Have you ever checked how many different stories your marketeers and sales people tell when it comes to pitching the services that you offer? Do they have a clear understanding when to make that pitch and to whom? How much do you loose in revenue because your teams are not enabled to recognize customer's need correctly or can't communicate the value your product provides clearly?
Position Statement should be an actionable artifact, not a dusty long manuscript that no one ever reads.
This is a tool that is in the core of your marketing efforts and driving sales motion, it allows you to have a unified powerful narrative across all the customer touch points be it your blogs, 1:1 discovery meetings, Google Ads, or conference speeches. This is how you align end-to-end from first marketing piece through sales, delivery and up to the customer support.
Here's a Position template to make your product statement include something useful for everyone on the team while also building a single narrative that is easy to communicate.
Position Statement Template Components
Target Audience
Always start with the user
Users should be able to recognize your solution as their "painkiller" so make sure you speak their language. Learn from conversations with them and quote their responses as much as possible.
Then think broader and include those who can be a deal breaker from the buying perspective.
Make sure you equip your users with enough info about the value you provide so they can fight for you in rooms you're not invited to.
Understand your customer's context, reasoning, and motivations
Always analyze what was the last straw that broke the camel's back and brought your customer to you. Those triggers are the foundation for a more powerful offering enabling your:
marketeers to tailor the messaging based on what is in your target audience's immediate attention span keeping them up at night;
lead generation specialists to have a creative filter to browse companies for the outreach;
teams to have in-depth conversations learning from every interaction with all clients.
Learn to ask the open-ended questions about the background. Things like "why you think your team needs this", "how did you come to this conclusion", "why now", "who and why is in charge of this initiative", "who else is impacted by this situation", etc. can help you meet your customers where they are, not where you want them to be.
The generated insights are not only your guides to fine-tune the product, they are a source for your experiments: new messaging, new target segments, new channels, etc.
Goals and Pains always go together
If your customers did not have a goal they wouldn't have had the pains as they become visible and hurtful enough when you can't achieve what you want.
If they didn't have pains and were capable of accomplishing the task themselves, why would they need you, right? Learn to identify those pairs.
Product Definition
When filling out this section try relying on the "Golden Circle" approach and incorporate the following angles:
The Why (Purpose): Articulate why the product exists and why customers should care. This isn't about making a profit—that's a result. It's about the core belief that motivates the purchase beyond features or benefits.
The How (Process): Outline how the product fulfills the company's purpose.
The What (Product): Describe what it is that you actually sell to your customers.
The Product Section is your way to ensure consistency.
Use it so that no one on the team invents their own story, promise something that your product doesn't do, or keep the expectations unrealistic damaging your net promoter score later.
This is your basis for RFPs, demos, one-pagers and slide decks. This is your tool to keep everyone focused and able to break your product down both from technical and value.
Customer Journey
The last section is an optional one, but can be really powerful if you want to up your game as it adds details and links and layers to your messaging and product delivery.
Here's how:
Include quotes from your target persona that speak to their triggers, pain points, goals, and motivations. Real conversations with customers can yield insights that resonate more deeply than any market research and provide hints on how the needs can be met with more than just one offering. Tools like Gong can capture the language giving you authentic material for your marketing and sales copy.
Make sure your own products are not cannibalizing each other. Selling the right thing to the right audience is a tough task: but if you learn to differentiate between the offers it can accelerate your sales cycles, enable you to speak better to various segments, and organize your service or product catalog to accommodate for easy trials as well as for long-term and expensive deals.
Always have a teaser for the next step. With the initial need met what your other services naturally follow? If your product is a starting point, what complementary products or services can enhance and extend the customer's experience? This is how you maximize your customers' lifetime value. And this is your basis for website customer journeys too.
By covering these aspects thoroughly, you put your product into the context that resonates with customer needs, aligns with their growth, and paves the way for a long-term relationship. This approach ensures that when you tell the story of your product, it's not just a list of features or benefits but a narrative that fits seamlessly into your customers' lives.
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