Is now the right time to evaluate positioning?

How do you know that you should take a hard look at your positioning? I suspect that “fix positioning” isn’t usually an item in the founders’ to-do list, making it easy to put off for later. This is generally a mistake — if you’re investing in sales or marketing and suspect your positioning is a problem, it’s something you should address immediately. Positioning is upstream from sales and marketing, and continuing to market the product while you’re experiencing symptoms of poor positioning (and especially if you do intend to change positions in the market at some time in the future, you’re just not sure if right now is the best time) could be not just a waste of marketing and sales budget but actually making it more difficult to shift positioning in the future.

When is it a good time to wait?

If you’re experiencing symptoms of poor positioning but aren’t doing any marketing or sales yet — maybe you’re deep in product development and not ready for prime time yet — you can hold off. If this is your situation, evaluating positioning around the time you’re putting together a go to market plan is a good idea. (NOTE: if your startup is based on an open source project, the project already has traction and but you’re not selling a paid product yet, it is entirely appropriate to focus on positioining the open source project. In this scenario, you need to be expanding the community around the OSS even as you build the paid product, and correct positioning is a key part of encouraging community growth).

If you’re conducting final interviews of a major (read: C-level) marketing or sales hire, it makes sense to wait until the new person is on board and can participate in the positioning discussions.

Lastly, if you’re in the middle of a fundraising round, it’s advisable to wait until you’ve finished the fundraising and are back to focusing on growing the company. This is both because a change in positioning mid-fundraising can confuse investors and because fundraising tends to occupy so much of the founders’ time that they can’t focus on positioning.

How bad should it hurt?

If you’re experiencing one or more symptoms of poor positioning and don’t fall into one of the above situations, it’s always a question of how bad it hurts. But chances are, if you suspect you have a positioning problem the sooner you fix it, the better.

Isn’t it better to shorten your sales cycle, improve conversion rates and reduce churn sooner than later?

If you’d like to learn more about how I can help you improve your positioning, reach out. If you’re like to learn more about why you and how to position for where you are right now (not where your product/ company might be in 3 years if everything goes right), join me on Thursday at 9am PT for a webinar on the topic.