The goal of a company is a repeatable sales process
Whether you’re building a company built around open source or some other company entirely, the end goal is ultimately the same: to build a repeatable, predictable sales process. You want to know levers you need to pull if you need more revenue, and exactly how to pull those levers.
How does your positioning fit in? Many ways. Bad positioning isn’t the only reason you might be struggling with building a repeatable sales process, but it’s common enough that if your sales process is not repeatable, it’s always worth examining if your positioning, or some part of your positioning, might be the problem.
Who are you selling to? No company — even the big ones like Apple — definite their target customers as ‘everyone.’ You probably know that already, but nonetheless you’re likely defining your target customers too broadly. This isn’t forever, either. As a loose rule of thumb, try to define your ideal customers so that the potential market is no more than 100x the number of deals you want to close in the next 12 months. So if you want to close 10 deals, a market of 1,000.
This increases repeatability because you know who to reach out to in outbound campaigns and you can tailor your message (both in marketing terms but also during your sales conversations) to precisely what these customers want. That gives you more control over the sales pipeline while also making it more likely that prospects will end up converting.
Better quality conversations. One of the key symptoms of poor positioning is people not understanding your open source project or commercial product right away. They compare it with the wrong alternatives, often with complementary projects/products, and are confused about the value. This confusion creates unnecessary friction in your sales process, because confused people don’t buy. Getting potential customers to understand what your project/product is, and why it matters to them as soon as possible, before they have the chance to get frustrated, is a key part of a repeatable sales processes.
Your sales team on the same page. Sometimes a company’s positioning is spot on — at least in the CEO’s head. But it’s not written down anywhere, so there’s a lot of variation in how individual sales people present the product, and that doesn’t always match how marketing talks about the product or project, either. Getting everyone on the same page is critical to repeatable sales processes. You need marketing to get good quality leads (that meet the ideal customer profile), and sales to tell them the same story as marketing. You need all salespeople to tell the same narrative. This isn’t exactly a positioning problem, but sort of. If you suspect your positioning is fine but the rest of your team doesn’t get it, make a copy of my positioning canvas and fill it out. Then you’ll have the positioning captured in a shareable way.
I haven’t really addressed how your core positioning — the market category you put your project, product and company in — impacts your repeatable sales process. If you’re putting yourself in a market category that is too broad or puts your product in an unfavorable light, your sales process is going to feel haphazard. You need to get the market category right if you want people to understand the product immediately, which is an important part of making the sales process repeatable. Getting specific enough about your market category is what helps you connect with your ideal customer, and helps your ideal customer recognize your product as something that will help them.
Positioning is not the only component of a repeatable sales process. But you can’t build a repeatable sales process on top of poor positioning. So if your sales process seems broken, haphazard or just not repeatable, check in with your positioning to see if that might be the problem.