The Silent Positioning Mistakes That Kill Growth | MarTech

Many teams position themselves around what sounds convincing rather than what is true. It works for a while: the demos are peaking and the first reactions look positive. However, the gap between the pitch and the product is always clear during onboarding. Credibility breaks down in that gap.

A chocolate ad seemed funny – and not in a good way that could go viral. It was claimed that a piece of chocolate could instantly make women more attracted to men. There were even videos of women eating it and getting flirty. The copy warned that it contained oxylurexin, a concentrated form of oxytocin so powerful that the FDA forced them to permanently stop sales, so act quickly.

The FDA has never reviewed oxylurexine. And while the company claims to offer a 60-day money-back guarantee, I doubt the money will materialize. It was all a cleverly marketed scam. This one ad is everything that is wrong with marketing today.

The danger of selling what you cannot deliver

The chocolate scam follows the advice I hear all the time from marketing coaches and thought leader wannabes. “Sell what sells. Build demand first. You can build the end product later.” In other words: cash now, product later.

It’s short-term thinking at its worst. At first it seems like it’s working: more demo requests, better focus group scores, and a CEO who likes how bold it sounds. But you’re playing with gasoline next to a propane tank and you’re holding a lit match. It will all haunt you.

You’re creating high churn by promising something you don’t know how to deliver and probably can’t deliver, and you’re destroying your brand reputation in the process. The customers who walk away do not do so quietly. They tell their network, which makes them more susceptible to anything that even looks like a scam.

Dig deeper: If your value prop sounds like everyone else’s, you’ve already lost

I see this pattern all the time. One company positions its platform as “AI-powered sales intelligence that identifies your best opportunities.” What they actually provide is a database of basic scores – useful, but requiring a lot of analyst time to extract value from.

Sales does not provide clarity, because if you look cross-eyed, it could work that way. Customers sign up expecting automation, but are disappointed. Within three to six months they leave and tell everyone.

These companies rarely cross the eight-figure mark. If they do, it’s because the founding team has personally strengthened each deal or because customers are locked into annual contracts, marking calendar days until they can escape.

Positioning that works

The solution is simple. Marketing, sales and product depend on each other in the same way as your heart, lungs and liver. Within the body, these organs continuously send and receive chemical signals, adapting and responding to the needs of each other. But I don’t see anything similar happening at most companies.

I see the opposite. Somewhere between 50 and 100 employees no longer send or receive these signals. It’s not malicious. People get busy and end up in survival mode. Marketing stops listening to the product. Product views customer feedback from sales as an annoyance to be dealt with later, if at all. Sales promises whatever it takes to close the deal, leaving the product to clean up the mess. The solution consists of four parts.

Listen and respond

This sounds obvious until you look back and realize it was months ago:

• Sales and marketing participated in a product roadmap discussion.
• Product took part in a sales call to hear what potential customers are actually looking for.
• Sales brought customer delivery issues back to marketing to adjust messaging.

The companies that learn to listen and respond – and treat this as a non-negotiable part of the culture, done reliably at scale every month or quarter – are the ones that achieve the right positioning in the long run.

Map your positioning in the buyer journey

Recognizing poor positioning is not enough. You need to replace this with positioning that meets customers at the time and place they are most likely to lead to a purchase. That is why it is important that your message matches the buyer’s journey. While everyone organizes the trip a little differently, I think Bob Mosta’s definition of the best for long-term thinking.

It starts with a moment of struggle when the customer realizes that their current solution no longer solves the problem. That first thought leads to passive viewing, where customers keep a close eye on their radar, but don’t invest time, money or energy in finding a replacement.

When the solution fails again, they start actively looking, which culminates in a decisive phase in which they make trade-offs. Once they’ve made their choice, they move on to onboarding, where expectations and reality must align or the customer will churn. In the final phase, the customer consistently chooses you over alternatives.

Dig deeper: if it tells the right story, the brand will drive demand

Effective positioning meets customers where they are and shows them that you understand their pain and can solve it with such clarity that they’ll say, “That’s exactly what I’m dealing with.”

The struggling moment gives you something. The active viewing phase shows you where. The considerations that customers make show how you can compare your solution with alternatives. These are all core components of a strong positioning.

Offer customers proof, not promises

In a world where people sell chocolate claiming it will make women instantly attracted to you, people no longer respond with “trust us.” This also applies to the three carefully compiled case studies on your website. They are massively looking for social proof.

Your positioning should be supported by substantial, verifiable evidence, such as dozens of case studies or hundreds of user-generated reviews or testimonials. Even customer logos are important because they indicate that you are serving the market at scale, not just a handful of early believers.

As companies move from early adopters to the mass market, purchasing psychology completely changes. Early adopters will take a leap of faith – that’s what makes them early adopters. However, mass market customers want a well-trodden path that dozens, if not hundreds, of others have successfully gone before.

Define the positioning floor

There is a simple internal rule that teams can adopt that has a big impact: the positioning floor. It’s a promise to underdeliver or overdeliver every time, never promising more than a fixed percentage of what the product can deliver today. That could mean:

• Save surprise and delight features for onboarding.
• Positioning around the minimum time saved.
• Make claims that apply to 80% of customers in the first 30 days.

The positioning floor protects brand credibility and allows you to expand upward as the product evolves. It also puts marketing and products in a constant feedback loop. Every time marketing tiptoes near that edge, the product knows where to build next.

Dig Deeper: 3 GTM Principles to Help Emerging Products Gain Popularity

Which allows for disciplined positioning

See how Dropbox positioned itself during its growth phase. It didn’t promise “revolutionary cloud storage that will transform the way teams work together.” It positioned itself around “your stuff, anywhere” – a simple, almost boring promise. But it was supported by millions of users who could vouch for exactly that experience. The positioning was so specific and proven that it immediately passed everyone’s scam radar.

That is the power of positioning built on a solid floor. Dropbox knew what it could offer every user, every time. It positioned itself accordingly, delivered consistently and exceeded expectations turning customers into advocates, and then used that advocacy to scale quickly.

The last-place companies aren’t positioning themselves for what’s being sold in the demo. They position themselves for what they can reliably deliver at scale. It feels less exciting in the pitch deck. But it builds the one thing that actually increases over time: trust.