Positioning

“If you have category and positioning wrong, you can be the best at just trying to crank the, grind the funnel, but it just doesn't matter if you haven't gotten those, that the first, first key decision, right?”

“The clearer they get on the person that they're serving, And what they stand for, the more likely it is they're going to find customers. It's counterintuitive.”

“Pricing is the biggest lever in SaaS. And I think positioning is number two.”

“The best way I've found to position your product is to really understand what your most beloved fans see in it and use that as the crux of the positioning, which you're aiming to express to people who don't understand it yet.”

“It's almost impossible to create a net new idea in someone's head. It's much easier to take a couple of existing ideas and put them together. So it's much easier to say it's like, Jaws meets Star Wars, or it's Uber for pets, or something like that, than to com…”

“If you are impacted by pricing, and you want to change your pricing, there's a lot to that. You have to think it through, you have to, it'll probably take you a few weeks to both think it through, and then implement it, and then communicate it, and this and th…”

“But I don't think that marketing should be able to change positioning or look at positioning or do it on their own. They could try, but it won't stick because sales won't believe in it. CEO won't believe in it. What we actually need is a cross-functional team …”

“So we actually think that positioning is simply where you are on a grid. Reframing is drawing the grid.”

“There is positioning and there's branding. Those two things are actually really separate. So most of the things that we confuse with positioning are actually things we do with positioning once we're done with it, but positioning is an input. So if you think ab…”

“So I can choose to position it as a muffin. It's the same product, but the assumptions about that, the competitors are different. Your value is different. The assumptions that customers have about that product are different because I've placed it in a differen…”

“I would say that most companies just don't think about positioning at all. In the vast majority of cases, the companies that I work with, the positioning feels obvious. It feels like you couldn't possibly position it as anything else.”

“And everybody looks like a genius when they're in a good position and everybody looks like an idiot when they're in a bad position.”

“How do you position yourself and anchor yourself in your prospects minds by doing one thing differently and doing one thing really well.”

“Your positioning and your pitch needs to really work for the champion. Because if it doesn't, you don't even get to talk to anybody else. Like you don't even get to go near anybody else. We don't make it on the short list and you don't get the deal cooking. Bu…”

“Well, so generally, if the sales pitch isn't working, it's because the positioning was weak.”

“Sales is often a symptom. It's not the root cause. The root cause could be that, you know, you've not done the positioning right. You've not allowed the customer to have the conversation placed in the right box in their head.”

“If you're getting more discovery calls and people are saying, do you do this? And you're like, no, absolutely not. Something's off. And it's time to readdress that positioning and clean things up a little bit.”

“Positioning is, is, you know, somewhat like messaging in some ways in that it's not a static thing. Like it changes over time. Like your product itself, it doesn't stay the same. The market doesn't stay the same. And so things will shift over time. And so you …”

“And the interesting thing about this segue was that refusal to position it at a micro level left it up to the customers to decide what it was. So even when we saw it was like, okay, so it's human transport. We get that. But like, what should I compare it to? S…”

“I actually think the first step in a good positioning exercise is to really understand what do we have to position against? So put another way, it's like saying, what do I have to beat in order to win a deal? So in positioning work, we call this competitive al…”

“And then the last piece of positioning, of course, is market category. And so again, a lot of people will just start with market category and then try to back up, which I think is crazy because, and then we don't have anything, we don't have any way to judge t…”

“And I would honestly say, if you can wait to do your new site until after you figure out your new positioning, do it, because mixing those two together, This is actually kind of the second or third version of a fully designed site that we kind of went through,…”

“And like, also if you're like writing positioning at your company, or if you're on marketing your company and you can't tell me what the product is, why it's better, who it's for, like, Go figure that out. Like that's what the homepage of your website should c…”

“So there's always somebody you can compare yourself to Who's doing the exact optimal thing in the moment, but since the environment and the context in which we operate is always changing, eventually positioning wins, but it never wins in the moment, but it win…”