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Drounz, from whatspodcasting
In the first part, we discussed key drivers and the significance of positioning, such as the role of fear as a major driver in B2B positioning. This part of my notes is more into actionable breakdown of positioning.
These notes were taken from The Knowledge Project Podcast, A discussion with April Dunford. "How to get more sales."
The best questions to ask first is: If you did not exist, what would customers do?
And that should lead to one of the things when it comes to breaking up positioning:
Differentiated value. What do you have that competitors don't have? And who cares about those different values? What are the characteristics of the people or companies that care about this value? ask these questions to yourself and build positioning around that.
You have to be able to tell why features matter and build a lot of use cases around the features you offer every time; that's the way the customers will understand and see your value even more.
Understand the Tech influence: Tech has made it harder because now users and customers have more options over you, and standing out is not a choice you cannot make. Using tech like social media to enable you to be in front of your potential customers.
Evaluating the product in its position: First, the grandmother test is useless (I mentioned this in part one) in B2B, your product must always resonate with the persona of the buyers, not everyone. Not your grandmother, except your grandmother is into that niche you are serving.
Once your customer starts comparing your product with products outside your potential competitors, know your positioning is bad already, and the way you are pitching the product can be the leading cause of this.
E.g When customers start asking why they would pay you to get that thing done, ask them if they understand the value. If they said yes but still believe they can get it cheaper with an alternative, this points out that you need to work on positioning your value differently.
Action: make sure your pitch is right.
Storytelling: The story to tell needs to answer the question "Why pick us over the other guy?"
In that storytelling framework, you need to have a spot in that framework, to paint a picture of that whole market that talks about you and where everyone else fits.
Your story must help the customer understand how to confidently make a decision. Help the customer know what happens when they choose you and when they choose others.
It's not your typical marketing team, but everyone who is in a position to talk about the company anywhere needs to be in such meetings and discuss how to handle the positioning of the businesses.
If there's confusion at the beginning of a sales process, stemming from what a customer knows about the business and its offerings, it may indicate that the sales team is not aligned with the positioning established in the company's marketing meetings.
It's important to understand and learn about the people who influence your buyers and look for ways to tap into that, using partnerships, deals, etc. If you can control how mothers buy books for their kids, then you can improve your sales of books by influencing that source.
Not thinking about it in the first place is a big mistake.
Thinking about it as a marketing thing instead of an all-rounder thing, It's not just making ads and flyers. When a developer on the team talks about the product in a Dev conference with 200k people, and they use a different language from your marketing team, that's a mistake. Positioning is a thing for all-round teams to learn and be a part of.
Wishful thinking (believing your product is the best all the time) and creating new categories for a product that already has categories can end up confusing buyers.
B2B is never B2C, most B2B lectures are lessons from B2C, and that's bad.
The secret to B2B is Decision making: Help people get what you are selling and its long-term benefits. Making decisions is hard for most people, and reducing that friction will help boost your chances of closing deals.
Note: If a prospect cannot tell what you do and keeps on confusing your product with another product that is outside your niche, then you have a positioning problem.
Thank you for reading!
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