What's Your Positioning?

“We have a positioning problem.”

Dan, my second VP of Sales at Proposify told me this in our one on one. 

It was 2020, and we had been struggling to move up-market and sell to larger businesses. 

We had changed our pricing strategy to be able to sell bigger deals. We completely revamped our Salesforce integration, but things still weren’t clicking in the market.

Most of our growth was coming from small 1-3 seat customers who come in through a free trial and self-serve. Our sales team found it hard to win big deals against established players.

I had heard of the term positioning before but, like most people, it seemed like a vague term that could be used interchangeably with branding or a tagline. 

Then I came across April Dunford. She is “the” positioning expert - at least in SaaS - and wrote the book Obviously Awesome.

We hired April to run a positioning workshop for me and my team, and after two days of conversation, we came away with a positioning strategy that turned out to be the last piece in the upmarket puzzle.

One clear sign you have weak positioning is that customers don’t understand what you do.  Maybe even your internal team doesn’t have clarity - everyone describes the company a little bit differently.

Before our positioning exercise, if I asked a random employee in my company what problem Proposify solves I would get answers ranging from “we help you organize your content” to “we help you close deals” to “We help you design great proposals.”

After we rolled out our new positioning suddenly everyone got it.

Proposify helps growing sales teams get back control over their documents so they can deliver consistent, on-brand, professional proposals, and get visibility into them so deals don’t go dark.

Control + Visibility. That is our positioning. 

Your positioning isn’t a brand or a tagline. Those things come out of your positioning. Your positioning makes it clear what problem you solve, for who, and the value of solving it.

We know it’s working because our ideal customers describe the value Proposify offers exactly how we do. 

When prospects who fit our ideal customer profile (ICP) are looking for a proposal software solution they come in saying “Our sales team is growing and everyone is creating documents their own way. Mistakes are happening. The documents don’t reflect our brand. We have no idea what is going out to prospective clients.”

We can confidently say that our product solves that pain by offering you control over your document workflow so you can send out consistent, on-brand documents that close and get visibility into what reps are sending and how prospects are interacting with them.
Clients who value that buy it.

And that means our positioning works. 

So how do you figure out your positioning?

April’s framework is simple. Follow it by asking yourself the following questions in order:

What are the competing alternatives?

If someone doesn’t use your product, how do they solve the problem? 

It’s been said that every SaaS competes with Excel at the end of the day. In my case with Proposify, our number one competitor is Word closely followed by Powerpoint. That’s how the majority of the world sends out proposals.

You compete with something even if it’s not a direct competitor. If you look at most of your prospects coming in today, are they already using a similar tool or are they using ‘the status quo’ ie: spreadsheets, handwritten notes, etc. Get clear on what this is first because everything else stems from it.

Now, if you’re competing in a well-established category, like CRM or help desk, where most people use a dedicated software solution like Salesforce or Zendesk, then you may want to think of the established incumbent as your primary competitor.

What are your unique attributes?

What does your SaaS company offer that’s unique when compared to the competing alternatives? This is where you get to lay out all your core features, but try to focus just on the ones that are different than what the most common alternatives offer.

In the case of Proposify, we have a centralized library of sections and templates that can be locked down based on permissions, variables that pull the correct contact and pricing information from your CRM, e-signatures, analytics, interactive pricing, and approval workflows. We have more features than this, but these are the ones that differ most from Word and Powerpoint.

What is the value of those unique attributes?

This is how we landed on control and visibility: of all the features that we offer that are unique compared to Word, they all amount to the same thing: locking down what reps can use so they can’t mess up the document or send out wrong information, but keeping the brand on point so Marketing is happy.

So when you list out your features, what value do they create?

The simplest way to think of this is a power-up in the Mario games. The powerup itself isn’t valuable, it’s the ability it unlocks.

Most of us spend more time describing what we do rather than why it matters.

Who cares a lot about that value?

What is the type of customer who values what you offer? This is really hard for most of us to answer. We like to say “anyone can use our tool” thinking that’s a good thing, but until you get really clear on who your perfect customer is, it’s going to be tough to really go to market and win on this positioning.

In the early days after product-market fit, it was really easy for us to scale up to $1M because we were laser-focused on attracting and solving the needs of digital marketing agencies. People told us at the time, “guys, every company writes proposals. The market is so big for this, why are you focused on agencies?” 

But I knew from my prior experience building a generalized web design agency that not having a specific niche would be our downfall.

I fell into the same trap again later when we started moving upmarket; We didn’t have a clear idea of who our perfect customer was other than “big”. Without knowing the “who” we couldn’t predictably scale.

Eventually, we found that the large customers who care a lot about what we do tend to be large blue-collar services like janitorial, landscaping, roofing, etc. - especially when these types of companies are franchised. It’s a lot easier to generate pipeline within these markets because we know which conferences to sponsor, which case studies to promote, and which companies to target in our outbound sales. 

Sales and marketing are way easier when you narrow down your target market.

Finally, what context makes the value obvious to your target segment?

This is where you choose what category you best fit within.

Founders love to say they are creating a new category, but in practice, this is very hard to do and usually fails. Instead, play in a market your customer can understand.

Starting out, Uber was an alternative to taxis.

Netflix was an alternative to home video rentals.

In software, there are firmly established product categories that make it clear to your customers what space you play in. 

For example, Proposify sits firmly in the proposal software category and adjacent categories like quote and esignature. Even though we have document analytics we do not put ourselves in the analytics category of software because that would make it really unclear to our audience what we actually do.

Positioning is really powerful stuff. It can fundamentally change your business. I recommend running through this framework with your co-founder or team and seeing what comes out of it. 

The key in all of this is to test the message with new prospects and see if it really clicks with them. If it doesn’t, you’ll want to go back to the drawing board and figure out why it doesn’t resonate. 

I ran my co-host, Matt Symes, through it in our latest podcast episode. He has been thinking about his positioning for Symplicity Designs. Hearing me walk through the framework may help it become more clear.

If you’re trying to get your SaaS business off the ground and getting product-market fit, positioning is an essential element that will help you win.