10 Years. 10 Insights. #5
Insight 5: Don’t Skip Product Positioning
This is the fifth post in a ten-part series marking Inkberry's 10th anniversary. Each post covers an insight drawn from a decade of working with B2B founders and leadership teams on growth strategy.
In my experience, one of the most common mistakes companies make, especially those without a dedicated product marketing resource, is to build a product, launch it, and skip the positioning work entirely. The result is a product that may be excellent but lands in the market without a clear story about why it matters to the people it's meant to serve.
Positioning is not a marketing exercise you do after the product is built. Done well, it makes every downstream decision faster and sharper, and it leads to more sales, more quickly.
What Product Positioning Actually Is
Product positioning isn't a tagline or a list of features. It's the work of understanding your product in the context of the market it's entering: who it's for, what problems it solves, how those people are solving the problem today, and how your product is a better answer.
That means getting clear on a few things:
Who is your target audience? Not a broad category, but a specific description of the people or organizations most likely to need what you've built.
What are their real problems? What keeps them up at night? What are they trying to get done, and where are they getting stuck?
How are they solving the problem today? Whether through a competitor, an internally built workaround, or a manual process, understanding the current solution tells you what you're actually competing against.
How does your product address those problems? This is where features meet context. It's not enough to list what the product does. You need to articulate how what it does translates into a solution your audience will recognize as solving their problem.
Why Skipping It Is Costly
When positioning work doesn't happen, a few things tend to go wrong.
First, even a great product can land flat. If prospects have to figure out on their own how your product solves their problem, many of them won't. They'll move on. The burden of connecting the dots should be on you, not them.
Second, your sales and marketing teams are left without a clear story. They know the features. They may not know how to present those features as a solution to the customer's specific reality. That gap shows up in sales conversations, in marketing materials, and ultimately in close rates.
Third, without positioning, you may discover post-launch that there's a mismatch between how you built the product and what the market actually needed. That's an expensive correction to make.
When to Do It
Ideally, positioning work happens while product requirements are still being defined. When the market understanding that informs positioning is baked into the product development process, the resulting product is sharper and the launch story writes itself.
If that window has passed, do the work before launch, not after. Make sure whoever is responsible for product marketing, whether that's a dedicated resource, a mix of marketing and product, or outside help, has a clear answer to two questions: How does this solution solve the customer's real problem? And how are we preparing our sales and marketing teams to make that easy for customers to understand?
Getting those answers before you go to market isn't a luxury. It's the difference between a product that gains traction quickly and one that earns it slowly, if at all.
If you're preparing for a product launch and want to talk through the positioning work, I'd love to help.