Positioning Value – The Simplest Things Are The Hardest to Say
To all of you product marketers out there, you totally understand this situation! When it comes to positioning value, sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to say.
A good friend of mine is leaving his corporate job and going out on his own as a consultant with an amazing track record of success.
He put up a website and asked me to give it a look.
Here’s the headline at the top of his homepage:
“We help businesses like yours achieve your key business results and partner with you on your journey to deliver tailor-made practical business solutions, fast.”
Sure, there are a whole lot of mistakes here such as the length of the headline for starters. Let’s forget about those for a minute and just focus on the message.
I looked at his homepage and said, pretend I’m a typical chief revenue officer you’d be targeting. What can you do for me?
His response was lengthy, which is what you’d expect from a newly minted entrepreneur. So I boiled it down to the following:
“You do two things every chief revenue officer dreams about, and you have the metrics to back it up.”
1. Fill the top of the sales funnel with more leads that are higher quality.
2. Convert a higher percentage of those leads into revenue.
He looked at me with a stunned face, laughed and said, “that’s just too simple!”
My response: That’s the point. I encouraged him to replace the current copy with those two phrases since those are the end game for his target buyers.
For all of you in product marketing, you know where I’m going with this.
There’s a lot that goes into positioning value and making it unique and compelling. And it’s easy to overthink it so much that we often end up with messages that say nothing or don’t say the simple things we really need to communicate to our target buyers.
By no means would I call this a gift, but my customers have been telling me for 20+ years that I have a knack for making complex things sound simple!
Positioning Value the Simple Way
I’ll share my secret. This is tough to do psychologically but divorce yourself from your products as best you can and step into the shoes of your target buyer. Then just think about the bottom line of what they want relative to what you do.
Don’t go straight to revenue, profitability, market share, etc. They’re too fluffy. Think about the things your target buyers are constantly trying to improve that have a significant impact on their higher-level goals like revenue, profitability, market share, etc.
That’s a really good place to start.
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