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Positioning is a verb, not a fancy document

Hey there! After two weeks taking some time off in the wilderness of Scotland, I’m back in full force.

While coaching a founder on how to improve their offer and research their ICP before a product launch, I had a nagging thought: too many companies think of positioning as the thing you end up with, instead of the work you do to get there.

You run the workshop. You fill in the canvas. You land on a cute statement. And then everyone looks at the final document like: great, that’s our positioning.

Now everyone and their mother can use it across marketing and sales, right? They share the PDF. The CEO says something hopeful about how this will change the go-to-market motion. And within a day or two, people are back at their terminals doing the work exactly as they did it before.

Sales is using one narrative, marketing blames them for not being consistent, swarms of committees have revised the website until it says something entirely different from the pitch deck, and a buyer still cannot explain why this company is meaningfully different from the ten alternatives on their list.

These are the companies that treat the process like a document-production machine. They spend a few hours — or a few minutes with AI — producing something that looks fancy and complete, then drop it into a shared drive where no one has to wrestle with the choices anymore.

The way I see it, positioning is a verb, not a noun.

The final document is not the positioning. It is a representation of the positioning work. Sometimes a useful one. Sometimes a pretty one. But still only a representation. The positioning is in the work that happens before the document exists: the arguments, the trade-offs, the exclusions, the “not for them,” the “yes, but only if,” the taste, the discernment, the uncomfortable moment where the team has to choose one differentiator or feature and let another go.

That is why a positioning workshop matters. I regularly run 90+ minute sessions for clients. The goal is not to produce a neat 1-pager, it’s to create the space where those choices finally get made out loud with accountability. The canvas earns its place when it forces the team to align, disagree, narrow, select, and commit before anyone starts writing copy.

The canvas is not there to capture your positioning. It is there to make the team do the positioning.

A useful positioning canvas has a sequence. Proper positioning work starts with competitive alternatives, then moves into differentiated value themes and the few enabling capabilities that make them true, best-fit buyer, market category, and finally the positioning statement. That order matters because each step puts pressure on the next one. It makes the thinking visible.

Here’s how.

Start with the alternatives buyers already have in their heads. Not your “competitors” in the neat analyst-grid sense. The options buyers would actually use if you disappeared tomorrow: a spreadsheet, an agency, an internal hire, a familiar platform, doing nothing. Then ask what those alternatives claim and where their promises break. This is usually where the room stops pretending the market is blank.

Then name the differentiated value themes. Not twelve of them. Three or four max, or the whole thing gets diluted. These are the reasons a best-fit buyer should choose you instead of those alternatives. And each value theme needs its enabling capabilities or features underneath it: the product, process, data, method, or expertise that makes the claim true.

This is where the fluff tries to sneak back in. Best-in-class. Enterprise-ready. Most innovative. You know the words. A useful canvas makes those claims uncomfortable. If sales cannot defend the difference on the next call, and a buyer would not care even if they could, it does not belong in the positioning.

Then you choose the best-fit buyer. This is not “any company with a budget.” It is the person or team who feels the pain most sharply, understands the trade-off, and values the differentiated value you can actually prove. Someone in the room will feel the lost opportunity, the FOMO. Good. That discomfort is the point. If everyone leaves knowing this is who we are not for, that one sentence starts changing real decisions.

Only then do you choose the market category and write the statement. Category is not just a label you slap on the homepage. It tells buyers how to understand you, who to compare you against, and what kind of problem they should believe they have. This is why the category design people obsess over the game you are asking buyers to believe they are in, and why positioning has always been about the place you occupy in the prospect’s mind. The positioning statement comes last because it should compress the choices the team already made. Think of it as a record of the work.

This is where a lot of teams accidentally declare victory though.

The canvas is done! Everyone feels like they solved something together. But without reinforcement, teams risk losing the thread of what they decided in the workshop. The forgetting curve is a useful reminder here: one intense session does not mean the team will remember the choices under pressure. So how do you turn your work and canvas into a tool for decision-making?

You protect the work that got you to the canvas. You turn it into a messaging framework. It’s what helps everyone use the same language in calls, on the website, in emails, proposals, and launch docs. Which makes it easier to spot when you diverge.

The best teams I have worked with rarely talk about our positioning statement as if it were something sacred. They talk about our bet: what they are claiming, who they are claiming it for, who they are claiming it against, and why they believe the market will care. It is closer to the active career strategy Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha describe in The Start-Up of You: you keep adapting the story because the market keeps moving. And because that bet came from real, often heavy discussion, instead of just a paragraph you iterated on for 10 minutes, it makes it through sales, marketing, product, and to leadership.

No document creates that alignment by itself. The document records the alignment the team created by doing the work.

If you need help doing that work properly, get in touch.

DISCOVERY

Taking time off is part of the work.

I wrote a short LinkedIn post about unplugging in Scotland, and it feels connected to this piece. Sometimes you only see what the work actually means when you step away from the tools, the tabs, and the very urgent fake urgency.

What should stay human in AI writing?

Ethan Mollick’s post on choosing to stay human has a line I keep coming back to:

That is also a positioning point. The useful work is making yourself do the thinking you were about to outsource.

Agentic systems are starting to look less mysterious

Taylor Pearson’s piece on the AI knowledge work stack is a clear, simple explanation of how agentic systems fit together. It is useful if you are trying to figure out what to use agents for, and more importantly, what kinds of processes are worth building around them.

RESONANCE

fs.blog, The Work Required to Have an Opinion

Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

Chris

Chris Silvestri Founder & conversion alchemist

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