True Isn't The Same As Unique

You spent three tedious months on your messaging, until you landed on something that felt right. Now go pull up your three closest competitors.

Did you see what I see? Without a compelling reason for prospects to choose you, you're going to have a hell of a time getting your marketing to work for you without a heroic effort from your team.

You already went through the back-and-forth with your team in search of the right answer. Pressure-tested the options and eventually arrived at something that accurately describes what your product does. Picked language that matched what you wanted or what customers should gravitate towards.

"Personalized learning for K-12 and Higher Ed.” sounds pretty good right? Big, long-lasting relationships from school districts and universities that hold all the money.

It sounds like positioning because it's specific to your product and it's true. But describing the best version of what you do isn't a position. It's an aspiration. And aspirations aren't unique by definition…they're shared.

‍True and uniquely true are not the same thing. And almost nobody pressure-tests for the second one, because the first one already felt like enough work.

The three pulling forces and the narrower fourth

There are three reasons your positioning drifted from the thing that made you build this. Some of it is compromise. You translated the original insight for investors, for procurement, for the sales deck, and each translation sanded it down. Some of it is accommodation. You bent the language around what you thought the buyer wanted to hear rather than what you actually see differently. And some of it you just can't see. You've been so close to it for so long that category language sounds like your language. Each of these three forces drift you toward the same island as everyone else. I’ve described this a bit more in an earlier article, Who Was That Decision Really For?.

The fourth, the faithful representation of what you actually set out to accomplish, is the one that takes the most courage to hold onto because it's specific, it's narrow, and it doesn't sound like what everyone else is saying. Which is exactly why it works.

The only addressable element in the "Personalized learning for K-12 and Higher Ed.” is the certainty of K-12 and higher education clients out in the market. But we still have no idea who that person is (a parent, a teacher, a principal, district superintendent, dean of students). Nothing tells you when they'll buy or what triggers them to place that order.

Here’s an example.

Let’s say you build reading intervention tools for K-12. K-12 probably doesn’t make much sense if reading intervention is most relevant in the earlier years, maybe even before Kindergarten to around 3rd grade. Preschools and the alternatives are a tough market because they spend their own money and they probably have more urgent priorities (like hire good staff and keep the doors open). Preschools attached to districts probably fare better, but have funding allocation rules in place.

And it tells you nothing about where to show up or when someone needs you.

What if you got even narrower to target a more viable group? Something like, "We build reading intervention tools for Title I elementary schools.” There are roughly 60,000 Title I schools in the US and they have federal funding specifically allocated for intervention. That's a list you can easily build. The buyer has budget that's earmarked for exactly what you do. And you've eliminated every higher ed institution, every high school, every private school, and every district that isn't serving the population you're built for.

Terrifying. Also addressable.

Now the only that’s missing is a timing trigger. How do you know when the buyer thinks its the perfect time to place that order, its expensive and specialized, and gives enough lead time for the school to begin facilitating with new students? Third-grade reading scores are published annually by every school, district, and state. When a district's scores come back below the state benchmark, that triggers Response to Intervention plans and a curriculum director who needs to find something fast, before the next testing cycle. That data is public. The timing is predictable. You know who just got bad news, you know when they got it, and you know the pressure they're under to act.

Now you can build an entire go-to-market strategy around when and where to find who. You know which conferences to attend, which communities to join, what to write about. You know when to reach out and what the conversation sounds like because you know what just happened to them.

Your positioning is no longer just true, it’s uniquely true and addressable.

Let's go back to your original positioning and ask how uniquely true it really is.

Could a competitor put your headline on their site and have it still be true? If yes, that's not positioning. That's category language. When you describe your company to someone at dinner (no deck, no rehearsed pitch), does it sound anything like what's on your website? If those are two different descriptions, the real one probably isn't on the site.

I can already sense the objection: Yes, procurement pulls toward standardized language. Yes, RFPs are compliance checklists. But the district usually already had someone in mind before the RFP was issued. The positioning problem happened before you ever encountered the system. Running a business in a regulated market is hard. That shouldn't be the excuse not to do the thing you set out to do.

And if none of that gets you there, try this one...

What did you see in that classroom that made you leave everything behind to go build this? And when was the last time you said that out loud to a customer?