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If the company mainly sells a group of products together, I would position the company first, and worry about how much to focus on positioning products individually later.
In startups, the head is the CEO and/or the founders. In larger companies, the head is usually the division or business unit leader and occasionally the head of marketing or head of product.
In my experience, the head of marketing is often the first to feel the pain of weak positioning and therefore often kicks off a positioning discussion inside the company.
Marketing, sales and customer success interact with customers at very different points in the buyer journey.
highly recommend bringing in an experienced facilitator to guide the positioning discussion. Having someone from outside the company facilitate the discussion will make the exercise much more productive and balanced.
I also hear how helpful it is for the facilitator to gently challenge long-held assumptions that seem cast in stone and untouchable.
you have managed to gather the senior team to work on strengthening a product’s positioning, the last thing you want is to spend half the day arguing about what the heck positioning is.
The reality is that most products can be many things to many types of buyers. There are lots of examples of products that have historically been sold for one purpose, but as markets shifted, they became better known in a completely different market.
Market confusion starts with our disconnect between understanding the product as product creators, and understanding the product as customers first perceive
Start by calling out where your history appears in your current positioning. Is your current market the one identified when you imagined the product? Do you use terminology and describe features in the same way as when you started? Being conscious of the presence of your history in your current position will help everyone be open to alternatives.
Customers don’t always see competitors the same way we do, and their opinion is the only one that matters for positioning.
The features of our product and the value they provide are only unique, interesting and valuable when a customer perceives them in relation to alternatives.
the foundation is the problem your customers are trying to solve,
problems are the root, why not start by asking customers what problems they’re trying to solve?
Understanding the customer’s problem wasn’t enough—to really understand how they perceived our strengths and weaknesses, we needed to understand the alternatives to which they compared us.
For many new products, the answer is “use a pen and paper” or “hire an intern to do it.” Some
intern” and “do it myself with Excel” and another group called “use a small-business accounting solution” that includes QuickBooks, FreshBooks, etcetera.
Once you have a list of competitive alternatives, the next step is to isolate what makes you different and better than those alternatives.
Your opinion of your own strengths is irrelevant without proof.
Focus on the characteristics of your product or company that drives a potential benefit—ideally those features are based on objective facts and are provable.
If an independent reviewer or analyst stated that your product is easier to
use, that’s a fact.
If a customer says in an approved quote that your customer service is much better than anoth...
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Concentrate on “consideration” rather than “retention” attributes.
Retention attributes are features that aren’t as important when a customer is making an initial purchase decision, but are very important when it comes time to renew. These include how easy it is to do business with a company and the quality of customer support.
Features enable benefits, which can be translated into value in unique customer terms.
An engineer by training, I often viewed features and the benefits derived from those features as interchangeable early in my career.
An actionable segmentation captures a list of a person’s or company’s easily identifiable characteristics that make them really care about what you do.
Best-fit customers are easiest to sell to and retain.
The reality is the exact opposite. The broader your focus, the more difficult it is to connect with prospects and convince them that your solution is the best one for them above all others.
encourage teams not to get their positioning too far ahead of their business objectives. Think about your sales targets for this year and how many sales you need to make to achieve them. Could you hit your targets by focusing on only your best-fit customers? If the answer is no, you need to broaden your definition
For example, companies in highly regulated markets have to care more about information security; managers with very large teams struggle more with team communication and collaboration; smaller companies without in-house IT support need solutions that are easy to set up and run, etcetera.
In general, the segment needs to meet at least two criteria to be worthy of focus: (1) it needs to be big enough that it’s possible to meet the goals of your business, and (2) it needs to have important, specific, unmet needs that are common to the segment.
With abductive reasoning, you choose a market category by isolating your key features and their value, and asking yourself, What types of products typically have those features? What category of products typically deliver that value?
Positioning yourself in a growing market has obvious benefits: a rising tide of customer interest, media focus and buzz, and the appearance of being new and cool—who doesn’t want that? But be careful—simply wanting to belong in a market doesn’t make it the right one for you.
Only choose a market if it makes your strengths obvious.
Prospects are comparing alternatives using a set of features where you come out on top.
If you are launching a new product, particularly if you are a small business just starting out, the Head to Head style is rarely a good choice.
Without a clear competitive advantage, however, even a large company will have to be prepared to fight hard for every win and cross their fingers for the leader to make a mistake.
Word-of-mouth marketing happens most naturally in tight market subsegments.
Just because your initial target market is narrow doesn’t mean you will stay narrowly focused forever.
You might start out targeting a very narrow segment but once you have enough customers there, you can start going after adjacent markets where the success you have built so far is relevant.
Second, there needs to be clearly definable groups of customers with unique needs that are not addressed by the market leader.
The subsegment needs to be easily identifiable—meaning if I had to create a list of prospective buyers, I could figure out a way to do that.
Last, it has to be possible to demonstrate that this subsegment has a very specific and important unmet need.
These buyers were getting along for the most part by buying a solution that didn’t do everything but was likely “good enough” for their business.
Convincing them to switch will require showing them that you have deeply understood their specific pain and have fully solved the problem.
The work of this style is first to educate the targeted subsegment about how a general-purpose solution is not meeting their needs.
