Product positioning is a less understood but incredibly important aspect of your organization’s ability to sell your product to your ideal customer.
You can think about it like the opening scene of a movie – where the context is set by an opening line, identifiable scenery, time-specific objects, and so on. Just like an opening scene, positioning sets the context of your company for prospects who know nothing about you.
By the time they get to sales, they know your product is perfect for them. And they’re ready to purchase.
What Is Product Positioning, Really?
People think product positioning is the same as messaging, a tagline, a market strategy, or – most commonly – branding.
Let me clarify: it is not branding.
Normally, we confuse positioning with what are actually outputs of positioning. For example, I can't create messaging until I understand who the message is for, what the message is, and what the value is that we're trying to get across.
“My definition of positioning is that it defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about.”
Positioning requires understanding the competitive analysis and how your company sets itself apart.
And baked into this are a number of different, very important, questions:
- Who do I compete with?
- How am I different?
- What differentiated value does my product deliver for customers that others can't?
- What customers am I trying to go after – and what's the market I intend to win?
You need to answer these questions before we can do anything for a company’s positioning. You wouldn’t be able to build a sales strategy, a marketing strategy, or content, or even run a campaign until you know the answers to those questions.
Positioning is the foundation for everything you do in Marketing and Sales.
To Watch out for: Signs of Weak Positioning
In my 25 years of working with Marketing and Sales teams, I’ve approached each new case by assessing where the positioning was falling flat because that’s always the weak link.
I figure this out very quickly by sitting in on sales calls. During those calls, I observe these two phenomena:
1. Clear confusion from the customer
Ten minutes in, you can already hear the customer repeatedly ask questions like, “What is it again?” or “Can you say that again?”
In the first part of the pitch, the Sales rep had to repeat information. Then go back through their slides. Or just repeat the whole thing! Taking so much time to explain “what you are” is a clear sign of poor positioning.
2. Grasping for comparisons
You can often feel customers grasping for comparison. They might say something like: “You're like Salesforce, right?”
The Sales rep then has to spend time explaining how their solution differs from the competitor.
This is an indication that there is something in the way the Sales rep is pitching that sparks a set of assumptions that says you’re something you’re not. There's a gap between what the customers are trying to figure out and what you actually are.
The resulting rejections
At times, the Sales rep finishes the pitch, and people will end the conversation, not understanding why they would pay money for your solution.
“The worst one is when people get what you are, they just don't think your value is valuable.”
A common objection comes up when the person feels like they are being pitched “the fantasy.” They say something like, “If you could do that it would be amazing, but I don’t believe it can be done.”
They acknowledge that it would be fantastic to have your solution but don’t believe it’s right for them. You've got a prospect that should be right in your sweet spot, but they’ve disqualified themselves because of poor positioning.
How Jobs-to-Be-Done Underpins Positioning
The five components of positioning are: competitive alternatives, unique capabilities, differentiated value, target market segments, and market category.
What struck me when I sat down to find an answer for each component is that each piece actually has a relationship with the other.
For example, where does differentiated value come from? It doesn't come out of thin air. It clearly comes from your differentiated capabilities. These two are tied. You can't do one without the other.
Clay Christensen’s Milkshake
At McDonald’s, they did jobs-to-be-done interviews when they realized people were ordering milkshakes in the drive-through in the morning. They discovered people were ordering a milkshake as their breakfast.
They were able to then build a better milkshake based on the findings of these interviews. And this is where I realized something… it wasn’t actually a milkshake.
It was a smoothie.
The milkshake phenomenon was actually a positioning problem.
This was when I realized the answer to the five components loop of doom should instead begin with competitive alternatives.
To nail your positioning, you need to first know who or what you’re up against.
Ask yourself: what would your prospects be doing if you didn't exist?
Nail Your Product Positioning With These Two Tips
After you’ve determined what you’re up against, you’ve got to tackle these next steps.
Define what makes your product special
…and then figure out which context is best to frame those qualities.
What wins a cake contest?
It’s definitely not a cake pop. They’re too small to be a proper piece of cake – you want a big slice. It is a dessert, after all.
But if we look at what makes cake pops special, it isn’t the cake at all. A cake pop is very different from a cake on a stick. And we can say this because we know what’s differentiated and special about this product.
Once we reposition it as a lollipop for grownups with their coffee, we can picture it perfectly and see its unique value. And you can clearly see it in the middle of a perfect market category, rather than over in a cake competition.
Find your differentiator. Then find the perfect market category to give it context.
Convince leadership about the importance of positioning
You can't fix a positioning problem on your own because the whole company will have to be bought into any new strategy. And the whole executive team needs to work on it.
There's no point in even trying to do a repositioning without that.
Start off by sitting in on meetings and sales calls and collecting information about how customers perceive the product and company. Then casually approach different team executives and ask them if they noticed any of the issues you’ve collected data about. Do this with important stakeholders in the company.
Once you’ve planted seeds in each department about the positioning, approach the positioning topic lightly with leadership. See if they would be willing to get in a room with other team leads to explore the topic.
With a clear structure, start the meeting by mapping the competitive alternatives. From there, you can move through the five components of positioning.
As You Iterate, so Will Your Positioning
Positioning isn’t set in stone. It’s an iterative process along with product development, figuring out customer fit, and developing new hypotheses that need to be tested.
In the beginning, you might only have a positioning thesis and a product, which will change with time and experience.
Your teams might check on it every six months or so to see if the competitors, your capabilities, or even competitors’ capabilities have changed. It’s essential to stay up to date with what is differentiating or not between your products.
And what usually happens over time: your positioning evolves.
