Positioning Against the Real Alternative
Your competitor is usually a spreadsheet, an intern, or doing nothing at all.
A deal you were sure of goes quiet. You chase, and eventually the buyer says they have decided to hold off for now. Your competitive battlecard has four columns comparing you to the three funded startups in your category. It has nothing to say about hold off for now, which is the option that just beat you.
April Dunford's central point is that positioning starts from the alternative your customer would actually pick if you vanished tomorrow. Sometimes that is a rival product. Far more often it is a spreadsheet somebody maintains, a junior hire doing it by hand, an agency, or the status quo of living with the problem.
What buyers actually did instead
Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares deeply about.
This matters to you as a PM, not only to marketing, because the alternative determines what you build. If your real competitor is a spreadsheet, then import, export, and the ability to keep working the way the spreadsheet worked are product decisions of the first order. If your real competitor is a well funded rival, feature parity on the things buyers compare matters more. Get the alternative wrong and you will build against a phantom.
Working backwards from the alternative
- Name the alternative
- Ask ten recent buyers what they would have done if you did not exist. Do not accept a category name. You want the specific thing, including who maintained it and what it cost them in time.
- List your unique attributes
- Things you have that the alternative does not. Attributes, not benefits. Real time sync is an attribute. Peace of mind is not.
- Translate to value
- For each attribute, what does it let the customer do that they could not do before? If you cannot finish that sentence, the attribute is not load bearing and you can stop talking about it.
- Find who cares most
- The value is only valuable to some people. Describe the segment by a characteristic you can observe from the outside, so sales can act on it.
- Pick the frame
- The market category you ask to be judged in. Choosing the frame chooses your competition and the buyer's expectations, so choose one where your attributes look obvious rather than incremental.
Worked example
Hypothetical: Thatcham, compliance software for small pharmacies
Thatcham positions against two rival compliance suites and loses most deals on price. The team calls fifteen recent losses and finds that only two evaluated a rival at all. Twelve were using a binder and a shared drive maintained by whichever pharmacist had been there longest. One had an accountant doing it quarterly. So the real alternative is a binder and a person's memory, and the real fear is an inspection landing while that person is on holiday. Everything shifts. The value is not cheaper compliance, it is that the knowledge stops living in one head. The product priority moves from adding workflow depth to importing the binder in an afternoon. And the frame changes from compliance suite, where Thatcham looks like a thin version of the incumbents, to inspection readiness, where the binder looks negligent.
Positioning against the category
- Battlecards comparing feature grids
- Roadmap driven by rival release notes
- Pricing anchored to competitor list prices
- Wins framed as being better
Positioning against the alternative
- Interviews with buyers about what they did before
- Roadmap driven by the cost of the current workaround
- Pricing anchored to the hours or the risk being replaced
- Wins framed as making a new thing possible
Two failure modes to watch for. The first is choosing a frame that flatters you but that no buyer searches for or has a budget line for. Inventing a category is expensive, and most teams should pick an existing frame where they can plausibly be best rather than build a new one where they are alone and unfunded.
The second is positioning against the alternative your best customers left behind years ago. The workaround that your earliest users escaped from is not necessarily what today's prospect is comparing you to. Re-run the question every year, and run it on losses, not just on wins. Won deals tell you who already agreed with you.
Quick check
Why does naming the real alternative change the roadmap, not only the messaging?
The takeaway
Find what a buyer would do if you did not exist, then build and sell against that, not against the category leader.
Try this tomorrow
Call five recent closed lost deals and ask what they are doing instead. Bring the answers to your next roadmap review.
Answer the check above, then bank the day.
Where this comes from
- Obviously Awesome, April Dunford
- Inspired, Marty Cagan
Strategy is one of six tracks. These lessons summarise and build on the work above, they do not reproduce it. Buy the books, they are better.