Strategy 4 — Riding a winning position

Summary: How to stack our fundamental strategies to ride a winning position to #1 in your segment and market.

Ride it — in a nutshell:

• Strategy: Once you’ve found a winning position, ride it to be #1 in your niche, then your market, then your adjacencies.
• Attention: A combination of right and left-brain attention, with brand building to boot.
• Action: Ride it — keep your eye on the prize and sequence your positioning as you go from niche to reach.
• Position: A compounding stack of proving it, finding it, and owning it.

The last of our four science-based positioning strategies is, essentially, “hold on tight.” If you’ve found a winning position, there’s still plenty of work ahead, but if you can empower your product teams and ship fast, you can build and sell your way to an incredible outcome.

Lots of folks, however, get caught up on the next deal, the next release, and the next raise without stopping to think about what truly winning their segment or their market would plausibly look like and how they can position themselves to get there.

To be fair, some folks don’t have to. If you’ve managed to tap some rich vein of demand and you’re being inundated with customers, there’s no need to worry about building momentum through niche positioning — the momentum is already there. You might think about what comes next, of course, and be deliberate in how you position in new adjacent niches as you grow — there’s always the next level to reach and the next boss to take on — but when you’re on this trajectory, it’s really just up to you to not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. 

But if you haven’t stumbled across that pot of demand gold, it can be a highly useful exercise to think through what, exactly, your vision is for the winning position you’ll build for your company, with your product, in your market.

What does your winning position look like?

Consider making a checklist of steps that would help you identify when you’re on the right track, even if it’s just the basics, for example:

• You’ve clearly identified the goals you need to achieve relative to your ambition and funding.
• You’ve planned a reasonable positioning experiment to create the necessary momentum to reach those goals.
• You’re getting an appropriately positive reaction in demos and sales calls — people are genuinely lighting up and wanting more and not just giving you the polite “Oh wow, sounds great, yeah, uhh, we’ll definitely get back to you on that, just let me have a think about it” (i.e., no, thank you).

From there, it’s a matter of what makes sense for your GTM motion. 

Sales folks can ‘segment and sell’ with a narrow focus in a niche to build momentum; PLG folks may go for ‘cast and catch’ with a broader pitch for an entire discipline (like product design, marketing, or general productivity and team collaboration) in a much more horizontal fashion.

Not to beat a dead equine, but your positioning, ambition, and go-to-market strategy all need to work hand-in-hand. PLG folks need the volume; sales-led folks need the contract value. Design your N=1 experiment accordingly. 

Qualtrics’ winning position

On the PLG side, we’ve already discussed Figma’s winning position, where they were able to ride a wave of change around digital product design, zero in on where their WebGL and collaborative technology made sense, and build an incredible brand, achieving complete market dominance in the product-design world. 

On the sales and enterprise side, it’s worth returning to Qualtrics because they’re also a fantastic example of making these strategic choices over the lifetime of the company, which was founded back in 2002.

Qualtrics, for example, as we’ve touched on:

• Niche — find it: Qualtrics started as a survey product, originally selling to marketing professors in business schools because that was the background of one of the founders.
• Wave — prove it: 15 years (!) into their journey, Qualtrics would then create a category — “experience management.” But the brief wasn’t so much to create a new category of survey software; it was to transcend the survey software category entirely with a new concept they could put on the right-brain radar of C-suite prospects. The wave they identified was the “experience economy,” and they aimed to prove their value with their experience management, or “XM” playbook. And they could prove it because they had 15 years of experience under their belt.
• Brand — own it: They went all-in on “XM” as a brand ($XM was their stock ticker, echoing Salesforce’s $CRM ticker). XM is in their logo; it’s how they organize their product lines (“XM for customer experience,” “XM for employee experience,” etc.); it’s the theme for their events and content marketing, it’s everywhere. All told, it’s an incredibly strong clarity strategy that hammers home their owned message and position across every touch point. But it took years to build, and it was initially a lonely time trying to make it happen.

Nevertheless, this gave Qualtrics a winning position they could happily ride to an IPO and subsequent acquisitions — acquisitions that were predicated, in part, on the strength of their category creation efforts.

It also drove their main competitor, SurveyMonkey, bonkers. They tried to rebrand as “Momentive” to chase the enterprise and the “experience management” category, only to revert back to SurveyMonkey two years later.

Evolving your brand to set the pace and completely rebranding to chase a leader are two very different strategies with very different results. High-stakes rebranding is a fraught business — it’s not a positioning experiment I’d recommend. In this case, Qualtrics evolved their brand to build incredibly tight memory associations between their name and XM. SurveyMonkey’s attempt to try and build a new brand from scratch that could also be associated with experience management was, in comparison, always a doomed mission.

Winning positions are unique

Qualtrics is an interesting example of the fundamentals of positioning, but I’m not describing it here as a template every enterprise-focused B2B SaaS company must follow. 

Zuora, for example, built a narrative around the “subscription economy” which helped in deals to a point (and became the basis of the “strategic narrative”), but their shares currently trade at less than half of their IPO price, and the stock has slowly sunk (with an exception of a COVID rally) over the 6 years they’ve been public. The narrative evidently didn’t have legs, especially when compared to, say, “payments for developers.” 

What worked in the 2010s may not work in the 2020s and beyond. Once, killer software was a “X management system” (content, customer, learning); now it’s all about being the “O.S. for X” or the “AI-native X.” Winning positions are reflections of their markets, and tech markets evolve at a rapid rate. 

What doesn’t change, however, are the underlying fundamentals of our brains and behavior. Attention, market science (diffusion and memory), and the need to run thoughtful N=1 experiments will always remain the same. 

They’re the fundamentals of science-based positioning that transcend any particular flavor of the month and help you build a position, narrative, and clarity strategy that’s unique to you, by looking out on the right-brain radar and down with your left-brain laser beam. 

From there, we get waves, niches, and memories, and your choice to prove it, find it, own it, or ride it. 

That’s science-based positioning. The result will be unique to you — all great business positions are. Great businesses ‘compete to be unique,’ to borrow the line from Michael Porter that sums up just about every popular business book that has been released since. 

In the world of tech and venture-backed startups, that’s what we’re trying to do — we’re trying to build truly great unique businesses. That requires a great deal of vision from you as a founder, both into what is and what could be. I hope, in some small way, these four positioning choices we’ve discussed have given you a better sense of what it is you’re looking for so you too can build a truly unique company.

Now it’s time to put these ideas into action. To start with, in light of these choices, what will your sales narrative say?

Vision questions

• What’s your current vision for the winning position you want to achieve and ride in your market?
• What choices will you make to get there, especially in terms of proving value on a wave, finding it in a niche, or owning it as a brand?
• How can you stack your advantages across the wave you’re riding, the technology you’re developing, and the brand you’re building, like Figma did, for example?
• Or, how can you sequence your growth, going from niche to reach to brand, like Qualtrics did?

First published: September 2024 · Last updated: October 4, 2024