Everyone understands that your choice of market category is an essential aspect of positioning. That said, I think that sometimes companies focus too much on the category at the expense of getting very clear on the story around their differentiated value. 1/ What is the job of a market category? It's is a starting point for customers. It takes a prospect that doesn’t know too much about our product and places them on a path that leads to our differentiated value. 2/

Happy Friday Twitter! You asked for it - here are my top 10 threads on Positioning 1/ At its core, great positioning is about communicating your company's point of view on a market -

https://twitter.com/aprildunford/status/1517121923750244352

2/

I've been thinking about Mastodon vs Twitter and positioning this week. I think it's a neat case study on how we can't really position a product purely by saying it's "not xyz" - where xyz is another company. 1/ To be clear - I don't believe that Mastodon positions itself as "not Twitter" but many folks are thinking about it that way because they don't really understand it yet. The problem with this type of positioning is it doesn't help us understand the Value of the other offering 2/

If your company has only one product how does the company positioning differ from the product positioning? What happens when you have many products? Here's my thinking on that 1/ In single-product companies, company positioning equals product positioning. Trying to force a separation is both expensive and potentially confusing to the market. For example - many never understood what Research in Motion was vs Blackberry and frankly, it just didn't matter 2/

One neat positioning trick that most companies don't take advantage of is a good product diagram. These can be super-powerful if done well. Here are some examples (mainly good plus one not so good) for you to think about 1/ A good product diagram can be a powerful positioning asset. It can position your company, your product, and also - if you are getting really fancy - your competitors. You need to build the diagram with intention - what is the message you are trying to communicate? Example: 2/

Product walkthrough demos generally suck (I've seen a lot of them). I think doing a good one is easy. Here's how I like to think about it - 1/13 Customers come to the first sales meeting with one big question in their minds - Why pick you over the alternatives? Most product walkthroughs don’t answer that question 2/

Saying "just talk to customers" feels like a lazy copout to me. Some companies think customers know everything about why their product is valuable. Some companies think they know everything about why their product is valuable for buyers. The reality is always in the middle. 1/ The "We know what's good for customers" crowd often ignores the complexity of the customer's environment, processes, context, and how that impacts the value of what a product might enable for buyers. 2/

Oh man, I get asked about this a LOT. This is probably hard to answer in Tweets but here goes - In my experience, it's not usual to have a product that serves multiple customer segments (marketers, recruiters) and sometimes those use cases (thing A/B) are different 1/

https://twitter.com/ottokainen/status/1552888666158399488

But what really matters here is the Value - i.e. Saves you Y hours a week by eliminating a tedious task. If the value is the same, the positioning is the same for both segments. You might create some content aimed specifically at one or the other, but the core is the same. 2/

A: Buyers don't care about features, they care about the value those features enable. The core of good positioning is differentiated value 1/

https://twitter.com/ottokainen/status/1552888054116978688

We may have thousands of cool differentiated features, but we try to keep the number of value themes we message around small - ideally 3 or less. Buyers can't digest, understand and remember more than that 2/

Consumer marketers are often tapping into a range of emotions (status, self-worth, love, acceptance). In B2B, the grandaddy of emotions is fear. Fear of making a bad decision and the consequences of making a mistake. Fear of looking stupid. 1/ A buyer that doesn't feel confident that they are making the right purchase decision will default to the status quo. "No decision" is the lowest risk decision a buyer can make. This is often not a vote FOR the status quo - it's a vote AGAINST making a potentially bad choice. 2/

The most common positioning problem I see at B2B startups is misalignment. The founders, sales, marketing, product, all have slightly different views on competition, ideal customers, market category. This misalignment causes a bunch of problems 1/ Interdepartmental squabbling - marketing and sales are spending too much time arguing over target customers and value props. This conflict reduces cooperation and all the good stuff that happens when sales and marketing see eye to eye 2/

Positioning changes with the maturity of the company. Early stage startups can keep their positioning fairly loose, and the more traction you have, the more you can tighten it up. I think about it a bit like this - 1/ Before you launch, ideally, you've done customer discovery and have a "Positioning thesis." The thesis outlines the alternatives to your solution, the value that only you can deliver, and what customers you believe will care a lot about that value. But it's just a thesis. 2/

Startups often avoid talking about competitors because they a) don't want to call attention to other alternatives, or b) don't want to be seen as trashing the competition. Those reasons make sense but it's possible to position against alternatives in a way customers appreciate 1/ Research tells us that 40% of B2B purchase processes end in "no decision." That's not because there aren't good options. It's because there are so many options, buying teams can't agree on the approach to solving the problem in order to narrow down a short list. 2/

This week I'm thinking about positioning, B2B complex deals, and personas. If we have multiple folks involved in making a purchase decision - do we need different positioning for each persona? How do we handle that in our marketing? I have opinions about this 1/ In a typical enterprise B2B sale there are 7 stakeholders. There's an economic buyer (who holds the budget), end-users, sometimes other departments like IT, Purchasing, Legal, Security - that all need to agree for a deal to get done. Each might have different requirements 2/

I've been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between Vision, Strategy, and Positioning. I think sometimes in startups we get them mixed up or we think they are all the same. I think about it like this... 1/ Your vision is what you'd like the company will be in the future. It's important for folks internally to know where the company is headed and also for investors that are taking a bet on this future version of the company 2/

Positioning is more important for a considered purchase than it is for a non-considered purchase. In a considered purchase the stakes are higher and we need to justify a purchase to other people. Positioning helps us do that 1/ If I buy a pack of gum, the stakes are low so I don't need to weigh my options too much. If I don't like my choice, I try to pick another one next time. I don' have to defend my choice to anyone else. Distribution, price, brand, matter more than positioning but 2/

I think a good demo call with a customer does a lot more than just demo the product - it's your chance to position your product, your startup, and all the alternatives in the market. In startups, we generally stink at this 1/ Problem 1: Most startups jump straight to the demo without any context setting at all. This is a missed opportunity imo. You first want to frame the conversation around your view of the real problem customers are facing and why other ways of solving it fall short 2/

There's been so much written about storytelling but so little focused on how we know we are telling the right stories. The goal of B2B storytelling isn't just to engage and entertain - it's to help customers buy 1/ Often B2B buyers have never purchased a solution like ours before. They first have to make sense of their options and decide what criteria they should use to build a short list. This is very very hard to do 2/

I've done a number of positioning workshops lately where the team has come with a detailed analysis of a very long list of competitors. So long in fact, that I think it's almost a problem... 1/ Positioning is about figuring out how you're going to stand out from the competitive alternatives, so it makes sense that you'd want to understand what those competitors are. But your positioning should only consider the real alternatives in the minds of prospects 2/

Last week I had a handful of discussions on Segmentation vs Personas. These two get really muddled, particularly in startups. In my opinion startup folk spend way too much time on personas and not nearly enough time on segmentation 1/ Segmentation lets us take a market and split it into distinct groups of buyers. If you take "restaurants" as a segment - I can split that into "fast food", "family casual", "steak house" etc. Personas represent buyers within a segment "owners", "chefs", "waitresses" 2/

There are 2 main reasons you want to get your positioning solid. 1) It helps your sales and marketing teams understand where to focus and 2) It gives customers an easily understandable framework for making choices 1/ Positioning defines 5 key things - Competitive Alternatives, differentiated Features/Capabilities, Value, Ideal Customers, and Market Category. These are the inputs to everything we do in marketing and sales. 2/