So you've figured out your product positioning - now what? On this week's episode of the Positioning show, I'm talking about what I think should come next after a positioning exercise if we really want to make sure the positioning sticks. THE SALES PITCH - If we have a sales team, It's critical that we understand how the positioning translates into the conversations our sales folks are having with prospects. If the sales team is unclear about how to tell the story, they are likely to stick with the old story and our new positioning won't survive the jump from marketing to sales. THE MESSAGING DOCUMENT - I was a late convert to using a messaging document. I was forced to use one at IBM and at first, I thought building it was a stupid waste of time. However, when I left to go back to a startup, I wondered how I ever functioned without one! If you don't have an approved set of canned messages that everyone uses as a starting point for building copy (for the website, for campaigns, for sales materials), you are guaranteed to get what I call "message drift." It's like a real-world game of broken telephone - the copy will shift each time new material is created and in a few weeks you won't recognize the new positioning in your copy at all. A messaging document ensures a common starting point so everything is only one degree away from the approved messaging. REGIONALIZATION- In my experience, it is very rare that the core differentiated value, and therefore our positioning, needs to be different for different regions (although you will generally have regionalized case studies and campaigns). In big companies, there will be an assumption that EVERYTHING needs to be regionalized. If you don't get buy-in from the regions on the core positioning, you run the risk that each region creates its own. This is a recipe for market confusion. Check out this week's episode - link in the comments. #positioning
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