Open ten SaaS homepages in your category right now. Count how many say some version of: the all-in-one platform that helps teams streamline workflows and boost productivity. That sentence is not positioning. It is the absence of positioning wearing a suit.
Positioning is a decision, not a paragraph. Specifically, it is the decision about what context you want a buyer’s brain to load when they encounter your product. Get the context right and everything downstream, the headline, the demo, the pricing page, writes itself. Get it wrong and no amount of clever copy saves you.
The best process for making that decision is April Dunford’s, from her book Obviously Awesome. Here is how to actually run it, not just nod at it.
The five components, in the order that matters
Dunford’s insight is that positioning components have a dependency order. Most teams start with the market category. That is backwards. The order:
- Competitive alternatives: what would customers do if you did not exist?
- Unique capabilities: what can you do that those alternatives cannot?
- Value: what do those capabilities enable for the customer, in outcomes?
- Best-fit customers: who cares intensely about that value?
- Market category: what context makes all of the above obvious?
Each step feeds the next. You cannot know your unique capabilities until you know what you are being compared against, and you cannot pick a category until you know who you serve and why.
Step 1: List real alternatives, not just competitors
The single most common mistake: listing only direct competitors. Your true competition includes Excel, a Notion doc, an intern, an outsourced agency, and the most dangerous one, doing nothing. Ask your last ten customers what they were doing before you. Ask your last ten lost deals what they chose instead. The answers rarely match your competitive battlecard.
Worked example. Say you sell an AI tool that turns sales call recordings into CRM updates. Your alternatives are not just Gong. They are: reps typing notes at 7 pm, managers nagging in Slack, a Zapier duct-tape setup, and CRM fields simply staying empty. That last one, the empty field, is probably your biggest competitor.
Step 2: Isolate what only you have
List every feature, then strike out everything an alternative also does. What survives is your differentiated capability list. Be brutal here. If Gong also does it, it does not belong on the list, even if you do it slightly better. Slightly better is not positioning material unless you can prove the difference in a demo within 60 seconds.
In our example, suppose what survives is: works with WhatsApp voice notes (half of Indian field sales happens there), updates any CRM including Zoho and LeadSquared, and costs a tenth of enterprise revenue-intelligence suites.
Step 3: Translate capabilities into value
Capabilities are what the product does. Value is what the customer gets. The translation test: so what, asked twice. Works with WhatsApp voice notes. So what? Field reps update the CRM without opening a laptop. So what? Managers finally see the real pipeline, and forecast reviews stop being fiction. That second so-what is the value statement. It belongs in your messaging. The capability belongs in the demo.
Step 4: Define who cares most
Value is not valuable to everyone equally. Best-fit customers are the segment with the most acute version of the problem plus the characteristics that make them buy fast and stay. For our example: Indian B2B companies with 20 to 200 field sales reps, running Zoho or LeadSquared, where the sales head personally feels forecast pain every Monday. Note how specific that is. Specific enough that a salesperson could build a list from it. If your best-fit definition cannot generate a list, it is a vibe, not a segment.
Step 5: Choose the category last
Now, and only now, pick the market frame. You have three strategic options:
| Strategy | When it works | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| Head-on: existing category, claim you are best | You genuinely beat the leader on what the market already values | Incumbent has more money to shout with |
| Big fish, small pond: subsegment of an existing category | You dominate a niche the leader underserves | Pond may be too small; pick one that is growing |
| Create a new category | Rarely, when no existing frame fits and you have funding to educate | Extremely expensive; most category creation attempts die |
Our example should not position as revenue intelligence, Gong’s category, where it will look like a cheap toy. Position as CRM automation for field sales teams, a small pond where WhatsApp support makes it the obvious best fish. Same product, different frame, completely different win rate.
Turning positioning into copy that does not sound generic
The positioning doc is internal. The homepage is where it becomes visible, and where most teams regress to the all-in-one platform sludge. Three rules that keep the sharpness:
- Lead with the alternative, not the aspiration. Your CRM updates itself. No more 7 pm data entry, beats Supercharge your revenue engine. Buyers recognize their pain faster than your vision.
- Use the customer’s vocabulary from win-loss calls. If buyers say my pipeline is a work of fiction, that phrase outperforms anything a copywriter invents. Mine your call recordings, G2 reviews, and support tickets for exact language.
- Make the best-fit filter visible. Built for field sales teams on Zoho and LeadSquared scares away bad-fit visitors, which is a feature. Generic positioning attracts everyone and converts no one.
The mistakes that quietly ruin the exercise
- Running it solo. Positioning needs the founder, sales, product, and marketing in one room, because the output is a decision everyone must execute. A doc nobody agreed to changes nothing.
- Skipping customer evidence. If the alternatives list comes from your head instead of ten customer conversations, the whole chain is built on sand.
- Refusing to exclude. Positioning that does not turn some buyers away is not positioning. The fear of a smaller audience is why every homepage sounds the same.
- Never revisiting. Rerun the exercise every 6 to 12 months, or whenever a new competitor class appears. In AI categories, that can mean twice a year minimum.
FAQ
How long does a proper positioning exercise take?
Budget two weeks of research, ten customer or win-loss conversations plus review mining, then one half-day workshop with founders, sales, product, and marketing, then a week to draft and pressure-test the messaging. A solo founder can compress this to a focused week. What you cannot compress is the customer evidence: skipping the ten conversations produces confident fiction.
What is the difference between positioning and messaging?
Positioning is the strategic decision: alternatives, unique value, best-fit customer, category. Messaging is that decision expressed in words for a specific audience and channel: homepage headline, sales one-liner, ad copy. One positioning produces many messages. When teams complain their messaging is not working, the actual problem is usually upstream in positioning, which no rewrite fixes.
Does the Dunford method work for AI products in fast-moving categories?
Yes, arguably better than anywhere else, because AI categories are crowded with identical claims. Two adjustments: rerun the competitive-alternatives step more often, since a foundation model update can create new alternatives overnight, and be cautious about positioning on a capability the next GPT or Claude release might commoditize. Position on workflow depth, proprietary data, and segment focus, which survive model upgrades.
