Are the Founders on Board?

When someone reaches out to me to talk about working together on a positioning workshop, one of my first questions is whether or not the founders are on board (unless, obviously, it’s a founder-CEO reaching out).

It’s not uncommon for sales and marketing teams to feel positioning pain — in the form of sales pitches that fall flat, high churn, low conversion rates throughout the funnel — before the founders either feel the pain or at least feel the pain enough to take action.

Positioning is very core to not just the company’s business strategy, but also to the company’s identity. It’s not something that marketing can ‘own’ and expect the rest of the company to go along with. It’s a CEO-level decision that requires buy-in from all the founders and the leadership team.

A change in positioning is a change in the company identity. It can often require founders to let go of their vision for what they thought they were building to embrace the unique advantages of the thing they actually did build. Trying to re-position a startup without founder buy-in is at best a waste of time and money, at worst a morale-busting disaster that ends with hard feelings all around.

If you do have founder buy-in and want to learn more about working together, check out this page.