Ten questions to ask your positioning before the year ends

December is a good month to look at positioning, mostly because nothing is launching. Here are ten questions to put to a positioning statement before trusting it for another year. Answer them in writing. The ones you skip are the finding.

1. Who would complain first if the product disappeared? Not who likes it. Who would notice by Wednesday.
2. What did your last five customers use before you? A competitor, a spreadsheet, a contractor, nothing. If the answers are all different, your category may be too narrow or too vague.
3. Which sentence on the homepage could a competitor paste onto theirs? Underline it. That sentence isn't positioning yet.
4. What do you say when a buyer asks why they shouldn't just build this? If the answer is a feature list, the real reason hasn't been found.
5. Which claim has no proof? Write the claim, then write the proof beside it. Leave a blank where there is none.
6. What changed in the market this year that your messaging still ignores? A competitor's acquisition, a pricing shift, a new buying committee member, a platform that now does half of what you do.
7. When do you lose? Pull the last ten lost opportunities and read the reasons the buyer gave, then the reasons your rep wrote down. They rarely match.
8. Does sales describe the product the way marketing does? Ask three reps to explain it in two sentences without looking at anything. Record the differences.
9. What are you known for that you'd rather not be? Some positioning sticks to a product for years after the product has moved on.
10. If you could only keep one of the three audiences you target, which one? If you can't choose, you may have been writing for the loudest audience, and the one that buys has had to guess.

What a weak answer usually means

A skipped question 5 usually means the messaging was written before the proof existed, and nobody went back. Trouble with question 7 usually means win and loss data lives in somebody's head. Question 3 is the quickest to fix and the one people resist most, because the sentence they underline tends to be the one they like best.

There is no scoring scheme on purpose. Ten answers don't add up to a number, and a number would give the audit more authority than it has. Read them together and see which two or three point at the same problem.

Running it with pmmAgent

If your facts are already in pmmAgent's Brand Box, the Positioning Framework tool can draft against them and flag the claims that have no proof behind them, which covers question 5 on its own. You can start on the Free plan at app.pmmagent.ai.

Consistent battle cards, positioning and launch messaging, so you can spend your time on enablement and the work that moves the sales needle.