Positioning

Most founders don't call me about positioning. They call about leads.

There aren't enough of them, or there are plenty and they're the wrong ones, or the right ones show up and then go quiet somewhere around the second call. Those are real problems and I take them seriously. A surprising amount of the time, they're also the first visible symptom of something further upstream. The business never got specific about who it's for, and why that person would buy now instead of next year.

That's what I mean by positioning. A tagline is part of it, a brand refresh rarely helps, and a persona deck with a stock photo of "Marketing Mary" is decoration, however much Mary seems to enjoy her latte. Positioning is the set of decisions that tells everyone in your company who to spend time on and who to politely let go. When those decisions are clear, marketing knows what to say, sales knows who to call back first, and the forecast starts to mean something. When they're fuzzy, every team fills the gap with its own guess, and the guesses don't match.

What I look for first

When I start on positioning with a founder, I'm usually looking for one of three gaps.

The first is the gap between the audience and the buyer. These are different groups more often than people expect. The audience is everyone who likes what you say. The buyer is the smaller group who has the problem, the budget, and a reason to act this quarter. You can build a big, warm, engaged audience that almost never buys, and it will feel like progress the whole time. I wrote about the version of this I caught in my own launch in Optimism doesn't buy.

The second is the gap between the market you chose and the market your tools can see. Every targeting tool, scoring model, and data provider has blind spots, and they're very good at quietly suggesting you narrow your market until the blind spots stop showing. It feels like focus, and it's usually closer to giving up on the market you wanted. Don't shrink the market to fit your data is about the time a tool told me to do exactly that, and what we did instead.

The third is the gap between what you offer and what the buyer expects by the time they're talking to sales. Somewhere between the ad and the proposal, the promise drifts. Marketing describes one thing, sales sells a slightly different thing, and the customer bought a third thing they assembled in their head, like flat-pack furniture with the instructions missing. The symptom shows up as "lead quality," and the fix is rarely at the top of the funnel.

Why this sits upstream of everything else

I spend a lot of my time on revenue systems, the CRM, the handoffs, the reporting. I'd love to tell you the systems work comes first. It doesn't. A beautifully instrumented pipeline pointed at the wrong buyer will tell you, very precisely and to four decimal places, that things aren't working.

Positioning is the input every other system depends on. Your scoring model encodes a belief about who's a good fit. Your sales process encodes a belief about how that person decides. Your content calendar encodes a belief about what they're worried about. If those beliefs were never written down and agreed on, each system ends up encoding a different one, and you get the very modern experience of having excellent data about a business nobody can explain.

How to use these essays

The pieces in this section are about the decisions underneath positioning, more than the copy that comes out of it. Each one starts from a real situation, a client engagement or something I got wrong in my own business, and works toward the pattern you can check against your own.

If you're a founder reading these with a specific problem in mind, here's the honest test. If you can say, in one sentence, who your best customer is and what was happening in their business the week they decided to buy, you're in better shape than most. If that sentence takes a paragraph, or the answer changes depending on who in your company you ask, that's the place to start.

And if it changes depending on who you ask and nobody's noticed yet, that's the part I'm usually hired for.