What Your Best Customers Would Do If You Did Not Exist

You already know which one matters by how your deals feel. The deal that was going to close in the spring is still open in the autumn, and nothing has gone wrong, it just keeps moving. You get into a pilot and so do two other vendors, and after four months of good calls the answer comes back as price and quality. Or the tender lands with the evaluation grid already written, and the grid is not describing you. From the inside none of that looks like a positioning problem. It looks like a long quarter.

This week I went through the positioning of five B2B companies between seed and Series A, all of them selling into buying committees: risk, compliance, IT, procurement. None had anyone running marketing. In each one the founder or a single salesperson was doing the selling. And in all five, the same thing was missing from the website: any statement of what the buyer is comparing them against.

The companies knew. The answer was there, just never on the homepage: in a founder interview, in a salesperson's post, in a customer's own words on a case study. A legacy system older than half the team. Building it in house. The spreadsheet and the group chat. The sentence existed. It had simply never travelled from the conversation to the page.

That is not a copywriting problem, and treating it as one is how companies lose a year.

April Dunford's Obviously Awesome (2019) makes an argument that sounds obvious and almost nobody follows: the pieces of positioning have to be defined in order, and the first one is not your product. The order is competitive alternatives, then your unique attributes, then the value those attributes deliver, then who cares a lot about that value, then the market category that makes all of it obvious.

Alternatives come first because they are the yardstick. Your buyer decides what "better" means by comparing you to whatever they would otherwise do. If the real alternative is a spreadsheet and a shared inbox, you cannot win on "easier to use" unless you are genuinely easier than a spreadsheet, which you may not be. If the real alternative is a system installed in 1994 that nobody wants to touch, then your integration story matters more than your interface, and the interface you spent two years on buys you very little in the room.

Start anywhere else and the chain breaks quietly. Start with features and you assume competitors your buyer has never heard of. Start with the category and you inherit the status quo, which was written by the incumbent and favours the incumbent.

The symptoms at the top of this piece are where that break shows up. The book lists four signs of weak positioning, among them long sales cycles, losing deals you should win, and price pressure. In one of the five companies this week, closing a new customer can take more than a year. In another the deciding criterion, after the pilots, was price and quality. When you have not told the market what to compare you against, somebody else does it, and they will do it in whatever terms make the cheapest option look reasonable.

Before the real exercise, do this one. It costs ten minutes and it usually settles the argument about whether the problem is real.

Open a blank document. Four columns. Paste, word for word, how your company is described in four places:

1. The first line of your website, above the fold.
2. Your LinkedIn company tagline.
3. Your page on your accelerator's or your investor's portfolio site.
4. Your most recent press release, or your terms of service.

Now count the distinct categories. Not the adjectives, the nouns. Platform, marketplace, software, consultancy, operating system, infrastructure, suite. Here is what that looks like for an invented fleet maintenance company:

Website, first line

“The AI powered maintenance platform for modern fleets.”

Category: platform

LinkedIn tagline

“Smart fleet software that keeps trucks on the road.”

Category: software

Investor portfolio page

“A marketplace connecting fleets with certified workshops.”

Category: marketplace

Latest press release

“Predictive maintenance infrastructure for logistics operators.”

Category: infrastructure

4

Four places, four nouns, four categories. “AI powered”, “smart”, “modern” and “predictive” do not count: adjectives describe you, only the noun tells the buyer which shelf to put you on and what to compare you with.

In the five companies I reviewed, the count ran from three to four. Not one of them came out at one.

If you count more than one, your prospect is picking one on their own. They will pick the one that is easiest to compare against something cheaper.

Now the real one. In the book this is the fourth step of the process even though alternatives are the first component, and the gap is deliberate: the components have one order, the work has another, and before you can ask the question you have to know whom to ask. So the hour starts with the list.

Step 1. Pick the right customers, not the big ones.

Make a list of five to eight customers who bought quickly, paid full price, refer you to others, and defend you internally when something breaks. That is the definition.

Not your largest logo. Not the account you discounted to win. Not the one your investors like to hear about. Pick the ones who behave like fans, because the fans are the only ones who can show you the pattern that the full customer base hides.

Step 2. Ask one question, in these words.

Call them, or write to them. Fifteen minutes each is enough. Ask:

"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."

Then one follow up:

"And before you started looking for anything like us, what were you doing?"

That second question matters more than it looks. It gets you the answer from before your sales process taught them your vocabulary.

Do not ask them about their problems. They will describe their problems in their own technical language, and you will get a list of symptoms you cannot act on. Ask about replacement. Replacement reveals the mental category they filed you under, which is the thing you need.

Step 3. Write the answers down verbatim.

One column, their words, no editing. The moment you start paraphrasing, you start writing your own answer instead of theirs. Keep the ugly phrasings. "Go back to doing it by hand" is more useful than anything you would write in its place.

Step 4. Group them into two to five buckets, ordered by frequency.

Name each bucket the way your customers named it, not the way your industry names it. "Build it ourselves" and "ask the dev team for a script" are the same bucket. "Nothing, we would live with it" is a bucket, and often the biggest one. A tiny competitor that obsesses you does not get a bucket if no customer mentioned it. Back to the invented fleet company, with seven best customers:

1. A“Honestly? Back to the spreadsheet. And the whiteboard in the yard office.”
2. A“Excel, and whatever our planner remembers.”
3. A“Nothing clever. The planner would keep the sheet going.”
4. A“Before you, it was a shared sheet and a lot of phone calls.”
5. B“We’d ask the workshops to call us when a truck is due.”
6. B“The dealer used to remind us. We’d go back to that.”
7. C“IT would try to build something inside the ERP.”

A

Back to the spreadsheet and the whiteboard

4 of 7

B

Let the workshops chase us

2 of 7

C

Build it into the ERP

1 of 7

Nobody named a competitor. The rival the founder worries about every week does not get a bucket.

Step 5. Put bucket one next to your homepage.

This is the reading of the result, and there are three outcomes.

Your homepage names that alternative, directly or in words close enough to it. Good. You are ahead of most companies at your stage, and your next question is further down this article.

Your homepage argues against a named competitor that nobody in your list mentioned. You are fighting an opponent your buyer does not see, and that fight makes you look smaller than you are.

Your homepage starts with your product, your modules, or your catalogue, and says nothing about what the buyer would otherwise do. This is the common case, it was the case in all five companies this week, and it is where the leak is. Every prospect who lands there does the comparison themselves, in silence, using criteria you never saw.

What the best customers compare it to

A spreadsheet and a whiteboard

They filed it under: a better way to plan maintenance

vs

What the homepage says

The AI powered maintenance platform for modern fleets

It asks to be judged as: an AI platform

The category your customers already use is sitting in bucket one. The homepage asks to be compared with AI vendors none of them mentioned, so a prospect weighs it against those, on price.

You will finish with a column of sentences in your customers' own words and the first link of the chain in your hand. The next links are visible from there, and none of them are answered by what you just did.

Which of your attributes still count as unique once you compare them to that specific alternative, rather than to the vendor list in your deck. Some of them stop being differentiators the moment the real alternative is named. Some of the things your team apologises for turn out to be the reason you win.

Which value those surviving attributes actually buy, stated as a goal your buyer already has rather than as a product capability.

Which buyers care a great deal about that value, described tightly enough that you could build the prospect list from the description alone. If you cannot build the list, the segment is not real.

Which market category puts your strengths at the centre instead of forcing you to argue your way out of someone else's assumptions, including what price your buyer expects before you open your mouth.

And the order you say all of it in, in a first meeting, when you have twenty minutes and a committee of four people who each want something different.

Each answer narrows the next. That is the part that makes positioning strategy rather than wording, and it is also why starting at the end never works.

This exercise is the first step of The Loom, the ten week method I run alongside the founder, which carries the work from that column of sentences to a position you can hold and on to the story each member of the buying committee hears.