Maximize Your Business Impact with Effective Positioning

Positioning of a product impacts every group in the organization. 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 prioritization

The best way to understand competitive alternatives is to answer the question, What would our best customers do if we didn’t exist? The answer could be that they would use another product that looks like a direct competitor with you.

Your opinion of your own strengths is irrelevant without proof. Some groups at this stage will list features that are either difficult to prove or really more of a benefit than a feature. “We provide outstanding customer service” is probably the most common of these, followed by “very easy to use.” 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. For example, I have yet to meet a company that believes they provide terrible customer service.

If you truly believe that your company is better at customer service, how would you go about proving that? Do you have more support people than your competitors and can you prove it Do your support people have certifications that others don’t? Ease of use is another “feature” that I believe is really a value. What is it about your product that makes it easier to use and how do you prove it? Do your competitors’ products require training and your product doesn’t? Can you quantify how long it takes to become proficient with your product versus alternative products?

Moving from “features” to “benefits” and then to “value” often confuses people, particularly folks who come from a technical background. An engineer by training, I often viewed features and the benefits derived from those features as interchangeable early in my career. For many consumer technical products, features are presented as valuable in their own right-but only because we do the translation to value automatically in our heads. For example, phone makers have often represented the quality of their cameras by talking about the number of megapixels. Consumers have been trained to translate megapixels to photo quality and therefore believe that cameras with more megapixels take better photos. Digging a bit deeper, the value of “better photos” for most consumers means sharper, more detailed images when printed or zoomed in.

To group points of value, you need to take the perspective of a customer. What points would naturally be related in the minds of your customers and prospects? For example, if you have attributes like “works on any mobile device” or “works without an internet connection,” those might both provide value to customers who would like to use the solution with field workers in remote locations or locations with intermittent Wi-Fi or cell access. You could clump those attributes in a group called “supports remote environments.”

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. For consumers, a segmentation could include combinations of things such as other brands they own or like, stores they buy from, the job they hold or their music or entertainment preferences. For businesses, it could be the way they sell, other products they have invested in or the skills they have or don’t have inside their company.

Think about the difference between your best-fit customers and your other customers. Your other customers think your product is OK for the price, but they will jump ship if a different company offers a cheaper or better version. These customers are harder to close business with- they take their time making a purchase decision and frequently ask for a discount. In short, they like your product but they just don’t love it. You can target your marketing and sales programs at them, but selling to them and keeping them happy isn’t going to be easy.

Now think about your best customers. Everything about doing business with them is different. They understood your product immediately and couldn’t wait to get their hands on it. They bought quickly and instead of asking for a cheaper price, they might have told you your product should be priced higher. They tell their friends about your product, and not only do they not churn, they will fight anyone who tries to take it away from them. They don’t just like your product, they loooooove it.

Marketing and selling to these folks doesn’t take much effort once you’ve found them-they are “buying” as much as you are “selling.” If you have limited marketing and sales resources land let’s face it, almost all of us do, even if our business is large), it makes sense to spend them on prospects that are most like your best-fit customers, provided there are enough of them to meet your sales objectives.

In the context of this exercise, a “market” needs to be something that already exists in the minds of customers (except in the very rare case where you make a conscious decision to create a new market-which we’ll discuss later in this step). We position our offering in a market to trigger a set of assumptions-about competitors, features and pricing-that work to our advantage. By choosing to position within a specific market, you’re giving your prospects clues about what products they should compare you with, your key features, your price and your benefits. Those comparisons help customers quickly figure out what your product is all about and whether or not they should consider purchasing it.

Pay particular attention to adjacent markets that are growing quickly. 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.

You are aiming to be the leader in a market category that already exists in the minds of customers. If there is an established leader, your goal is to beat them at their own game by convincing customers that you are the best at delivering the solution.

Source : Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It by April Dunford

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