Why positioning projects fail

Hi, I’m James. Thanks for checking out Building Momentum: a newsletter to help startup founders and marketers accelerate SaaS growth through product marketing.

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I’ll admit it. I’ve worked on numerous positioning projects that completely drowned.

On some, the messaging was obviously not right. On another, the messaging never really took hold and was left rotting in a slide deck somewhere.

Here are five reasons that positioning projects can fail.

Internal assumptions, over external evidence

Positioning by assumption doesn’t work. But still, teams lead with internal “knowledge” first, and simply don’t know what they don’t know.

Sure, it’s easier. “Insights” reverb around the room as ideas riff off each other. Excitement builds, the group gets rowdy as confirmation bias sets in.

This is capital-D Dangerous. While the team might have customer-facing exposure or have been a customer before, they’re biased and blind to the day-to-day challenges and opportunities that real prospects are facing.

Most commonly, this means your team overestimate the maturity of the average customer. Hoping to sell their ‘bleeding edge tech’ to early innovators doesn’t work when customers are actually still extremely early in working out what their problems are (let alone how to solve them).

This is why I make clear that we will willingly gather assumptions – but we’ll validate with new market/customer research to make sure we’re seeing the full picture.

No hard decisions

Positioning (and product marketing) is strategy. And strategy is just as much what you say no to, as what you say yes to.

Trying to be everything for everyone, wanting to throw in every feature, and suggesting every message is a must-have … it’s distracting for everyone involved.

Often this isn’t accidental… it’s a sign of cautiousness, a lack of conviction. Unfortunately, this means your positioning becomes meaningless – it’s much better to be the thing for someone instead.

Rather than allow positioning to end up messy, I’ll constantly bring up examples where having a niche, refined ICP has a positive impact on momentum. I’ll also gather challenges they’re experiencing that are often implications of poor positioning, so we bring hard choices back into the real world.

Crafted by marketing, but never activated with sales

Positioning that’s created in a vacuum might be aesthetically perfect and pleasing to the marketer, but will likely be ineffective in the field.

If sales don’t have confidence in the messaging, they won’t embrace it. Trying to encourage adoption is like pushing a rock up a hill.

Most failures come from creating positioning in an ‘about us’ deck that doesn’t translate well into the actual pitch. Messages designed to create an impressive sense of superiority are perceived as fluffy nonsense in a sales conversation – and are summarily skipped.

New positioning requires a considered rollout with sales reps being brought along the journey. The evidence behind the updated direction has to be shared – reps need to build empathy and your messaging needs to feel ‘real’. Not activating evidence is a surefire way to positioning failure.

I always involve sales reps from the frontline in my positioning processes. Not only do they have accurate knowledge of the challenges today’s customers are facing, they’re a good benchmark for confidence in the new direction – and can help act as a champion in the sales team.

The CEO wasn’t involved

Every great project I’ve been involved in had significant involvement from the CEO. Every less-than-great project had CEOs with tangential involvement – enough to have a say and promote/demote ideas, but not enough to take responsibility for the project.

If the project is a success, everything is good! If not, then the CEO has plausible deniability.

Ideally, CEOs are involved all the way – including the customer/market research calls that you should undertake in your project. This way, it’s real for the CEO and they can operate with up-to-date evidence of what customers want, rather than the idealised persona that exists in their head.

This hasn’t been something I’ve required – but will be moving forward. Especially when the business is growing, CEOs are often undertaking investor discussions at the same time as trying to grow sales – and ensuring we’re communicating the right thing, to the right audiences in the right way, is important.

“We’ve always done it this way” (and other bad advice)

One of the most annoying things about working on projects is that if a team has done positioning before – regardless of its actual success – the past process they used is their benchmark.

Any bad advice they took away from those projects gets regurgitated, leaving those with more effective processes and frameworks to spend a ton of time countering, rather than moving forward productively. This also affects the confidence of the positioning team, wondering if there is another/better way (which can lead to infighting).

Many marketers claim to be experts at positioning, but not all have the right experience for your business. B2C vs B2B, industry expertise, SaaS vs on-premise, SMB vs Enterprise, and many other variables can vastly impact the process, experience, and results that you’ll gain from your project.

I don’t think this will ever get easier. All we can do is help teams understand how modern frameworks, with the best practices we’ve learnt, make it easier to attack the challenges the business is facing.

Positioning doesn’t have to be hard

I actually think positioning is quite simple. Find your best-fit customers, understand what’s going on, and tell them exactly how you help them overcome challenges and achieve better outcomes.

Check out my Customer Value Positioning framework for a how-to, and everything you need to make it happen – and give your project the best chance of success by avoiding the issues above.

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