The Positioning Workshop That Actually Changes Your Homepage

A positioning workshop should produce one sentence you can put at the top of your homepage, and the argument underneath it that your champion can carry into a committee without you in the room. Everything else the room generates is working material: the whiteboard, the sticky notes, the forty slide deck, the shared document with everyone's comments in the margin. Those are the shavings, not the thing.

The order matters more than the output format. The components of positioning, as April Dunford lays them out in Obviously Awesome, run like this: competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, who cares a lot, market category. Alternatives come first because they are the yardstick. Nothing you say about yourself means anything until you know what the buyer is holding you against.

Most workshops run that order backwards. They start with the category, because the category is the fun part, the part where someone says the words "we are creating a new space". Then they reverse engineer attributes to fit it. You end the day with a sentence that is accurate about your product and useless to a buyer, because it answers a question nobody in the committee asked.

A workshop cannot fix a product the market does not want, and it will not, by itself, shorten a sales cycle. In one of those five companies, closing a new customer can take more than a year. Positioning is not the only reason for that, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you the room.

It is, though, a reliable suspect. The signs of weak positioning that Dunford names are long sales cycles, losing deals you should win, and price pressure. In another of the five, after pilots run against two other vendors, the deciding criterion came back as "price and quality". That is what it sounds like when the buyer could not tell you apart and fell back on the only yardstick left.

Who should be in the room, and who should not, is the question that quietly decides the outcome. Three people belong there: the founder who still sells, whoever has heard the most lost deals in their own ears, and the person who will edit the homepage. If the third one is absent, you are running a workshop whose output has to survive a handoff to someone who did not hear any of it.

Who should not be there: everyone else. Not the whole go to market team. Not the board observer who wants to watch. Not an agency arriving with a template and four slides of category theory.

There is a specific failure mode with large rooms. The sentence gets voted on, and voting produces the sentence nobody objects to, which is never the sentence that makes a stranger stop scrolling. Claims lose their edges when they are negotiated. Six people will sand a sentence until it is safe and says nothing.

Keep the room at three or four, and make one person the writer. Not the decider. The writer. Somebody has to be responsible for the fact that a sentence exists when the room empties.

There is a fourth chair, and it belongs to someone who does not work for you. Not for the expertise. For the asymmetry. Three things go predictably worse when the team runs this alone. Customers soften their answers when the founder is the one asking, because they like the founder and they are being polite about something they pay for. The loudest voice in the room is the founder's, and everyone present knows it, so the sentence bends toward whatever they said in the first twenty minutes. And when the honest answer comes back as a spreadsheet, the team flinches, because nobody wants to tell a board that the main competitor is a file. An outsider has no stake in any of those three flinches. That is most of what they are for.

What should you bring to a positioning workshop? One thing, and it is not a competitive matrix: the verbatim answers of five to eight of your best customers to a single question about what they would do if you vanished. Bring that and the room has raw material. Bring a deck of your own hypotheses instead and the room has opinions, and the loudest opinion in a startup is usually the founder's, which is how you end up back at the category.

The exercise takes about an hour. I wrote it up in full here: what your best customers would do if you did not exist. The short version is this.

1. Pick five to eight best customers: the ones who bought quickly, paid full price, refer you, and defend you internally.
2. Ask each of them: "If we disappeared tomorrow, what would you actually do instead? Not which vendor you would call. What you and your team would do next month."
3. Follow up with: "And before you started looking for anything like us, what were you doing?"
4. Write the answers down verbatim, in their words, not yours.
5. Group them into two to five buckets, and name each bucket in the customers' language.

Bucket one is your real competitive alternative. It is very often not a vendor. It is a spreadsheet, a contractor, an analyst who stayed late, or nothing at all. Teams flinch at this, and then go write a homepage that competes against the two funded startups in their category instead, neither of which their buyer has heard of.

This is the step that gets skipped, for a reason worth naming. Calling five happy customers to ask how they would replace you is uncomfortable. It is also the only hour in the whole exercise where new information enters the building.

How do you know a positioning workshop worked? Within two weeks of the room, the first line of your homepage is different, and you can point to the specific customer sentence that changed it. That is the whole test. Not whether the document is thorough. Not whether everyone left the room feeling aligned.

Keelbridge, before

“The intelligent platform for modern laboratory operations.”

Three categories across site, LinkedIn and press.

vs

Keelbridge, after

“Most lab networks still book instrument time in a shared spreadsheet. We replace the spreadsheet.”

One yardstick, named in the buyer's words.

Keelbridge is invented, as an illustration. Bucket one of its customers’ answers, verbatim: “We would go back to the spreadsheet and put someone in charge of it.” That sentence wrote the second homepage. The first one was written in a room.

Notice what the second line gives up. It gives up sounding large. It concedes that the competition is a file, which a certain kind of investor update does not enjoy. In exchange, a procurement officer skimming it knows what is being replaced and can repeat it to the committee without a demo.

I have done this with my own name on it. For four years I was CMO of an AgTech platform called LAYERS, selling satellite yield prediction to sugar mills. The product worked. Its value lived in the language of the people who had built it, and mills do not buy resolution, models or per parcel accuracy. They buy tons, days, and dollars per hectare. So the claim was rebuilt as a chain: feature, operational lever, industry KPIs, financial impact, cost of inaction. Then the chain was published as a public calculator where the visitor sets their own crop, hectares, yield and price. A claim made by the vendor becomes arithmetic done by the buyer.

The chief executive I reported to through those four years, Xavier Silva, described the result this way: "you helped us define the value proposition so that it was far simpler, clearer and easier to communicate." Simpler is the part founders resist, because from the inside it reads as giving something up.

The two week deadline is not arbitrary. Positioning decays the moment it leaves the room, because the room is the only place where everyone remembers why the sentence is phrased that way. Ship it somewhere public while the argument is still live and the sentence acquires a job. Leave it in a document and in nine months you have four categories again.

The homepage is the test, not the deliverable. A sentence at the top of a page is worth little if the sales deck still leads with the old category, if the outbound sequences quote attributes nobody cares about, and if the value argument lives in the founder's head and goes into every call on their shoulders. The sentence has to be carried, by other people, into rooms you are not in.

Here is what happens to it after an in house workshop, on the ordinary schedule. Week one: the homepage changes and the work feels done. Week three: the deck still opens on the old category, because nobody owned the deck. Week five: a new salesperson learns the pitch from that deck, not from the homepage. Week eight: outbound goes out quoting attributes nobody in the committee cares about. Week twelve: someone rewrites the LinkedIn tagline from memory, and the second noun comes back. Nobody made a mistake. The sentence simply had no system under it, so it drifted toward whoever last needed a slide.

Building that system is not a workshop. It is messaging architecture, enablement, sequences, a sales deck, a diagnosis of where the go to market is bleeding, and a named owner for each. Most of this market sells you a document, or rents you a senior brain by the month.

This is the work I do. The Loom Sprint runs in ten weeks and two phases: by week four you hold the positioning document, and by week ten you have a go to market your team runs without me, built from your own calls, your own wins and your own words. The first four weeks are the workshop this article describes, done the long way: a small room with an outside chair, the verbatim answers of your best customers, and the headline that replaces your first line, written while the argument is still live. The last six build the system that keeps that line from drifting. Ten weeks sounds long next to a two day workshop. Set it against what it replaces: a sales cycle that can run past a year, and pilots that end with a committee deciding on "price and quality" because nobody could tell you apart. The first step is fifteen minutes. Run the three tab count first, then book the call and bring me the nouns. You will leave it knowing whether positioning is your bottleneck or something else is, and which one I would fix first.