Why positioning matters a lot in sales

You don’t hear about this topic a lot in the sales world.

But positioning is probably the #1 thing either helping or hurting your sales efforts.

Usually it’s discussed more as a marketing topic.

But you know as a founder, you wear every hat.

So in this newsletter, we’ll dive into what is positioning, why it matters in sales, and the different ways positioning manifests itself throughout your go-to-market motion.

Table of Contents

• What is positioning?

• How to do product positioning

  • Alternatives

  • Unique Features

  • Why it Matters

  • Who Cares?

• Positioning is Everything

• Where does positioning show up?

What is positioning?

Positioning is mission critical to the success of an early stage startup. If you get it wrong, you’re invisible. Positioning is the work that’s involved in defining the problems you solve, the capabilities you have, the uniqueness of your features, the outcome they drive, and the people who really really care about it.

One of the unique parts of running sales as a technical founder is you don’t have the support you usually get once there’s a sales and marketing team in place. You probably don’t have a product marketer yet, working on your positioning, messaging, and sales narrative.

You need to create this from the ground up, yourself.

There are selling systems out there designed for sales professionals, but they generally miss this critical component of early-stage founder selling. They typically work with sales leaders who have teams, and assume Marketing is already coming up with positioning. This is a major downside of a lot of sales trainers, coaches, and legacy methodologies.

The flip side is you have amazing resources, consultants, and coaches out there that can genuinely help with positioning and messaging. The problem there is that the resources are focused on the process to come up with positioning and go as far as crafting the sales pitch, but don’t really connect the dots with the rest of the sales cycle. You still need to figure out how your positioning helps with discovery, demos, pricing, email follow-ups, implementation calls, prospecting, etc.

What we’re going to do in the next two sections is go through the core elements of crafting your positioning theory, and we’ll relate it back to the FOUNDER Operating System™ so you know where and how to pull your positioning throughout your sales process.

How to do product positioning

It’s important we spend a bit of time going through how to position your product in the market. You’re early, and likely competing against much bigger players. We need to make sure we emphasize your uniqueness to win those early deals.

Your prospects need to understand your unique point of view on the market. You need to be different from the alternatives. You need to provide more value. Why else would they make the switch, or go with a lesser known product?

Your sales process is designed to help your buyers understand how you’re different, why your way of solving the problem is the best way, and why they should care.

Let’s go through a simple process for getting to “good enough” positioning and start testing it through your sales process. 

**NOTE: You might want to create a spreadsheet or table with the following headers in columns so you can follow along with the exercise.

• Alternatives

• Unique Features

• Why it matters

• Who cares

Alternatives

In this section, you’ll do an exercise to understand the different types of alternatives your prospects have to solve their problems.

If your prospects or customers didn’t use you, what would they use? How would they solve the problem? How would they run the workflow?

Oftentimes we think of direct competitors, but for the majority of deals that you’ll run, you’ll find out that direct competitors are typically not the way they’re currently solving the problem. There are typically four buckets of competition:

1. Manual/Do it Yourself: Biggest culprit here is Excel or Google Spreadsheets. Most B2B SaaS companies compete with spreadsheets. I’ve seen a ton of executive meetings run out of Excel. It’s crazy really, but it’s an incredibly powerful business tool. You might also come across people doing stuff manually, maybe using Slack, Google docs, emails, etc., to make up for a broken process.

2. Legacy Solutions: These are typically the very old software solutions that your parents/grandparents used to buy. They’ve been around. They’re safe. Sometimes you’re displacing these.

3. Makeshift solutions: These are not quite direct competitors, but if you finagle them in certain ways, you might be able to get by. When I was doing work with the founders at Savio.io, a product feedback and roadmapping tool, they came across this a lot. Using Salesforce CRM to capture product feedback requests from sales. Or using ClickUp (general project management software) to store product feedback. These tools are usually lacking a complete solution to the problem you’re solving.

4. Direct Competitors: These are tools that solve the same problem as you, in a very similar way. If you’re in a new market, you might not have a ton of these. If you’re in a crowded market, then there will be many. It’s important that you find out the thing that makes you unique against them, or you’ll continuously lose to folks that have better resources than you.

The alternatives part of product positioning relate to the Facts part of FOUNDER. It’s something you think about and collect when planning your sales process. It’s also info you’ll get from prospects when doing your discovery, so you understand their context. When you use this in your sales pitch and demos, it also demonstrates your expertise in the space.

Unique Features

In this section, you’ll do an exercise to list off every unique feature you have against the alternatives. This will help you craft your pitch and demo later.

What features do you have that your competition doesn’t? What makes you unique? What’s hard to replicate? This is your unique approach to solving the same problem your competition is also solving. Dig deep to understand this.

Do the exercise against the four competitive groups. It will be easiest against “do it yourself” because they usually don’t have any of your unique features. Which is why selling to greenfield (aka “not using anything”) is always the easiest sales cycle to target.

It will be the most difficult against direct competitors, because they’re solving the same problem as you, and have a full solution set for it. This is where you’ll really need to spend the most amount of time. For Savio, it was how they sorted and organized product feedback using revenue data. Only a few competitors could do it, and didn’t do it well. It wasn’t the major focus of their software. So it made sense for Savio to use this as the major unique feature against direct competitors.

This part of positioning relates back to Facts, and Objectives and Pain part of FOUNDER. You’ll be using this to craft the Solution part of your demo and sales pitch. For example, if a unique feature of yours is an integration with Salesforce CRM, then that relates to Facts - your prospect needs salesforce in order to use this feature. Another example could be if your feature helps segment product feedback based on Salesforce attributes, then this could relate to Objectives and Pains because the prospect has to do the collection of data manually today.

Why it Matters

In this section, you’ll do an exercise to tie your most unique features to outcomes and problems solved. This will be used in your demo and sales pitch.

What value or outcome do your prospects get? What impact does it have on their business? This is where you tie your features to something bigger for the prospect and company. If you have results from case studies, then this is where you would use it. 

In order to do this, start grouping features together that have commonality. You want to see patterns that emerge.

For Savio, a product management software, once we looked at what value the features brought, or what problems it solved, it started becoming obvious. There was a set of features that helped centralize feedback. There was another set of features that helped Product Managers structure and roll-up feedback. And there was a set of features that tied product feedback to revenue metrics in the CRM. So we grouped everything in these three buckets and started outlining the problems they solved, and the outcomes they helped achieve.

Try to get it down to 2-3 value points. More than this and your positioning starts becoming murky.

This part of positioning relates back to Objectives and Pain, Uncovering Impact, and Negative Consequences of FOUNDER. You’ll be using this to craft discovery questions, frame your demo, tee up your sales pitch, and much more. For example, at LevelJump, a sales enablement platform, our main use case was onboarding new sales reps. The value or outcome of our unique features was around measuring the revenue impact of training programs. If measurement was painful to a prospect, this feature set mattered to them. If they were onboarding a lot of sales reps, this mattered to them. If their current sales onboarding program didn’t drive the results they wanted, this mattered to them. If they weren’t hiring, none of this mattered to them.

Who Cares?

In this section, you’ll do an exercise to list the different types of companies, functions, and job titles that would care a lot about the outcomes of your unique features. This helps you define your ideal client profile, which helps with qualification, executing some of the FOUNDER framework, crafting your demo, and your sales pitch. It can also help you with targeting if you’re doing outbound prospecting.

This is where you start defining the types of companies, functions, and people that will care a lot about your unique value. Are there different size companies that would benefit from your value? Maybe industries? Maybe mid-level management? Specific titles?

You can also look at more qualitative or situational attributes as well. Are they hiring? Are they growing? Do they use a specific tool?

For Savio, a product management software, there are different groups and companies that would care about the 3 different value points. For example, a growing company that’s hiring a lot of sales and support people would care a lot about centralizing and structuring product feedback. A VP Sales would care a lot about attaching revenue to feature requests to better align with product leadership on what belongs on the roadmap.

This section of positioning will help you create ideal client profiles, personas, and identify company triggers. Knowing who to target will help you tons with marketing, advertising, and prospecting.

This part of positioning relates to Facts and Reaching a Decision part of FOUNDER. You’ll be using this to craft discovery questions about the decision making process, for qualifying deals, and for multi-threading (working with multiple stakeholders in a deal).

Positioning is Everything

At this point, you should have a spreadsheet or table with columns for each of the steps of positioning. It should be full of alternatives, unique features, outcomes, and people who really care about the outcomes.

Try to identify themes. What stands out? I like to summarize the spreadsheet in 1-3 differentiating points. You don’t want more than 3. This will be the high-level summary of the exercise and will be present in everything you do in sales (and even marketing).

Each differentiating point summary should include:

• Topic

• The problems it solves for prospects

• Outcomes it drives for prospects

• Your features that drive the value, solve the problem, deliver the outcome

Here’s an example of one of the differentiating points for Savio, a product management software company that organizes and prioritizes product feedback linked to revenue metrics in your CRM:

• Topic: Prioritize around revenue

• Problems it solves: Not knowing which features to prioritize because you don't know which ones are the most valuable. 

• Outcomes it drive: Build the right product for your ICP, increase revenue

• Unique features: Integrates with Hubspot and Salesforce, Filter feature requests by CRM metrics

**NOTE that this positioning canvas isn’t the same as messaging and copywriting. It’s a frame of reference for how you define your product to prospects and customers. Messaging is what you decide to say, copywriting are the specific words you choose. Positioning is a frame of reference.

If you want to take a deep dive into how to do this very well, I highly recommend you read April Dunford’s book, Obviously Awesome. Or you can learn more about positioning as part of your sales process through the FOUNDER Operating System™ ebook.

Where does positioning show up?

Positioning is everywhere. It’s the anchor to your messaging, your sales story, and any copywriting you’ll be doing. It highlights the deep pains your prospects feel when they have the problem you solve.

The key with positioning is to make it consistent across every single communication channel you have, so that the story flows throughout your sales and marketing efforts.

Here’s how positioning shows up:

• Sales Story: Usually this is the first step to translate positioning into something more practical. Write down a strategic narrative or sales story that articulates everything in your positioning. The polarizing insights, the alternatives in the market, the real problem as to why none of these are great, the solution, then your solution. Tell it as a story that a prospect can see themselves in. This could end up becoming a pitch deck, or could just be a loose script.

• Website: Your website homepage should hit on the key points of positioning. Who would care a lot about the product, what problems do they have, what unique features do you have, what are the reference points against alternatives.

• Pricing and Packaging: Pricing is product. Product is pricing. And everything is positioning. How you decide to package your features, and the pricepoint you decide, all anchors your key positioning themes.

• Targeting/List Building: How you come up with your list of prospects to outreach is fully dependent on the “who cares a lot” part of your positioning. And clearly defining the problems will help you think of “in what context the problem shows up.”

• Outreach messaging: The key pains you decide to focus on during your outreach should be relevant to the people who care a lot about the problem you solve.

• Content marketing: Your blog posts should help funnel folks through the various problems and pains you solve. It should include how-to articles specific to your product, how-to complete a job in general (without your product), why those jobs are difficult/hard/fail, and what is the job (glossary content). It should have alternative pages against the competitive set. All of this will anchor into your positioning, and will focus on “who cares a lot about the problem.”

There are tons of other ways positioning shows up. What discovery questions you ask, how you demo, whether or not you do a trial, etc. It all stems from a strong position.

So don’t skimp out on this step. It’s not a big company exercise. It’s the blueprint that glues everything together, and makes sure that there’s a consistent flow between all of these disparate communication channels.

Let me know what you think of the newsletter! Always want to cover topics that you care about.

For more practical early-stage sales tips, connect with me on LinkedIn.

If you’re looking for more hands-on help implementing your first sales process, reach out for coaching packages.