The big idea: Science-based positioning

Summary: A new positioning approach for B2B tech companies — new fundamentals, new choices, & new outcomes. Get started with the simple 1-2-3-4 framework.

Science cannot tell us everything; but what science can tell us is pure gold.

— Dr Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things

The big idea behind the science-based positioning framework is in the name: science! It exists! We can use it! And with the right framework, we can put those insights from science to work in a way that helps you distill your vision and find a market-winning position.

But why bother with this “positioning” stuff at all? Why not just ride the vibes of your vision into the market and beyond?

The reason is this: vision is about you — what you see. But positioning is about them — the buyer — and what they believe. If you want folks to buy from you, you need to create a clear position in the mind of the buyer about you, about your place in the market, and about what you can do for them.

This is one of the key challenges of finding product/market fit. As much as you’re excited about your vision, as much as you’ve thought about your idea, and as much as you’ve felt the pains you’re trying to solve, buyers — B2B buyers especially — have about fifty other things they’d rather be doing than buying new software.

For B2B buyers, change is pain. It’s a huge time sink that gets in the way of their actual job. It can require approvals, committees, and risk to their reputation. No one wants to be the idiot that bought the wrong thing and made the team’s life miserable with buggy, half-baked, or bloated software.

So getting your positioning right is vital. It has to thread the needle with the product you’ve got and the buyers who could get the most value out of it. Getting that product thread through that eye of the buyer-who-has-better-things-to-do needle is hard. There are more and less plausible ways of doing this, of finding your positioning. There’s the YOLO, ad hoc way, and there’s the science-based way.

If the YOLO way works for you, great. But I’m a big fan of learning from the science where possible, and that’s why I created science-based positioning specifically for B2B tech companies. Here’s the pitch.

The SBP pitch

Science-based positioning updates the 50-plus-year-old original concept of positioning with new and known science on a customer, market, and company level.

This gives us:

• New fundamentals: The point of science-based positioning is to use these fundamentals to build momentum in your market so you win more logos and grow your ARR.
• Clear positioning choices: To get there, we go from fundamental modes of attention to four distinct positioning strategies and the choices of prove it, find it, build it, or, once you’ve found a winning position, ride it.
• Stronger sales narratives: Stronger inputs mean stronger outputs, and with new fundamentals and clear positioning choices, we can craft exceptionally well-targeted sales narratives and broader clarity strategies to land our position in the buyer’s mind.

All of this is intended to help you figure out what you’re about so your customers can figure out what you’re about, so you win more deals and ultimately win in your market.

Taking a science-based approach doesn’t guarantee you’ll find that proverbial pot of market gold, but given the choice between running an experiment based on science or one that’s more akin to medieval alchemy, the choice is pretty clear.

The P in SBP

That’s why the “science” in science-based positioning (SBP) matters, but let’s stick with positioning for a moment. We’ve touched on why positioning matters as the link between your vision and busy B2B buyers, but how does positioning actually work? Why do we talk about “positions” at all? Here’s how I think about it:

• Demand exists, so you want to be as close to that as possible.
• Competition exists, so you want to differentiate from competitors as much as possible.
• The intersection between those two points — close to demand but apart from competitors — is the ‘position’ you want to build in the mind of the buyer.

That’s it; that’s classic B2B positioning, especially as it applies to tech.

If you’re too far away from demand — you build the wrong thing, you describe it in the wrong way, or you market it to the wrong people — no one will want it.

If you’re too close to your competitors — you’re competing to be the same, not competing to be unique — then if they’re bigger and more established than you, there will be no reason to choose you.

Instead, you need to connect your vision to a position that taps genuine demand while remaining differentiated from the competition. That’s a very hard balance to strike, which is why folks need all the help they can get with their positioning, hence this new framework.

There’s both a science and an art to this work, but fundamentally it comes down to innovation and clarity. I’m assuming you’ve got the innovation. What I’m curious about is whether you’ve got the clarity — clarity in your vision, clarity in your story, clarity about your customers and your segment, and clarity around the bets you’re making as a company.

From Clarity to clarity

Clarity doesn’t come easily, as I know all too well. It took me forever to translate the problems I saw founders were having with their narrative and positioning into a neatly distilled term like “science-based positioning” that I finally coined in 2024.

That’s the funny thing about this work — the most introductory pieces often come last. It took me years of work to get here, including writing my textbook-book length Positioning Playbook.

But I knew I needed to keep iterating and eventually I’d thread the needle. Eventually, I got there — I was able to capture the hard-won ideas from my Positioning Playbook in a handful of bullet points that founders could use. Perhaps it’s time for you to do the same with your positioning? You’ve probably already put the years of work in to test and refine your vision and see what you can see. What would it look like to distill that into something catchy and concise so you too can thread the B2B needle with your chosen buyers?

In my case, I needed a simple introduction to this new world of science-based positioning, and here it is. (Feel free to study the format to see if something similar might work for you, too.)

Positioning 1-2-3-4

This is the simplest formulation I’ve come up with — my 1-2-3-4 framework. Science-based positioning is:

1. One big idea: Positioning was originally about creating a position in the buyer’s mind. Now, 50 years after the concept’s original introduction, we have a much more scientific understanding of buyers’ minds, hence the need for science-based positioning (SBP).
2. Two modes of attention: We all attend to the world through our right-brain ‘radar’ and our left-brain ’laser beam.’ That’s the key scientific insight about the mind (with my goofy labels) that comes from Dr. Iain McGilchrist and his study of the divided brain.
3. Three areas of science: SBP takes this concept of attention and combines it with modern market science (diffusion and brand), along with N=1 company-level experiments. That is, we use science for minds, markets, and go-to-market in the hope of finding a winning position that drives product/market fit and compounding growth.
4. Four strategies: Your positioning choices in SBP boil down to, as mentioned, prove it, find it, own it, and ride it. That is, you can pick a wave to ride and prove your value; you can look at your customer base and find your best-fit customers; you can own your message and build name/need brand memories over time; and ultimately, you can ride your winning position to fame and fortune.

That’s years of work, writing, hair-pulling, and some seriously skeptical looks from my eternally patient wife distilled into a framework you can count on one hand — with a pinky to spare.

And — in true consultant fashion — I have a neat 2x2 that captures those positioning choices:

Warning: it’s pretty intense!

The SBP 2x2

You were warned! I don’t expect this image to mean much right off the bat, dear reader, but if you keep reading, that’s what we’ll be unpacking here — catching broad waves, zeroing in on niches, and/or building brand memories over time, with the net result being a killer narrative you can run with.

That’s the fifth part of the framework, by the way — the outputs, i.e., your sales narrative and clarity strategy. (So I guess that’s your pinky accounted for, too.)

Your turn

Let’s make this practical — think about your company for a moment. How does the 2x2 apply to you?

• What new value from a wave are you trying to prove?
• What unique value for a particular segment have you found?
• What associated value are you trying to build your brand around?

Try writing down your answers. How succinct are they? Do they reflect what’s on your homepage and in your sales deck? If you asked your colleagues these same questions, would their responses match yours? What if you asked your prospects?

(If you’re not yet sure how to answer these questions, the examples for each approach in the strategy section might be helpful.)

Doing the work

So how do we actually implement this? The methodology is pretty simple:

• Inputs: Based on your vision and attention preferences, you collect inputs from your market, including what you’ve learned, what your customers say (e.g., in sales calls), and what trends are dominating the market.
• Narrative: The fastest way to test your positioning is by distilling it into a master sales narrative, one that’s tailored to the two modes of attention of the prospects you’re targeting. You might go big-picture for execs or outbound folks, or get into the specifics for end users or technical folks. (This is the ‘story 1/story 2’ balance that drives your narrative.)
• Clarity strategy: With positioning and a narrative that resonates with buyers (or customers who recently bought), you can then go to the rest of your market. To do that, you need a clarity strategy where, as the name suggests, you need to be as clear and consistent as possible with your message across all your customer touchpoints, laddering folks up from “huh?” to shut up and take my money.

That is, at least, the plan. The test for positioning is whether external reality eventually matches internal aspiration.

The two sides of positioning

There are two sides of the positioning coin — the clarity you need internally to focus on developing a clear position and the clarity prospects need to experience externally so they actually hear what you have to say and have it resonate in their mind or memory.

That is, there’s the position you aspire to and the position that actually exists in a prospect’s mental map of the world.

Positioning work in decks and documents is useful for the first half of that equation — the positioning you’re aspiring to internally — but the difference between positioning as a winning strategy and positioning as a wish that won’t come true is whether the magic happens in the prospect’s mind.

And we know a lot more about minds than we used to.

What makes that magic happen, then, is when the science of positioning and the art of crafting a value proposition connect in such a way that the light goes on for customers and you tap into something they genuinely care about, will pay for, and recognize you as the unique or first-to-mind source of that value.

The B2B opportunity

In the hyper-competitive world of B2B tech, that’s hard, as we’ve discussed. But there are great advantages in building for B2B, too, including:

• Buyers who care: We’re not selling toothpaste or toilet paper here; we’re selling to folks with very particular needs whose career trajectory may depend on the success of our products, which makes them a fascinating source of insight and feedback.
• Buyers who talk: Likewise, we’re not sticking products on shelves and hoping a focus group will have all the answers — every sales conversation is a chance to discover and refine what works for your positioning, especially in the early days.
• Products that evolve: Best of all, we control the product and market — we can tailor the product to the market, evolve it to suit a new position, or, in a classic positioning sense, find the market that makes the most sense for the product we’ve got.

That is, positioning in B2B can actually be a really fun, interesting, stimulating challenge. If you enjoy the more cerebral side of business, then positioning gives you plenty to think about, especially on the market side of the product/market fit equation.

One big idea

It’s the “market” in “product/market fit” where positioning really matters. And it was ever thus. It’s almost now a cliche, in a book about positioning, to point out how much has changed since the concept was originally introduced.

“There are just too many companies, too many products, too much marketing noise.”

Modern B2B tech market, meet the 1970s B2C American consumer market, where the advice was simple:

“In our overcommunicated society […] a company must create a “position” in the prospects’ mind.”

Both quotes are from the classic 1981 book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by the late, great Al Ries and Jack Trout, who originally began writing about positioning as New York City ad men in 1969.

Fast forward 50 odd years, and we know far more about how positioning works, thanks to the legendary efforts of some great thinkers in the field, as we’ll see. (Not least of which is April Dunford, who almost single-handedly re-popularized positioning in B2B in the late 2010s and early ’20s.) And we know far more about how the “prospects’ mind” works, both individually (in sales) and collectively (as markets), too.

This is the new science that has emerged in the decades since Ries and Trout first wrote about positioning. It confirms some of their suspicions and corrects others. We’re not going to dwell on the past, though — science-based positioning is ultimately about making sense of modern approaches and modern science to ensure you really do have the best chance of creating that position in the modern B2B buyer’s mind.

So that’s our one big idea to start with — this science exists! It gives us new fundamentals to work with! Fundamentals that are especially important when it comes to positioning in high-consideration, high-attention contexts like B2B sales.

Especially when, it turns out, as humans we have two fundamentally different ways of ‘attending’ to the world. If we can better understand these two modes of attention, we can untangle and clarify our vision, how we do positioning, how we write sales narratives, and even how we do startups in the first place.

That’s the power of science-based positioning.

It’s vastly superior to the all-too-often wish-based approach of category creation or startup story telling that looks more like alchemy than science and often leaves folks spinning their wheels for years, wondering why their vision or narrative just won’t click. To understand why those sales narratives often fall flat and positioning doesn’t seem to land, let’s explore the two modes of attention.

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