Chapter 5: How to position your product so buyers choose you

Jasper De Geif: Welcome to another episode of the uncut podcast, a B2B SaaS marketing series that takes listeners from A to Z in demand generation. In this show, we'll teach you how to build, execute and scale a modern demand gen engine from scratch. It's brought to you by myself, Jasper De Geif, and my friends in tech, Ted Van de Berg and Jasper Hissink. Welcome, gents.

Ted Van de Berg: Good morning.

Jasper Hissink: Good morning.

Jasper De Geif: So in today's episode, we'll talk about positioning and messaging. Um, in short, we'll cover what it is, its importance, how you should do it, and as usual, some great versus some awful examples. I'm excited.

Jasper Hissink: Me too. Thanks for the introduction.

Jasper De Geif: Good, good, good. So, um, let's start with like, the first chapter. The what? Kind of like the question that always comes back so, you know, the audience gets to understand what it is we're talking about in the first place. So what is positioning in you guys view?

Ted Van de Berg: For me, it's a simple. I always translate it to myself as the context that you put yourself in. Uh, and then the context you want the buyer to see. Uh, you at like, are you an alternative for xyz? Uh, I know you have this famous, uh, violin player in the metro. This is one of this example. You put a violin player in the concert hall and, and everybody's like paying attention and paying hundreds, uh, of euros to see that person. And then you put, uh, the same violin player in the metro and it's a totally different story.

Jasper De Geif: Right. What's your take there?

Jasper Hissink: Um, I like that example. I remember that one too. But, uh, I think depending on what position we're talking about, right. You have brand positioning. Who is indeed sort of the emotional value or the emotional perception that you have with the brand. Um, right now I think the product positioning is very important. And it's just for me simply deciding who's it for, um, what it is, um, what it replaces and why it's better than that thing you replace.

Ted Van de Berg: Uh, right. And that's why it's so important to have like the previous, like, episodes, what we talked about, customer research, uh, your icp, the target accounts. It's so important to have that knowledge to be able to answer those questions. To do, uh.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah, it's funny. So all the previous episodes are sort of the ingredients to positioning and messaging. We'll touch on messaging, I guess, later. And then positioning, Messaging is sort of the ingredients for everything that comes after this episode.

Jasper De Geif: So we're stringing it all together.

Jasper Hissink: Demand gen A to Z.

Jasper De Geif: So if I understood you guys correctly, and I really like that distinction between like the product and the brand positioning is that at the, at the end of the day it's kind of like the place that you choose to occupy in the customer's mind or the potential customer's mind, but always relative to others. So you bring a whole space, kind of, uh, you map out the whole space, you choose a position compared to that and you try to occupy that specific position in the customer's mind.

Ted Van de Berg: Exactly. And it's dynamic. Right. I think that's an important one there. It's like the position you take at that moment or that you think at that moment has the biggest uh, the biggest worth or the biggest value. But it by definition it should be

Jasper De Geif: uh, changing perhaps to avoid any confusion. What are like common pitfalls? What are things that positioning is absolutely not that customers that you have or previous employers tend to think it is.

Jasper Hissink: Um, I had to think for a second but I think um, what I sometimes feel is that people think positioning is a simple tagline. Right. It's a simple headline on the homepage. And that is um, that is for me the biggest pitfall that I often see.

Jasper De Geif: That's the one that I thought of as well. Because a lot of companies, they have exactly this tagline on the website. For instance we have B2B SaaS marketing agency. And I've heard that a lot like oh no, our positioning is clear. But at the end of the day that's just the category that you chose to play

Ted Van de Berg: often. Um, that other mix up that I've seen in the past a lot is the vision, mission, like where you want to be in a couple of years, taking that as your current positioning. Uh, so very aspirational saying hey, we are a company that can help you with XYZ for all these types of companies, for all these types of markets, versus really uh, approaching it in steps and saying okay, hey, this is the first position that we're going to focus on. And maybe that's like a lot more specific. I don't know that this Snowblowers example from um, I think it was Spotify or Shopify where they just focus on a very small segment, uh, versus uh, going we are the store for everyone. Or like the same thing with Amazon. They started with books.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah. So you mean it's what they often do wrong, you think is that they take a long term positioning and keep on going with that.

Ted Van de Berg: Yeah.

Jasper Hissink: Well actually what you're saying is you should have a position for right now and it's okay to have a different positioning in six months if that is required.

Ted Van de Berg: Exactly. Like they will position it as like the long term pit and like we are the alternative for everything versus like we are the alternative for one thing.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah, I like that.

Jasper De Geif: The story that keeps changing and this should be revisited every six months. Also ties into my answer because what I've seen a lot is that companies or people think they have determined their positioning but all they have is like a one word answer such as Spain or for feature space or CRM. Right. Whereas it should be like this whole story, uh, pretty much is what we just explained relative to kind of like

Jasper Hissink: the alternatives out there, I guess for the listener. Also the story or the contents of this positioning and messaging we'll get to later. Right in the, in the technicalities. Yeah, yeah.

Jasper De Geif: Um, because these two are so related and because this is kind of like the definitions chapter, what is messaging in you guys view?

Ted Van de Berg: I think for me it's like just how you translate or how you communicate the positioning to different contexts or different segments. Uh, so you could have different messaging for different uh, uh, clusters of accounts or uh, you could adjust your messaging based on the buyer Persona that you want to reach. Um, so it's making that translation layer from the overall positioning to the specific segments, uh, that you want to specify on the big pitfall, just to stay on like um, the pitfall line from before is some companies think that you need 10 different versions of messaging which there becomes like a total spaghetti ball. Ah, different versions of like telling your positioning. I think there it's very, you have to be very strict in terms of like how much you want to tailor your messaging for different stories. And maybe it makes sense in the beginning just to have one messaging based upon uh, based off your positioning.

Jasper De Geif: So if I understood you correctly, you're basically saying your messaging is essentially the words and the structure you communicate to express your positioning.

Jasper Hissink: Spain.

Ted Van de Berg: Yes, but not, but not yet the copy. So not the actual words that the, that the external world would see, but like how you would translate the positioning into uh, uh, the message that you want to send.

Jasper De Geif: Gotcha. Moving on to the why. Because all of this is really nice, but why should I care in the first place? Why is positioning important to begin with?

Jasper Hissink: Um, one, one clear one is that I just highlighted as well. I mean this positioning as messaging is the foundation for everything around the mansion. There are multiple layers that I think we'll, we'll get to. But for me that is that this is the most important part. Everything that I do also for, for clients, paid content, regular content, website copy, everything starts from this positioning and messaging

Jasper De Geif: exercise, I very much agree that it's the foundation. If you were to look at, okay, who does it, um, kind of like affect inside of a company? Which sort of departments is it supposed to align within a company?

Ted Van de Berg: I think all the departments that are, ah, like product, customer success, sales, marketing, uh, everybody should understand and tell the same story. If you have strong positioning and a strong story based on that, and that's carried out throughout the whole organization, it makes the conversations for sales a lot easier because they understand like how they're different and how they can um, tell a better story. But it also helps the product in terms of like a direction. It's like, hey, what should we develop? Uh, and like, what are we, uh, what's our North Star for?

Jasper Hissink: Sure. Yeah. I think if you don't do this then, well then all these different departments that I just mentioned will all pull in different directions, right? Sales will create their own truth. Product will create their own truth.

Ted Van de Berg: Uh, and you want it like the whole positioning is not like it sounds. Um, it's a very normal thing. Like you see this all around you every single day, right? Like you go into the supermarket store and uh, you get like hundreds of examples of positioning. Like, hey, this is to say this is the eco variant or this is the biological one version of Mesli, or this is uh, the premium, uh, rice everybody takes, uh, heavy gainer here, the protein rice. First things on mind, right? But um, you see, like, you make it easier for people or for the consumer to uh, to choose. Because if you don't like focus on, you always have like the price gainers, like the cheapest version, like that's where you end up. You don't differentiate yourself. Very clear.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah, absolutely.

Jasper De Geif: So essentially what we're saying, if and indeed understood you guys correctly, is that positioning is essentially in order to align everyone internally, product, marketing, sales, so that everyone understands, okay, which position do we claim and how in essence are we going to be able to win or build like a sustainable business? The very minimum, um, if you were to compare that with messaging, why would you then say that messaging is important?

Jasper Hissink: I think my answers that I just gave were sort of the combination of positioning and messaging. I think having clear messaging in combination with positioning really makes it clear to the buyer what position you have. Also in their minds, I think the biggest gain you get out of that is that buyers, um, self select. What you said is like, okay, if you want to get rice with high protein, you get rice with high protein. You know what to get. So by yourself, select. And I think in this, in this world of demand gen, it's, uh, the easiest way to scale is true clarity and not through channels and tactics. It's true clarity. And I think good messaging based on good positioning is what, what will get

Ted Van de Berg: you that, like the tailoring for the audience that you want to write the messaging for. Like, I think that's where the, the difference lies. You could understand, like, for this type of buyer, positioning stays the same, but the way we explain it is different.

Jasper De Geif: Yeah, love that. Um, can you truly thrive at one without the other than you guys view

Jasper Hissink: thrive with messaging without a good positioning or vice versa? Well, I like that question.

Jasper De Geif: I just don't know.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah, I'm also thinking, I'm thinking, yeah,

Jasper De Geif: give it some thought.

Jasper Hissink: There's no hybrid going on in the studio now. We're actually thinking about this.

Ted Van de Berg: The easy answer, like, the quick answer is yes. Uh, one example from, uh, my days at Udemy. One of the key, and this is like positioning, messaging, copywriting. You need like a collection of different type of courses, uh, any, any topic you want to, you want to learn. And one of the key things the marketing leader at the time always, she always said is like, we don't want to use the word library. So most elearning companies, they always talk about the word library, uh, as a way to explain, uh, all the courses that they were offering. So this is where it goes hand in hand, like the position you want to take and the words and messaging that you're using to describe it. Uh, yes, we are an elearning, uh, platform with all of different courses, but we're not a library because if you say the word library, it has a very strong connotation with like, old school, the library, uh, the library you go to physically. So there was like very strongly connected, say, hey, the position we want to take and the words that we want to use or that we don't want to use to be able to, uh.

Jasper Hissink: So you've been. So are you saying that you, yes, one can thrive without the other or no, you need to have both?

Ted Van de Berg: I think you need to have both because you have a, you can have a very strong positioning, uh, and like why you're better, how you're competing against the different competitors. But then let's say if you still use old words or words that have a different meaning, it still fall in the other bracket.

Jasper Hissink: I think I maybe to add to that because that gave me time to think about it for a second. I think if your positioning is bad and even though Your messaging is good. You're still always going to. You're probably going to compete on price or number of features because you don't have a clear space in the field. If your positioning is good, but your messaging sucks, your marketing won't perform well.

Jasper De Geif: Right.

Jasper Hissink: So you won't create that clarity. That's my answer.

Jasper De Geif: I like that answer a lot. I do have a slightly different take, though, because I do think that you can position yourself well without messaging effectively.

Jasper Hissink: Here we go.

Jasper De Geif: Here we go.

Ted Van de Berg: Let us hear it.

Jasper De Geif: Um, for the very simple fact that if we basically just said that positioning touches upon all of these different departments internally and you're essentially just rallying them all together, I think you can perfectly do that without messaging, because messaging is the next step. As a business owner, if I heavily prioritize messaging and I make sure that I have someone that dedicates a lot of time to it and that he involves all of these departments and that sooner or later we end up all being aligned as to, okay, what is our spot in the field? How are we going to win this market? Um, what sort of product should we develop and so on? How are we going to market that? I think that's perfectly possible. It would be very dumb to not change your messaging in order to get that story out, but you can definitely tick off that Step one.

Ted Van de Berg: Yeah. Okay. I was seeing it as like. As the final product. Like is a final way to go to market. You need both to be successful, but you could do it in steps.

Jasper Hissink: You could have started positioning and do messaging after, but messaging after.

Ted Van de Berg: Yeah.

Jasper Hissink: Would you also think that if position, let's say you have a position messaging strategy, but it's just crap, but you have a good positioning, do you think you're still. You can still be successful?

Jasper De Geif: Absolutely. No, not at all. No. I very much agree with your point. Like, okay, even if your positioning is great, but you don't put it out there, um, you'll always end up competing on features, on price, just because you haven't claimed your spot. So people are just not going to understand why they should choose you. And if you happen to have some rockstar salespeople that can actually, actually claim that spot in the mind of the buyer, you're still going to make sales and you're still going to be able to make money, but obviously it's going to be a lot harder because every company is going to have some sort of rockstar sales rep. Yeah.

Jasper Hissink: So, yeah. But an example, um, if we have a minute, an example, what I see often go wrong in messaging is you can have a pretty good positioning, but then the only messaging strategy that the companies have is like in the fourth order benefits. Right. But that this tool will increase your revenue or you will work more efficient or those things which is just not a good messaging. Right. Just a quick example with, I think it's Asana, where you manage um, all your team's task in one place. That is the capability. The first, um, order benefit is so you can um, have a better overview of your team's task and work more well. Then I already go to efficient. But then the second one is so you can complete more tasks and then the third one is um, so you can launch more features and then the fourth order benefits. More features means more revenue and if you go to market with Asana, you gain more revenue. That's just a very bad messaging and it's just not believable.

Ted Van de Berg: It's the number one mistake made. Right. Or like the one we see most often.

Jasper De Geif: Yeah.

Ted Van de Berg: Because it also sounds great.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah.

Jasper De Geif: And it also kind of makes sense because quite often marketing is trying to involve sales in order to close a sales deal. It always comes down to like the bottom line. The bottom line are these first line benefits. So in order to be aligned with sales, they're pretty much always going to bring up that. But I agree with you guys. It's just for prospects that first come across your website. They want to be able to understand, okay, what kind of job am I able to get done with this? And increasing my revenue is just not the job they're looking to get done.

Jasper Hissink: I'm hoping there comes a point in this recording that we disagree on something.

Ted Van de Berg: But like the practical thing, what you just said is like, look at like headline that you're using on your homepage and see is it like a first order benefit or is it a fourth order benefit?

Jasper Hissink: Exactly.

Ted Van de Berg: Just for like people listening to be able to uh, judge where they stand.

Jasper De Geif: Would you say that, um, positioning and messaging are given enough importance inside companies?

Ted Van de Berg: I think they're giving too much importance. As in like it's uh, the positioning and messaging exercise I've been part of in the past were major strategical efforts, loads of different stakeholders involved. Um, and that's exactly where it went wrong. Like positioning is very important, but it's also very important to tackle it in a short period of time. Because I've seen those. Because it's like a strategic, important project, uh, either take six to 12 months to complete or start it, never finished. And then you end up with the same messaging for Years on your web.

Jasper Hissink: Yes. And I think. But then it's basically the wrong way to do it because it should be lean and quick. But I don't think you can make it too important because I do think also when the company grows, it's. It is so important to get everyone aligned. It's just, it sounds like it's just bad practice the way you explain it rather than ah, March importance.

Ted Van de Berg: What I was trying to say is that, um, in terms of like, importance, um, what I've seen in the past, that people find it so important that they are afraid to make decisions as it has like big strategic impact on like the whole company. It's like designing for tackling a part of the market versus the whole market and therefore either delaying the decision or going so deep that it takes months or years to uh, to renew the positioning. So, um, more. Is it like the being afraid to take a decision that I really like?

Jasper Hissink: Because there I go agreeing again. But I think that is indeed something that often goes wrong. The fear to make decisions.

Jasper De Geif: I very much disagree, actually.

Jasper Hissink: Nice.

Jasper De Geif: When I look around and I see customers joining unmuted, what I see is that there's hardly any demand for product marketing sort of services. No one ever knocks our door and is like, hey, I think our positioning is unclear. No one is like, hey, our messaging doesn't resonate. Most of them show up with one objective, which is more leads. And I think marketing in general by the vast majority of the market is still very much misunderstood. They come here, they want to grow faster, they say, hey, get me leads. They don't really know how, but if you don't get a certain amount of leads, then you fail. And I think it actually should be about, okay, we want to claim this spot in the mind of a certain customer of like, of the entire market because sales will be easier because people will understand what they can turn to us for all of that. And as a result, because that question hardly lives, we don't even have dedicated resources for it. We have no product marketing as a service. We do offer it through content marketers. But yeah, what was there first, the chicken or the egg? Right. If the demand in the market would be there, I think we would go ham on offering this service and essentially making it as good as possible through dedicated resources.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah, I do think what I notice, I'm curious to hear if you see this as well, is that if a company reaches a certain size and you have a senior marketing leader who is allowed to build his or her own team and there's Room for a product marketer, or gtm, however you define it, that owns this positioning and messaging, then I do see it's often pretty important. And I often also agree with Ted that it's sometimes such a big deal that it's such a big project. Um, but I do think in smaller companies it's often an overlooked thing because, yeah, you're not gonna. Maybe product market is not your first hire or whatever. And then, yeah, it's often, um, so

Jasper De Geif: kind of like an afterthought that is then made too big in order to do it successfully.

Ted Van de Berg: All right, how did you just, on that point, like, interesting. So like, companies coming in, sir, you have to convince them saying, hey, this is the foundation part. You get to start there. Um, and companies wanted to focus on the outputs straight away. It's like, how many leads do we get this month, uh, what channels are we going to open, etc. What do you give them as an example? Like, how do you convince them to go back to the drawing board saying, hey, this positioning workshop is worth your time? Like I've also said in positioning workshop, where somebody just copy, uh, pasted everything in between, say, hey, judge, if you can answer this, why should we spend time on this? How do you, how do you go about this?

Jasper Hissink: That is. Darren?

Jasper De Geif: Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think the answer could be twofold. But it obviously all depends whether the company is open to it. Because at the end of the day, we're in the our business, right? So we can just do stuff for free because we want to make a point. But I think by running the math, so reviewing their cost per lead, their cost per demo, cost per sale, lifetime value, cac, payback, that sort of stuff, if it's just completely off and we're not able to get customers in at a reasonable rate, obviously the product could be a problem, might be bad. But if that's not the problem, then it's probably the type of marketing that we do. And the foundation of that marketing, in my opinion, is vital. So that should probably be revisited. And then secondly, if you happen to do customer research, as discussed in a previous episode, do tune in. Um, you might get the answer there because you might send people to the website and you might ask them, okay, what do you think of the website? Like, does the messaging resonate? Do you understand what this company is trying to sell you? If the answer is like, let's say you do five interviews, you get four times like a. Hmm, no, not really. Why should I take them? How are they Better than company xyz. How are they better than, I don't know, the table stakes, competitors such as you know, a spreadsheet or whatever. Then you have the living proof.

Ted Van de Berg: I really like that approach going like not saying hey, positioning is important, we are the expert, you should do it. But starting with the data and like diagnosing saying hey, the data is off or like the efficiency is off. Let's dive in deep and see what. Nice.

Jasper De Geif: Yeah. Um, heading over to like the consequence. What happens if it doesn't get done or it's delayed for too long?

Ted Van de Berg: Well every department going different directions. I think that's the one I've seen.

Jasper Hissink: Or sales not being happy with the. The incoming um, leads or entraises also.

Ted Van de Berg: Yeah, the disconnect between like what marketing is advertising and then the story that sales is telling.

Jasper Hissink: I think one, one to sort of stay in the realm of actual demand gen and marketing. You'll probably see it in your results right in your, in your marketing results. So you probably get you. You're able to attract traffic but not really demand. So you'll see it in your conversions and um, raises demo requests totally.

Jasper De Geif: I really like the answer of like all of the disjointed apartments. I think that's essentially the crux product will build features based on requests rather than vision. Sales will try to close any deal regardless of the segment, probably resulting into high churn. Marketing communicates all sorts of random features and benefits that to your point probably won't resonate very well. Um, but perhaps the most important thing is that the company strategy will just lack direction so that maybe in the beginning a bunch of signals will be green, orange, ish because you get some traffic, you get some deals, you get all of that. But at the end of the day you're never going to be able to win market share at a rate that allows you to build that sustainable business.

Ted Van de Berg: Also comes down to the question because it's all the different departments who owns this project and who is the final decision maker? Because I guess the hard part, right like the reason sales or marketing or customer success, everybody goes their own direction because they all think they know best, right? Like sales speaks to the customers every day like they know best. Marketing uh, has uh, a good view on like what's happening in the market. So we want to go that direction. Um, so having a final decision maker because if you want to tell one story everybody needs to like uh, maybe disagree but commitment to like this is the story today as like I've seen it as like the CEO actually being the owner or the final approver, uh, being involved in these conversations to be able to move it forward.

Jasper De Geif: That was, that was going to be my question. Who would you make in charge?

Jasper Hissink: Uh, I wouldn't, I would let the marketing leader facilitate it again so they're in charge to get this project off the ground. The final decision makers you put it should be indeed the CEO or the senior person and even like, like maybe

Ted Van de Berg: m marketing as the facilitator. But I think works. What makes it work with a muted helping uh customers is that it's like um, an external facilitator for those sessions.

Jasper Hissink: Higher and muted.

Ted Van de Berg: As an agency that's always a good decision but it takes, there's a lot of emotion in this story. Right. So if you're as a marketer or like the marketing leader at your company trying to host uh, these workshops, you also have your own thoughts in which direction you should go.

Jasper Hissink: That's actually very interesting because we have now for one of our clients who our client is um, a software company, part of a larger company. Not own, no, not a pure software player. But um, we work for the software um, sort of data company and next year they're going to put all of the different data companies together under the big umbrella and they again also went to muted to Jonas and said in the previous positioning workshop that we did for that Pure SaaS company, you asked us such critical questions as being very objective and external. That made us really think because we're all sort of um, swallowed by everything already within the company that indeed an external one like Jonas, our colleague, um, asking those questions as a facilitator for them works really nice. I like that.

Jasper De Geif: Awesome. Moving on to the actual work, um, which questions are we looking to get answered to determine our positioning?

Ted Van de Berg: I think the ones as Jasper mentioned at the beginning like what is it that we do in simple terms, who is it for? Um, what does it replace for the alternative? Uh, and why is it better? Like do you replace an Excel sheet? Do you replace like an existing workflow? Do you replace, Um, I don't know, you name it.

Jasper Hissink: No, indeed I like it. That's I think April Danforth, uh, good recommendation for everyone listening. April Dunford's obviously awesome. Very good uh, book to read and study.

Jasper De Geif: Absolutely. Yeah. I think high level. It pretty much just comes down to two questions. Why would someone choose us and for us, why would we win? Um, and then you can break that down further into customer questions, market questions, product questions, competitor questions. In order to do the whole exercise, um, Customer questions being who's our product for? So for instance, the icp, which we also covered in a previous episode, what is the core problem they urgently want solved? How are they solving it today? What outcomes are they truly trying to achieve? That sort of stuff. And then there's like market questions. So which category are we active in? Resulting into that beautiful tag that you probably have on your homepage. Which countries, uh, which trends influence how buyers perceive value. So you can actually make it resonate with the market right now. So to your previous point that, that it should be a living story that changes every six months so it remains relevant within the market.

Ted Van de Berg: Um, what addition to what you said, like the, the, you can have like the category as the positioning, but you can also have the use case as positioning. So like having the different flows there, it's like, do you say, hey, we are, um, I don't know, sales intelligence software for X, Y, Z, focusing on the category. Or if you say, hey, we want to replace a specific use case, you can take that as your front and center.

Jasper Hissink: Uh, you're talking about the positioning strategy. Like either a new way to do something, a vertical solution, like, let's say Toast is a very famous one. I think you have to buy, buy and build and you have to 10x better. I think those are the, I think

Ted Van de Berg: this is a very, very good framework, uh, to think about.

Jasper Hissink: Maybe very, very practical question of me. Maybe one of you can explain how we help the actual process of how we help with positioning and messaging for our customers. Because I really like that approach and if I would now go to an in house marketing role, I would follow this exact approach that we do for our customers.

Ted Van de Berg: Um, I think for me the big eye opening because I've done different positioning workshops, messaging projects, like all these things in the past and always the assumption is like, hey, this takes six months to do. Uh, everybody needs to be involved. It needs to be like massive Miro boards with like loads of input. Sources need to speak to. I don't know how many, how many people. What I really like about our approach here is that like in one afternoon, of course there's like a lot of prep going into it, a lot of thoughts going into it. Uh, you get a lot of clarity because we push you towards like making those choices.

Jasper Hissink: So we very, very briefly explain a bit how we do this process.

Jasper De Geif: Go for it.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah. So, um, I'll try because it's a bit of a, it's a, it's a mirror board with, with some elements. But what we do is let's say every six months you get facilitated by the marketing leader. So that in the, in, in our case a muted agency, we do it. You get the CEO in, in a meeting of an hour and a half, maybe two hours, let's say the product leader, um, and the sales leader. Right. Maybe I, maybe there's an internal marketing leader that should also be involved. But from these different teams, the, the leaders and you basically, indeed, in aeroboard have these sort of canvases frames, uh, to answer the questions, indeed, uh, what is it that we do? Who's it for? What does it replace? And why are we better? And then basically you do an exercise following these questions and get all of the inputs, um, of these four questions to eventually come and decide, okay, on one icp, that's what we're going for. And then you're going into the messaging exercise. Right? And also, um, for instance to decide, okay, this is our positioning and then the messaging will be okay. The capabilities of our platforms are these, these are the features of these capabilities and these are the benefits of the uh, of these features. Right. Um, and if I'm not explaining clearly, maybe, maybe help me here. But uh, and then you do this exercise with these three or four people of senior leaders of these departments, get them in, in the, in a, in a meeting and in this mirror board, answer all these questions, get all of the in and work towards a positioning strategy. Also the 10x better, uh, buyers build those things and then look at the benefits and create a messaging strategy together there, um, in the meeting.

Jasper De Geif: I like that. Perhaps a good addition are the customer questions. Sorry, the competitor questions. So why is it better than whatever alternative? Why is it different from the competition? What results do customers get that they can get elsewhere for the very simple fact that I would personally always want, um, for the positioning to not become like some sort of wish list, like something that you want to achieve but isn't very obtainable in the customer's perspective at least. Um, and once you also answer these competitor questions, you probably get like a better feel for okay, how do we actually, how are we going to be able to claim our spot compared to competitor xyz? Because otherwise you essentially just give sales a huge problem where leads enter with a certain understanding or expectation and then when it comes to like a comparison and sales rep pulls out their, their battle card, they shut up for a loss because they can't actually win that battle.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah,

Ted Van de Berg: um, one, one quick addition to like the Miro board, like one health exercise for everyone is just take a screenshot from the homepage of your competitors and put them next to your own one just to see like where you currently stand as ah, like a base point. Like, hey, do I need to like how unique is my positioning? And if I change the headline from one competitor to myself, like, is that totally doable? Or do we really say something unique that only we can say nice like that.

Jasper De Geif: Um, let's say you've done this whole positioning exercise and you've created this sort of clarity and you know, the mirror board is crystal clear and every participant in there is like, yes, this is direction we should take. Um, what's next will follow.

Jasper Hissink: Maybe one thing that I didn't flag earlier, but I think a end product could be a short positioning statement and a longer positioning statement. Short positioning statement being used for homepage copy and ads, Longer positioning statement used for sales and decks and those things. Um, that's a good end product.

Jasper De Geif: Yeah, well, I think that's a good one to highlight indeed the positioning statement as like the ultimate outcome of the workshop. So that you make it super tame and that it's not just a bunch of various frames in which you decide on all sorts of things, but that there's like one clear thing in which you essentially just fill in the blanks. Right, okay, this is our target market. This is how we're different. All of that, um, you touched briefly upon assets, um, that could follow after this positioning statement has become clear. And that probably also ties back to. Okay, how does this rally all of these different departments together? So what sort of assets, um, at least in your view, should follow Once the positioning is clear, I'll just make

Ted Van de Berg: a full list and then prioritize from top to bottom. I would start with the sales deck as like the number one. And then afterwards all the supporting resources for the different departments. If that's like different set of ads, if that's um, your website, leave um, behind stand at an event that you're, you're building. Now let's start with the sales deck, because then it makes it like sometimes like positioning messaging can be a bit of a dry document. You see all these things, but what does it really mean if you have it into a story that sales tells in a call and then we all see like the one on one reaction to it. I think that's also a clear sign to then move further along and like rebuild the whole, Rebuild all the assets.

Jasper Hissink: I mean, I follow, I follow what that is saying. When you ask the question, my initial response would be, make sure the website being the core of everything you do reflects the positioning of message, but I can also imagine it's a bit of a longer project and that you want to prioritize a bit lighter first to get that sort of breathing in the company. But my answer would have been fixing the website, making sure that reflects it.

Jasper De Geif: Yeah, if I was to take a step back, I think all in all what I would want it to do is kind of like come up with a memorable, powerful story so that you get to claim your position within the market. And then you probably want to update all of your assets in order to get that memorable, powerful story out so that it's easy to be remembered. And if I was to then sum up the assets that I would think of instantly, I would agree with you that it probably starts with the homepage because that's where potential buyers are going to go. And then there's probably also the about page and then there's the sales deck. And then as it's supposed to become a story, then it's probably your LinkedIn post from like your internal SMEs and your CEO. Um, there's battle cards so that the salespeople can actually win their deals because the positioning is relative to the alternatives. Um, there's the blog post, like I said, all in all, you just want to put out this story so that you can claim this spot and make it stick. Um, so that people always know whenever they move in market, okay, this is my go to company because I know what they stand for, I know who they work with, I know what they accomplish, I know what they can do for my business. And thus it's a logical choice to turn to them. Um, now we've defined this, so question I have for you, Ted. How do we know whether it's working?

Ted Van de Berg: I think to your earlier question, you see it in the numbers, but not right away. That's where the tough part comes with sending a new positioning, messaging, recreating all the assets. I would give it at least it always, it depends. But at least, uh, six months of runtime to able to then say, okay, hey, do we see an increasement? Do we see signals that it's going in the right direction?

Jasper Hissink: I think something like a focus group could help accelerate that. If you have a focus group on which you can test positioning and messaging and say like, okay, this resonates true,

Ted Van de Berg: but like a focus group is not never the real, like people that are paying money to the product. So I'll always be, I would use it as input, but it will be hard to fully trust on it. Um, I don't know. Let's say, for example, imagine, uh, this exercise going into the whoop, like this, uh, wearable fitness, uh, tracker. In a meeting, they do a focus group and then people say, yeah, but we want a fitness tracker, uh, with a screen. And then whoop, saying, yeah, we're going to make one without a screen. Like now, of course, like, they have many things before them that got them very successful, like a very smart marketing strategy. But I don't know if a focus group would have been coming back saying, hey, we, uh, you do, we do think or we do agree that we don't want to screen.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah. You're saying focus group is maybe not a guaranteed, um, commercial success. Yeah.

Ted Van de Berg: I would look here, would rely on the bet saying, hey, we're betting that this group of people are going to buy us and we're going to commit to going this direction for the coming six months. And we then evaluate, uh, what the response of the market is.

Jasper De Geif: I like the example, although that's the B2C space. And it's also very much kind of like the vision of the CEO that decides whether there's a screen or not. I do like the fact that they position themselves so freaking clearly because it's what really differentiates them. But as we are in B2B SaaS, you probably also want to make it tangible. So you do probably want to work with some sort of test group so you can actually show to the CEO what the actual responses are are when being confronted with your positioning and your messaging. Other ways to do that is by, I don't know, making people listen to like, okay, what's the response when prospecting calls? Or how do people respond when they sit in on a demo and they get to understand the whole story, given the prospecting goals are obviously very short.

Ted Van de Berg: Yeah. But more on a level of clarity versus then the decision you're making. In terms of positioning, I would say like there. I would take the input from like, like it could be gone calls or like focus group, uh, or like a winter to review the homepage saying, what, what does this company do? And like on the, the word level or like the clarity level, like what you're trying to say is that clear versus the decision on the positioning itself.

Jasper De Geif: Right. Would you also set specific goals in order to test it?

Ted Van de Berg: I think many companies there is uh, the artificial goal already there in terms like, you have to grow xyz. And then it's always like what story you're going to tell with the next fundraising round. And if the story, you think you're betting on the storytelling, and if it doesn't grow fast enough or it doesn't move the needle, then you're anyway forced to change the story.

Jasper De Geif: Yeah, I'm getting ahead of things a little bit, but I actually saw it with one customer of ours that redid their positioning because they felt like winning deals was just a constant battle in which it always came down to, okay, do we have the better product, yes or no. And they went through all of this with us and they not only saw it in terms of amount, uh, of visitors, that converted to a hand raiser because the new clarity that was provided, how were they different? But they also saw it in the demo to sale ratio. Just because they no longer tried to explain everything about their product or everything about their company, they kind of thought, okay, customers are going to assume, based on all of the customers that we have and the sort of business that we have built, that we can compete in terms of the product. But now, okay, what makes us different? And they really just focused the whole conversation on what makes us different. And their sales rate spiked from 20% to 35%. And I think that was pretty, pretty powerful because it just makes it very tangible for a business leader. Right? At the end of the day, they, they care about a good story, of course, but if you can grow faster and you can do so with like fewer resources, then you can reinvest, um, that and make your company more successful. As I got ahead of things, that was already the example of, you know, it going well, but it tied in nicely, I guess, with, okay, how do you test it? Do we also have an example of like a company doing it completely wrong and struggling both internally and externally as a result?

Jasper Hissink: I can, um, give an example, although it's not an example of it's being done horribly wrong, but it's a, um. In a previous company I worked for, um, we had a, it's called a customer experience solution. And the means of it was through service. Same way that Qualtrics does it as well, right? Qualtrics being well known also to the listener, probably. You send out surveys, you get a bunch of data and you show analytics and insights about, let's say, the customer experience. Um, there was a lot of search volume, um, around service, customer service, NPS service, those things. So you sort of bank on that with blogs and with paid traffic and those things, website copy. The thing is, also in April, Dunford's positioning framework, you have this frame of reference that you need to position yourself in, right? What is that little place in the map that you position yourself in. And then being a survey solution, people also have a certain, um, idea of the price of a servicing solution. Right. Because of Typeform, SurveyMonkey, DOS Things, if you didn't come with premium prices, then there's a huge disconnect between the expectations and the actual price that you have. But then if you reposition yourself as a customer analytics platform, customer experience platform, then it's a total different frame of reference. Right. And it's a total of also expectations that people have of the product, but also the price. So I guess that was uh, an example of how it started wrong but improved later on through repositioning.

Jasper De Geif: Gotcha. We're uh, nearing the end of the episode, so before we're talking about the next step and stuff, essentially summarizing the takeaway, um, you know, of this episode. Positioning is a strategic choice that gives your company direction. Messaging is a disciplined repetition of that choice. Without them, every team defaults to scattershot execution, resulting in marketing promoting random benefits, sales chasing pretty much every deal and product, um, following requests instead of a vision. So the tldr and also kind of like the advice, don't overlook or half ass the foundation. Um, that's that that was the episode. What's the next one going to be about?

Ted Van de Berg: Actually don't know, do you?

Jasper De Geif: Thankfully, I looked it up. It's about attracting in market demand. So it's an episode on demand capture, um, AKA performance marketing in some people's book.

Ted Van de Berg: So finally the fun stuff coming, right, that we've been talking for a couple of episodes on laying the foundation. Everything that's like un. Not visible, boring, the boring stuff, boring stuff under the water.

Jasper Hissink: Then we finally get to people are still tuned in. Then, uh, now the good stuff happens.

Jasper De Geif: Exactly. It's only going to get more exciting. So, um, see you guys in the next one.

Ted Van de Berg: Thanks.

Jasper Hissink: Ciao.