Our CEO hated our new positioning.
I'd spent six weeks interviewing customers, analyzing competitors, and crafting what I thought was brilliant positioning: "The enterprise-grade revenue intelligence platform for high-growth SaaS companies."
He read it and said: "This could describe five of our competitors. What makes us different?"
He was right. I'd done what most PMMs do with the Focus box in Pragmatic—I'd wordsmithed instead of making strategic choices.
Positioning isn't copywriting. It's not finding clever ways to describe your product. It's making hard decisions about what you are, who you're for, and what you're competing against.
The Focus box in the Pragmatic Framework—positioning, messaging, naming, and roadmap influence—sits between understanding the market (Market box) and building the business case (Business box). It's where market insights turn into strategic direction.
Most PMMs treat Focus as a creative exercise. You write positioning statements, develop messaging frameworks, run wordsmithing workshops. You produce beautiful documents that nobody uses because they don't drive decisions.
Real positioning makes product uncomfortable, forces sales to say no to some deals, and causes marketing to reject campaigns that don't fit. If your positioning doesn't make someone push back, you haven't made real choices. You've just described what you do in slightly prettier words than last quarter.
What Positioning Actually Is
I used to think positioning was about how you describe your product. Then I read April Dunford's "Obviously Awesome" and realized positioning is about context.
Positioning isn't "what we say about ourselves." It's "what category buyers put us in, who they compare us to, and what makes us different within that comparison set."
The genius of Pragmatic's Focus box is that it forces you to answer positioning questions in sequence. What market category are you in, which determines who you compete against? Who is your target customer, which determines who you're for and who you're not? What is your unique differentiator, which determines why someone chooses you? What proof do you have, which determines whether buyers believe you? And what's your roadmap influence strategy, which determines how you stay differentiated?
Most PMMs answer the unique differentiator question and skip the rest. That's why positioning doesn't land.
I learned this when we repositioned from "sales engagement platform" to "revenue intelligence for mid-market." Before the change, we competed against Outreach and Salesloft. Buyers evaluated us on email sequences and cadence features. We lost 60% of deals because we didn't have feature parity. After repositioning, we competed against spreadsheets and internal reports. Buyers evaluated us on forecast accuracy and pipeline visibility. We won 70% of deals because competitors didn't solve that problem.
Same product. Different positioning. Completely different competitive landscape. That's what the Focus box does—it changes who you compete against by changing the category buyers put you in.
The Positioning Mistake That Kills GTM
Most PMMs position for everyone. They try to appeal to startups and enterprises, SMB and mid-market, technical buyers and business buyers.
The positioning sounds like: "Our platform helps companies of all sizes improve efficiency, increase revenue, and reduce costs."
That positioning doesn't exclude anyone. It also doesn't compel anyone.
Real positioning requires saying no. No to certain customer segments. No to certain use cases. No to certain competitive comparisons.
I worked with a PMM who couldn't figure out why her win rate was stuck at 30%. I asked: "Who is this product not for?"
She said: "Everyone can benefit from better analytics."
That was the problem. When you're for everyone, you're compelling to no one.
We repositioned to "revenue analytics for Series A-C SaaS companies with outbound sales motions." Not for enterprises because we'd lose on enterprise features. Not for PLG companies because we'd lose on product analytics. Not for early-stage startups because they couldn't afford us.
Win rate went to 50% within two quarters. We stopped wasting cycles on deals we'd never win and started winning the deals we were built for.
What I learned: Positioning isn't about expanding your TAM. It's about dominating a segment by being obviously better for a specific type of customer than the alternatives.
How to Actually Do Pragmatic-Style Positioning
The Focus box in Pragmatic isn't a creative exercise—it's a series of strategic decisions informed by Market box insights.
Here's the process that actually works. First, you map your competitive alternatives from Market box work. Don't guess who you compete against—ask buyers who evaluated you what other solutions they considered.
The answers will surprise you.
I did this for a sales enablement product and learned something fascinating. About 40% of buyers compared us to internal wikis and Google Docs, while 30% compared us to enterprise platforms like Seismic. Another 20% compared us to LMS tools like Lessonly, and 10% compared us to doing nothing.
Same product, four completely different competitive sets. Each requires different positioning.
The decision we had to make: which competitive set do we want to own? We chose "versus internal wikis and Google Docs" because we could win 70% of those deals. We couldn't win against enterprise platforms where we had missing features, or against LMS tools where the use case was different.
That decision—who we wanted to compete against—drove everything else.
Then comes defining your target segment from Market box insights. Don't position for your entire TAM—position for the segment where you have the highest win rate and best retention.
I analyze win/loss data by company size, industry vertical, GTM motion, and use case. Then I find the segment with the best unit economics: highest win rate, fastest sales cycle, lowest CAC, highest retention.
That's who we position for. Everyone else is secondary.
For one product, the data showed something clear. Mid-market SaaS companies had a 65% win rate, $30K ACV, 8-week sales cycle, and 95% retention. Enterprise deals had a 30% win rate, $100K ACV, 6-month sales cycle, and 75% retention.
We positioned for mid-market even though enterprise ACVs were higher. Better unit economics, easier to win, easier to retain. The decision: who do we want to be obviously better for than the alternatives?
Next comes defining your unique differentiator from Market box customer insights. Your differentiator isn't a feature—it's the reason someone chooses you over the alternatives in your competitive set.
I find this by asking customers who evaluated us and competitors a simple question: "What tipped your decision to choose us?"
The answers reveal your real differentiator. Sometimes it's "you were easier to roll out," which means ease of adoption. Sometimes it's "you had the specific workflow for X," which means purpose-built capability. Sometimes it's "you showed ROI in the first demo," which means speed to value. Sometimes it's "you didn't require six months of services," which means low implementation burden.
One company I worked with thought their differentiator was "AI-powered insights." But when I interviewed customers, they said something completely different: "You were the only one that integrated with our existing stack without requiring us to replace anything."
That became the differentiator. Not AI, which everyone has. Integration flexibility, which only we had for this use case. The decision: what makes us the obvious choice within our competitive set?
Then you develop proof points from Market box research. Nobody believes your positioning without proof.
For each differentiator claim, I build a proof stack combining customer evidence, product evidence, and market evidence. For "easier to roll out" positioning, I'd gather stories from 10 customers who went live in under 30 days, highlight our implementation wizard that requires zero IT involvement, and cite Gartner research showing average competitor implementation takes 90 days while ours takes 25.
Proof turns positioning from marketing speak into something buyers believe. The decision: what evidence makes our positioning credible?
Finally comes influencing product roadmap—the part most PMMs skip.
This is where positioning often dies. You develop brilliant positioning, ship it to sales and marketing, and six months later product launches features that completely contradict your positioning.
You positioned as "built for mid-market" and product adds enterprise features. You positioned as "easy to use" and product adds complexity. You positioned as "purpose-built for X" and product expands to Y and Z.
Your positioning dies because product roadmap doesn't reinforce it.
Pragmatic includes "roadmap influence" in the Focus box for exactly this reason. Positioning only works if product builds in a direction that reinforces your strategic choices.
Every quarter, I present to product with our current positioning, the competitive alternatives buyers consider from win/loss data, the capabilities required to defend our positioning from buyer evaluation criteria, and the gaps where competitors are catching up from competitive analysis.
Then I make specific recommendations. To defend our "easier to adopt" positioning, we need to reduce setup time from 4 hours to 1 hour. Here's the buyer evidence showing why.
This isn't PMM telling product what to build. It's PMM showing product what capabilities are required to win in the segment we're positioned for.
Sometimes product says: "We're not building that. We're going upmarket."
Fine. Then positioning needs to change. You can't position as "built for mid-market" if product is building for enterprise.
The positioning-roadmap conversation forces alignment. Without it, you're positioning for a product that doesn't exist.
The Messaging Framework That Actually Works
Positioning is strategy. Messaging is execution.
Positioning answers: What category are we in? Who are we for? Why are we different? Messaging answers: How do we talk about this in sales conversations, on the website, in campaigns?
Most PMMs build messaging frameworks that are too abstract. They create "value pillars" and "key messages" that sound good in a presentation but don't translate to actual content.
The messaging framework I use starts with positioning condensed to one sentence. We're the revenue intelligence platform built for Series A-C SaaS companies with outbound sales motions.
Then comes the core message explaining why it matters to buyers. Sales leaders at high-growth companies need accurate forecasts to secure funding, plan hiring, and hit board commitments. We give you forecast accuracy in days, not months, without replacing your existing stack.
Then proof points showing why buyers should believe us. X company improved forecast accuracy from 60% to 92% in 30 days. Our platform integrates with your existing CRM and doesn't require data migration. 15 Series B companies use us to run their weekly forecast calls.
Then objection handling for what buyers push back on. When they say "we can build this internally," here's why 10 companies tried and failed. When they say "too expensive for our stage," here's the cost of a single missed forecast. When they say "another tool to adopt," here's why implementation takes 2 days, not 2 months.
Then competitive differentiation versus each alternative. Versus spreadsheets: automated, real-time, and doesn't break when reps leave. Versus enterprise platforms: 10x faster to implement, 1/3 the cost, built for your stage. Versus internal tools: full-time engineering team maintaining it, not your already-stretched engineers.
This framework translates to actual content. Sales uses it in discovery calls with core message and proof points. Marketing uses it in campaigns with core message and objection handling. Demand gen uses it in ads with core message and competitive differentiation. Enablement uses it in battlecards with competitive differentiation and proof points.
The test: Can someone read your messaging framework and write a sales email, ad copy, or website headline without asking you clarifying questions? If not, your framework is too abstract.
Common Focus Box Mistakes
I've watched PMMs make the same positioning mistakes repeatedly, and the patterns are predictable.
Positioning by committee never works. You run workshops where everyone contributes ideas. You try to incorporate feedback from product, sales, marketing, and executives. The positioning becomes a frankenstein of compromises.
The problem: positioning requires making hard choices, and committees don't make hard choices—they make everyone happy by excluding nobody. The fix: Own the positioning decision. Gather input, but make the final call based on market data, not consensus.
Positioning without differentiation is another common mistake. Your positioning describes what you do but not why someone should choose you over alternatives.
"We help companies improve efficiency" isn't positioning—it's a category description. The fix: Your positioning must answer this question clearly: given these alternatives, why would someone choose us? If you can't answer that, you don't have positioning.
Creating messaging that sales can't use happens when you build beautiful messaging frameworks with value pillars and brand positioning, but sales says: "I don't know how to use this in a conversation."
The problem: messaging is too abstract, optimized for executive presentations instead of sales execution. The fix: Test every message with sales. Can they use it in discovery calls? Can they answer objections with it? If not, rewrite until they can.
Positioning without roadmap alignment is the mistake that kills positioning over time. You position as "built for X" but product is building for Y. Your positioning dies within six months because the product evolves in a different direction.
The problem: positioning and roadmap aren't aligned. The fix: Make roadmap influence part of your Focus work. Every quarter, review whether product is building in a direction that reinforces or undermines your positioning.
Why Most Positioning Fails
The uncomfortable truth: Most positioning fails because PMMs are afraid to make real choices.
Choosing a target segment means excluding other segments. Choosing a competitive set means walking away from certain types of deals. Choosing a differentiator means admitting you're not good at other things.
Those choices are scary. What if you're wrong? What if the excluded segment represents future revenue? What if you could win those other deals if you just tried harder?
But positioning only works when you make hard choices.
When you position for everyone, you're compelling to no one. When you compete in every category, you lose to specialists who own one category.
I've watched PMMs position as "the all-in-one platform for everyone" and wonder why win rates stay at 30%. You're not losing because your product isn't good enough. You're losing because buyers don't know why they should choose you.
What actually works: Pick a segment. Own it. Be obviously better for that segment than the alternatives. Then expand.
The companies that win don't try to be everything to everyone. They dominate one segment, then use that as a beachhead to expand.
Salesforce didn't start as "enterprise CRM for all industries." They started as "CRM for SMB" and expanded upmarket over a decade. HubSpot didn't start as "all-in-one growth platform." They started as "inbound marketing for SMB" and expanded.
You don't need to own every segment today. You need to own one segment so completely that buyers in that segment don't even consider alternatives.
That's what the Focus box does. It forces you to make the hard choices that create real differentiation.
If your positioning doesn't make someone uncomfortable, you haven't positioned. You've just described what you do.
Go make some hard choices.