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.
3 hand-picked resources, 3 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
Why we picked it The clearest single hour on how positioning, segmentation and personas differ and how they connect to the sales call. Dunford has done this with 200+ companies including Postman, so the examples are concrete.
On Lenny's Podcast by April Dunford ~60 min
Open lennysnewsletter.com →Why we picked it Explains why positioning is not messaging, branding or a vision statement, which is the exact confusion behind the question. The email versus chat comparison makes the idea of category context land in one paragraph.
From aprildunford.com by April Dunford ~10 min read
Open aprildunford.com →Why we picked it The shortest path to the five components of positioning, with the Microsoft Access killer story that shows how a reframe turned a dying product into hundreds of millions in revenue. Read this before anything else on positioning.
From aprildunford.com by April Dunford ~10 min read
Open aprildunford.com →How positioning and messaging reads from a different seat.
The same ground, over in Understand your customers, our Starting Up track.
