How to Nail Product Positioning
Obviously Awesome is the best business book I've read. It created a whirlwind of ideas for how to build a start-up.
The measure of a good business book is "how much can I go and put into practice?".?To answer the question,?Obviously Awesome?should be read with paper and pencil at the ready - you won't want to lose the many actionable trains of thought.
Positioning is important. Customers need to quickly understand what your product is, how it is unique and why it matters to them.
Otherwise, they won't buy.
It might sound intuitive - but it is not. The definition of how you are the best at something that a market cares about is often incorrectly positioned. Often, you're too close to your product to realise that the market doesn't think about it the way you do.
Obviously Awesome?is for start-ups that want to grow revenue, marketers that want to generate more leads, salespeople that want to make more sales and businesses that aren't connecting with their customers.
Great positioning considers the following:
How is the problem viewed and solved?
Understand what your best customers might replace you with to understand how they categorise your solution.
For many new products, the answer is "use a pen and paper" or "hire an intern to do it".
Create a list of solutions your customers see as an alternative and rank them from most common to least common - if some have similar characteristics, group them.
It's important to understand what customers compare your solution with because that’s the yardstick they use to define “better”.
How are you uniquely different?
Customers don’t care about your unique features - they care about what those features can do for them. Your positioning needs to centre on the value you alone can deliver to customers.
The things that make you unique are the reason your offering deserves to exist in the first place.
List everything you have that no other solution does. The key is to ensure each feature is different when compared with the capabilities of alternatives. Do not list benefits like "outstanding customer service" or "ease of use" - these are not unique features - your opinion of your strengths is irrelevant without proof.
Then, put these benefits into the context of a goal the customer is trying to achieve. Value could be “sharp photos even when printed or zoomed in” or “a self-service portal that saves you money on customer service”.
A handful of themes will emerge in the value those features deliver to customers.
For example, if you have attributes like “available 24/7” or “works without an internet connection” these might both provide value to customers who value accessibility - you could clump those attributes into a group.
The objective is to see patterns and shorten the list to one to four value clusters.
In positioning a product, take the most critical things that make it special and worth considering and bring the resulting unique features to the front and centre.
Who?really?values your uniqueness?
Many kinds of prospects care about what you deliver, but only some of them?really?care. Understanding how to find those prospects is the key to maximising return on your distribution efforts.
Now that you have captured what you can uniquely deliver for customers, the next step is to identify a target customer most likely to love your offering. For start-ups this is critical.
You have limited resources to market and sell your products - so find customers that will easily understand your value and purchase faster.
Understanding how to find those prospects is the key to maximising revenue return on your marketing/sales efforts.
List the characteristics that you use to identify a target prospect. Include obvious things like industry, location, and company size - but also specifics to identify customers within these obvious groups.
In B2B, it could be the way they sell, the products they sell, other products they have invested in or the skills they have or don’t have inside their company.?
In B2C, a group could include combinations of things such as other brands they own or like, stores they buy from, the job they hold or entertainment preferences.
An actionable target market should answer the following question:
If your company was running out of cash, what customers would you focus on and why?
If you have already launched, make a short list of your best customers. They understood your product quickly and bought from you quickly.?
What market shows off your value?
Now that you know who values your uniqueness, choose a market frame of reference that makes your unique value completely obvious.
Picking a market is like giving customers an answer to the question, what are you? If you say my product is a type of CRM, your prospects immediately compare you to competitors in that market.
Products placed in the CRM market get compared against Salesforce and so forth.
Customers will make assumptions about your value, competitors, features and pricing based on the market.
There are always multiple possible markets, some of which will make your value more obvious than others. The key is to put your differentiated value at the centre of your positioning.?
You can try to win an existing market by taking on the leaders head-to-head or by choosing a sub-market in the overall category - avoiding taking the leader head-on - or you can use your unique innovation to change how people think about the entire market category.
Bringing it together:
The positioning template
Once you have worked through your positioning, share it across the organisation. Positioning needs company buy-in to inform branding, marketing campaigns, sales strategy, product decisions and customer-success strategy.
The sales story
When selling to businesses, a sales story generally follows an arc. It starts with a definition of the problem that your solution solves.?
The story then moves to how customers attempt to solve the problem today and where the current solutions fall short.
The next stage of the story is ‘the perfect world’ - where you describe the features of a perfect solution, knowing what you know about the problem and the limitations of current solutions.?
The sales story then introduces the product or company and positions it in the relevant market category.?
Read this book
Obviously Awesome is a golden egg - a rare business book that does not overexplain or bore at any point.
Dunford writes succintly, moving from value add to an explanation before offering proof.
It will take you just three hours to read and if you're anything like me, you'll take a heap of actionable notes down.
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