Positioning – The Superpower Your Business Might Be Missing

Eva Skoglund

When your positioning is sharp, everything else falls into place.

Great positioning is a superpower for your business, poor positioning silently sabotages many of the things you do

Imagine if your business could find the right customers faster, close deals more quickly, raise prices, and keep customers coming back — all without needing to pour money into building new features, hiring more salespeople, or ramping up your marketing budget. Sounds like a superpower, right?!

That’s exactly what strong, clear positioning can do for your product and your business. Positioning isn’t about a marketing buzzword or a tagline to slap on your website. It’s the strategic foundation that defines who your product is for, what problems it solves (on a very specific level), and why it matters – right now, in the minds of your customers.

When your positioning is sharp, everything else falls into place: sales conversations become easier, pricing discussions less painful, and your teams align behind a common story. But if your positioning is off, no amount of feature development, sales hiring, or marketing spend will fix the real problem. Poor positioning silently sabotages many of the things you do, from sales and marketing to product development and customer retention. You’ll keep spinning your wheels. You’ll pour time and money into new features that don’t move the needle, hire more salespeople who struggle to hit their targets, and push marketing harder without seeing real results. Meanwhile, your best-fit customers might be slipping through your fingers. Worst case, you’ll be opening the door for competition to swoop in and take your business.

But here’s the good news: when your positioning is clear and laser-focused, it becomes that superpower mentioned above. You can find new customers faster, close deals more quickly, raise your prices with confidence, and dramatically reduce churn — all without throwing more resources at the problem.

Do you have a positioning problem?

All business problems aren’t rooted in bad positioning. So how can you know if you have a positioning problem or not? In this article, I’ll share seven key signs that indicate your problems might be rooted in bad positioning, symptoms that can cause frustration, slow growth, and lost opportunities. I’ll also share some examples based on my own experiences. Recognizing these signs is the first step to unlocking that superpower and steering your business toward faster success and sustainable growth.

Sign #1: Some Customers Love You, Others Can’t Stop Complaining

Symptom: You notice a sharp divide in your customer base. Some customers absolutely adore your product and consider it indispensable, while others often complain and demand features that (worst case) don’t fit with your product’s core principles.

This isn’t just normal customer requests for incremental improvements, it’s about a clash in expectations. When you dig in, you’ll find that these “complainers” often don’t see the core value of your product as your best-fit customers do. Instead, they want something else entirely, often a different approach or a hybrid of features that conflict with your product’s architecture or vision.

Why it matters: This mismatch wastes your time and resources, as you try to please everyone and end up diluting your product with ill-suited features that in the end causes your product becoming a “Frankenstein mix” that hurts your uniqueness. It leads to frustration internally and confusion externally. It can be difficult to grasp why this situation occurs, why are some customers in love with your product, while others keep being dissatisfied? Without recognizing that it may be a positioning problem, not a product problem, you will try to fix it by pouring development resources into the problem. But it will not get you out of the trap.

Why are some customers in love with your product while others keep being dissatisfied?

Example: I worked with a product where some customers said they couldn’t imagine starting new projects without it — it was integral to their success. Others compared us constantly to competitors and demanded features that would have violated our product’s fundamental design. The breakthrough came when we dared to lean-in fully on our unique positioning, stopped chasing every feature request, and focused on the customers who truly fit our product. That shift aligned our product and market approach and gave us clarity.

Sign #2: You’re Under Constant Price Pressure

Symptom: Price pressure feels like a recurring headache. You know, with confidence, that your product delivers significant business value (measurable in cost savings or revenue for your customers), yet customers frequently push back on price or threaten to switch to cheaper alternatives.

We’re not talking about normal price negotiation here, which is expected. It’s a deeper problem: customers don’t clearly see or understand the value you create compared to alternatives, so they default to thinking that price is the main lever for their own business case related to your product.

Why it matters: Persistent price pressure drags down your margins, forces constant justification, and distracts your sales teams. It also signals that your messaging isn’t communicating your unique value in a compelling way, and the reason why your messaging fails is likely because you haven’t identified your optimal positioning. Great messaging stems from great positioning! Something to be aware of is that the price pressure symptom may also be related to bad product packaging or the price model. But the thing is – once you understand your optimal positioning, it will also help tremendously with identifying the optimal packaging and price model.

Example: I once worked with a product where we had a customer whose engineers told their own leadership that without our product, their development projects would be delayed by several months. In fact, some developers at the customer even threatened not even want to work on certain projects if they couldn’t’ use our product. Yet the customer’s contract renewal stalled due to severe price pushback. Only when a senior Vice President at the customer contacted our CEO, did we secure a fair deal. This was confusing until we realized that other teams at the customers didn’t feel that urgency and didn’t fully grasp when and why our product was critical to their own development projects. Once we clarified that through better positioning, the price pressure eased significantly.

Great positioning can ease price pressure

Sign #3: Long Sales Cycles, Low Win Rates, and Losing to Competitors

Symptom: Your sales cycles are dragging, win rates are disappointing, and competitors win more deals than you’d expect, even when your product delivers solid value.

Complex products often have long sales cycles, that’s normal. But when you consistently lose deals you feel you should win, or your sales teams struggle to clearly explain the product in the right way so that it matters in the mind of the customer, positioning might be to blame.

Why it matters: Poor positioning makes it hard for prospects to understand your value or see a clear reason to choose you. This causes indecision, delays, or prospects turning to competitors with clearer stories. You might confuse the root cause of this problem being a sales process issue on your side, or you might even view it as a problem on the customer side – they are not “smart enough” to see the value of your product. But in reality, it may very well be the positioning that is not crisp enough.

Example: Early in my career, I worked with a product sold through both direct sales and distributors. While one distributor crushed it, most others struggled to close deals. By studying the characteristics of customers that fit our product well, and learning from how that one successful distributor talked about our product in front of customers, we realized we needed to focus on our core strengths and base our sales story and customer qualification on clear positioning. This shift led to better win rates and faster sales.

Sign #4: High Customer Churn

Symptom: You see a churn problem — some customers love your product and stay loyal, but many (a majority?) leave soon after buying. This isn’t just normal churn; it’s a sign your product is being sold to the wrong companies.

Many customers leaving soon after they purchased the product?

Often, your sales teams are left guessing who to sell to and end up selling to “anyone who will buy.” Customers realize the product doesn’t solve their problems well and leave, driving churn and damaging your reputation.

Why it matters: High churn inflates customer acquisition costs and erodes lifetime value. It means you’re not clearly defining and communicating who your product is for, resulting in misaligned expectations and disappointment. To be clear, this may be caused by poor product quality or performance, but it may equally well be about bad positioning, and the positioning is usually much easier to fix.

Example: As a consultant, I worked with a client whose salespeople were selling broadly without guidance. They had a rather bad churn problem. Once we clarified the positioning, and most importantly the characteristics of a best-fit-customer, and the differentiated value that made the product stand out and shine, it helped sales focus, churn dropped, and customer satisfaction improved.

Sign #5: New Prospects Don’t Understand What Your Product Is, But Existing Customers Love It

Symptom: Your current customers are loyal and enthusiastic, yet new prospects don’t “get it”. You spend a lot of time trying to explain what the product actually is and why it matters, often with limited success. Many prospects drop off before a deal happens. But when you do win a customer and they start using the product, they love it.

Why it matters: This symptom indicates you don’t have a clear, compelling, and consistent story that resonates with new buyers. Even if your product is delivering huge value to existing customers, you need to translate that into a story that new customers immediately understand. Interestingly enough, the way you build up and structure your sales story can make a huge difference in how customers perceive your solution. The actual framing, the flow, and how you set the scene matters more than you’d think. The root cause of a poor sales story is often bad positioning.

Example: With one of my previous products, existing customers claimed their businesses would end without it (!) but salespeople still struggled to close new customers. We lacked a clear understanding of the exact problems solved and the value created. I also suspect being placed in the wrong market category made the story harder to tell. In this case, we never came to a solution, but in retrospect, I often think what could have been done if we had been deliberate about our positioning.

Sign #6: Internal Difficulties Making Go-To-Market Teams Succeed

Symptom: Your sales and marketing teams are out of sync, onboarding of new salespeople fails, marketing materials are ignored by sales, and different teams tell conflicting stories about the product. Your product may be presented in one way on your website, but in customer meetings salespeople tell a different story.

These are all signs of unclear or inconsistent positioning, and it causes internal confusion. Without a shared, clear understanding of the product’s value, fit, and narrative, teams struggle to present a coherent message to customers.

Why it matters: Misalignment internally hurts momentum, confuses customers, and creates friction between teams. It will create negative effects on business. If you are confused internally, your customers will undoubtedly be even more confused. You may also experience high turnover in sales and marketing staff, which will be costly over time.

Misalignment internally hurts momentum, confuses customers, and creates friction between teams. 

Example: A memorable moment for me was when an executive from one of our biggest customers visited our office and met with our engineering team. He shared their own technical vision and how our product was a key contributor in that vision. It revealed a big, compelling story we hadn’t fully grasped up until then. That insight was something I used to reshape our positioning, which allowed marketing to create better sales resources. It enabled us to create all sorts of assets for sales that helped them with customer dialogues. It improved internal alignment and business results, primarily by making everyone aligned around a shared story.

Sign #7: You Don’t Know How to Prioritize New Functionality

Symptom: You struggle to decide which new features to build and which requests to prioritize because you try to be “everything to everyone.” As a result, your roadmap is a mess of conflicting functionalities and prioritization problems, and in worst case building all of it would even take your product in directions that would contradict one another. This causes big frustrations with your technical team who complain about the situation.

Why it matters: Without a clear understanding of who your best-fit customers are, and why they choose your product today, it means you lack one (of several) important guiding stars for product decisions. Because positioning clarifies who you serve and what problems you solve, it will provide a lens through which you can make product choices.

Additionally, functionality prioritization problems are often caused by not having a clear product strategy. In its simplest form a strategy can be described as what will take us from the present (state A) to the grand future, our vision, (state B). Usually, we spend lots of time ironing out and describing the vision, our future state. But we tend to not spend nearly as much time on understanding our present state. If that’s unclear or debated internally, strategy and prioritization become nearly impossible since we don’t agree on the starting point for the road ahead.

Strategy is what takes us from the present to the grand future, our vision. Usually, we spend lots of time describing the vision (where we are headed), but not nearly as much time on understanding our present state. Positioning is all about our present state. If we don't understand our present state, it will become difficult to agree on a strategy.

Here’s the thing – positioning is all about the present. We can describe our current state with several aspects and nuances, but positioning is one key component since it describes the characteristics of our best-fit customers, why they choose us (for real), what problems we solve for them, what value we create for them, and what they consider being the alternatives to our product. Once we clearly understand our present state, we can have an insightful discussion about how to reach our grand vision – the strategy ahead.

Example: The product team at a client of mine had such a long and open-ended list of future functionalities the CEO and founders wanted them to build, that it almost caused paralysis in the build team. They could start anywhere with improvement work, but where to begin? We had already run a positioning exercise, because of business problems they wanted to solve, which resulted amongst other things in a crisp list of characteristics describing their best-fit customer. As a side-effect, when that description reached the product team, they immediately started to use it to describe their users. And suddenly, things started to unlock because they knew who they were building for, as a first priority.

Where to go from here?

If these any of these signs feel familiar, it might be time to pause and reflect on your product’s positioning. Consider:

• How clearly do you understand who your ideal customers really are?

• Are you able to articulate the unique value your product brings, in a way that resonates both internally and externally?

• Do your teams share a common understanding of why your product matters — and equally important, where and why it does not fit?

Positioning is often mistaken for a fluffy, abstract exercise — but in reality, there is a clear, established method to uncover your ideal positioning. It’s well described in April Dunford’s books Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch. Her method guides your company through a straightforward process in easy, practical steps, helping you cut through assumptions and get to the core of what truly drives customer value. Through my own (many years of) experience as an inhouse product person, I knew already from the moment I laid eyes on April Dunford's method that this was THE way to identify the core value of a B2B product and how to understand best-fit-customers. Ever since, I have been using it when working with my clients.

Many organizations find that without an outside viewpoint, it’s easy to get caught in assumptions or the “curse of knowledge”, making it harder to identify what truly makes your product unique in the eyes of the customer. Being on the inside, makes it surprisingly hard to take an outside perspective. That's why I would recommend you taking the time to explore these questions thoughtfully, and follow a proven approach, since it may open new perspectives on your business and guide your growth with confidence.

Sometimes, the simplest insights can become your greatest superpower.