Positioning, in one sentence

Positioning is the decision about who you are for and what you are instead of. Most small businesses have never made it explicitly, which is why their marketing is hard to write: every sentence has to work for everybody, so none of them works for anyone.

The sentence

One format, four slots, and the discipline is in filling them specifically rather than in the wording.

For somebody with a particular problem, we are the thing that does a particular job, instead of the obvious alternative, because of something checkable.

Illustratively, for the stock ordering service used elsewhere on this site: for independent restaurants that still count stock by hand, we set up a written ordering routine, instead of buying inventory software with a monthly fee, because most places need a process rather than a system.

Compare that with what the same business would otherwise write, which is that it helps restaurants streamline their operations. The second version is not wrong. It is unusable, because no sentence on the website can be derived from it.

The slot everybody skips

Instead of. A customer with a problem is not choosing between you and nothing; they are choosing between you and something, and that something is usually one of three things: a larger competitor, doing it themselves, or continuing to live with the problem.

Naming the alternative changes what you have to say. Against a larger competitor you argue specificity. Against doing it themselves you argue the cost of their own hours. Against doing nothing, which is the most common and least considered rival, you have to make the problem expensive before anything else, because somebody who is comfortable does not buy.

Narrow is not small

The resistance to positioning is always the same fear: that choosing a group means losing everyone outside it. In practice the opposite happens, for a reason worth spelling out.

A specific claim gets recommended. Somebody who knows exactly what you do can pass your name to the right person, and that is how most small businesses actually grow. A business that does a bit of everything cannot be recommended, because nobody knows which friend to mention it to. Breadth is not reach; it is the absence of a handle.

You will also still get work from outside the position. The position decides what you say, not who you serve. Nobody turns away a good client because they came from the wrong segment.

How to arrive at it

1. 01List the last ten customers and mark the ones you were genuinely good for. Patterns in that list beat any amount of thinking about an ideal customer.
2. 02For each of those, write what they would have done instead. That is your real competitive set, and it is usually not the companies you watch.
3. 03Write what you did that the alternative would not have. Keep it concrete: a thing you did, not a quality you have.
4. 04Draft the sentence, apply the competitor test, and rewrite until it fails for them.
5. 05Then check whether your website, your first email and your prices all follow from it. If they contradict it, the sentence is a wish rather than a position.

Expect this to take a few attempts over weeks rather than an afternoon. The first version is almost always a description of the category with your name in it.

Testing it on people rather than on yourself

A positioning sentence is easy to be satisfied with and hard to be right about, because you know what you meant. Three cheap tests, in increasing order of how much they tell you.

1. 01Read it to somebody in your market and ask them to say it back in their own words. What comes back is what it actually communicates, and the gap is usually in the because clause.
2. 02Ask them who it is obviously not for. If they cannot say, the first slot is not doing any work, and an audience nobody can be excluded from is not an audience.
3. 03Put it in front of people who do not know you, as the first line of a page, and see whether anybody acts. This is the only test that costs money and the only one that settles anything.

The second test is the one worth doing today, because it is free and it catches the most common failure. A sentence that excludes nobody has chosen nobody, and that is invisible from the inside.