How-to: Creating a clarity strategy

Summary: How to turn your narrative into a clarity strategy that builds a position in the mind of the buyer.

We’ve discussed science-based positioning as:

• Science (as fundamentals): Attention science (thanks to the hierarchy of attention), market science (diffusion and brand), and company experiments (N=1).
• Strategy (as choices): The four SBP strategies prove it, find it, own it, ride it.
• Sales narratives (as output): Your story 1 or story 2-based sales narrative that captures your core positioning and value proposition, giving you clarity in communication and leadership.

This gives you a framework to take your positioning to the market, but then what? What can you do to sustain your position in your market and build and maintain a position in the buyer’s mind (and memory)?

This next, ongoing stage is what I call your clarity strategy. It’s where you maintain clarity about the position you’re building across everything you do. That includes your product and the features you add and, perhaps, subtract, but here we’ll keep our focus on the “market” half of “product/market fit,” with a particular focus on where product marketing comes in.

Let’s briefly discuss your clarity strategy in terms of:

• Vision
• Stage
• Messaging
• Content
• Alignment

Clarity & your vision

“Clarity” is another vision word — you want to be clear about what you see so that prospects can be clear about what they see when they encounter your company and your product. If they don’t get what you’re about, they’re not going to buy. Simple.

In a macro sense, this kind of clarity is ultimately the product of your vision as a founder and your collective vision as a startup. As a founder, you don’t just build your ability to see, you build your company’s ability to see, too. And not just see, in a literal sense, but attend to the world in a right-brain and left-brain way, using both your collective radar on the look out for what’s new and what’s possible, and your laser beam to look down to the parts and pieces and see how folks manipulate the world with your tools.

Therefore, the foundation of your clarity strategy is understanding the two ways of attending to the world and working hard to be as clear as possible about your positioning using both modes of attention.

What is that positioning? As we’ve discussed, at its simplest it’s being as close to customer demand as possible and as differentiated from the competition as necessary.

That clarity in positioning is vital, because in B2B especially, products get complex fast.

Clarity & your stage

This is especially true at the enterprise end of B2B SaaS. Different features are used in different ways across different roles in different industries. Multiply that by all the products or product areas in a suite or platform, and you’ve got enough work for full-time employees — and perhaps a whole department of them.

This is often the domain of product marketing (a.k.a. PMMs, or Product Marketing Managers), who work on providing clarity internally to the team and externally to prospects on who you serve, how you serve them, and what outcomes folks are achieving.

In the early days, however, this might be the founder or first marketing hire who gets to wear the product marketing hat, and that can be a very strategic hat to wear.

To get the most out of your product marketing and your clarity strategy, you need to be clear on where you are on the growth curve and where your category is in terms of maturity.

Your clarity strategy needs to be unique to you, and your company may be unique, relative to the average B2B SaaS company, in all kinds of ways, from offering, to price, to sales motion, to GTM strategy, to market segment, to maturity, to funding, and so on.

We might talk about “B2B SaaS” as a monolithic thing, but aspirations and opportunities vary wildly. An early, SMB-focused product-led company using B2C-style tactics and a mature enterprise-focused SaaS company that’s 15 or 20+ years old, for example, are nothing alike, as Jason Lemkin says. And that’s why your clarity strategy needs to be unique to you.

So, first, get clarity about the company:

• Innovation curve: Where are you on the tech adoption curve? Are you early-stage looking for early adopters or late-stage looking to sell to the mass market?
• Market segment: What part of the market do you serve? Are you targeting SMB, mid-market, or enterprise customers? Are you trying to move up or down market?
• Category maturity: Are you looking to play in an existing category, establish a new one, or transcend one you’ve been stuck in for years? What is the growth rate for the category on the whole? Is it in land grab mode or a static war of attrition?

This should help you set expectations, be clear on goals, and think about exactly what kind of momentum you can build or maintain through more rigorous positioning. This matters because it’s hard to hit a target no one has defined.

Clarity & your messaging

Message. %$^&ing. Discipline.

That’s what most startups need, what most startups lack, and what your clarity strategy can be instrumental in introducing.

If positioning is about creating a position in the mind of the buyer — or at least finding best-fit buyers who have a position they’d love to plug you into — then you have to maintain absolute clarity and consistency in your messaging.

It’s very easy for messaging to go off-script in the name of “testing,” for example (which we discussed earlier in the context of N=1 experiments). Or even folks just making it up as they go because they don’t appreciate the fundamental position you’re trying to build. (If the team pushes back because they don’t believe in the message you’re trying to push, don’t ignore them! Your messaging has to pass peoples’ BS filters, and if folks internally don’t buy it, why would prospects?)

We’ll discuss team alignment in a moment, but science-based positioning is about running meaningful N=1 experiments, and to do that, you need consistency. By all means, test your pitch with prospects and test your ads within your various channels, but when you’ve settled on a message, put some guardrails around it and lock in.

Ensuring messaging consistency isn’t exactly the sexiest side of being a founder, but what’s the point of all this vision and positioning work if prospects fail to hear a consistent message?

Clarity & your brand

This message discipline eventually creates your brand. Brand, as we’ve discussed, isn’t just your logo or visual identity; it’s memory — the name/need association people remember when they look for a solution like yours. Need a website? Think Squarespace. That’s a strong brand.

This level of consistency needs to happen throughout the buying journey, too. When folks are considering you and engaging your sales team, they’re forming an impression in their minds and creating that need/name association. They’re positioning you, and it’s up to you to make sure that’s the position — and the name/need memory — you want. That requires clarity and consistency from the beginning to the end of the customer lifecycle.

Clarity & your assets

To ensure that a clear message exists, consider doing a clarity audit where you:

• Audit assets: Pull all your sales and marketing assets together on one Figma board and assess them for message clarity and consistency.
• Research customer language: Ensure your core messaging is either language you grabbed from customers themselves or language they’ll use.
• Lock in: Building a position and forming memories in the market takes time. If you aren’t bored to death with saying the same thing over and over internally, you haven’t said it enough. Lock in and let the experiment run.

Clarity & your content

Should you have a content strategy or a clarity strategy?

I see more and more folks saying the classic B2B content marketing playbook doesn’t work like it used to.

In part, that’s because there’s now a high quantity of high quality information out there, and this leaves buyers very confused. (Credit to the ever insightful Brent Adamson of The Challenger Sale fame for that insight and the next one.) It’s now your job to help them make sense of the market (‘sensemaking’), not just be another voice amongst many, adding to the confusion.

Marketing is, in some ways, a content arms race, and the default mode of many teams has been quantity, quantity, quantity, as though you can out-publish the competition. But sheer volume of content doesn’t offer much clarity; it doesn’t help folks make sense of all the competing viewpoints out there, and it doesn’t do much to ultimately build a position in the buyer’s mind.

Consider optimizing for:

• Clarity, when you’re helping buyers make sense of their situation, market, and possible options, i.e., giving them a genuinely valuable guide they can trust.
• Consistency, when you just need to stay in touch with folks over the long term — especially in their inbox — to build your brand in terms of mental availability (people associate you with a need) and physical availability (showing up consistently so folks can find you when they want to buy).
• Confidence, and not yours, theirs, and how you can help buyers make a confident buying decision.

On confidence, recent B2B sales research discussed by Matt Dixon in The JOLT Effect suggests 40-60 percent of B2B deals end in no decision, in part because buyers lack the confidence to move forward. That’s why it’s so important to help folks make sense of the market and understand how to make the right decision for them. At some point, they need to make a decision and move forward, though, so your clarity strategy needs to be focused on decision points, not just more and more information.

It’s hard work, but that’s where clarity comes from — taking messy reality and providing clarifying insight in a way that makes both your offer clear and where your product fits in the broader landscape, so buyers can move forward with confidence, no longer held back by the niggling FOMO voice that someone, somewhere, might have a better approach.

Clarity & alignment

A coherent clarity strategy, backed by strong positioning choices, also does wonders for team alignment. Startups are all about compounding efforts for compounding returns, and getting folks aligned is therefore one of the most powerful things you can do. Even the act of creating a new narrative and bringing the leadership team along for the ride can be profoundly helpful.

Ultimately, this alignment and clarity work should give you:

• Clarity for you and your team in terms of how you understand your market, your strategy, and the individual buyers and dominant types of attention in that market.
• Clarity for your buyer in their mind as they search for a solution to their problem and/or ride the waves of change in their industry.

To create that clarity internally, I suggest you follow the same pattern I use with my clients to deliver your own clarity strategy:

• Workshops with the leadership team to get everyone on the same page, starting with a snapshot of where you are now.
• Research or analysis to bring customer language, insights, and fresh industry trends to the table.
• A deliverable as the project’s outcome — perhaps a new sales narrative that then flows through your customer-facing messaging, where clarity and consistency are key.

This is how you take science-based positioning from theory to reality — as your specific, stage-appropriate clarity strategy that delivers that critical clarity both internally to the team and externally to your prospects.

And if you need help, drop me a line.

That’s it, that’s the book! Clarity seems like a fitting topic to finish on for a book about vision. If you want to dive deeper into any of these topics, check out Positioning Playbook, my textbook-length treatment of these ideas that goes super deep on narrative, positioning, and brand across the B2B SaaS spectrum.

I’d also sincerely love to hear what you think about the book, so if you want to chat, discuss a project, or pass on feedback, by all means get in touch.

Finally, if there’s a founder in your life you think could benefit from this book, please feel free to share it with them!

First published: September 2024 · Last updated: November 11, 2024