For a technology provider that sells the means to build digital capabilities to other businesses, positioning means a lot more than a slogan or marketing deck for use in sales cycles.
By separating positioning from the provider’s brand and product marketing, we can see how any software vendor understands its own market trajectory and behaves accordingly.
So for this truckload of the Intellyx Brain Dump, we’ll start pulling apart positioning into manageable, bite-sized pieces. While volumes have been written about positioning as a positive statement of vision and direction for customers, let’s start with positioning where you are not, or negative positioning.
In all of our conversations with startups, CTOs and product marketers, we seldom hear founders tell us they offer the second-best or third-best technology on the market — unless, of course, they are 100x cheaper than the leader, which is a respectable enough value prop for chasing budget-limited customers.
No, the most common marketing issue we hear at early stages is that the technology is in a class by itself. And, sales just needs more at-bats. You know, “we win every time we have a head-to-head bakeoff against the competition,” or, “we just need more leads so we can get more demos…”
This usually indicates a problem of positioning, that mental impression that determines whether or not a prospect will research further, or ultimately find a vendor interesting enough to ask for that demo or trial run.
Comparative research precedes competitive engagement
Before a site visitor becomes a prospect, they will read comparative research on your space. As a former marketer of high-priced software, I would say any given lead who would convert into a MQL contact in my system would read, on average, 6-10 of the downloadable reports and blogs on my site before consenting to be contacted.
The buyer’s comparative research almost never starts out as competitive analysis among products in a business-to-business or enterprise software selection scenario.
Competitive statements don’t start a meaningful conversation with a prospect. What is the point of saying you are better than all the other products? As a buyer, it immediately turns me off if I already invested in one of them, or at least, it makes me want to check out the others.
Positioning should do just as good a job of weeding prospective customers out as it does at qualifying them. If your technology isn’t a good fit for their problem and their existing technology estate, your chances of a win are low, and those that do buy will become very expensive and dissatisfied customers.
Positioning is not really a competitive exercise – except in that you have to compete for a unique message that makes sense in relation to the rest of the market.
Your biggest competitor is always ‘doing nothing’ which is the first competitor worth worrying about. So you say you have better software and smarter people, that’s great, but why should they even want to engage in your way of doing things now?
I already have one of those!
Rather than going head-to-head, highlight for customers how there are more effective ways to get the job done with the solutions that customers have today—even if your solution might land/expand and take out some other solutions down the road.
Existing deployment footprints are really footholds for good comparative positioning. “If you have X and Y, you can maximize your investments in them with our Z.”
Back when I was out there selling development and QA environments at ITKO (which is now CA, Broadcom, etc.), literally every other testing vendor we competed with was positioning “Better software faster.” Well, duh…
So, instead of positioning another ‘better/faster’ test automation suite, we positioned Service Virtualization as a safer strategy for all of those other testing tools to fail in our simulated environments. Like an aerospace engineering operation, with “a wind tunnel for your software.”
Think of it as if you were Nike or Adidas. Would everyday athletes be more likely to buy your shoes if you had a tagline like “Win more?” Of course an athlete would want to win more… but how would they change the way they train every day to “win more” if they donned your shoes? They need to just do it, get out there, make the shoe a part of their lives.
There’s more value in exploring complementary solutions to find the logical gaps you can fill. What’s adjacent to your solution? What systems and information feed it? Then, once you’ve done your magic in the value chain, what kinds of systems and what companies would consume your output?
The Intellyx Take
Negative positioning is hard to balance with typical product and feature statements, because it’s not just about touting the perfect mix of software, infrastructure and services that make up a solution, nor is it validated by massive ROI claims, or the ‘speeds and feeds’ independent parties could once benchmark in a lab.
It makes a lot of aspiring software startup engineers and marketers look longingly toward selling consumer goods. Like, what if instead of making this software catering to geeks, why not do something clear and easy like building a better mattress, or miracle energy supplements, or food delivery services. Then, you just get celebrity influencers, run ads and convert customers.
Fortunately that is of little interest to us as an analyst firm, save for useful testimonials on how those ecommerce communities used technology to grow and scale their application estates and protect themselves against security threats.
Figuring out exactly what kind of work your solution is best suited for must involve figuring out exactly what kind of work your solution is NOT suited for.
There’s no shortcut to negative positioning. You have to do the hard work of being relevant, caring about the future of your industry and not overpromising, before you can make the right customers believe they can join you where they are on their own journey.
Copyright ©2023 Intellyx LLC. No AI was used to write this article, intended for enterprise software technology vendors. Image source: Craiyon.
