#186 - Positioning for Category Leadership and True Differentiation, with Matt Hodkinson, Co-Founder and CEO at Tylt

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Finite Podcast. I'm sure you're all thinking about how your business is positioned at the moment as the pressure to conform to AI powered messaging is rife. I'm sure you understand the power of effective positioning, but our guest today really brings it to life with advice on what separates successful positioning from bad. Matt Hodkinson is a positioning specialist, being co founder and CEO of Tilt, which helps consultancies achieve category leaders. He provides examples of good and bad positioning in B2B tech and details how brands can bring their positioning to life beyond the tagline on their homepage. Whether you're considering repositioning or wondering how you can better differentiate against your competitors, this episode is for you. I hope you enjoy. Hi Matt. Welcome to the Finite Podcast. Hi Jody, thank you for having me. It's great to have you here. Today we're talking about a topic that I'm sure is at the top of a lot of our listeners minds and get into why in a second. But before we do, as we always do, please can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, your background in marketing and how you got to where you are now. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Matt Hodkinson from Tilt and we're a specialist positioning consultancy, tend to work with consultancies and technology firms on how they're perceived by their target clients. Something that's often overlooked, something that is misconstrued as we're going to get into today, I'm sure comes out of my background. I started my career really as a technology consultant. I spent 17, 18 years as a contractor across various industries, worked in quality assurance and testing for the likes of Marks and Spencer, Sky TV, O2, so some pretty big clients. And then latterly kind of second part of my career has been in marketing. I ran an inbound marketing agency for 11 years which I sold back in 2021. And since then I've been helping businesses to hone in on the one lever that really affects their growth in the biggest possible way, in my humble opinion, which is positioning, differentiation and messaging. Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's get straight into it. I know that your opinion is the stakes are quite high when it comes to positioning. If you get it wrong from the start, it leads to many kind of negative business outcomes in the. In the long run. I wonder if you could go into that a little bit and tell us why, why you think positioning is so important. Yeah, well, I mean it is foundational and this was born not out of an idea that I had or some research that was particularly done. It was very anecdotal and it was in my own business running Influence Agents, which is my agency for 11 years. And sort of partway through that part of business, I noticed that some of our clients, there's probably a 50, 50 split somewhat, absolutely killing it. When it came to brand awareness, lead generation, marketing in general and subsequent sales, as would typically be the case, whilst others were really struggling. And levels of activity were about the same. They're hitting all the same sorts of channels because we're very specific on clients, B2B Tech, B2B Consultancy. And so there weren't too many variables to really try and dig into. You know, when it came to buyer demand, everything was kind of a level playing field. And when I investigated it further, it became very, very starkly obvious that the ones that were really getting the results they were hoping for in the timeframe that they were hoping for were the ones that had their offer and their language and their differentiation really nailed. It was very obvious that they were unique in market, whereas others were still battling with comparison, battling with competitive bids and situations. And it was a bit of an eye opener when I saw that, of course, kind of went headlong into that and kind of researched everything that I could put my hands on. When it came to what makes for great positioning for me, it's a pre marketing exercise, I think, and I said this in the preamble to you Jody, that I equate poor positioning to like having a bad diet. It's like eating pizza and takeaway every single night. You're gonna have to spend a lot of time in the gym to try and outpace that poor diet that you, that you've put upon yourself. And the same is true of positioning and marketing. If your positioning isn't right, if your offer doesn't resonate with the target audience that you're looking to connect with at a deep level, then you're going to have to do a lot of marketing more than you would otherwise have to do. That comes with cost, it comes with time. And, and of course the big, big thing that I noticed as an agency when we were running that is that our competitors were still selling that idea of channel activity that they were very focused on. What is the specialism? Is email? Is it social? So you get, you know, very specific kind of tactics based agencies that are very good at what they do. But skip over that positioning part and it became very clear that they were looking to get to their specialist area and their tactics rather than really dive into what it is that they were promoting. There are agencies out there that do fantastically well at positioning and I won't name names but we all know who they are and. But that's the case. It's something that is foundational to the success of any onward marketing, any promotion, any campaign activity. It's something that really deserves more attention than it gets. Absolutely. I'm sure all of our listeners agree. I struggle to, I struggle with the concept of a business that gets off the ground without strong positioning. It seems so foundational that it needs to be in your very, very original seed business model. Even the idea that you write down on a napkin in the pub before you even start start any business endeavor. What do you think it is about businesses that succeed in positioning early and businesses that don't? Is you said that it's a pre marketing motion. Should it be a founder led one? What's happening now? Yeah, I think it does start with the founder. It definitely is a top down thing. And the reason it works so well when that's the case is that in my experience, in any case, the founder is the person with the greatest understanding of their buyer. They're the ones that are having those conversations. If it really was a bootstrapped business right from the off, it started with one person. Every business was a solo effort at some point and therefore they have the conversations on a day to day basis. I know even beyond owner managed businesses that are bordering on enterprise, where the founders and the chief execs, those at the very top of the organization, still make it part of their daily lives to have conversations with customers. And that's because they recognize that having that finger on the pulse of the buyer is the most important thing. Those that do, as you put it, sort of accidentally trip over success when it comes to positioning rather than necessarily making it part of their, their, their early efforts is because they've done just that. They understand their buyer, they know what's going to resonate. And to a deep degree, the way that I describe it to my clients is I want you to aim for a level of understanding that makes your buyers feel that you've bugged their office, you've literally put a microphone under their desk, you're listening in on their day to day conversations and if you can play that level of detail back to them, that it sounds like something they would say, it sounds like their gripes and their complaints, then that's when it really resonates and the best response is, I mean first off, this is for me the basis of attention you know, it's really about me in my role and in my situation. But next, that this company that are talking about this really, really gets me. They understand me. When people feel understood, then they can become buyers. It unlocks so much of their willingness to be in a conversation with anybody that might provide a solution to them in the future. And I guess this is where it kind of intersects with the marketing function. CMOs are supposed to be, you know, for the buyers. They're supposed to have the most optimal understanding of their audience and that's what fuels marketing and that's what fuels effective marketing as well. So I guess if, if a cmos listening right now know that they've got a positioning problem, how do you think they can go about bringing forward a business case to change positioning? And is it their responsibility because they, they know the market? Well, that's a really good question. Yeah, I think a lot of this does start with the, with the cmo. Again, not because they're best placed, but because the responsibility to get the, the ultimate results from their marketing, it resides with them. And yeah, generating a business case can be difficult because symptomatically the powers that be, many leadership teams will be looking at some of the KPIs, which are nothing to do with positioning itself. They're to do with the onward effect of it. So the views, the impressions, the reach, the lead generation, the lead nurturing stats, even down to open rates on email deliverability, even, you know, it all comes out of positioning and messaging. There are so many issues around messaging that prevent the right emails from getting into the inbox in the first place, for example. That all comes back to understanding the dialogue that a company needs to use when it's promoting itself. And then of course, onward from that number of proposals, number of trials, number of demos, number of sales. And so while that awareness is there, I guess the best thing a CMO can do is take that diagnostic approach of saying, look, yes, we're not hitting the bases across the board of these particular KPIs. Here's the underlying reason for it. And it can be difficult, but as with many, many aspects of marketing, it's an iterative and it's, it's a hypothesis kind of approach. Look, let's, let's test this. Let's, let's see which messages are resonating most with our market. And it's not that the message that you'll put out by default without really focusing on your positioning won't generate results. It will. And that's why it never feels Like a catastrophic thing. To have skipped over this positioning effort and exercise is because you don't really feel the ultimate pain, you just feel some of it. And so it can be difficult to justify. But if we all accept that there's money being left on the table and that it's worth investigating if we did test some of those different positions in market. And a great way to do that, by the way, is a very simple pay per click effort. You know, just put some messages out into market, make sure that the audience that sees it, of course, is as accurate as it can be, that it's going to reach the people that you would ultimately do business with, that it's a legitimate response, and test those messages to see, yes, first can you get the click. But then ultimately, is there a higher level of intent that we can mimic? You know, the classic one if we go back to the old lean startup sort of methodology, when you're testing new propositions in market, you set up a landing page, act as if somebody's about to pay for a subscription or they're about to take some action, like book a sales call. And if somebody takes that action or begins that action just by clicking on the button as a higher level of intent than just, you know, clicking on an ad and showing some level of resonance with the message that's been put their way. So there are different degrees to which you can go with this, but ultimately I think it's about really diagnosing providing as much evidence to the leadership team to justify this. And yes, it shouldn't be the CMO's responsibility, but that is completely within most of their wheelhouses and something that will serve them whatever comes next. Well, this is exactly it. If they're going to be the ones that have the best kind of impact on their KPIs and objectives, then yeah, definitely incentivized to update that positioning there. So you mention messaging a lot and I wonder, does positioning go deeper than that? Is it a tagline on a homepage and, you know, a consistent boilerplate in comms, you know, kind of. How can CMOs bring their messaging, their positioning, to life beyond that? Yeah, it's a really good question. I think a lot of people do consider positioning to be somewhat surface level, that it's just the language, it's the headlines and the taglines, as you put it. Don't get me wrong, the messaging is the presentation layer, but it's typically what comes last. It's the roof on the messaging house. That's what your buyers ultimately see. But the Vast majority of the positioning challenges I see a lot of companies facing are not external, they're internal. A lot of organizations out there, and this is sadly particularly rife in the technology sector, they're not internally solid on what they're for, who they're for, what they are, what are the outcomes that they drive. They're very, very good at describing their capabilities, solutions and features. That's fantastic because technologists, that's really where their strengths are. Strengths aren't necessarily on seeing the onward outcomes, the impact of the work that they do, creating those tools, those products and those solutions for clients, and they're notoriously bad as well. And this goes across technology and the consulting sector. I see it all the time, notoriously bad at going back and capturing those sorts of results, asking the question, what's the best thing that we've done for you? What's the best thing that our products, our solutions, have done for you and our people? Of course. And when you start to dig deeper, the onward impact is rarely that they made something just easier. You know, they made us more productive. It's the onward effect of that. It's the commercial impact that's being created. So many organizations out there don't see themselves as being a commercially led proposition that they're making life easier and they're making things more organized. The onward effect is nearly always commercial. The savings, the gains, the profitability, everything that comes from that is just amplified to a greater degree than I think we realize. So. So, yeah, it does go to a much, much deeper level. I mean, I talk about the fact I have this framework of mine, the positioning periodic table. There are 54 elements of positioning on that, and very few of them are that sort of surface level. The messaging, the roof of the messaging house, if you like. So it does go a lot deeper. A lot of it is about understanding the market, as I say. And then there are many, many differentiating factors you can dive deeper into. Like, what is your commercial promise? What. How do you describe the outcomes that you can offer to clients in the future? What is your proprietary method for delivering the transformation that you do? I call it the impact engine. What is that for you? What does the journey look like? What are the stages? What are the features? And also, you know, around the messaging side of things, when you do start to put that word out, the danger is that you're going to play it safe. So there are going to be many factors involved there about letting you come out of that comfort zone. Understand that a polarizing opinion is actually a really Good thing. The best positioned companies in the world stand strong, strongly for or strongly against something and they talk about it, they put it out into the world. And you will know this, Jodie, I'm sure if you spend any time on LinkedIn you don't have to spend too much time there to notice just how vanilla, generic and scroll pastable most of the content is. It's just awful. The stuff that does stop your scroll. Typically it is that standout content. It's where there is a strong opinion, it's where there is an element of controversy and that stuff gets the engagement too and the onward response as well. So yeah, there are many, many facets. It's not just messaging, it's not just your subject line, it's not just the image that accompanies your social post. There's a lot more to it. Yeah, definitely. And thank you for bringing that all to life. I do think about LinkedIn as an example and how much homogeny you see. And I feel like when we think about why we think about the risk averse nature of B2B and people wanting to build trust with their audiences and kind of fit into these very kind of already kind of credible associations, you know, like the use of similar words like digital transformation for example, I think you used before. What do you think is the balance between. How do you think CMOs should catch the right balance between, you know, relying on those existing kind of mental frameworks of, you know, high trust and de risking B2B? High value deals with pushing boundaries and having strong opinions. I think there's a couple of things to bear in mind here. I mean, and I've been asked this question even this morning around if we differentiate ourselves, we create this new category language and we really extol the virtues of somebody that is truly or an organization that is truly different, then people aren't going to search for that. They're not going to find us. Well, the discoverability factor is still very, very important. As you say, we have to kind of root ourselves in the understanding that our audience currently has. They're still going to use the same keywords, they're going to ask the same questions of the LLMs and we still want to be in the answers. So we have to be known for that. We still have to recognize that discoverability is going to be based on the understanding of the buyer. I equate this to the difference between your party invitation and the party itself. Okay. So on your party invitation you have to sell the event, you have to be recognizable, you have to make people want to come and see, comfortable enough to be part of something. And that's where you would typically use the well trodden terminology that they're familiar with. But when they arrive at the party, they're not going to be satisfied. If they walk in and it's your classic sort of village hall with a couple of balloons and you know, the DJs playing some absolute trash and the buffet is just some sad soggy vol au vents and, you know, cheese and pineapple hedgehog that's not going to wash. If they come in and the lights, the music, the decorations, the flowers, the costumes, there's a vibe, it's bouncing, then that's what you can give them through this differentiated position. So if the party invitation is your SEO and your presence online and everything, that's bringing people to your website, to your social profiles, and then when they arrive at your website and your social profiles, they're just hit with something that is obviously different, that is outcomes led, that speaks to their needs, that makes them feel like you've bugged their office, then that's where, that's where the real impact can be, can be generated. So hopefully that's sort of painted a picture of how it all kind of comes together. Probably a bit obscure, I know, but that's how I try to explain it. Still got to root yourself in understanding discoverability. But then wow them when, when they encounter you. Yeah, no, I think that makes total sense. If you're a naturally risk averse person or stakeholder group and you get an invite saying, come to this crazy party with, you know, clowns and whatever, you're gonna be like, no, thank you. But you might be delightfully surprised when you get there and there are funky clowns or I'm worried about the parties you're going to, Jodie, but that's, that's. Yeah, me too, me too. So I know that, I know that one of the words that comes to mind when I think of kind of homogeny at the moment is what's on the tip of all our tongues. AI. And I also know that a lot of CMOs and senior marketers who are listening to this podcast are thinking about their positioning probably more relevantly lately because of this surge and this, this transformation that's happening. I wanted to get your thoughts on how B2B tech companies are repositioning themselves in the age of AI and whether you think they're doing it well or not and how you think that they should be. Well, it's interesting. I'll give you an example, in fact, because I had a workshop this morning with a procurement technology company and we actually spent a bit of time and exercise looking at their competitors, the kind of language they're using and kind of white noise they're creating in the sector. The reflection was that's an exercise they'd done a few months ago as it was informing their website. And their recognition was that all of these competing websites, pretty much across the board, changed significantly since the last time they'd looked at them. And again, almost across the board, the addition or the change was all relative to AI. And here's what we've seen and what I know to be true in market is that there are a lot of companies, this is as true in the technology sector as it is in any other. Right now, there are a lot of organizations who are slapping the AI badge onto their proposition because they feel they need to be seen to be part of that front wave that they're across it. And I was reflecting on this again with this client and they said that they actually spoke to another technology provider and behind the scenes they were saying, oh, wow, I see that you've got AI solutions. You've been talking about it on your website, on your socials. Fantastic. How's it all going? And they confided in them that they didn't have a handle on AI at all internally. They didn't have the capabilities. They were selling that proposition without really understanding how it's going to impact on their client relationships and the delivery of their works. And I can't even name names because it wasn't shared with me. But so. So it's not going to be obvious to anybody. But there are so many organizations that seem to be slapping this AI proposition on. And I guess the message there is that your positioning shouldn't be an opportunity to appear to be something that you're not. It shouldn't elevate you into positions that you can't rightfully justify and deliver on. Authenticity is still something that has to be borne out through all of your positioning. It's got to. It's got to permeate, because at some point people are going to get wins. Though there is a mismatch somewhere when you get into the ultimate conversation, and that's what great positioning does, is get you in more of those conversations. It's going to become pretty obvious that you can't deliver on those promises. So stay authentic, don't ride any waves, be it AI or anything else that you aren't fully capable of riding. So that would be My advice on that. Do you think, in your opinion, is AI a very valuable differentiator at this point? I can't say that it is because again, if, if everybody claims it, if everybody slaps it onto their proposition, if everybody listen, everybody's using it. And therefore, to an extent, everybody can say we're using AI in the delivery of our solutions and services, typically for productivity purposes, for consist whatever it might be. But when everybody claims it, it no longer becomes a differentiator. A rising tide lifts all boats. And so you're still going to be at the same level as those competitors. You're still going to have to find a true differentiator. And listen, the definition of a true differentiator is something that nobody else can claim, anybody can claim to be using AI. Literally anyone from, you know, your biggest tech competitor to your grandma, everybody can be using AI. It's not a differentiator, don't use it as such. The other thing to look out for as well is this idea that what's the difference between a differentiator and just a baseline expectation? Because I speak with a lot of technology leaders, consultancy leaders, and ask them, what's your differentiator? And typically they'll come back and say, we really care about our clients or we've got X number of years experience, or we used to work in that sector ourselves, we understand it better than anybody else. All of those things can be claimed by others. They're not true differentiators. If you just ask that one question as you're going through this exercise of positioning differentiation, yes, by all means, brainstorm as many perceived differentiators as you can and then ask that question, can anybody else claim this? And if the answer is yes, move on. What's your true differentiator? It's got to be something else. Yeah, that makes complete sense. I guess if you're using AI in an innovative way, maybe, or you've got a specific product that uses AI in a new way, then absolutely. But if it's just we're AI powered, that's what I'm seeing a lot lately. AI powered then. And again, isn't everybody? Yeah, absolutely. I guess the thing, again to come back to this, because I see a lot of people positioning around capabilities and around features and service lines and slapping labels on themselves. I mean, you mentioned digital transformation consultancy. If you described yourself as that, if that's the business that you're in, then congratulations, you've just lumped yourself in with thousands of others. And if you spoke that to a client who's Worked with a digital transformation consultancy before. They had a terrible experience. They really had their fingers burned. Then all of that experience, that baggage is landed at your feet unwillingly and probably unfairly, but the reality is that you've just set yourself 20 yards behind the start line. You've got to get back to the start line before you can even begin to convince that prospect. But all of a sudden, just because of a label, a badge that you've slapp on yourself, you've set yourself back in the sales and marketing stakes. So that's another reason for that category ownership, that new category language to come to the fore. And it's not about saying something hyperbolic or left field. It still has to be rooted in relevance and context, but it's got to be different. It's got to be a novelty factor so that nobody can ever say if they came up to you and said, what do you do? And the answer cannot make them respond. Oh, you're a bit like so and so. Yeah, we worked with them. They were awful. You probably are too. Bye. Yeah, so it's so, so important. Absolutely. I want to kind of bring this conversation to life a bit more and I don't want to put you on the spot and ask you for any B2B technology companies that you think have terrible positioning, but I was wondering if there are any that come to mind that you think have really, really nailed it. Any examples that our listeners can look at and research and take advice from. Again, most of this is going to be from the presentation layer. So it's difficult to really understand what's going on behind the scenes, how deep through the organization these things run. But the one that comes to mind is zero. So they are at the juncture, I guess, of two very interesting sectors, technology and accounting. Now, when your average Joe, who might be running his own business as a solopreneur, not very technologically savvy, certainly not financially savvy either, when he's presented with that proposition. And it's almost essential, you know, we have to have this software now making tax digital. There's compliance as regulation and everything around it. But when we see accounting, we may default. And this isn't my opinion, we may default to that thought that that's boring. Okay, Accountancy boring. Technology complex. So complex, difficult to understand. Boring. Over here, Xero have got a job on their hands to market that, to occupy a position that's really going to get any sort of attention. The reason I bring them to mind is that the advertising layer and the messaging layer, they've done really, really well with this and they've used metaphors to sell what they do. So if you remember. And I can't remember the actor's name, even though my wife used his name this morning and I still can't remember it, he's the guy from Flight of the Concords. He's been in Jumanji. He's the Kiwi guy and he did the ads for Zero. Jermaine. Jermaine Clement? No, no, not Jermaine Clement, but the other one. Yeah, yeah. Is the shorter term. I should know as a Kiwi, but. Oh, well. In any case, he does the advertising for Xero and he gives this example of, you know, running your own business can be like running a marathon in the desert through quicksand. So make it like picking up on this fact and taking ownership of the fact that technology is complex. Accounting is boring. You know, it's like running through quicksand, you know, if you don't get it right. But then the convergence of technology and accounting together to put that power in your hands is more like running a fun run on roller skates with a jetpack and just, you know, so much easier, so much smoother. So, you know, telling people, you're probably in this space here, finding it really difficult, but there is a better way and it's us. And then they've paired that with this new sort of vocabulary and language which is around, you know, run a healthy business is a beautiful business. And so I think they've done really well to kind of extract themselves from this identity of being either a technology or an accounting business and something that's an enabler and a champion for businesses as well. So that's really good. The other one, I guess, to take a look at, again, comes to mind is in the payment space with Wise. I think they've done a good job of making. So I think their whole positioning is around having a current account, which goes for home and abroad. So it's having a global current account. So they're really going after a niche. And this is not through being outwardly obvious about who it's for. They don't say we're for international people in business or travelers or anything. What they're saying is if you are a global operator, on whatever level it might be, again, everybody from travelers to business people who are doing international trade, then we're going to be your current account. So I think that was a great position to occupy as well. Again, from a place of where people might be thinking a payments provider, again, something that's quite technical. I'll just send that out to the IT department. So, yeah, those are two examples that come to mind on the spot. Yeah, really great ones because I think they really showcase what we were talking about before. Positioning is more than just a tagline. It really should embody. You should embody your positioning in all of your kind of marketing and external and internal elements like this. The Ed with Reese Darby, I remembered his name. He had the three star be running through the sand. So definitely. Thank you so much for that, Matt. I think that's all we have time for today. It's been super helpful learning all of your insights into positioning, and I'm sure our listeners will be able to take away a lot today. Thanks for having me.