Seven Seconds: The Art of Product-Market Fit & Strategic Positioning
Many young and growing B2B tech companies often struggle to find product-market fit due to various reasons. B2B markets are complex with long sales cycles and multiple decision makers, making it difficult to find the answer quickly through trial and error. The competitive landscape can also change quickly, requiring constant product adaptation to meet changing market needs. Limited resources and credibility challenges for a new company can also hinder more disciplined market research and validation efforts that established leaders can afford. Overall, these hurdles highlight the importance of strategic planning, customer focus, and more thoughtful market positioning for young B2B tech firms.
Seven Seconds
The problem is, your sales and marketing teams need to nail your unique value proposition – your positioning statement – in seven seconds or less to get anyone’s attention to even consider you as a viable vendor, even before getting to the core features and differentiators of your product. The mistake I’ve seen repeatedly is that young companies often miss the opportunity to position effectively against their competitors because they are only looking through the product lens, and not the unique assets of the company overall. Afterall, your company viability is the first consideration factor of any potential customer. The reason for this in most cases is simple: the messages are typically led by product management or product marketing leaders on the technology side versus looking holistically at the overarching positioning of the company.
Product Versus Company Positioning
Company positioning and product positioning serve distinct yet complementary purposes when it comes to marketing strategy. Company positioning refers to the overall perception and reputation of the company itself against all other vendors. It encompasses the company's purpose and differentiators including but not limited to the product features. On the other hand, product positioning focuses specifically on the individual attributes of the products or services. While company positioning sets the stage for the company’s overarching narrative, product positioning focuses on the unique selling points and value propositions of each individual offering, tailoring them to meet the specific needs and preferences of target customers. In essence, company positioning shapes the company’s strategic reputation and vendor consideration, while product positioning drives the product/service differentiation and market positioning within the company's portfolio. This is a critical difference and is often missed early in company go-to-market.
Use This to Your Advantage!
Not a lot of young company’s do this well, so if you can nail this, you can compete with much more formidable competitors and get your flywheel moving faster. Crafting your company’s brand position is impactful and strategic work but requires discipline unwavering commitment to stick to it. This is the most difficult part actually – giving it enough time so it becomes your compelling reputation in the market! This endeavor requires three critical components; 1) making tough choices, 2) being clear and concise, and 3) having disciple to stick with it.
Tough Choices
First, you need to make choices about specific places you will and won’t compete to narrow your focus and drive relevance for a segment of the market that most needs what you have to sell. It’s hard, especially for your sales team who doesn’t want to limit their ability to hit their comp plan but must be done to provide focus and muster your resources to align for the biggest impact. To do this, you need to focus your business strategy with a unified view of your market segmentation model, prioritize your segments and ruthlessly focus on where you must create beachheads, and where you will take the business more opportunistically. Your sales team will push back initially, but if you do your segmentation work right, they will see the opportunities lie in subsegments where they have a better chance to attract and win business, often with shorter sales cycles and less competition. It's better to dominate a niche and create a great brand reputation with customer that you can build on and extend.
Rule of Thumb: Choosing to be more things to more people means choosing to be less things to more people. This runs counter to where the enabling technology for modern go-to-market is headed. With advanced analytics, hyper-targeting and AI personalization, generic, kitchen sink positioning is expensive and incredibly hard to execute on by your marketing and sales teams. If your sales team is telling you they need broader messaging, it's because effective market segmentation and strategic positioning work hasn't been done yet.
Ten Words
You have about seven seconds to get someone’s attention to click anything online, and the time is shrinking. You can’t afford to have a long-winded, convoluted message about your company and products that includes everything but the kitchen sink. You need to state to your target customer, what you do and why they can’t live without you in about 10 words or less so they will take the next step to learn everything about you. Your positioning statement is the bait, not the full story, which is where many companies get hung up. Think of it as the front door to your house, not everything in it but it should encapsulate the core idea about why you exist and what makes you different from everyone else, not simply what you do. It is the gateway to building your company reputation and enduring success, it’s not simply a marketing tactic.
Discipline is Hard
In the pursuit of creating differentiation and finding your product-market fit, consistency reigns supreme. In bleeding edge areas of technology, you often must create a need or educate buyers about a new way to solve a problem, in addition to leading with a familiar problem they already have. Early on, you will get anecdotal customer feedback about what messages work or don’t work which gives poses you with a messaging dilemma. The filter you must apply is through the customers that fit your intended market segment and buyer personas. This is where young and growing companies can get caught wanting to change their positioning strategy and unique value proposition often. It doesn’t mean the feedback is wrong, what’s missing is the lens you must apply to it and go back to the reasons you made tough choices about your market segment(s) in the first place. The definition of good positioning is, owning a unique position in someone’s brain and you can’t do that if you constantly change the position every time you get anecdotal feedback. This doesn’t mean to ignore customer feedback, it means you must properly filter and contextualize the feedback to make your position stronger, not weaker.
Successful Product-Market Fit Depends on the Right Strategic Positioning
Having a strategic brand positioning means it permeate every facet of the business, from marketing campaigns to sales plays, to customer onboarding and support and interactions across all touchpoints. Consistency breeds familiarity, trust, and loyalty, forging an unbreakable bond between you and your customers. It is the cornerstone for building an enduring brand reputation that has value beyond just your balance sheet.
Brand reputation is a strategic imperative that deserves executive attention. Senior leaders must champion the cause of brand reputation, recognizing its pivotal role in shaping customer perceptions and driving competitive advantage. By embedding brand positioning into the organizational DNA, companies can fortify their market position and chart a course towards sustained prosperity.
In the digital race of B2B technology, building brand positioning and reputation are not accessories; they are the linchpins of enduring success that afford strategic effort across your executive team. By mastering the art of brand positioning, communicating with clarity and conviction, and upholding unwavering consistency, companies can carve out a distinct lead in the markets they serve and attract customers that share conviction about what you have to offer.
This article is based on my new book:
Power of Surge: Five Ways to Supercharge Your B2B Software Business and Unleash Hidden Value.
For more on how to define the best strategy for your B2B software or software services-based company, check out my best-selling book!
