Positioning
Positioning is the decision about what a buyer should compare the offering to, and therefore which criteria they will judge it on.
Buyers evaluate by comparison. Positioning chooses the comparison set: name a category and you inherit its evaluation criteria, its price expectations, and its incumbents. That inheritance is the point, it is far cheaper to be the better option inside a category the buyer already understands than to teach a new one.
Positioning is a go-to-market boundary rather than a messaging exercise because it constrains qualification. If the position says mid-market operations teams, an enterprise deal that arrives anyway is not a windfall; it is a deal that will be sold, delivered and supported outside the model the company is built for.
Where it breaks
Positioning lives in a slide while the website, the pricing page and the sales deck each imply a different comparison set.
Related terms
- Ideal customer profile (ICP)
- An ICP is a testable specification of the accounts a company can serve profitably and repeatably, expressed in attributes the revenue system can actually evaluate.
- Segmentation boundary
- A segmentation boundary is an enforced rule that assigns an account to exactly one segment and governs which motion, pricing and coverage model applies to it.
- Go-to-market motion
- A go-to-market motion is a repeatable path by which a specific offer reaches a specific segment, including the channel, the qualification standard, the selling model and the economics that make it viable.
- Total addressable market (TAM)
- TAM is the total revenue opportunity available for a product if every qualifying buyer purchased, useful only when built bottom-up from the ICP definition.
Field notes on this
- Write the stop rule before the pilot starts
A market-entry pilot with no decision rule written before exposure cannot end. It gets extended until it is the default motion, without anyone choosing that.