Position Statement Template To Ensure Alignment Across the Org

Have you ever checked how many different stories your marketeers and sales people tell when it comes to pitching the services that you offer? Do they have a clear understanding when to make that pitch and to whom? How much do you loose in revenue because your teams are not enabled to recognize customer's need correctly or can't communicate the value your product provides clearly?

Position Statement should be an actionable artifact, not a dusty long manuscript that no one ever reads.

This is a tool that is in the core of your marketing efforts and driving sales motion, it allows you to have a unified powerful narrative across all the customer touch points be it your blogs, 1:1 discovery meetings, Google Ads, or conference speeches. This is how you align end-to-end from first marketing piece through sales, delivery and up to the customer support.

Here's a Position template to make your product statement include something useful for everyone on the team while also building a single narrative that is easy to communicate.

Position Statement Template Components

Target Audience

Always start with the user

Users should be able to recognize your solution as their "painkiller" so make sure you speak their language. Learn from conversations with them and quote their responses as much as possible.

Then think broader and include those who can be a deal breaker from the buying perspective.

Make sure you equip your users with enough info about the value you provide so they can fight for you in rooms you're not invited to.

Understand your customer's context, reasoning, and motivations

Always analyze what was the last straw that broke the camel's back and brought your customer to you. Those triggers are the foundation for a more powerful offering enabling your:

• marketeers to tailor the messaging based on what is in your target audience's immediate attention span keeping them up at night;

• lead generation specialists to have a creative filter to browse companies for the outreach;

• teams to have in-depth conversations learning from every interaction with all clients.

Learn to ask the open-ended questions about the background. Things like "why you think your team needs this", "how did you come to this conclusion", "why now", "who and why is in charge of this initiative", "who else is impacted by this situation", etc. can help you meet your customers where they are, not where you want them to be.

The generated insights are not only your guides to fine-tune the product, they are a source for your experiments: new messaging, new target segments, new channels, etc.

Goals and Pains always go together

If your customers did not have a goal they wouldn't have had the pains as they become visible and hurtful enough when you can't achieve what you want.

If they didn't have pains and were capable of accomplishing the task themselves, why would they need you, right? Learn to identify those pairs.

Product Definition

When filling out this section try relying on the "Golden Circle" approach and incorporate the following angles:

• The Why (Purpose): Articulate why the product exists and why customers should care. This isn't about making a profit—that's a result. It's about the core belief that motivates the purchase beyond features or benefits.

• The How (Process): Outline how the product fulfills the company's purpose.

• The What (Product): Describe what it is that you actually sell to your customers.

The Product Section is your way to ensure consistency.

Use it so that no one on the team invents their own story, promise something that your product doesn't do, or keep the expectations unrealistic damaging your net promoter score later.

This is your basis for RFPs, demos, one-pagers and slide decks. This is your tool to keep everyone focused and able to break your product down both from technical and value.

Customer Journey

The last section is an optional one, but can be really powerful if you want to up your game as it adds details and links and layers to your messaging and product delivery.

Here's how:

1. Include quotes from your target persona that speak to their triggers, pain points, goals, and motivations. Real conversations with customers can yield insights that resonate more deeply than any market research and provide hints on how the needs can be met with more than just one offering. Tools like Gong can capture the language giving you authentic material for your marketing and sales copy.

2. Make sure your own products are not cannibalizing each other. Selling the right thing to the right audience is a tough task: but if you learn to differentiate between the offers it can accelerate your sales cycles, enable you to speak better to various segments, and organize your service or product catalog to accommodate for easy trials as well as for long-term and expensive deals.

3. Always have a teaser for the next step. With the initial need met what your other services naturally follow? If your product is a starting point, what complementary products or services can enhance and extend the customer's experience? This is how you maximize your customers' lifetime value. And this is your basis for website customer journeys too.

By covering these aspects thoroughly, you put your product into the context that resonates with customer needs, aligns with their growth, and paves the way for a long-term relationship. This approach ensures that when you tell the story of your product, it's not just a list of features or benefits but a narrative that fits seamlessly into your customers' lives.

The Power of Pausing For Critical Thinking in a World Reshaped by AI

I was watching a documentary about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle the other day. It covers more of their struggle with tabloids and paparazzi than with the crown as one might have expected. And this battle looks very much like the one of David versus Goliath, with the only difference being that David seems to be losing this one.

For instance, they refer to a study of hate tweets about their couple and specifically Meghan. The cite the following figures:

• Reach: 17 million people worldwide

• Number of tweets: 114,000

• Number of tweeting accounts: 83.

Let it sync.

83 accounts can now potentially reach 17 million people.

The Digital Echo in Real Life

Who can guarantee that all of these seventeen million people have critical thinking skills or the ability to recognize that they don't know enough to pass the judgement and simply scroll by? For most of them, what fits into a tweet's 140 characters will be their comprehensive understanding of the situation and the people in it - carved in stone.

In a few days, they will forget the tweet, but the sentiment, or rather the residue it leaves, is what will stick. And any new information from now on will be perceived through this filter.

Interestingly enough, in the case of Meghan and Harry, it was not your average trolls or a bot farm. These were real people, united by an idea - hatred, envy, fear - that drove them to tweet, post, record podcasts, and vlogs.

How many of us have a narrative so important that we stay up at night writing, commenting, arguing, and shouting in caps lock?

The Power of Pause: Cultivating Critical Thinking

AI developers say they've noticed a pattern: if you don't demand an answer from AI immediately but you give it a little time to think, it produces much better results. Even a machine needs a moment to gather its thoughts to avoid talking nonsense, what to say of us, tired, worried, limited by our own experiences and twitchy eye?

When we scroll through the feed, each new post is like a new browser tab open, or a new chat with chatgpt. Here you need to understand the historical context and psychology of relationships between empires and their colonies, as well as all available methods of propaganda and genocide, this one requires knowledge of biology and immunology, and understanding this one implies the ability to distinguish types of weapons and instantly choose your fighter for mortal combat, and yes, for dessert, you absolutely need to be able to tell Monet from Manet, including those created by AI.

Try talking to ChatGPT about everything at once in one chat, and it will go crazy in about 10 minutes, forget what the discussion was about, and generate word salad instead of brilliant insights.

But what's worse is that we demand from ourselves to have not just the professional acumen and the opinion about all the spheres at once. What we want is to be able to go on X or Facebook and provide solutions - 140 characters that are supposed to solve the eternal problems of humanity. Remember the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything? Maybe 42 is the number of characters? Including spaces.

I increasingly feel that spaces are more important than the letters themselves.

Being able to give yourself a minute, pause and think is the main tool of critical thinking.

The organizer of the Devternity conference generated female speakers using AI. There's a new scandal in the tech world this week. He created full profiles, added them to the program, and then, as it usually happens, said they wouldn't be able to attend due to some private reasons. With one of these profiles, he went so far as to run her Instagram gathering 115,000 followers. It would have been pretty funny if they all were generated too, but no. Real people with background and interest in tech.

Let's see if you can guess who's not real here.

Source: The Pragmatic Engineer

I try to think about events like these more as a performance art than a scam, because (hopefully) they make those who believed in the reality of generated avatars think about why and how they were deceived. If you give brains a minute, you will remember what distinguishes this profile from others. And you will make a small note in your subconsciousness to make intuition throw an alert next time.

Any learning is a path of trial and error. Reinforcement learning is one of the most powerful tool that advances AI development: allowing the model to analyze the results of taken action, identify best and worst results, and gradually improve the quality of the output.

This takes time.

We all need time to analyze the results of our actions. The effect of our words. The impact of our likes. The power of our attention.

Maybe then not only AI will become super-human.