Many small and mid-market businesses find themselves at a growth impasse, not due to a lack of opportunity but because of misalignment across various functional areas. As a fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), my role often involves diagnosing these misalignments and charting a course for renewed growth. One of the most effective tools I recommend is creating and utilizing a clear positioning statement.
A positioning statement succinctly defines who your business targets, their needs and wants (both rational and emotional), what you offer, how it differs from the competition, and what makes your offer unique. In his seminal work, Crossing the Chasm, renowned author Geoffrey Moore highlights the positioning statement as a critical decision-making factor for customers contemplating purchasing your product.
Likewise, the founders of my company, Art Saxby and Pete Hayes, in their highly educational book, The Growth Gears, noted that, “Quite often, the CEO thinks that the company’s reputation is one thing, but sales is telling people something different that helps them sell.” To align on a solid positioning, they recommend company executives ask three questions:
The clarity provided by a well-crafted positioning statement is invaluable.
A well-built positioning statement enables you to align your internal and external communications, and even your product roadmap, around shared principles that are known or proven to drive substantial business traction. This alignment turns your positioning statement into a strategic tool for your marketing teams, helping them deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time — a fundamental recipe for business success. It also allows a company to align its operating decisions around a point of view that makes it unique – often and rightly protecting it as if it were a trade secret.
Without this alignment, your teams might unknowingly work against each other, creating friction and impeding growth. As quickly as two roads diverge, your teams can easily be heading in different directions without a solid picture of how the company fits in the competitive landscape.
This is a highly subjective thing, I’ll admit.
While many Chief Outsiders colleagues, including our founders, have their favorites, there is no perfect template. There’s only what works well for you.
I find Moore’s template an easy and effective tool for helping my emerging business and established client teams seeking to reignite growth understand these three key ideas about target, company, and unique message.
This straightforward template encompasses critical elements such as customer profiles, product descriptions, competitive landscape, and differentiation points. It’s designed for ease of use, with clear descriptions of how to fill in each blank. I have found it akin to an etch-a-sketch document in my client workshops. Teams can fill it out in PowerPoint and quickly make changes to revise and refine as their collective understanding starts to crystallize around shared perspectives across leadership roles.
Try it with your team as a litmus test for where you stand as an aligned organization.
I challenge you to distribute this template to your leadership team before your next strategic meeting. Ask each member, including yourself, to fill it out independently. Resist the urge to review the submissions prematurely. During your meeting, compare all the statements. Identify discrepancies in customer perception, product understanding, or market positioning and discuss the reasons for these perspectives and their potential impact.
This simple exercise can reveal significant misalignments in your marketing, sales messaging, internal comms, and customer support engagements. Any of these diverging from the center could erode your brand equity, impact retention, and offer opportunities for your competitors.
If you find alignment in the positioning statements, your foundation is solid, and you may need to turn your attention to how you are executing against this position if you are still stuck in the growth doldrums. However, if misalignments are apparent, then you have two choices:
A positioning statement is more than just a marketing tool; it is a strategic asset that can realign your business toward growth. If you’re ready to test this tool's power and need assistance leveraging its full potential, feel free to reach out for a no-cost consultation. You can also download and go. Try the template at your next meeting, and please let me know how it goes.
Whatever your next growth step, an agreed-upon and tight positioning statement will help you make significant strides toward new growth.