I’m sure you’ve been there, sitting round the table listening to a leadership team under pressure share their worries. You hear stories of competitors eating away product differentiation, sales cycles dragging out too long and teams pulling in opposite directions as the funding runway shortens terrifyingly quickly.
From your perspective, all symptoms point to a single problem. Slow to convert, hard to describe but little reason to choose over your competitor? It’s not a disaster you say, you’ve just lost market-fit. It’s time to tune up your positioning again.
So far so simple. But as you’ve probably experienced, building consensus to take meaningful action about positioning is a really big step.
“Positioning work often creates resistance long before it creates results.”
It’s certainly not unusual to encounter resistance to positioning work. I used to dismiss it as a simple reaction to workload. Often exec teams have only been involved in “major” positioning work, perhaps at the start of a venture or in the business case for a product launch. These are big strategic calls, so it’s understandable that some people conflate positioning with mountains of work and risk.
But I’ve learned to take a more nuanced view of this resistance as I’ve got older. So much so that sometimes I’m the one doing the resisting.
When left unattended, everybody’s positioning will weaken over time. We all have to buckle down and review from time to time. That said, very few people proactively track the health of “their positioning” in real time. We behave like we will never have to take action.
In fact, it's surprising hard for any one individual in a business to experience all the signals of weakening positioning. Sales teams watch how customers respond, product teams track usage of features, while marketing teams listen intently to what competitor’s say. Everybody owns a different piece for the positioning puzzle. And a single piece is never convincing enough evidence to suggest that it's necessary to take action now.
So when somebody collates the signals and suggests repositioning, it’s usually a prickly surprise. There is cognitive dissonance between each exec's personal experience and the imagined workload or risk of updating their positioning. Deep inside, their brain is telling them that the proposed solution is way out of proportion to the problem they can see. Their push back "to wait and see" comes from a genuine place of truth.
But hesitation simply pushes the problem out to be solved in the future, heightening market risk rather than mitigating it.
I’ve become adept at handling "not now, lets wait and see" conversations over the years. My aim is never to force through unmerited work, but rather to face the team with two much more profound questions. Instead of asking if we should review positioning, I ask them when they should update their positioning and why that's the right time to take action.
This little flip is gold.
Because it reminds that team that their positioning is alive; continually shifting relative to the needs of their customers and the actions of their competitors, regardless of what they hope or plan. Much like painting the exterior of your home, it’s up to you to choose when to do it. Too early and you’re creating excess work, too late and you’ve let the rot take hold.
Knowing when to build a consensus for action depends on the whole exec team sharing a common threshold for commercial discomfort. How pressured does it have to get before we take action? As in any strategic work, a few common rules agreed in advance make life so much simpler later on.
I like to set some business rule around three sets of "positioning triggers". For each trigger, just define what the threshold is to consider it worthy of action.
Developing a new product
Launching a major product upgrade
Significant changes to prices
New competitor enters market
Competitor enters or exits your value segment
Significant impact on market affordability
Sales are too slow to convert
Products are too similar to competitor
Proposition is too hard for market to understand
I like to use a simple spreadsheet that forms part of the strategy stack, naturally the more quantitative the tolerance point is for each trigger, the easier it is to administer. In more sophisticated teams it’s possible to calculate the cost of inaction, but don’t sweat it. The very process of deciding this in advance is the exact groundwork you need. It familiarises your colleagues about the reality of maintaining a great position in market and eliminates the opinions of the loudest voice in the team.
Above all, it means no more prickly surprises and push back when a positioning refresh pops back onto your strategic agenda in the coming months. After all, a little less noise, a little more action, is good for everyone’s business.
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