to see marketing messages that don’t quite say what the product is, exactly.
This method forces extreme clarity, and it’s a great jumping-off point for elevator pitches and highly condensed marketing messages.
The X for Y statement
The [unique value][product category] for [target market] [buyer need].
This is very condensed. If you do it right, it reads like a website header or a sales deck title. It comes right out and says what you are, who you’re for, and why you’re different, with brutal efficiency.
If you want a positioning summary that feels like copy and fits on the back of a matchbook, this is a good choice.
Whatever format you choose for your statement, the goal is concision and clarity. We need to write in plain English, speak the truth, and make sense.
This is not poetry or copywriting. It’s the answer to a logic puzzle.
I strongly encourage my clients not to be grandiose, florid, or clever when we write this. It has to be clear. And it has to be right.
These are the words that describe how you win.
If you’ve spent time on my website, you know that I don’t do positioning work without a market-facing deliverable attached to the project.
That’s because the biggest point of failure for positioning work is what I call “death by consultant deck.”
It goes like this: The consultant comes in, runs the workshop, spends a lot of time polishing a pretty deck, drops a big bill, then leaves. At which point, the positioning committee isn’t quite sure about what to do next. Or maybe they launch an internal messaging exercise, with a three-week timeline that somehow stretches into three months.
The energy around the positioning effort dissipates, life goes on, people get busy, and very little actually happens.
I am a dyed-in-the-wool practitioner and marketing operator. I also deeply believe in creating real value for the people who hire me. So the death spiral I’m talking about here is unacceptable.
You gotta get in market.
My positioning projects come with some combination of the following:
Of all these, sales messaging followed by website copy are my favorite immediate next steps. Sales messaging is a great place to start because you can write it quickly, train a few reps on it, and get in front of real buyers in live-fire sales calls.
Good reps know right away if a message is landing well. While it’s hard to get quantitative data out of a sales messaging test run, seller enthusiasm is a good leading indicator.
Whatever we create, our goal is to construct a simple, foundational message that activates your positioning strategy with a puts your differentiated value front-and-center in a strong appeal to your best-fit buyers.
Get it in market. Give it time to incubate. Start learning.When to refine positioning
If we’ve done a good job, your positioning should last for a while. You might tweak it a bit, but I would expect to get a least a year out of it before making a meaningful change.
Positioning can and does change over time. And circumstances do matter. If AI flips your category on its head, or a black swan event like a global pandemic happens, it’s going to affect your positioning.
But done right, positioning should be durable.
Remember, positioning lives in the minds of buyers, which change much more slowly than your product does. If we did positioning work based on a deep and accurate understanding of the buyer, it really should last.
My rule of thumb is don’t mess with positioning for at least a year unless something crazy happens.
Messaging, however, is different.
You’ll want to have a strong, clear foundational message that expresses your unique value to your best-fit buyers. This shouldn’t change a ton, but it’s always a work in progress.
My general advice is to give foundational messaging time to sink in in the market, then make changes cautiously, and only with a very good reason.
Recency bias is a bear. You can do tremendous harm to your positioning by cycling through too many messages in too short a time. The biggest companies in the world were built with simple messages they repeated over and over.
Don’t forget that.
Hey, congratulations. You made it to the end of this beast of an article.
If you're a CEO, CMO, or VP Marketing at a growth-stage or at-scale B2B tech company wrestling with positioning, I'd love to hear from you. The companies I work best with have millions in revenue, complex sales cycles, ambitious growth targets, and are usually working through a significant product or GTM transition.
Get on my calendar and we can talk.
