Most companies think they have positioning. They have a tagline, a value proposition sentence, and a handful of differentiators on their website. They think that’s positioning.

It isn’t. That’s a description. And the gap between a description and a position is where most go-to-market strategies quietly fall apart.

A description tells people what you do. A position tells people what category they should put you in, why you’re the best choice within it, and — critically — it does so in the terms buyers actually use when they’re making decisions, not the terms your marketing team invented in a workshop. The test isn’t whether the positioning sounds good in a deck. It’s whether a customer who just finished a sales call could repeat your positioning to their boss without looking at any of your materials. If they can’t, you don’t have positioning. You have content.

This distinction matters more now than it ever has. As Scott Brinker’s marketing technology landscape project has tracked, the number of software tools competing for attention has grown by more than 7,000% over the past decade — over 11,000 martech products now exist. In a market that crowded, sameness is death by a thousand quietly ignored touchpoints. The companies that break through don’t just describe themselves better. They claim territory — a specific, credible, defensible position in the buyer’s mind — and then they hold it.

Here’s how to do both.

Start Where Buyers Start, Not Where You Want to Finish

The most consistent mistake in positioning work is starting with your product. Founders and product teams know their capabilities intimately — they built them — and the natural instinct is to lead with what’s interesting about the product and work outward from there. April Dunford, who has run positioning exercises with over 200 companies including Google, IBM, and Epic Games, calls this “inside-out” positioning, and she’s unsparing about why it fails: it assumes context that buyers don’t have, and it answers questions buyers aren’t asking.

Buyers don’t start by asking what your product does. They start by asking what problem they have and what alternatives exist to solve it. Every day, as Dunford puts it, a customer is stacking you up against everybody else and choosing you — or not — for reasons that may have nothing to do with how you describe yourself internally. The positioning exercise begins there: with the competitive alternatives buyers actually consider, not the competitors you track on an analyst grid.

This is a more uncomfortable question than it looks. The real alternatives aren’t always direct competitors. For many B2B products, the most common alternative is “do nothing” or “keep using Excel.” For others, it’s an internal build. For others still, it’s a suite product from a vendor who’s already in the account. The positioning that works in the market has to make sense against those real alternatives — not against the hypothetical shortlist you’d prefer buyers were using.

The five-component framework Dunford developed in Obviously Awesome flows in a specific order for good reason: competitive alternatives first, then your differentiated capabilities relative to those alternatives, then the value those capabilities create, then the customers who care most about that specific value, and finally the market category that makes the value obvious. Start anywhere else — especially with capabilities — and you’ll produce positioning that’s accurate about your product but uncompelling to anyone evaluating their options.

The Category Question Is the Highest-Leverage Decision You’ll Make

Most positioning work treats market category as a label — a box to put yourself in for organizational purposes. It’s actually a strategic decision that determines what comparisons buyers make, what their price expectations are, and what proof they’ll demand before they trust you.

Slack understood this precisely. Stewart Butterfield’s famous internal memo — “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here” — was a category argument disguised as a product philosophy document. Slack wasn’t positioning itself as another enterprise chat tool competing on features with HipChat or IRC. It was positioning itself as an organizational transformation platform. The category it claimed wasn’t “team messaging.” It was “making work simpler, more pleasant, more productive.” That category claim let Slack price at a premium, avoid feature-by-feature comparison, and build emotional rather than rational purchase justifications. It also faced a significant portion of buyers who said they were currently using “nothing” for team communication — which meant Slack had to create the felt need for the category before it could claim leadership of it. That’s expensive and slow, but the payoff is that you write the rules.

Category creation is seductive for exactly this reason. If you define the category, you get to define what winning looks like. But Dunford is characteristically blunt about the cost: category creation requires educating buyers from scratch, which takes time and money that most companies don’t have. The more pragmatic move for most organizations is to find a specific, well-defined category where you can claim a distinct position against the alternatives buyers already consider — and win there decisively before attempting to expand.

The practical question to answer: which market context, when applied to your product, makes your differentiated value most obvious to buyers who care about it? That’s the category. It’s not the biggest possible description of what you do. It’s the most precise context that makes your advantage self-evident.

Real Differentiation Is Narrower Than You Think

Here is a thing companies do constantly: they list six or eight differentiators in their positioning, hedge each one with “best-in-class” or “industry-leading,” and produce something that sounds comprehensive and means nothing.

Real differentiation is narrower. It’s the one or two things you can do — or the specific combination of things — that the alternatives buyers actually consider cannot match in the way that matters to the customers you’re targeting. The phrase “the customers you’re targeting” is doing important work in that sentence. The same capability that’s a differentiator for one segment is irrelevant noise for another. A feature that enterprise legal teams care deeply about may be the exact thing that makes your product feel overcomplicated to a growth-stage startup.

This is what Dunford means when she argues that differentiated capabilities are only differentiated relative to competitive alternatives. There’s no absolute differentiation — there’s only differentiated value for specific customers against specific alternatives. An IBM product that offered 52 dropdown options looked like terrible UX to a mid-market client and looked like extraordinary enterprise flexibility to a Fortune 100 CIO. Same product. Same feature. Completely different positioning depending on who’s looking and what they’re comparing against.

The stress test for real differentiation is simple: pull your sales team into a room and ask them, without any materials, to explain why a specific type of customer should choose you over the two alternatives they most commonly see in deals. If the answers are inconsistent, or if they keep drifting toward features rather than value, or if the word “innovative” appears, you don’t have defensible differentiation yet. You have a starting point.

The goal is to land on two or three differentiated value pillars — specific, provable, relevant to buyers who are actually on shortlists — and then build everything from those. Messaging, sales enablement, content strategy, competitive response. Everything flows from the value pillars or it creates drift.

Defending the Position: The Work That Never Ends

Claiming a category position is a one-time exercise. Defending it is an ongoing discipline, and most companies are much better at the former than the latter.

Positioning erodes in three ways, and the first two are almost invisible until the damage is done.

Drift. This is the slow accumulation of messaging inconsistencies across channels, teams, and time. The website says one thing, the sales deck says another, the SDR emails say a third. No single deviation is fatal. The cumulative effect is that buyers get different stories from different touchpoints and construct their own mental model of what you do — which is rarely the model you intended. Drift is almost always a process failure, not a strategy failure. The fix is a single source of truth for positioning, owned by one function (PMM, as argued in the previous article), updated deliberately, and distributed in forms that every customer-facing team can use without interpretation.

Copycat convergence. As Scott Brinker’s martech landscape data illustrates, when a category attracts enough entrants, competitors start copying each other’s positioning until everyone sounds identical. “Industry-leading,” “AI-powered,” “enterprise-grade,” “customer-centric” — these phrases signal nothing to buyers and cost nothing to say, so everyone says them. The defense against convergence isn’t claiming to be better at the same things. It’s sharpening your specificity until competitors literally cannot copy your positioning without misrepresenting their product. Zappos didn’t just claim good customer service — they claimed free returns, 365-day return policy, and a call center that would stay on the phone as long as a customer needed. That’s specific enough to be testable and hard enough to match that competitors didn’t bother.

Competitive response. When a well-resourced competitor enters your category — as Microsoft did with Slack — the instinct is to fight on the terms they’ve established. This is almost always a mistake. Microsoft had unlimited resources, a bundled distribution advantage through Office 365, and an existing IT relationship in every enterprise account. Slack couldn’t win a head-to-head feature war or a price war against that. What Slack could do — and did — was fight on the terms where Microsoft was structurally disadvantaged: usability, user experience, and the authenticity of its relationship with the teams who had adopted it bottom-up. The “Dear Microsoft” ad, which ran the day Teams launched, is the most elegant example of competitive positioning in recent software history. It congratulated Microsoft on entering the market, subtly surfaced Slack’s advantages, and positioned Slack as the confident incumbent welcoming a slower-moving follower. It made Microsoft look like the derivative.

The underlying principle: defend your position by going deeper into what makes you distinctive, not by expanding toward what competitors claim. Every time you extend your positioning to compete on a dimension a competitor has established, you’re playing on their terms. The stronger move is almost always to double down on the territory you already own.

The Customer Language Test

There is a shortcut to knowing whether your positioning is working, and it costs nothing but time.

Talk to customers who bought you in the last six months. Ask them two questions. First: before you bought, what were you considering instead? Second: what made you choose us over those options?

Their answers — not your positioning document, not your sales deck, not your website — are your positioning in market. The words they use are the words that are actually landing. If those words match what you intended, you’re working. If they don’t, you have a gap, and the gap is a roadmap.

The companies that sustain strong positioning over time run this exercise continuously and update their messaging based on what they hear. They treat positioning not as a document produced once and filed, but as a feedback system that gets sharper every time a customer tells them what they actually bought and why.

That’s the difference between positioning that’s theoretically correct and positioning that sticks. The theory lives in the deck. The sticking happens in the words a buyer uses to sell your product internally — to their boss, their procurement team, their IT department — after the sales call is over.

Get those words right, and the category takes care of itself.