Positioning is a subtraction exercise

Everyone wants to add

Ask a team what makes them different and you get a list. Fast. Secure. Easy to use. Great support. Good value. Built for enterprise. Also good for small teams.

Every item is true. That is what makes this hard.

But a list of nine strengths tells a buyer nothing. They cannot hold nine things. They will hold one, and it will be whichever one they happened to read first.

Why more claims say less

Think about how someone actually meets your company. They are half paying attention. They are on a phone. They have four other tabs open.

You get one idea through. Maybe two.

So the question is not what is true about you. It is which true thing you want to own. Everything else competes with it for the same small space.

How to run the exercise

We do this in a room with the people who can actually decide. It takes about half a day.

Write every claim you currently make on its own card. All of them.
Sort them into what a buyer would expect from anyone, and what is genuinely rare.
Cross out anything a competitor could say word for word. Be honest here.
From what is left, pick one. Just one.
Write down what you are giving up by picking it.

That last step is the one people skip. Do not. If nobody feels a small loss, you have not chosen anything.

It is meant to feel bad

The moment you pick one, someone in the room will say “but we are also good at…” and they will be right.

That discomfort is the work. A position that costs you nothing is not a position. It is a description.

One client gave up the word “affordable” and it cost them a slice of their inbound leads. It also doubled the size of the deals they did win. They knew that trade going in, because we wrote it down before they chose.

A real example

A tools company came to us saying they were the fastest, most secure, most flexible platform for teams of any size.

Every word was defensible. Together they said nothing.

We spent a day on the cards. What was left was small and specific. They were the only one that kept working offline, and field teams cared enormously.

Before: The fastest, most secure, most flexible platform for teams of any size.
After: The only one that still works when the signal drops.

They lost the ability to lead with speed. They gained a sentence a customer could repeat to a colleague. That is the trade.

What positioning is not

A few things get called positioning that are not.

A tagline. That is an output, and usually one of the last ones.
A list of values. Useful inside the company, invisible to buyers.
A description of your features. That is a spec sheet.
A target audience. Knowing who does not tell them why you.

Positioning answers one question. Why should this person pick you over whatever they would otherwise do, including doing nothing at all?

Test it before you commit

Before rolling a new position across everything you own, try it in one place where feedback comes back fast.

A sales call is ideal. Have someone open with the new sentence, then stop talking. Watch what happens.

If the other person asks a question that shows they understood, it works. If they say “so what do you actually do?”, it does not. That test costs a week and saves a quarter.

What you get back

When you take things away, a few things get easier straight away.

Writing gets faster, because you know what a page is for.
Design gets sharper, because it has one idea to carry.
Sales calls get shorter, because people arrive knowing what you do.
Your team stops arguing about the homepage.

Worth remembering

In four lines

Positioning is choosing what to drop, not what to add.
Cross out anything a competitor could say word for word.
Write down what you are giving up. If it costs nothing, you did not choose.
One repeatable sentence beats nine true ones.

Questions we get asked

Will we lose customers by narrowing?

Some, yes, and you should plan for it. The bet is that being the obvious choice for fewer people beats being an option for everyone. Write the trade down before you make it.

How often should we redo this?

Not often. Every couple of years, or when the market moves under you. Changing your position every quarter just means nobody learns it.

Who needs to be in the room?

Whoever can say no and make it stick. If the decision gets approved later by someone who was not there, you will do the work twice.

Working on this yourself?

We help teams sort this out for a living. Tell us what you’re building, or see how it went for other people.