How to prevent positioning sabotage
Like any fundamental change in your business strategy, changing positioning can be frightening both for the executive leadership and for everyone else in the organization. It can even be unnerving for investors, even if investors were the ones who pushed the founders / C-suite to re-evaluate positioning.
On the other hand, you need everyone in the organization to be on-board with the new positioning and working to execute it with focused marketing campaigns, targetted sales efforts and a product roadmap that makes sense given the market category you’re trying to win. If enough people (or one person who is very important) in the organization tries to undermine the new position, you’ll end up confusing your target market even more, defeating the purpose of better positioning.
Here are some ways to prevent sabotage.
Involve key people in positioning discussions. This should be obvious, but positioning is a CEO-level exercise, not something “owned” by marketing. Not only does the CEO need to be on board, he or she should be championing the exercise. However, the positioning exercise, either with a consultant like me or done DIY, should involve the highest-ranking people in product, sales, marketing and engineering. It should include all founders. This is the positioning team. The market category, unique attributes and value and target market the team comes up with should be accepted by unanimous agreement.
Communicate the new positioning with the entire team. Getting the department leaders fully committed to the new positioning is critical, but getting their whole teams excited is important, too. One of the reasons I create a positioning canvas at the end of a positioning workshop is that it distills the most important aspects of positioning into a simple document that can be easily shared. The larger the organization the more leaders need to pay attention to communication with their team, but there should always be a combination of sharing the written positioning canvas (this prevents “game of telephone” problems), other communication directly from the CEO (this could be speaking at all-hands meetings and/or witten communication sent to all employees) and conversations between department leaders and their direct reports. You need everyone rowing in the same direction, and that includes everyone not just the leadership team.
No waffling. Unless they are directly insubordinate, most employees aren’t going to consciously try to sabotage your positioning if they 1) understand it and 2) are sure the company is actually committed to the new position. If leadership clearly waffles on the new positioning, employees down the hierarchy will get confused and could very easily start doing things that undermine your positioning. Not because they want to hurt the company, but because they are getting mixed messages.
Obvsiouly, if you have someone who is totally unable to come on board with the new positioning and is not a founder or critical team member, fire them. This is a very rare situation.