Can you have a full-time in-house person facilitate a positioning workshop?
It is absolutely possible to re-evaluate your positioning without a consultant coming in to help you… but it can be challenging.
I’m not going to address all the steps you should take to (re)evaluate your positioning in this post (I’ll post something along those lines soon!). What I want to address is whether or not you can just hire someone to come on board and make positioning a part of his or her job duties. The answer to that question is no. Here’s why.
Positioning shouldn’t be reviewed every day (or week)
While positioning is certainly not static, it is not like web traffic results or your lead funnel or your feature request list — there is little point in reviewing it regularly, which makes it awkward to include as someone’s job duties. Once you settle on a market category and a market segment to target, you shouldn’t consider changing those things until:
You’ve given them at least six months and they are clearly not working
There is a major shift in the marketplace and the customers’ needs/desires
There’s a major shift in your competitive landscape, otherwise known as now Google or Amazon are competing with you
Everyone on your team is going to realize if Google has suddenly released a competitive product. The people most responsible for determining that certain positioning is not working after six months, on the other hand, are the company leadership / CEO, not someone you hire.
A positioning exercise should be done once, and perhaps repeated if any of the above events happen. For example, a lot of companies rushed to reposition themselves after Covid lockdowns hit — a great example of repositioning because of a major marketplace shift. But they aren’t continually working on the positioning.
Positioning exercises can include hard questions
If you hire someone and expect them to run a positioning exercise for them, it could put them in an uncomfortable spot unless you have the most unbelievably amazing workplace culture. Positioning exercises involve a frank conversation about:
The gap between customer perceptions about the product and internal perceptions about the product
The product’s weaknesses
The leadership team’s blind spots
Stuff the leadership team says that doesn’t make sense
It’s one thing for an external consultant to come in and ask questions / give results of customer interviews that put the CEO on the defensive. That’s why people hire consultants. It’s another thing to do that if the CEO is your boss.
Positioning exercises can involve talking about things that nobody wants to hear and/or asking the founders to let go of a part of their vision for the product and company. That is not impossible to do as an employee… but is hard.
Only a positioning specialist does positioning all the time
There’s also the question of expertise with positioning. Because positioning isn’t something done continually at any one company, if you don’t work with a diverse set of companies you aren’t likely getting much practice with positioning. If you hire someone to work for you full time and just add positioning as one of his or her responsibilities, he or she isn’t going to have much experience doing it.
An outside perspective
Lastly, an often overlooked aspect of hiring an outside consultant to help with positioning is that you can’t always read the label when you’re inside the bottle. When you’ve already been immersed (maybe indoctrinated) at a company, it’s hard to let go of the things you think you know about the product, the company and the value it creates for customers and approach positioning with a truly open mind. Someone outside the company will approach the positioning challenge as a riddle to solve and not as a potential threat to his or her identity.
Are you struggling with positioning? I’d love to hear your positioning-related challenges and questions — reach out here or, if you’re getting this by email, hit reply.