How to find your product’s “secret sauce” and then sell it to those who desire it.
The importance of positioning
Positioning is intentionally defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares about. Customers need to quickly understand your product, why it’s unique, and why it is important to them.
Positioning is vital to every tactic we use, every campaign we launch, every bit of content we create, and every sales pitch we make. If we fail at positioning, we will also fail at marketing and sales, and the entire business is at risk of dying.
Form a positioning team
A positioning process works best when it’s a team effort from different functions within the company, as they can bring a unique perspective to how customers perceive and experience the product.
Consider these outputs that all flow from positioning:
- Marketing: messaging, audience targeting and campaign development
- Sales and business development: target customer segmentation and account strategy
- Customer success: onboarding and account expansion strategy
- Product and development: roadmaps and prioritisation
Find a market frame of reference that puts your strengths at the centre
Pick a market frame of reference that makes your value evident to those who care about that value.
When you choose to position yourself within a specific market, you give your prospects clues about what products they should compare you with.
Some ideas:
- Positioning to win a subsegment of an existing market by targeting buyers who have different requirements that the current overall market leader is not meeting.
- Create a new market category that deserves to exist.
Aspects of great positioning
Most products are exceptional when we understand them within their best frame of reference.
Great positioning considers all these aspects:
- The customer’s point of view on the problem you solve and other ways of solving that problem.
- The ways you are uniquely distinct from those alternatives and why that’s meaningful for customers.
- The characteristics of a potential customer that values what you can uniquely deliver.
- The best market context for your product that makes your unique value obvious to those customers who are best suited to your product.
Layer on a trend
You can use a current trend to your advantage if it helps to reinforce your position and the value of your offerings. Aligning with a trend can help make your offering look current and relevant.
Only use trends when they have a clear link to your product.
Use a trend if it is possible, but you can have a successful business without being trendy.
Components of effective positioning
- Competitive alternatives. What would your customers do if your solution didn’t exist?
- Unique attributes. The features and capabilities that you have and the alternatives you lack.
- Value (and proof). The benefit that those features enable for customers.
- Target market characteristics. The characteristics of a group of buyers that lead them to care about the value you deliver.
- Market category. The market you describe yourself as being part of to help customers understand your value.
- Relevant trends. Trends that your target customers understand that can help make your product more relevant right now.
Understand the customers who love your product
Your best-fit customers hold the key to understanding what your product is.
Make a shortlist of your best customers. The best customers understood your product quickly and bought from you quickly. They referred you to other companies and acted as a reference for you.
Capture Your Positioning so It Can Be Shared
Once you have worked through your positioning, you need to share it across the organisation.
Positioning needs to have company buy-in so it can be used to inform branding, marketing campaigns, sales strategy, product decisions and customer-success strategy.
The signs of weak positioning
- Your current customers love you, but new prospects don’t understand what you’re selling.
- Your company has long sales cycles and low close rates, and you’re losing out to the competition.
- You have high customer churn.
- You’re under price pressure.
Align your positioning vocabulary and let go of your positioning baggage
We have to consciously set aside our old ways of thinking to consider possible new ways to think about a product. This can be done with a common positioning vocabulary.
Get the agreement from the team that the product may no longer be best positioned in the way it was created with a certain market and audience in mind.
Understanding the customer’s problem isn’t enough. It is also important to understand the alternatives you are compared to.
To do that, you need to understand who your real competitors are in the minds of customers. Grouping the alternatives can help the team move to the next step.
Determine who cares a lot
Once you have a good understanding of the value that your product delivers, look at which customers really care about that value.
Actionable segmentation captures a list of easily identifiable characteristics of a person or company that make them really care about what you do.
The segment needs to be big enough that it’s possible to meet the goals of your business and have important, specific, unmet needs that are common to the segment.
