Metrics that do and don't reflect on your positioning

Sometimes evaluating your positioning, like evaluating product-market fit, can seem pretty squishy. I’m guilty here too — I’m always asking people how like it takes prospects to understand their project/product, for example. That’s not really a hard metric.

There are some hard metrics to pay attention to when it comes to positioning, though. And some red herrings.

Here’s metrics that matter:

  • Length of sales cycle. Long sales cycle is a sign of bad positioning (by ‘long’ I mean comparatively — obviously large enterprise sales cycles are longer than startup sales cycles).

  • Low margins / price pressure. If you’re competing on price, you have a positioning problem. Period. You do not want to be the Walmart or Ikea of Kubernetes networking. Note: This is an especially tricky issue for open source companies, which run the real risk of positioning themselves as “like XYZ commercial project, but free!”

  • Low close rates. If you have a lot of people starting the sales process but then dropping off… well, it could be that your product sucks, but it’s equally likely there’s a mismatch in expectations, so prospects aren’t getting what they expected. That’s a positioning problem.

Here are some metrics that don’t matter:

  • Your homepage bounce rate. You might even find it gets higher with better positioning — that’s how it works. People who land on the homepage and aren’t the right fit self-select out. You can’t know from just a bounce rate whether the people self-selecting out are the right people or not.

  • GitHub stars. We all know how meaningless these are, but just to put it out there.

  • Open source project downloads. Raw download numbers, again, won’t tell you much about people who downloaded it the project only to discover it didn’t match their expectations, so they abandoned it. However, you should pay attention to the relationship between downloads and how many people start using the project — if you can get that data.

If you’re experiencing problems with the first set of metrics, reach out! They’re fixable, with better positioning.

Emily Omier