Positioning Formula: Write One That Sales Will Use

A positioning formula is a structured statement that defines who you serve, what you offer, why it matters, and what makes you different from every alternative your buyer could choose. Done well, it becomes the anchor for every sales conversation, every campaign brief, and every piece of copy your team produces.

Done badly, it becomes a framed sentence on a conference room wall that nobody reads and nobody uses.

Why Most Positioning Statements Are Useless

I have sat in more positioning workshops than I can count. Across 20 years and probably 30 industries, the pattern is almost always the same. A room full of smart people, a facilitator with a whiteboard, and two hours later: a statement that says something like “We help businesses grow through innovative, customer-centric solutions.”

It is not wrong. It is just completely useless.

Nobody wrote that sentence thinking it was bad. They wrote it because consensus smooths out anything sharp. Every stakeholder adds a qualifier, every qualifier removes a commitment, and you end up with a statement that offends nobody and means nothing.

The irony is that positioning is supposed to do the opposite. Its entire job is to create a clear, specific claim that makes a defined group of buyers choose you over a defined set of alternatives. Generality is the enemy of that goal. A statement that could apply to any company in your category is not a position. It is a placeholder.

When I was growing the agency I ran from around 20 people to close to 100, one of the sharpest decisions we made was to stop describing ourselves as a “full-service digital agency” and start owning a specific position as a European hub with genuine multilingual capability across 20 nationalities. That was not a tagline. It was a real operational fact that we turned into a competitive claim. It changed the conversations we had with prospects almost immediately, because it gave people a specific reason to call us rather than the agency down the road.

What a Positioning Formula Actually Contains

There are several versions of the positioning formula in circulation. Geoffrey Moore’s version from Crossing the Chasm is probably the most widely referenced. April Dunford’s work in Obviously Awesome is more practically useful for most teams. The specific template matters less than understanding what every good positioning statement needs to contain.

There are five components. All five need to be present, and all five need to be specific.

1. Target Customer

Not “businesses” or “marketing professionals” or “enterprises.” A specific segment with a specific context. The more precisely you can describe who this is for, the more credible the rest of the statement becomes. If you are tempted to write “all companies that need X,” you are not positioning. You are prospecting.

2. Frame of Reference

What category does your product or service live in? This is the mental shelf your buyer places you on. It shapes what they compare you against and what they expect from you. Choosing the right frame of reference is one of the most consequential decisions in positioning, because it determines your competitive set. Change the frame of reference and you change the comparison entirely.

3. Key Benefit

The single most important thing your target customer gets from you that they cannot get as easily elsewhere. Note: single. Positioning statements that list four or five benefits are not positioning statements. They are feature lists. Pick the one that matters most to your target customer and defend it.

4. Reason to Believe

The evidence that your claim is true. This is where most positioning statements fall apart. The benefit gets stated but the proof never arrives. Reasons to believe can be structural (how you are built), empirical (what results you have delivered), or testimonial (who else trusts you). They need to be specific enough to be checkable.

5. The Alternative You Are Displacing

This one is often left out entirely, which is a mistake. Every buyer has a current solution, even if that solution is “doing nothing” or “using a spreadsheet.” Your positioning needs to acknowledge what you are replacing and why your approach is better in the context that matters to your target customer. Ignoring the alternative means ignoring the actual decision your buyer is making.

Positioning sits at the centre of go-to-market strategy, and if you want to see how it connects to the broader commercial picture, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full landscape, from market entry decisions through to scaling.

The Moore Formula and When to Use It

Geoffrey Moore’s template is the one most people encounter first. It runs like this:

For [target customer] who [statement of need or opportunity], [product name] is a [frame of reference] that [key benefit]. Unlike [primary competitive alternative], our product [key differentiator].

It is a solid structure. The “unlike” clause at the end is particularly valuable because it forces you to name what you are competing against rather than pretending the choice does not exist. Most marketing materials are written as if the buyer has no alternatives. They always do.

Where Moore’s formula shows its age is in complex B2B environments where the buyer’s situation is layered and the competitive set is not obvious. A SaaS platform competing partly against incumbent enterprise software and partly against custom builds needs a more nuanced approach than the template allows. That is where Dunford’s component-based model tends to serve better, because it treats positioning as a set of strategic choices rather than a fill-in-the-blanks exercise.

I have used Moore’s template as a starting point in client engagements, but I always treat it as a diagnostic tool rather than the final output. If you cannot fill in every slot with something specific and defensible, you do not have a positioning problem. You have a strategy problem that is masquerading as a messaging problem.

How to Build a Positioning Statement That Holds Up

The process matters as much as the formula. Here is how I approach it when working with a brand that either has weak positioning or positioning that has drifted away from what they actually do.

Start With the Customer, Not the Product

Before you write a single word of positioning, you need to understand how your best customers describe their problem before they found you. Not the problem as you see it from the inside. The problem as they experienced it from the outside. There is almost always a gap between those two descriptions, and that gap is where your positioning lives.

Talk to five or ten customers who chose you over a real alternative. Ask them what they were trying to solve, what they considered, and what tipped the decision. The language they use is more valuable than anything a workshop will produce. Understanding how customers describe their own problems before they encounter your solution is one of the most underused inputs in positioning work.

Choose Your Competitive Frame Deliberately

The frame of reference you choose shapes everything downstream. A project management tool that positions itself against spreadsheets is making a different promise than one that positions itself against enterprise software. The product might be identical. The positioning, the buyer, the sales conversation, and the price expectation are all different.

Most companies default to the obvious frame of reference, which is usually the category they grew up in. That is not always wrong, but it is worth asking whether there is a more advantageous frame available. Sometimes the most powerful move is to reframe the category entirely rather than fight for position within it.

BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy in B2B markets touches on how market structure shapes the choices available to you. The same logic applies to positioning: the structure of your market determines which frames are credible and which ones will be dismissed.

Isolate the One Benefit That Earns the Sale

Every product has multiple benefits. Positioning requires you to pick one as the lead. This is uncomfortable for most marketing teams because it feels like leaving things out. It is. That is the point.

The benefit you lead with should be the one that is most important to your target customer AND most difficult for competitors to credibly claim. If everyone in your category can say it, it is not a differentiator. It is a category entry requirement. Those still matter, but they should not be your lead claim.

Build the Proof Into the Statement

A positioning statement without a reason to believe is just an assertion. Assertions are easy to make and easy to ignore. Proof is harder to produce and harder to dismiss.

The proof does not need to be exhaustive at the positioning stage. It needs to be specific enough to signal credibility. “Trusted by 400 mid-market CFOs” is more convincing than “trusted by leading finance professionals.” The specificity is doing the work.

Test It With Sales Before You Publish It

This is the step most marketing teams skip, and it is the one that matters most. Give your positioning statement to three or four salespeople and ask them to use it in a real prospect conversation. Not a role-play. An actual call.

If they cannot use it without paraphrasing it into something else, the statement is not working. Sales teams are not the enemy of good positioning. They are its best quality control mechanism, because they hear the reaction in real time. When I ran agency teams, the conversations our business development people were having with prospects were always the most reliable signal of whether our positioning was landing or not. Not the workshop output. Not the brand deck. The actual conversation.

Common Positioning Mistakes That Are Easy to Avoid

Most positioning failures are not failures of creativity. They are failures of discipline. The same mistakes appear repeatedly across categories and company sizes.

Positioning to everyone. If your target customer is “any company that needs our service,” you are not targeting. You are hoping. Positioning requires exclusion. Saying you are for a specific type of buyer in a specific situation implicitly means you are not the right choice for everyone else. That is not a weakness. It is what makes the claim credible to the people it is aimed at.

Claiming differentiation you cannot defend. “Best-in-class service” and “unparalleled expertise” are not positions. They are what every company says when they have not done the work to find a real differentiator. If a competitor could put the same words on their website without anyone noticing, the claim is not doing anything.

Confusing positioning with taglines. A tagline is a communication device. Positioning is a strategic decision. The tagline might eventually express the positioning, but they are not the same thing and they should not be developed in the same conversation. Jumping to taglines before the positioning is settled is one of the most reliable ways to end up with something that sounds good but means nothing.

Letting positioning drift without noticing. Companies change. Products evolve. Markets shift. Positioning that was accurate three years ago may no longer reflect what you actually do or who you actually serve. I have seen businesses running campaigns built on positioning that their own product team had quietly moved away from. The marketing was still selling version one. The product was on version four.

Writing positioning by committee. The more people involved in the final wording, the blander the output. Positioning needs to be developed collaboratively at the strategic level, but the final statement needs a single editor with the authority to keep it sharp. Consensus kills specificity.

Positioning in the Context of Go-To-Market Strategy

Positioning does not sit in isolation. It connects directly to how you price, how you sell, which channels you prioritise, and what you say in every piece of content you produce. A positioning statement that is not reflected in your pricing signals an inconsistency that buyers will notice even if they cannot articulate it. A positioning statement that claims enterprise credibility but routes buyers through a self-serve onboarding flow creates friction that undermines the claim.

BCG’s analysis of go-to-market strategy in financial services makes the point clearly: the way you go to market must be consistent with the position you are claiming. Misalignment between positioning and execution is one of the most common reasons growth stalls even when the underlying product is strong.

Forrester’s research on go-to-market struggles in complex categories points to a similar pattern: companies that cannot clearly articulate their position to a specific buyer segment consistently underperform in sales cycles, regardless of product quality. The positioning gap becomes a commercial gap.

When I was building out the agency’s SEO practice as a high-margin service line, the positioning work we did internally was as important as the client work we were doing externally. We had to be clear about who we were selling to, what we were promising, and why our approach was different from the dozens of other agencies making similar claims. Getting that right internally made every external conversation easier.

If you are working through how positioning connects to the broader commercial strategy, the articles in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy section cover the adjacent decisions around market entry, channel strategy, and growth planning that positioning needs to align with.

A Note on Repositioning

Repositioning is harder than initial positioning, and it is underestimated almost every time. When a brand has an established position in the market, changing it requires sustained effort across every touchpoint over an extended period. You cannot reposition with a new tagline and a refreshed website. You reposition by consistently behaving differently over time until the market updates its perception.

The companies that reposition successfully tend to do it by adding a new frame of reference rather than trying to erase the old one. They expand into an adjacent position rather than abandoning the current one overnight. That approach preserves existing customer relationships while building credibility in the new space.

The ones that fail tend to announce a repositioning and then expect the market to catch up. The market does not catch up. It waits for evidence. Repositioning is a proof problem more than a messaging problem.

Growth-focused teams looking at repositioning as part of a broader scaling effort might find it useful to look at how growth strategies interact with brand positioning in practice. The tactical and the strategic need to be pointing in the same direction, or the effort gets diffused.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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