Chapter 5 Nailing Your Go-to-Market Positioning • Marketing and awareness: Providing marketing teams with clear positioning will enable them to focus on developing the content and programs that educate and engage your prospects. It also gives you the clear story you need to share when talking with press and investors. • Sales effectiveness: Empowering your sales reps with clear positioning will help reps ramp up faster and shorten sales cycles. Great messaging can even create a sense of urgency for your prospects. • Inspire recruiting: Strong positioning can inspire employees and help you recruit the right executives and experts you need to build and scale your business. • Align executives: The process of working through your positioning is the single best way to align all your go-to- market teams across product, marketing, sales, and business development around a common, unified strategy. More on this later in the chapter. Three Hard Truths Before we jump into the positioning framework, let’s review a few hard truths that every startup needs to embrace before you start your positioning work. Hard Truth #1: No one cares about your product. Time to be blunt — no one cares about your belly button, and no one cares about your product. You could have the most elegant and technologically advanced solution for something you know is very important. But I don’t care yet, and neither do your prospects. If your messaging begins by talking about your product and features, then you may as well be talking about your belly button, and whoever you think is listening to everything your product has to offer is just being polite. The sooner you accept that no one cares about your product, the sooner you can take a step back and start to think about what your target audience does care about.