Positioning your offering in a market sets up who your competition is and why you are a better choice for your target buyers. Done really well, it also positions your competitors too (thread)
In B2B often buyers have never purchased a solution like yours before and they struggle to make sense of what they should pay attention to and what they can ignore. Helping them do this is valuable and often essential to getting on a short list. (2)
As vendors we know the solution landscape better than buyers do. We can tell them - (for example) "these solutions are high performance but inflexible and these other ones are flexible but the performance sucks" and that's valuable, precisely because most vendors won't do it (3)
So while you are positioning your offering, you can position your competitors as well. They might be "highly customizable" but that also makes them "complex." "Proven and reliable" is often also lacking in innovation ("legacy" is the "OK Boomer" of enterprise IT-speak) (4)
In startups we often shy away from talking about competitors but if you know customers are evaluating them, why not give them some context? Your sales team should have the confidence to say "Pick them for this and pick us for that" and only chase deals they can win (5)
Strong positioning helps everyone internally and externally understand what you do best and for whom. At the same time, done smartly, it can really shine a light on the weaknesses of your competitors. /end
