There are 2 main reasons you want to get your positioning solid. 1) It helps your sales and marketing teams understand where to focus and 2) It gives customers an easily understandable framework for making choices 1/

Positioning defines 5 key things - Competitive Alternatives, differentiated Features/Capabilities, Value, Ideal Customers, and Market Category. These are the inputs to everything we do in marketing and sales. 2/

I need a detailed understanding of which customers I'm targeting, what alternatives we need to beat/displace, and why we win to build an effective marketing campaigns to generate leads and sales programs that move the needle on revenue. Solid positioning drives all of that. 3/

Secondly, clear positioning partitions out a market so you can clearly communicate who should choose you and why. It lays out: "We're the best at delivering value X, for customer A. There are other ways to solve this problem - but they are for customer B who wants value Y." 4/

Giving customers a clear way to make choices is incredibly important. Markets are crowded & confusing. Customers need to understand their choices and how to evaluate them. Helping them do that speeds up the purchase process and ensures you're attracting your best fit customers 5/

Clear positioning helps us clearly communicate where we win and why. We need this internally to focus marketing and sales and we need that externally so we can craft a story that helps our best fit customers understand that and choose us. /end