Sary's notes on Obviously Awesome

Your current customers love you, but new prospects can't figure out what you're selling. Do you spend more time explaining what you're selling rather than closing deals? If your prospects can't figure out what you do— quickly—they will invent a position for you, one that potentially hides your key strengths or misrepresents your value.

Customers who misunderstood your value chose you for the wrong reasons, and now they're trying to recover sunk costs by turning your product into what they thought they were get-ting. In a worst-case scenario, your development team may spend time building features for these disappointed custom-ers, trying to appease a group that is likely to quit eventually, while overlooking your happiest customers. Pairing weak positioning with strong marketing and sales efforts leads to customers abandoning your product soon after they have purchased it.

We rely on context to make sense of a world that is full of street performers and concert hall musicians, and full of mit lions of products of all shapes and sizes. Context allows us ts make thousands of little decisions about what we should pay attention to and what we can simply ignore. When we lack context for a product, the easiest way to create one is by starting with some thing we already know. When you saw a hoverboard, you may have thought, "Hey, that kid is riding a thing that looks like a skateboard, bur he's not pushing with lis foot." Or you saw an iPad and thought, "That's like a giant cell phone or a little monitor withour a keyboard."

Great positioning takes into account all of the following: • The customer's point of view on the problem you solve and the alternative ways of solving that problem. • The ways you are uniquely different from those alternatives and why that's meaningful for customers. • The characteristics of a potential customer that really values what you can uniquely deliver. • The best market context for your product that makes your unique value obvious to those customers who are best suited to your product.

These are the Five (Plus One) Components of Effective Positioning: 1. Competitive alternatives. What customers would do if your solution didn't exist. 2. Unique attributes. The features and capabilities that you have and the alternatives lack. 3. Value (and proof). The benefit that those features enable for customers. customers. 4. Target market characteristics. The characteristics of a group of buyers that lead them to really care a lot about the value you deliver. 5. Market category. The market you describe yourself as being part of, to help customers understand your value. 6. (Bonus) Relevant trends. Trends that your target customers understand and/or are interested in that can help make your product more relevant right now.

Attributes like "15-megapixel camera" or "all-metal con-struction" enable benefits for customers such as "sharper images" or "a stronger frame." Articulating value takes the benefits one step further: putting benefits into the context of a goal the customer is trying to achieve.

The advantage of positioning in an existing market category is that you don't have to convince people the category needs to exist. You also benefit from the assumptions that the category brings to mind for prospects. The bonus is you get all of that without having to fight directly with an established leader.

If you choose to enter a market without a strong leader, you will have to commit to moving quickly to establish yourself as the leader before someone else does. For technology companies, this often means committing to growing your customer base as quickly as you can, which can require outside funding (and the risks and potential headaches that come with that).

In Head to Head you are attempting to beat Coke in the cola market; in Big Fish, Small Pond, you're selling Coke for dogs. While your product is a lot like Coke (brown and fizzy), it does something that Coke doesn't do and that dogs really, really want (it tastes like bones).

Companies tend to shy away from this style because they are worried that moving from targeting the entire market to just a small piece of it will mean less oppor-tunity. In reality the opposite is frequently true: you are simply unselecting the part of the market that was never going to buy your product anyway in order to focus only on customers where you have a distinct advantage.

The best way to determine if your chosen subsegment is big enough is to determine how many sales you need to make in the next year to meet your revenue goals. If you need to close thirty deals to make your number this year and your target segment has only one hundred businesses in it, you are going to have to look elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you need to close thirty deals and there are thousands of businesses in your subsegment, it's likely big enough for now.

Create a New Game: Positioning to win a market you create Sometimes new technology or circumstances pave the way for a completely new market. Other times a market can be created by combining one or more existing markets to form one with different buying criteria. Developing a new market comes with its own distinct set of opportunities and challenges.