What is Positioning?

Positioning is the choice of market context that makes a product’s value obvious to the buyers who care most about it: which alternatives it’s compared with, what’s different, why that matters and to whom.

At a glance

• April Dunford, author of Obviously Awesome, defines it as how your product is a leader at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about.
• It isn’t messaging, a tagline or a brand story. Those come after it.
• Dunford breaks it into five components: competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, target customers and market category.
• The value proposition and the sales pitch are built on top of it.

How positioning works

Dunford’s point is that a category label sets off assumptions before the buyer reads another word. Call a product a CRM and buyers assume Salesforce is the competitor, the head of sales is the buyer, and the price should be lower than the leader’s. Good positioning sets off assumptions that are true about you.

Her method runs the components in a fixed order, because each one depends on the one before it:

1. Competitive alternatives: what customers would do if you didn’t exist, including a spreadsheet or nothing at all.
2. Unique attributes: what you have that those alternatives don’t.
3. Value: what those attributes let the buyer do. The “so what” for each one.
4. Target customers: the segment that cares a lot about that value, not just a little.
5. Market category: the frame that makes the value obvious to that segment.

A positioning example

Dunford tells the story of a database first sold as a “Microsoft Access killer”, which barely sold. Calls with 100 customers found six using it heavily, all to sync orders and service updates from laptops in the field. Repositioned as an “embeddable database for mobile devices”, the same product took off.

She ran a similar play at Janna Systems. Pitched as enterprise CRM, it lost every comparison with Siebel. Positioned as CRM for investment banks, where its way of modeling relationships mattered most, it had a clear advantage.

Common positioning mistakes

• Filling in a positioning statement. Dunford calls the fill-in-the-blanks template pointless, because it assumes there’s one obvious answer for each blank.
• Phantom competitors. Listing companies you never meet in deals waters the position down. Use the alternatives buyers actually consider.
• Ignoring “no decision”. Dunford estimates enterprise software loses about a quarter of deals to no decision, so position against the status quo as well as rivals.
• Inventing a category too early. A new category has to be taught before it helps. Most companies start in an existing one.
• Targeting everyone who might care. The best-fit customers care a lot, and that should show in your ICP.

How positioning shows up in a revenue system

Positioning gets tested in the market every week: in which accounts reply to outbound, which objections come up on calls, and which deals stall. Our sales pods run the list and the message inside partners’ tools and report those numbers weekly, which is where a weak position shows itself first.

Terms that sit next to positioning

Positioning narrows the ideal customer profile and the buyer personas inside it. It decides your choice of vertical, sits at the start of your go-to-market plan, and gets carried into deals on a battlecard.