A positioning framework that starts with your buyers

A positioning framework defines who you are for, the alternatives they compare you with, what you do differently, and why it matters to them. The research-led version fills each part from recorded buyer interviews rather than a workshop. Every claim needs two independent sources, and the position is decided against the real alternatives, including doing nothing.

You bought a company with a product that sells, and the value-creation plan says move upmarket. Months later, the website, the sales pitch and the content still talk to the customer you are leaving behind. Deals get compared on price, and the ones you lose often go to doing nothing. Those are downstream symptoms, and the cause usually sits upstream, in a position decided before anyone checked what your new buyers actually compare you with.

Key takeaways

• A positioning framework names your best-fit customers, their real alternatives, what you do differently, the value that creates, and the frame of reference.
• The research-led version fills every part from recorded buyer interviews, with two independent sources behind each claim.
• A workshop with only your own team in the room produces what the room already believed, written more confidently.
• Answer six questions about your buyers before you start. Three or more guesses means the framework will fill with assumptions.
• At a company of 40 to 200 people, ten interviews and the decision fit in about three weeks.

Why "we look like everyone else" is usually a positioning problem

Symptoms lie, and they lie upward. "Our messaging isn't landing" usually sits on a position that was left undecided, which sits on buyer decisions nobody has documented. Rewriting the words at the top leaves both layers underneath exactly where they were.

After an acquisition the gap is usually wider. The best-fit customer moves as the company goes after larger accounts, the message lags behind, and the commercial signs follow: Discounting to close, losing deals to doing nothing, and revenue concentrated in a handful of older customers. Repositioning comes first in the plan because every page, deck and outbound sequence inherits from it, and repositioning after an acquisition covers how that shift usually shows up.

What does a positioning framework contain?

Most practitioners agree on the parts. April Dunford set them out in Obviously Awesome, and her version remains the reference most teams use:

• Best-fit customers. The buyers who get the most value from you and buy fastest.
• Competitive alternatives. What the buyer would use in your place, including a spreadsheet, a consultant, or doing nothing.
• What you do differently. The capabilities you have that those alternatives lack.
• The value that creates. Why those differences matter to this buyer, in their own terms.
• The frame of reference. The category or context that makes the value obvious at first glance.

Her work already insists on starting from your best customers. In practice, most teams keep the components and skip that step, filling the boxes in a workshop from memory. The rest of this piece is about filling them properly.

Should positioning start with a workshop or recorded buyer interviews?

Here is the position this piece takes, stated plainly: A positioning workshop with only your own team in the room produces what the room already believed, written more confidently. Workshops still earn their place, for alignment once the evidence is in. The difference lies in where each one gets its inputs.

The fifth row is the one a value-creation lead cares about most. "Ten of the customers we now want told us the same thing" survives an investment committee or a board meeting in a way "the team workshopped it" rarely does.

Six buyer questions to answer before you start positioning work

Answer each one as "I know" or "I'm guessing", and write down where the answer came from.

1. What was happening in the buyer's business before they came looking?
2. What was the old way, and what was bad about it?
3. What was the moment they started actively looking?
4. What else did they consider, including doing nothing?
5. Why did they pick you, in their own words?
6. What has changed in the last six months?

If three or more come back as guesses, the framework will fill with assumptions however carefully you run it. That is the signal to speak to buyers before anyone writes a line.

How to run a research-led positioning framework in 7 steps

Each step has what you do and the standard it has to clear before you move on.

1. Interview ten people. Recent buyers, long-term customers and lost deals, with every call recorded and transcribed. Listen for the trigger, the old way, the alternatives they weighed and the exact words they use, using the approach in customer discovery interviews. Standard: Ten conversations, each one traceable to a person.
2. Group buyers by how and why they decide. Segments must differ in why and how they buy, beyond size or sector. Standard: Each segment has its own trigger or its own reason to choose.
3. Choose one priority segment. One ICP. Positioning that tries to serve two buyers at once ends up serving neither. Standard: One named segment, agreed in writing.
4. Map the real alternatives for that segment. Include doing nothing, and record what each alternative actually gives the buyer. Standard: Every alternative on the list was named by a buyer.
5. Decide the position in the gap. What you do that the alternatives lack, which this buyer values. Standard: Every claim has two independent sources.
6. Grade your confidence. Mark each claim for how strongly it is evidenced, then test the weakest assumptions first, using the evidence that is easiest to validate before more work is built on them.
7. Write it down. One positioning statement per segment, in buyer language, then hand it to messaging. Standard: A statement your buyers would recognise as their own words.

The steps run in this order because each one uses the output of the one before it. The wider set of evidence sources behind them is covered in voice of customer research.

Kestrel, a worked example: How ten interviews decided one company's position

Kestrel is fictional, a composite built to show the structure. It is a workforce-scheduling platform for staffing agencies, about 90 people, selling in Europe, and bought by a mid-market PE fund last year. The value-creation plan calls for moving upmarket to larger agencies, and the website still speaks to the small ones.

The interviews split the market in two. The larger agencies Kestrel now wants start looking after a client audit finds a working-time breach. The small agencies it already serves buy to build rotas faster. Same product, two different triggers, and therefore two segments.

For the larger agencies, buyers named these alternatives:

• Spreadsheets plus a compliance consultant, with a quarterly review of what went wrong
• The rota module inside their HR system
• An enterprise workforce suite
• Doing nothing, which is where two of the three lost deals ended up, staying on spreadsheets and hiring a consultant

The position falls out of the gap those alternatives leave. For staffing agencies whose largest clients now audit them, Kestrel checks every shift against each client's working-time rules before it is published, and shows each client its own compliance, live. Compared with spreadsheets and a consultant's quarterly review, it catches the breach before the shift is worked. Buyers also described the outcome as "audit-ready", which became the language the messages are written in.

Why buyer evidence matters more when AI makes generic messaging easier to produce

In a 2025 Wynter survey of 100 marketing leaders at B2B software companies above $50M, 94% said their brand barely stands out, and 6% rated it genuinely distinctive. Buyers notice the same thing. In a 2020 Gartner survey of more than 1,100 B2B customers, 64% struggled to tell one supplier's digital experience apart from another's.

When every team writes with the same AI tools from the same competitor research, a category ends up sounding identical. Buyer language is the one input nobody else has. It also becomes the source your team and its AI tools write from afterwards, which is why positioning built from customer interviews holds up when copy is produced at volume.

Stride has seen this in its own work. At Harba, interviews surfaced an ICP the team would have ignored, and that ICP became the inbound channel that started booking demos.

How long research-led positioning takes at a 40-to-200-person company

At this company size, ten interviews and the decision fit in about three weeks. Your side of it is three meetings and a handful of introductions to customers. That timing is a property of the method, since the interviews do most of the work and the meetings decide. Stride runs it as the Positioning Sprint, and the repositioning then feeds the opening of the 100-day marketing plan for a newly acquired company.

FAQ

Decide the position from buyer evidence, then turn the decision into messaging

Name the components, answer the six questions honestly, interview ten buyers, and decide the position in the gap your alternatives leave. Grade what you are unsure of, write it down in buyer language, and hand it to messaging. No random acts of marketing.

If you would rather have the evidence gathered and the position decided with you, book the Fit Diagnostic. It takes 45 minutes, it is free, and you leave with a one-pager naming the layer your problem lives on. Stride, a GTM firm built for the AI age, runs this inside the value-creation programme for portfolio companies.

Book the Fit Diagnostic →