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Breaking into GTM

What is positioning in plain English, and why does everyone insist we have got it wrong?

Positioning is the context you give a buyer so that your strengths look obvious. It is the answer to 'what kind of thing is this and who is it for', and everything else, your tagline, your website, your pitch, is downstream of it. Most teams get it wrong because they start from what they built rather than from what a customer would use instead of them. The practical version has five parts: the alternatives buyers actually consider, what only you can do, why that matters to them, which customers care most, and what market you want to be judged in. Get those five right and the words write themselves.

Go deeper

3 resources, 3 link-checked.

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

The cleanest statement of the boundary you are asking about: positioning is the input, and messaging, taglines and branding are all things that happen after it. Read this before you let anyone book a messaging workshop.

An Introduction to Positioning

From aprildunford.com by April Dunford 10 min read

  • Positioning has five components: competitive alternatives, differentiated capabilities, value, target segment, and market category.
  • Positioning is not messaging, a tagline, a brand story, or a mission statement.
  • The category sets the expectations: the same features are judged differently as email than as chat.
  • It works like an opening scene in a film, telling the buyer where they are before anything else lands.
Open aprildunford.com →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

The clearest short explanation of why market category is one of five interdependent positioning pieces, with a real repositioning story attached. It is also where Dunford makes the case that most companies should not invent a category.

A Quickstart Guide to Positioning

From aprildunford.com by April Dunford 12 min read

  • Positioning has five components: competitive alternatives, differentiated features, value, target segment, market category.
  • Always start from competitive alternatives, or you get positioning that sounds good internally but is not differentiated.
  • 90 percent of tech companies that IPO'd in the past five years were positioned in existing markets, not new ones.
  • Dunford's own repositioning took a product from under 2M dollars to close to 80M dollars in 18 months.
Open aprildunford.com →

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The same ground, at another level

How positioning and messaging reads from a different seat.

Our positioning reads fine on the website but every rep says something different on calls. How do I fix that? That gap is almost always a sign the positioning was written for the website and never translated into a conversation. Fix it by building the pitch... Doing the work 4 resources → We are changing our positioning. How do I roll it out without breaking the pipeline mid-quarter? Sequence it: sales first, marketing second, brand last. Reps carry the new story to live deals before the website changes, because they can adapt i... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How do the best B2B companies get positioning agreed when product, sales and the founders all disagree? They stop arguing about opinions and go find the buyer's view, because the only competitive alternative that matters is the one the prospect would ... How the best do it 4 resources →

People also ask

How do I write a one-line description of what we do that a normal person actually understands? 4 → Our positioning reads fine on the website but every rep says something different on calls. How do I fix that? 4 → How do I build a sales deck that is not just a tour of our features? 4 → We are changing our positioning. How do I roll it out without breaking the pipeline mid-quarter? 4 → Do we need to create a new category, or should we position inside one that already exists? 4 → How do the best B2B companies get positioning agreed when product, sales and the founders all disagree? 4 →

Also in Starting Up

The same ground, over in Understand your customers, our Starting Up track.

How do I talk to customers without them just telling me what I want to hear? 24 → What is an ideal customer profile and how do I define mine? 2 →
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