How Good Positioning Increases Sales?
Introduction
Before diving into how Positioning impacts your marketing and sales, a business must understand what Positioning is. Over 20+ years of transforming businesses, “positioning” is one aspect that I see almost all companies need to reassess and focus on. Business owners, CEOs, and sales and marketing executives think their Positioning can be done without refocusing. However, a business should rethink its Positioning based on negative customer feedback, low-win bid rates, lost opportunities, and poor customer perception. Remember, it’s not what we think of our company, products, and services but what your ideal customers and prospects think.
What is Good Positioning?
Simply, a company’s product/service positioning is about providing customer-centric value that best-fits customers who love and want more.
Positioning impacts many aspects of a business. It affects how you market and sell products, directly affecting revenue and ROI. It determines how customers perceive a business. It affects what you build and what is offered to customers. It impacts marketing and sales costs. From an operations perspective, Positioning affects a business’s COGS (Cost Of Goods Sold) and SG&A (Selling, General And Administrative ) costs. Furthermore, good Positioning increases employee productivity from a people and culture perspective.
When it’s mapped out, the value of Positioning impacts nearly every financial measure of a business, particularly profit margins. In short, good Positioning impacts the health of a company. Based on our research and experience, companies must take the time to reassess their Positioning if they are facing marketing and sales challenges.
How to implement Good Positioning?
A business can develop and implement good Positioning by;
- Understanding clearly your best-fit customers’ personas and characteristics.
- Know your unique attributes and capabilities.
- Know the value and benefits of your product/services quantitatively and qualitatively.
- Understand your Competitors.
- Develop value-based context.
Utilizing positioning tools and techniques together with having discussions with the right team members in your company, a business can achieve good Positioning.
By executing the above strategically, a business will get continuous insights into the external market, create innovative alternatives, develop a business design and ensure the executability of that design by orchestrating and developing the organization’s capabilities. It is not principally about creating a positioning statement or document, although both play a role.
How can I ensure my Positioning Increases sales?
If a business’s Positioning is good, they will notice an increase in their prospecting rates, sales closure rates, and sales growth. Their Top-Line growth will increase. Furthermore, they will notice a reduction in their sales and marketing costs, that is if your your tracking them (which is very important to do). Moreover, pay close attention to the variances in a company’s profit margins with good Positioning. If executed right, monitoring and tracking their positioning change, they will increase the overall health of your company.
How good is your Positioning today? Do you want to get better?
A structured positioning assessment will clearly help you understand where you currently are and what need you to better position your business.
There is an adage “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting a different result”. If you are stuck or challenged, make the correct change. Wrong Positioning may be a blind spot and pain point that you might need to mitigate.
Do you think you have a positioning problem? Acumentica can help by:
- Performing a Positioning assessment of your business through analysis and team-based interviews.
- Utilizing our fact-based positioning tools, processes, and methodologies.
- Executing the inferences from the assessment to reach a good positioning state.
- Tracking and monitoring a company’s positioning strategy.
