Chapter 5 Nailing Your Go-to-Market Positioning Positioning Exercises and Templates In this section, I’ve provided three road-tested templates that you can use with your teams to work on your own go-to-market positioning. Exercise 1: Target Audience Matrix The first, and most important, step in your effort to develop clear and compelling company positioning is to have clarity on your audience. You can’t start messaging without first defining and achieving internal alignment on the prospects you are building your product for, marketing, and selling to. Since there’s no one-size-fits-all in business software, it’s important to think about your target audience in terms of clear segments and profiles. This template will help you work through what’s most important for each of your target segments. It requires you think through: 1. Main use case your company could help with. 2. Top challenge (related to their goal or use case). 3. Reason why a prospect would choose your solution. Startups typically have between 3–5 unique target customer segments. Startups don’t have the resources to build product, market, and sell to every segment at once. 3 - 5 cl wha ea r t th ey se gment nee s d to do SEGMENT SPECIFIC USE CASE Customer segment 1 Very short and to the point Very short description statement of what they need to do • Sample company • Sample company ... so they can (5 words) “Colorful, between-friends expression here.” ey ts th fi ene he b t t’s hindering wha t from ge ll wi se heiR use ca t on ti lu ur so yo CURRENT CHALLENGE ($) REASONS TO CHOOSE (YOU) Biggest blocker here Short headline (1 line only) (what’s stopping them) • Biggest impact 1 ... with capability A Ex: “But i can’t because it still takes 15 hours to pull all the data together each week.” • Biggest impact 2 ... enable by feature B • Biggest impact 3 ... with rich capability C