This document provides strategies for creating an effective positioning story to differentiate a company's products or services in the market. It outlines a new positioning model focused on the buyer's perspective. It then describes 9 rules for effective positioning, including focusing on a specific buyer persona, owning a well-defined problem, taking a corner of the room rather than trying to be everything to everyone, and communicating through stories rather than technical specifications. The document also provides examples of how to apply these rules by developing positioning pillars, powerful messages, and launch strategies focused on a journey rather than a single event.
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1. Creating Break-Away
Positioning
Strategies
Secrets of Silicon Valley
By: Robert M. Wright
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2. Today’s Agenda
What is Positioning?
New Positioning Model
9 New Rules for Positioning
Putting the Positioning Model In Action
Positioning Strategies
Launching Your Story
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3. Inflection Points = Growth and Disruption
New Product
Inflection Points
M&A
Cloud
Mobile
Fast, More Frequent
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4. The Problem: Strategy to Revenue
Point of
Strategy Revenue
Takes too long!
Don’t maximize revenue opportunity!!
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5. The Root Cause is Not A Bad Strategy
Product Channel
Making Your
Making Your Strategy Work
Strategy
Business Go-To
Model Market
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6. Root Cause: Different Buyers, Competitors
CIO?
Cloud Computing Committee?
VP Security?
VP Applications?
Data Center Executive
Cloud
Virtualization Computing
Servers Platform
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7. The Answer: Making Your Strategy, Work
Point of
Strategy “Go-to-Market” Journey
Revenue
Strategy
Intelligence
Positioning
Strategy ✓ Sales
Enablement
Revenue
Optimization
Launch
Strategy
Is there a What is is my
What my SALES REVENUE?
STORY?
STORY? conversations? ROLL-out?
MARKET? accounts?
Do I know DIFFERENT? Sales SUCCESS marketing momentum?
DIFFERENT?
these resonate? model? LEVERS?
resonate?
BUYERS?
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8. What Do They Have in Common?
They All Have Powerful Stories!
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9. Definition of Positioning
What is
Positioning?
“
…Positioning is in the mind of the
prospect. Its how you differentiate
your solution in their mind. It cuts through the
clutter. If focuses on the perceptions of the
prospect.
Al Reis
”
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10. You Know You Have a Positioning Problem…
1 Your slide deck is 30 slides
.
2. Long sales cycles and lots of “no-decisions”
3. Blah, Blah, Blah – you sound like all your competitors
4. ask 3 people what you do …get 3 different answers
5. Your company is not considered a player in the market
6. You spent a lot of money on PR and got nowhere
7. Sales will call on anything that moves
8. You don’t have a viewpoint
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16. Examples of personas
“Avniash” “Aditya” “Kenneth”
Change-Agent Early-Adopter Maintainers
• Complex organizations • Regionalized IT ops • Business does not rely on IT
for change
• High pace of change • Heritage of experimentation
• Steady state: legacy
• Focus on revenue growth, Not • Need for game-changer
cost cutting • Focus on budget costs
• Reports to LOB
• Reports to CEO • Reports to CFO
• Optimize current IT
• Results-based IT • Resources-based IT
• Value: technical performance
• Value: IT agility, shared risk • Value: cut costs, IT
operational excellence
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18. What is the problem you “own”?
Before After
Product IP Problem Solved
“Hyper-Relational “Applications Integration”
Technology” Company Company
“Customer
“Decisioning, Predictive
Lifetime Value”
CRM” Company
Company
“Campaign Management” “Find More Revenue”
Company Company
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25. Does your message
sound like this?
New Software Development Kit Enables Users, Developers and
Partners to Take Full Advantage of Vertica’s Real-time Parallel
Processing Engine for Big Data
BILLERICA, Mass., June 20, 2011
Vertica today announced availability of Vertica 5.0, the latest
version of the Vertica Analytics Platform, which offers greatly
improved flexibility and real-time performance for
customers’ most demanding business intelligence and
analytic workloads.
The Vertica Analytics Platform analyzes data on a massive
scale, with several customers analyzing more than a petabyte
of data in real time. Vertica 5.0 delivers improved flexibility,
extensibility and performance in how users analyze and
manage their business-critical information.
BLAH, BLAH, BLAH
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26. We are BANNING these 5 words
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27. Plain-Spoken Messages in
Your Buyer’s Words
PowerAdvocate is an energy intelligence company delivering
supply chain applications that incorporate the world’s largest
FactBase of supply market data, which help energy executives
restructure costs and steer company performance.
Only PowerAdvocate delivers a complete view and in-depth
understanding of the energy supply chain market - every
supplier, every spend transaction, and every commodity – as well
as the data intelligence needed to navigate through volatile
markets, economic swings, and an ever-changing regulatory
climate. With PowerAdvocate, pace-setting executives see
everything to better manage and deliver an order-of-magnitude
improvement in performance.
PowerAdvocate offers data intelligence to chart future growth
and profitability. Executives can see the probability of cost
changes, understand the impact on the cost structure of the
business, and better manage their risk.
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31. Typical Tech Story
“Why we are so great”
Slide 2: Slide 4:
Our great Our great
Platform Analytics
feature
Slide 7: Slide 9:
A few cool Our wonderful
screen shots executives
3
1
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32. Powerful Stories:
“Why your company, now”
Slide 1: Slide 2:
Big results from Slide 3: Slide 4: Slide 5:
Recent market
customers like Causing you a …And you may Traditional
dynamics: your
you BIG problem lose your job approaches no
world has changed
longer work
Slide 6: Slide 7: Slide 8: Slide 9: Slide 10:
What you need The Answer: 3-4 reasons Cleaned up the Call to action
to fix the Our company customers like problem: How
problem you choose us your life will be
different
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36. Why Customers Choose XYZ company
Keep Tabs Sift Through See
Noise Everything
Monitor Correlate Consolidate
• Add real-time, • Correlation of • Bigger picture
active monitoring • data • Marry application,
• Automate, Understand network and physical
streamline baseline behavior, • Universal Pane of
collection of log • detect anomalies Glass: 3600 view
and user data Better understand
what’s happening
Broader, More Complete View
36
37. Why Customers Choose ABC Company
First Energy Control Network
Smart, Fast Share Data Bullet-Proof Go One Step
Local Decisions Across the Energy Reliability Further
Network
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39. Messages the bring products alive
Category viewpoint
TippingPoint leads the advancement of network security with a modern network
security IPS platform. Purpose-built to protect today’s next-generation data
center, TippingPoint arms security executives with new capabilities to stop
Who is this threats faster and protect the highest, multi-gigabit bandwidth networks from
for
ever-evolving, global security threats.
What is the
product
Business TippingPoint is a powerful front-line defense that can be rapidly deployed in less
benefits
than two hours, providing immediate protection at critical entry and isolation
points in the network. With TippingPoint, your business is protected 24x7.
Further, TippingPoint solutions automate most security functions, freeing
organizations from the growing cost burden and helping security executives drive
to zero administration.
Business benefit
Over 6,000 of the world's most demanding organizations trust TippingPoint to
help secure the networks that run their business.
Aspirational
Business benefits
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40. Buyer-centric messaging
Category
Chordiant Software heralds a new era of Customer Experience Management (CEM)
solutions to help global brands multiply customer lifetime value.
Point of
view Chordiant Software, and its Foundation and Cx Solutions, arms customer service
executives with a suite of predictive decisioning applications to deliver an order of
magnitude improvement in customer experience.
What is the Big Benefit
solution
Chordiant gives global brands a unified view and understanding of their customer’s
behavior. Chordiant reshapes the way brands engage customers with Next-Best-Actiontm
that dynamically guide conversations across every channel.
These CEM capabilities are transformative in nature, enabling companies to deliver
intelligent conversations based upon analysis of past customer behavior, as well as
current responses and mood. Now, today’s fast-paced brands can engage more
effectively with customers, quickly measure how the strategy is working and change at
new levels of speed and economy. The net result: faster acquisition, improved
competitiveness, less churn, and superior customer service.
Business benefits Aspirational
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42. Key Launch Principles
Journey, not an Event
Unhook from GA date
Time-to-REVENUE, not
Time-to-market
Communicate to
Multiple Audiences
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