Positioning: Say Who It Is For and Who It Is Not
"It's for anyone who needs it" is not a market. It is a confession that you have not decided.
Ask a struggling founder who their product is for and you get a paragraph. Ask a founder who is winning and you get a sentence with a number in it. That difference is not a communication skill. It is the difference between a company that has made its decisions and one still hoping the market will make them.
Positioning is the frame a buyer puts around you in the first eight seconds. Get it right and everything downstream gets cheaper: ads convert, demos shorten, referrals actually refer, and your roadmap stops being a debate. Get it wrong and you spend your entire budget explaining yourself to people who were never going to buy.
You do not get to pick whether buyers categorise you. You only get to pick whether you did it or they did.
CB Insights' post-mortems put "no market need" at 35 percent of startup failures and "got outcompeted" at 20 percent. Both are usually positioning failures wearing different clothes. There was a need, but not in the group you spoke to. There was a differentiator, but the buyer never understood it because you described it in your language rather than theirs.
Gartner's B2B buying research adds the constraint that makes this urgent. Buyers spend roughly 17 percent of their purchase process talking to all potential suppliers combined. Split across three vendors, any one of you gets about 5 or 6 percent of their attention. You are not being evaluated carefully. You are being sorted quickly, into a category, by a distracted person with a shortlist.
That last pair comes from Bain's delivery gap study: 80 percent of companies believed they delivered a superior experience, while 8 percent of their customers agreed. Read it as a positioning statistic rather than a service one. Ten times more companies believe they are differentiated than have any customer who noticed.
The five components, in the order that matters
April Dunford's framework in Obviously Awesome is the most usable positioning method I have found, because it starts from the buyer's frame rather than yours. Work through the components in sequence. Each one constrains the next.
1. Competitive alternatives
What would this customer do if you vanished tomorrow? Not the funded competitor you watch on social media. The real alternative, which is usually a spreadsheet, a manual process, a junior hire, an agency, or nothing. If your buyer's alternative is a spreadsheet, then every comparison you make against a software competitor is invisible to them, and every feature you built to beat that competitor was built for an audience of one: you.
2. Unique attributes
What do you have that the alternatives do not? Features, yes, but also data, integrations, a delivery model, a licence, a distribution relationship. The test is brutal: could your closest alternative write the same sentence on their site without lying? If yes, it is not an attribute. It is table stakes.
3. Value
Translate each attribute into what it does for the customer, in their units. "Real-time sync" is an attribute. "Your finance team stops reconciling two systems every Friday, which is four hours a week" is value. Value has a number attached or it is decoration.
4. Best-fit customers
Who cares about that value so much that they would be annoyed if they could not buy it? Describe them by things you can filter a list on: headcount, tooling, business model, regulatory obligation, transaction volume. "Innovative mid-market companies" is not a filter. "Insurance brokers with 10 to 50 staff who still key claims into two systems" is a filter, and you can build a target list of them by Friday.
5. Market category
The category you claim tells the buyer which mental shelf to put you on, and shelves come with expected features, expected competitors and expected prices. Claim "CRM" and you inherit a comparison with the market leader and a price ceiling. Claim "claims intake automation for brokers" and you inherit a comparison with the manual process, which is slow, expensive and has no marketing department.
Clear win, broad audience
You beat the alternative and everyone qualifies. Rare and expensive: you now compete on budget, and the biggest budget wins. Works if you are already the category leader.
Clear win, narrow audience
A specific buyer with a specific alternative you beat on a specific dimension. Short sales cycles, high win rates, referrals that compound inside one industry.
Unclear win, broad audience
"A platform for teams." Nobody can tell what you replace. Every deal is an education project you pay for. This is where most pre-traction startups sit.
Unclear win, narrow audience
You know exactly who you serve but not why they should switch. Cheapest problem on this grid: ten customer calls usually produce the answer.
Two axes decide how hard selling is: how specific your buyer is, and how clearly you beat the alternative they already use. The narrow, clear quadrant wins fastest. The broad, unclear quadrant is where marketing budgets go to die.
Score your position honestly
Tick only what is true today, on your live site, in your current deck. Not what you intend to write this quarter.
0 to 2. You are in the invisible quadrant. Stop all paid acquisition this week and run ten customer calls before you spend another dollar. 3 to 5. Half positioned. Pick the two unticked boxes with the lowest effort and close them in the next ten days. 6 to 7. Sharp. Your remaining gap is usually the willingness to turn away bad-fit revenue. 8 of 8. Positioned. Now go narrow on channel: one audience, one message, one place they gather.
Eight observable tests, not opinions. Each is either true on your live site and in your last five deals, or it is not. Most pre-traction companies score two or three, and the fastest fix is almost always item one: find out what your buyers actually used before you.
Narrow is not small, narrow is fast
Founders resist narrowing because it feels like shrinking the prize. Run the arithmetic instead of the feeling.
Version A: you target "small businesses." There are millions, so the market looks huge. Your message must be generic to cover them, so your cold email converts at 0.5 percent, your demo-to-close rate is 8 percent, and your churn is high because half the people who bought were never a fit. Sending 2,000 emails produces 10 conversations and closes 0.8 customers.
Version B: you target "insurance brokers with 10 to 50 staff running two claims systems." There are perhaps 4,000 of them in your country, which feels terrifying. But your email names their exact daily annoyance, so it converts at 4 percent. Your demo speaks their language, so close rate is 25 percent. The same 2,000 emails produce 80 conversations and 20 customers. Twenty five times the output from a market 99 percent smaller.
And that is before compounding. In version B your customers all attend the same two conferences and read the same trade publication, so your referrals stack inside one network. In version A every customer is an island.
Call your last ten customers and ask two questions. "What were you doing about this before you found us?" and "What nearly stopped you buying?" Write the answers verbatim, in their words, in a single document. The first question gives you your real competitive alternative, which is usually not what you assumed. The second gives you the objection your positioning has to pre-empt. Then rewrite your homepage headline as: "[Product] helps [specific customer] [do specific thing] without [the alternative's specific pain]." If you cannot fill the blanks with words from that document, you do not have positioning yet, you have preferences.
The three positioning mistakes that cost the most
Positioning against a competitor nobody in your segment uses. You are on a comparison page with a company your buyer has never heard of, arguing about features they will never use. Meanwhile the actual competitor, the spreadsheet, goes unmentioned and wins the deal.
Claiming a category you cannot lead. Calling yourself a CRM invites a comparison you lose and a price you cannot charge. Categories carry expectations, and inheriting the wrong ones costs you the deal before the first call.
Letting revenue redefine you. A big customer from outside your segment arrives, pays well, and asks for three things nobody else wants. Two quarters later your roadmap serves them and your positioning has drifted to fit a single logo. This is how companies become agencies with a product attached. Take the money if you need it, but name it as a one-off in writing, and do not let it move the site copy.
Gartner's B2B buying research: buyers spend about 17 percent of the process with all potential suppliers, so a single vendor on a three-way shortlist gets roughly 5 to 6 percent of their time. Positioning is what has to survive being read in that sliver, without you in the room.
That figure is the argument for specificity in one image. You are not writing for a careful evaluator. You are writing for someone skimming three tabs before a meeting, and the tab that says exactly what it is and who it is for wins by default.
How to know it is working
Positioning is not a document, so measure it in behaviour. Three signals tell you it landed. Sales calls get shorter, because you stop explaining what you are. Inbound leads start describing themselves in your words, which means the frame transferred. And your win rate against "do nothing" improves, which is the only competitor that never goes away.
If none of those move within six weeks of a repositioning, you did not reposition. You rewrote the tagline.
The takeaway
- Start with the real competitive alternative. It is usually a spreadsheet or doing nothing, not a funded rival.
- Describe best-fit customers with filters you can build a list from, never with attitude words.
- Narrow markets convert far better. Twenty five times the output from a market 99 percent smaller is normal, not exceptional.
- You get about 6 percent of a B2B buyer's process. Your position has to work without you in the room.
- Measure it in shorter calls, inbound leads using your language, and wins against doing nothing.
Frequently asked questions
What is product positioning?
The context that tells buyers what you are, who you are for, and why you beat the alternative they would otherwise pick. April Dunford breaks it into five components: competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, best-fit customers and market category. It is the frame everything else sits inside, not a tagline.
How do I choose an ideal customer profile?
Rank existing customers by how fast they bought, how much they pay and how long they stay. The segment that wins on all three is your profile, whatever you intended. Then describe them by observable filters (size, tooling, business model, obligation) so you can build a target list, not by words like innovative.
Does niching down limit growth?
It shrinks the list and raises the percentage that buys. Specific messages get believed, referrals concentrate inside one network, and roadmap decisions get obvious. Companies expand from a beachhead they own. Almost none expand from being vaguely useful to everyone.
What is a competitive alternative?
What the customer does if you do not exist. Usually a spreadsheet, a manual process, a junior hire or nothing at all. Your positioning must beat that, because that is what the buyer is actually comparing you against.
Most startups are not beaten. They are never understood.
Kill My Startup traces how vague positioning turns into slow sales, high churn and a burn rate nobody can explain.
Buy on Amazon →Sources
- April Dunford, Obviously Awesome, the five components of positioning.
- Gartner B2B buying research on how buyers allocate time across the purchase process.
- Bain & Company, the delivery gap: 80 percent of companies believe they deliver a superior experience; 8 percent of customers agree.
- CB Insights, "The Top Reasons Startups Fail," on no market need and competitive displacement.
- Al Ries and Jack Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.