Newsletter · 18 min read

A guide to advanced B2B positioning

April Dunford · Lenny's Newsletter Freemium Advanced

Deals with the four places positioning work actually stalls, including teams that cannot agree on their competitive alternatives. Useful once you have tried positioning and it went nowhere.

  • B2B vendors typically lose about half of all opportunities to whatever the prospect uses today, sometimes over 80 percent.
  • There are only two pure points of value in B2B: help a business make money or save money.
  • Watch for whale bias, where the team positions against one big lost deal to a competitor they rarely meet.
  • About half of status quo losses are customer indecision, not a real vote for the incumbent.
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It answers 10 questions

  1. Should we create a new category or just say we are a better version of something that already exists?
  2. We are changing our positioning. How do I roll it out without breaking the pipeline mid-quarter?
  3. How do I test whether a category name lands before we commit the whole website to it?
  4. How do the best B2B companies get positioning agreed when product, sales and the founders all disagree?
  5. What do I actually change when we reposition? Website, deck, pricing, all of it?
  6. When should we start talking to Gartner and Forrester, and what do we actually say?
  7. Everyone we sell to already uses the big incumbent. How do I position against them without trashing them?
  8. We have three products now. Do we message them separately or tell one platform story?
  9. We pivoted, but the market still knows us for the old thing. How do we reposition without losing the customers we already have?
  10. How do I build a narrative the whole company tells the same way?

Read with it

  1. A five step exercise you can actually run in a room this week, ending in the market frame of reference that makes your... aprildunford.com Article · ~12 min read A Product Positioning Exercise April Dunford
  2. Podcast · 1 hr 15 min The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin Lenny Rachitsky
  3. Kramer's four product types (vertical solution, new way, 10x better, buy versus build) tell you what you are positioning... MKT1 Newsletter Newsletter · 20 min read The MKT1 Guide to Positioning Emily Kramer
  4. Pierri has done this on hundreds of early stage homepages, so the advice is unusually concrete: say when someone would use the... Exit Five Podcast · 53 min How to Master B2B Positioning with Anthony Pierri (Fletch PMM) Dave Gerhardt with Anthony Pierri
  5. Covers how the No Software logo and button became a repeated physical act rather than a tagline. The lesson is that a category... OpenView Article · 10 min read Marc Benioff on How and Why Salesforce.com Succeeded: My Favorite Plays Scott Maxwell
  6. A founder writing up her own repositioning in detail, including naming Intercom and Customer.io directly and landing on a... Userlist Article · 16 min read How We Used April Dunford's 10-Step Method to Overhaul Positioning at Userlist Jane Portman
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