First-call positioning deck

+ Use Template

+ Use Template

+ Use Template

Tactics

Contrary to other sales methodologies that teach openers, how to ask good questions, etc., we believe the success of the call is built on the back of how clear your product's positioning is. That said, let's see what good positioning looks like then dive into how the call unfolds around it.

Step 1. How to create differentiated positioning

Positioning is how your product is different and better than the alternatives for a particular set of customers. Said differently, it's what you're the best in the world at delivering for a well-defined group of customers who care a lot about it. Positioning works like context setting: it tells buyers what your product is, what to compare it to, and why it matters. It isn't messaging or a tagline. It's the foundation underneath them, and the starting point for your messaging, branding, lead generation, sales strategy, and pitch.

There are five things you need to answer in a positioning exercise:

Start with the customers who already love you

Pull a list of your ten to twenty best customers. Select ones who bought fastest, use the product most, renew year over year, and refer you to peers. Then get on a short call with whoever drove the purchase at five or six of them. Ask what they were using before they found you, and what they would do tomorrow if you disappeared.

Here are a few sample questions to ask to get to you the input you'll need:

• Who else they looked at and what nearly stopped them from buying?

• What would they tell a peer you're good at?

• What has changed in their business since they started?

Listen for the specific words they use. The patterns across those calls will give you a starting point.

Do it as a team

Positioning works best as a cross-functional effort between company leadership, sales, marketing, product, and customer success. Each represents a different side of the business and sees a different slice of the value customers get. Sales hears what wins and loses deals, customer success sees why people stay, product knows what's genuinely hard to copy, and leadership can make the call when those views pull in different directions. bring those sides of the business together to get a holistic picture of the value you provide to them and what won them over.

Work through the components in order

Start with competitive alternatives: what your best customers would do if you didn't exist. That list often includes the status quo or doing it manually, and it helps to group the alternatives together.

Next, isolate what you have that those alternatives don't. For each of those unique attributes, ask "so what?" to capture the value it enables for customers, then group that value into themes. Keep asking until you reach something specific a customer cares about, but stop before you land on something generic like saving money, which any competitor can claim.

From there, identify who cares a lot about that value, and only then choose a market category.

Choose the category

Write down two or three candidate categories and test each one against your value themes. A good pulse check is asking yourself: Would a buyer who hears this category immediately assume the strengths you actually have?

In most cases, there three options. You can:

1. Compete head-to-head as the leader of an existing category

2. Win a sub-segment of an existing category where your strengths matter most

3. Create a new category

Creating a category is the hardest path, so default to the sub-segment unless no existing category makes your value obvious.

Write it down so others can use it

Capture the result on a single page: the alternatives, your differentiated capabilities, the value themes with proof for each, the best-fit customer profile, and the category. April calls this a positioning canvas. Share it with sales and marketing, use it to rebuild the pitch and website copy, and revisit it whenever the market shifts or you start losing deals you used to win.

Step 2. Define your unique market insight

The insight is a statement about the market that the buyer has to believe in order for your value to matter to them. It is important to understand that the insight is not a description of the buyer's problem. It is a claim about the world that makes your strengths the deciding factor.

To find it, you must start from your differentiated value, then ask what a person would need to believe for that value to be the most important consideration in the evaluation.

Here's a simple example. Imagine two database companies whose products are almost identical, except for one thing.

If Database B opens the call by talking about speed or scale, the buyer learns nothing, because the two products are even on both. So instead, B's seller asks a few simple questions:

• Q: "Why are you storing all this data?"

  A: "Because it's becoming one of the company's most valuable assets."

  
  

• Q: "What will you do with it?"

  A: "Run analytics and AI on top of it."

  
  

• Q: "Which tools, specifically?"

  A: "Nobody knows yet, because we haven't worked through the use cases"

In this scenario, the buyer reaches the conclusion that a database you'll keep for years has to stay open to whatever comes next. Openness becomes the deciding factor, and it's the one thing Database B is guaranteed to win on.

Notice what was left out of the opening: features, technical specs, and proof points. All of that comes later in the call. The opening has one job, which is to establish the single criterion that your company wins on.

Step 3. Lay the call out in eight steps

Think about the call in two halves.

• The setup: the goal is to align the buyer to your view of the market. We covered this in the section above.

• The follow through: proof that you deliver on your unique value outlined in the setup.

If you deliver all eight steps without the buyer talking, the structure has failed even if you said every word correctly.

Here is the sequence at a glance, followed by what belongs on each step and what does not.

We'll use the same two database companies through each step to demonstrate how this works in practice.

As a reminder:

• Database A's strength is that everything comes bundled together, which makes it fast and cheap to set up, with one vendor to call.

• Database B's strength is openness: customers can run whatever tools they want on top of it.

Insight

The insight is your point of view on how the market works, boiled down to the one idea the buyer has to believe for your strengths to matter. To find yours, ask what a customer needs to understand in order to see why your differentiated value is important.

On the call:

• Deliver it as a short conversation, not a slide, and keep it to a few minutes.

• Make a claim about the market the buyer can agree or disagree with, then give just enough reasoning for them to reach the conclusion themselves.

• Check in before moving on. Ask something like, "Does that match what you're seeing?" If they push back, stay here until you agree, because it is the backbone of everything that follows.

Example: Neither database can win on speed or scale, since the two products are even on both, so the insight is about time. The data a company stores today will outlive every tool it runs on top, and the analytics and AI tools it will want in a few years haven't been invented yet. Database B's seller gets there with three simple questions:

• Why are you storing this data?

• What will you do with it?

• Which tools will be using this data?

Once the buyer admits nobody knows yet, openness becomes the thing that decides the purchase.

Alternatives

This step maps the market for the buyer, including the parts of it you don't sell. Laying out every realistic option is what makes you a guide to the category rather than one more vendor arguing for itself.

On the call:

• Cover everything the buyer could genuinely do. Those options include the status quo, doing it manually, building in-house, an adjacent category of tool, or doing nothing.

• Group the options into roughly three approaches and give each one a fair account, strengths included.

• Use it for discovery. On the call, ask what they use today, what they've tried, who else they're evaluating, and what constraints they're working under.

Example: Database B's seller lays out three options.

• An all-in-one package like Database A is fast, cheap up front, and easy to support, but the vendor decides what you can add later.

• An open option like Database B takes a bit more work up front but keeps future choices available.

• Keeping the current database costs nothing today but won't handle the analytics and AI work the buyer is planning.

Perfect world

Before you say anything about your product, describe what an ideal solution would need to do, and ask the buyer whether they agree. The requirements should follow directly from your insight and be written around your differentiated capabilities.

On the call:

• Ask for agreement: "Would you agree that any real solution here would need to do these three things?"

• If they agree, you've set the criteria your product happens to meet.

• If they disagree, either your setup didn't land or they want something you don't do. Better to find out now than two months into a deal.

Example: Any database you plan to keep for years would need to run tools that don't exist yet, add them without forcing a migration, and do it without one vendor deciding on your behalf what's supported. A buyer who agrees to those three requirements has agreed to openness, and Database B still hasn't been mentioned.

Introduction

Only now do you say who you are, and you say it through your market category. The right category makes your strengths look obvious and your gaps look irrelevant.

On the call:

• Name the category you've chosen.

• Add one line about who you serve.

• Keep it short. The buyer has already agreed to the criteria, so show where you fit rather than pitching.

Example: If Company B introduces itself as just another database, the buyer compares it on speed and price, where it's even with Database A. If it introduces itself as an open data platform, the buyer compares it on flexibility, the exact criterion they just agreed matters most. The product hasn't changed but the category that it operates in has.

Differentiated value

This is where you show the two or three things you're exceptional at, and connect each one directly to a requirement the buyer agreed to in the perfect-world step.

On the call:

• Lead with your biggest value theme.

• Name the value first, then show the part of the product that delivers it.

• Stick to two or three themes.

Example: Company B's seller leads with flexibility, tying it back to the buyer's own words: they need to add tools that don't exist yet without a migration. Then she shows how a new analytics tool plugs into B.

Proof

This is the closing argument of the call. You've made claims, and now you show evidence that you deliver on them.

On the call:

• Use named customer outcomes, hard numbers, and benchmarks.

• Match the proof to the buyer's industry. In April's view, this is the one place in the first call where tailoring belongs.

Example: For a retail buyer, Company B's seller shares how another retailer added a new AI forecasting tool shortly after it launched, without migrating any data.

The ask

Close the call with a next step that both sides have agreed to.

On the call:

• Agree on one specific next step.

• Name who needs to be there.

• Put a time on the calendar.