What is Market Position?

One of the most useful things in business is to know where to play and how to win. It would be great if you could stake your claim and then settle in for a lifetime of success. Unfortunately, someone, somewhere is trying to steal your business.  So, what to do?

I typically ask four questions when I meet a new company:

• What do you do?
  
• Who do you do it for?
  
• Who else does it?
  
• Why would they choose you? 
  

Figuring out the answers to these 4 questions is a lot harder than asking them. It takes a lot of research to get the basic facts, and then you need to keep iterating the answers until you arrive at a market that you can serve, that is big enough to be profitable, and where you can compete successfully.   This diagram is good way of showing how the overlap of these factors creates a ‘sweet spot’ typically called a Market Position.

A Market Position is an excellent way of focusing valuable (and expensive) corporate resources on the business opportunity that will give you the highest return.  Once you have your Market Position, you can use it to ensure:

• Your product development team knows the clients in this segment better than anyone else and builds just for them. 
  
• Your sales and marketing team and expenses are laser focused on that specific market segment where you have exactly what the customer needs and where you have a distinctive advantage over your competitors. 

 We talk about the need to be best in the world in today’s global reality. Without a highly focused (and evolving) position statement, this is almost impossible to do. 

So…..

• What do you do? 
  
• Who do you do it for? 
  
• Who else can do it? 
  
• And why would a buyer select you?
  

 Andrew  

PS – We love developing position statements for our clients. They really are a thing of beauty when done right and become the foundation of your go to market strategy.  Email me to discuss. Or use our Hot Seat Consulting.