Constructing Your Positioning Statement

Here is the template for a positioning statement. You can do this yourselves, but it's much more effective on the heels of competitive positioning/market research.

I've spent nearly full days holed up in a conference room with executive teams, trying to get them all to agree - so don't take this lightly. You need to have consensus on all the elements, minimally among the sales head and spokespeople. Don't let the CEO dictate positioning just because she's :-) in charge. You can vet the statement with a few investors, or even department heads, but it's really up to the leadership team because too many cooks can = an uncooked statement.

Here are the components of the core statetment:
X company provides X product or service to X types of companies (size, type, market) enabling them to/so that they can achieve X and X key business benefits.

Here is the 2nd part, which does not make it into your press release boilerplate, but is critical for marketing and sales, and for press and analyst briefings:
Unlike X or X category of competitor, which do X or fall short in X way, our products or solutions (name) can be deployed in X timeframe/deliver X  very unique value, so that companies can achieve X (secondary message) home-run benefit that screams addressing an urgent problem.

Once this is baked, marketing uses the statement to help with branding and the tagline, PR uses much of it to draft the first half of the company boilerplate (last paragraph in press releases) and all of it for pitching, and sales gets to actually name those competitors in their sales decks. Yes, you can revisit it - but it should last you at least 1.5-2 years.

Important tips:

1) Be visionary about the statement. Leave room, but not too much that you are too broad, for company growth. For instance, I work with a company that sells software to the insurance sector, and I started using "insurance software" vs. for "x specific function platform for X type of carriers," up front (higher SEO ranked) in their press releases. Why? Because this fast-growing company will ultimately sell to other types of insurers and may also broaden their types of offerings. Chances are, your company will expand as well...

2) Do your market research about the terms your publics - customers, prospects, press, analysts, partners, and investors - are using to find the types of solutions you offer. You might want to create a category, but that's not wise for companies with marketing budgets smaller than those of Google to Microsoft. Minimally, check out Google adwords (research is free). In my client's case, it showed me that no vendor had "insurance software" locked up yet for paid search, yet the term was commonly searched. So, we had a shot to try to own it with organic (vs. paid) search if we used it frequently and consistently with wired press releases, site content etc. Since this company was largely creating a category, and insurers had not budgeted for what they offer, it could only benefit us to have prospects stumble on content and learn about the amazing platform we offered that tackled real challenges in a new way, and with impressive early ROI, yadda yadda.