The definitive product positioning framework (part one)
Anthony Pierri on how to choose your target customer segment
👋 Hi, it’s Kyle and I’m back with a 🔥 edition of Growth Unhinged, my newsletter that explores the unexpected behind the fastest-growing startups.
It could be a tad embarrassing to have *someone else* write the top-performing post on *your* newsletter. But not when the person is Anthony Pierri (co-founder of FletchPMM) and the post is the only SaaS homepage framework you need.
Anthony along with co-founder Robert Kaminski have helped over 300 startups discover their ideal product positioning and bring it to life on a newly crafted homepage. And now Anthony is open-sourcing that knowledge with his 6,500 word (!) definitive product positioning framework. Part one of two will help you build your positioning strategy and choose your target customer segment. (Read part two here.)
Before we can talk about the process of building your positioning strategy (and actualizing it on your homepage), we need to define some terms.
When we say “positioning,” we actually mean “product positioning.”
Product positioning contains two strategic choices:
Who are you going to target?
How will you differentiate?
As you’ll quickly realize, different customer segments use your product for different reasons… and each will need their own positioning strategies.
Product positioning ≠ brand positioning.
Brand positioning on the other hand is more concerned with the commonalities across all segments, use cases, etc. It includes making decisions about your vision, purpose, personality, emotional connections you wish to create, and any other important associations you seek to foster with customers.
Both types of positioning have their place in the overall company strategy, but for our purposes, we’ll be focusing on product positioning.
It’s a strategic bet, not a quickly testable hypothesis.
Because we argue that the above-the-fold section of a homepage should house your positioning, people often believe that positioning can be tested and optimized using standard conversion-rate techniques.
They look at heat maps, run A/B tests, and do quantitative and qualitative surveys on the homepage to “test” or “measure” their positioning.
While totally understandable, this is a misguided approach.
Take this one small example:
Should you position for enterprise?
Or should you position for SMB?
Imagine you were trying to decide which would be a better focus for your company… by running an A/B test with two different website hero messages—one for enterprise, one for SMB.
In case it doesn’t become immediately apparent why this would be unwise, let me walk it out:
Which segment converts better on a homepage is a terrible indicator of which segment is better overall for your company.
The product requirements for enterprise companies couldn’t be more different than the requirements of SMB.
The go-to-market strategies of each are world’s apart, along with the ways you monetize those deals, the level of customer support expected, the amount of competition, etc.
Not to mention if your GTM efforts up to this point have been aimed at SMB, then your enterprise messaging will flop (because likely no enterprise clients are even viewing your website in the first place).
This is just one vector of positioning that impacts essentially every part of how you operate your business. And there are an infinite number of related decisions you could make when positioning your product with an equally staggering number of cascading impacts on every department in your org.
Positioning (unfortunately) is not something you can test in an afternoon. There’s no A/B test to determine positioning. Data can help inform your decision, but ultimately you need to make the call of where you will focus.
The better way to think of positioning is placing a strategic bet — i.e. making a choice to focus on one group rather than another, to compare yourself to one set of competitive alternatives rather than others, and then to build differentiation for that specific context.
Positioning comes before messaging.
On the flip side, once you’ve made the decision about whom to target and how you will differentiate, you can test how you frame these choices.
The way you express these decisions in different assets is called “messaging.” For example, do you lead with the problem? Do you lead with the outcome? Do you lead with the key capability? All of these are messaging decisions that depend on you having pre-chosen whom you will target and how you will differentiate. And these messaging differences are testable.
Positioning needs to be owned by the CEO.
Because positioning is in essence an extremely strategic decision, it must be owned by the highest level of leadership.
The most likely candidate to spearhead positioning projects is the CMO — yet ultimately, it is the CEO’s responsibility to make these positioning decisions final and drive their actualization throughout the org.
Weaker CEOs will often attempt to pass off these extremely difficult decisions to others in the org. They’ll often rationalize their abdication of leadership as “delegation.” However, this is not something that can be handed off. If the CEO is not the one driving the positioning, the strategy will fail.
The homepage is your most important positioning asset.
When we began Fletch, we debated exactly how we would “package” positioning work.
We could focus on sales decks and sales narratives, similar to how April Dunford or Andy Raskin deliver their strategy work.
Our long term vision was to help companies determine their positioning strategy and then aid in its execution across all their assets. But ultimately as a two person consultancy, we realized this would be biting off way more than we could chew.
Eventually, we decided to anchor our delivery solely on homepages for two primary reasons:
1. The homepage is incredibly accessible.
Most positioning strategies live in a “positioning brief” hidden deep in the marketing org’s Google Drive folder. This inaccessibility all but guarantees that other teams outside marketing will not transmit the ideas into their own internal or customer-facing communication.
Additionally, positioning work that finds its home in a sales deck or sales narrative is equally siloed from the rest of the org, making it much harder to guarantee widespread adoption.
Conversely, the homepage is just one URL click away.
Investors can see it, customers can see it, and most importantly, your employees can see it with virtually no effort — which helps keep everyone aligned.
2. Homepages are written with customer-facing language (and thus easier to translate).
Another issue with many positioning briefs is that the strategic language is often wooden, stilted, and devoid of context. There’s usually too much room for interpretation in applying the messages across channels and departments.
As a result, you can get “positioning drift” (i.e. teams making changes to your strategy—often without realizing it—for the sake of “better copy.”)
“We didn’t like how that sounded, so we changed the wording.”
“We just punched up the language.”
“We thought saying it this way was catchier.”
The problem is these types of “creative changes” often contain substantive changes in whom you are targeting, how you’re differentiated, and what value you’re providing.
Listen how your sales teams pitch your product on demos and compare it to how your marketers talk about the product in their ads. Then take a peek into your onboarding and check how the company is being explained to new employees. Finish out your journey by sitting in on a call with the board to see how your CEO positions the company.
If you’re like the vast majority of organizations, you will find massive discrepancies in each of these contexts.
It’s very possible (and likely) that each team was distributed the same “positioning brief,” “brand strategy,” or “communication guidelines.” And yet because these documents are “pre-translation” (i.e. they haven’t been written in a way that’s meant for public consumption), teams will take heavy liberties when translating them to their differing contexts.
If you’re able to do that initial translation from strategy to a public homepage, everyone gets a workable frame of reference that makes it significantly easier to translate for their given contexts.
Choosing your target customer segment
There are two main decisions that comprise your positioning strategy:
Choosing your target customer segment (the focus of this piece)
Choosing your differentiation (the focus of part two)
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