Positioning: How to Explain What You Sell

Weak positioning rarely announces itself. It shows up as friction. In a summary of her conversation on Lenny's Podcast, Dunford describes the signs:

• Prospects need an extra sales call before the idea clicks, or say "Back up and pitch it to me again".
• Prospects compare you to the wrong thing: "Oh, you are like that big platform" or "I can do this on a spreadsheet; why do I need you?"
• Founders, marketing, sales and customer success each describe the product differently.

She also warns against the most common way companies try to fix it: executives in a room agreeing on why everybody loves the product. That produces opinions with no way to test them.

There is a further cost that is easy to miss. In the same summary, read on 2026-10-17, Dunford notes that in B2B sales a large share of deals, which she puts at about 40%, are lost to "no decision", meaning the buyer stayed with a spreadsheet, a manual process or an intern. If your positioning does not explain why to change, the status quo wins.

Positioning also has a time dimension. In her positioning exercise, Dunford notes that markets shift, features that were once unique become standard, and great positioning often becomes weak over time. A product that was well positioned at launch may need repositioning years later.

The first step is to list what customers would actually do if your product did not exist. Dunford frames it as asking who you have to beat in order to win a deal.

The answer is usually broader than the competitor list in your pitch deck:

• Direct competitors that do roughly what you do.
• Adjacent tools stretched to fit, such as a general project tool used as a sales tracker.
• The status quo: spreadsheets, email, paper, or a person doing the work by hand.
• Hiring someone or using an agency.
• Doing nothing and living with the problem.

Ask your best current customers what they used before and what else they considered. Their answers matter more than your view of the market, because positioning is about the buyer's frame of reference, not yours.

Harvard Business School Online's guide to value propositions offers a useful lens here: Clayton Christensen's jobs to be done theory. It holds that customers "hire" products and services to get jobs done. When you know the job, you can see every alternative a customer might hire for it, including ones that look nothing like your product.

List what only you have. Dunford's second step is to list everything that makes your offering unique compared with the alternatives: features, a business model, relationships, a proprietary process or expertise. At this stage, list them without judging who cares.

Translate each one into value. Her third step starts from a blunt observation: customers do not care about your unique features, they care about what those features do for them. Her example: a patented way to query a large amount of data quickly becomes valuable when it means a company can answer a customer's question while they are still on the phone, instead of calling back the next day.

A simple worksheet:

Group the values into a few themes. Most products have two or three value themes, not ten. Dunford notes that unique attributes often bucket into themes of value that are differentiated.

Strategyzer's value proposition work offers a complementary checklist from the customer side: the jobs customers are trying to do, the pains they face and the gains they want. If a value theme does not relieve a real pain or create a real gain for someone, it does not belong in your positioning.

Many customers care somewhat about your value. Some care a great deal. Positioning should aim at the second group.

Dunford's fourth step asks what makes a prospect particularly interested in the value that you deliver. She explains why it matters most for small companies: customers who are a good fit understand your value easily, buy faster and are less likely to ask for discounts. "We sell to small businesses" is not a target. Which small businesses, and what is it about the ones that love you most?

In her database example, the original target was any company with a lot of data. That was too broad, because many such companies only stored data for backup. The customers who cared most were those who needed fast answers from large amounts of machine-generated data, such as banks and security firms looking for breaches.

In business-to-business sales, Dunford describes a two-layer approach. First, segment by firmographics: company size, revenue, geography and similar facts. Then tighten the segment with characteristics that predict need, such as the tools they already use or the roles they have not yet hired. After that, identify the internal champion who will carry the purchase through the organization.

A useful test from her exercise: if the future of your company depended on how much you sold this month, which prospects would you call first, and why? The answer describes your best target customer.

The final component is the market category, or frame of reference. This is where positioning has the most leverage and the most risk.

Dunford's own early experience illustrates the stakes. Her startup built a fast analytical database. Positioned as a database, it was compared with an established database vendor and lost: prospects said they already had a database that did many other things better. Repositioned as a business intelligence tool, the same product put its fast analysis at the center, and the comparison changed in its favor. Nothing about the software changed. The frame did.

She describes several ways to position within a category:

• Win an existing market by taking on the leaders directly.
• Own a sub-segment of an existing market where your strengths matter most.
• Change how the market thinks about the category using your innovation.
• Create a category of your own, which she calls the most difficult option.

PitchKitchen draws a clear line between positioning and category design. Positioning answers who you serve, what specific problem you solve and why you over every comparable option. Category design tries to reframe the market itself. Its advice is that most growing B2B companies need positioning clarity before category design is relevant, because a category name without clear positioning underneath it adds friction instead of clarity.

A practical test for each candidate frame:

1. Does this frame make our main value obvious within one sentence?
2. Who will buyers compare us with, and do we win that comparison?
3. What features will buyers expect us to have, and do we have them?
4. What price will buyers expect, and does it fit our model?

Dunford also warns that changing positioning changes the business: competitors, pricing expectations, sales channels, partnerships and even the roadmap shift with the frame. Treat it as a company decision, not a marketing exercise.

Write it down. Dunford recommends documenting the agreed positioning so there is a record of what it is and why, and dating it so you know when it was last reviewed. A one-page document covering the five components is enough.

Be careful with the classic positioning statement. eCornell's guide offers the familiar positioning statement template: "For (target market), (brand) is the (point of differentiation) among all (frame of reference) because (reason to believe)." The guide stresses that the statement is an internal tool for checking decisions, not marketing copy. Dunford argues against starting with this kind of fill-in-the-blanks statement, because it assumes there is only one right answer for each blank and gives a false sense that positioning is done. The two views fit together if you do the component work first and use a short statement only as a summary of the result.

Test it. Use the positioning in real sales conversations and on your website, then watch for the symptoms that prompted the work. Do prospects grasp the value faster? Do they compare you with the alternatives you expected? Do fewer deals stall in "no decision"? PitchKitchen suggests a further check: whether your best customers can describe your value in their own words in a way that matches what your sales team says.

Turn it into messaging. Positioning is the input to messaging, not the messaging itself. Dunford builds a separate messaging document that references the positioning and goes deeper into value statements for each buyer persona. From there come the homepage headline, the sales deck, the elevator pitch and the answer to "So what does your company do?" Harvard Business School Online calls that last answer one of the main uses of a value proposition.

A simple way to check the final result is to write the one-sentence explanation a customer would give a colleague:

"It is a [market frame] for [target customer] that [main value], unlike [main alternative], which [limitation]."

If your team, your customers and your website all say roughly that sentence, the positioning is working. Teams that want structured help running this exercise can use workshop-style playbooks, such as the strategy skills on Quanta Intelligence, but the inputs have to come from real customers and real lost deals.