A Guide to Positioning with Multiple Products, Segments and Personas

Nov 01, 2023

I am frequently asked about how we handle positioning where we have multiple products, serving multiple market segments, and being bought by a range of different personas. Do we need different positioning for each of those things? Should we have a different sales pitch for each market segment and persona? I’ve touched on this topic before on the podcast, but I think the topic is confusing enough that it deserves the full essay treatment. Grab a beverage, get comfortable, and let’s get into it.

A/ Positioning Multiple Products

One product, one position in the market

Most companies start out with a single product. In my opinion, I don’t think a single product company needs separate positioning for the company and the product. Slack (pre-acquisition) was just Slack - both the company and the product. Now I get it - your plan is to be the Dyson Labs of whatever your market is, but you aren’t there yet, and when (if!) you add product number two, you can figure out your positioning and the naming convention that goes with it at that time.

Aside - naming is not positioning, and product names don’t have to be brands

Product naming is not the same thing as positioning, and companies can have multiple products under a single brand with distinct positioning. In my opinion, startups overthink naming and needlessly confuse customers. It’s hard enough to establish one brand in customers' minds, let alone a completely separate company brand that stands for nothing else (if you are still a single-product company). I’m a big fan of separating product names from “brands.” This was a concept I saw put to good use in the very large companies I worked at. At IBM, for example, the database division had one brand (DB2), and every product in the division (dozens of products, billions of dollars of revenue) had a descriptive name. My product was the information integration product. The name? DB2 Information Integrator. Yeah, the name is boring as heck, but imagine if we had tried to come up with creative names for each of the hundreds of IBM products? The customer would never figure it out!

With Multiple Products - You Have Choices to Make

Suppose you have just added your second product. Do we now need separate positioning for each product and the company? The answer is - maybe. It depends on who you sell the products to and in what order you expect to sell them.

“Standard” multi-product positioning

Often, when we have multiple products, the company positioning is simply an umbrella positioning that includes the capabilities of all of the products. For example, back when I worked at IBM, we positioned the company as the only company that could deliver hardware, software, and services and the value that went with that combination. Each division had its own positioning, which cascaded down to individual products. A simplified version would look like this:

The major lead product

Let’s say you intend to always sell one product first, and the second product is either an upgrade to the same buyer or a cross-sell to different buyers in the same company. In this case, you will have positioning for product 1 and then positioning for product 2 that builds on the assumption that you are only selling to companies that already have product 1. For example, in the early days of Salesforce, the main CRM product (Sales Cloud) was positioned as the lead product, and the marketing products were only sold to teams that already had the core CRM. Marketing Cloud had its own positioning for marketers, but that positioning could assume the buyer already owned the CRM. So, Salesforce only could position Marketing Cloud as the best for teams using Salesforce, which is much easier than attempting to position it as the best marketing platform in the world for anyone.

The product “family” or “platform”

Suppose you have two or more products sold to the same company, but we would expect companies to buy both together or one at a time in no particular order. We would certainly want buyers to know that both products exist and to understand the value of buying both products from us. In this situation, I’ve seen many companies position products together as either a “family” or a “platform,” depending on how integrated the products are. (Grumpy old tech lady aside - We tech people love the word “platform.” When I started in tech, we only used that word for something that had tightly integrated functionality and could be extended. Today, the word gets thrown around for any collection of things, regardless of integration or extensibility. In my opinion, most customers find the term “platform” meaningless and interchangeable with “product family.” But that’s just my opinion - please don’t fight me in the comments!)

Your positioning should reflect your company’s point of view about the market. If the company believes that the best course of action for prospects would be to buy the products together, then position them together and teach the customer why. Whether or not you allow a customer the flexibility to purchase the products separately or not is more of a matter of pricing and packaging than positioning.

Selling different things to different types of companies may mean you split up.

If you have two products but you sell them to completely different types of companies, then you would want to position the products separately. The bigger question in this situation is whether or not there is value in having company positioning that attempts to position the combined products together under an umbrella. Sometimes, demonstrating our expertise in one market helps us sell in another. For example, I worked with a company with two products for delivering streaming video, one for big media companies and one for developers who wanted to embed streaming functionality into their products. Their experience in media companies helped them gain the trust of developers and vice versa - so they talked about both in their company positioning. I’ve worked with other companies where this was not the case and they handled this by essentially forming separate companies owned by a holding company that buyers were unaware of.

B/ Multiple target market segments for a product

What happens when you have a product that is aimed at multiple different market segments? For example, your product is used by Banks and Insurance companies. Do you need different positioning for each target segment?

Multiple segments but common differentiated value

In my opinion, multiple target segments rarely need distinct positioning - but there are some things downstream from positioning that you might want to tailor to the segment.

Positioning is centered around your differentiated value - the value that your product can deliver that no other alternative can. It’s easy to think that you might have different competitors in each segment, leading to different differentiated value. But in my experience, that is rarely the case. When we go through a positioning exercise, what most commonly happens is that even though the competitors are different - the differentiated capabilities are the same (or similar), so the differentiated value is the same, and therefore the positioning is the same.

This makes a lot of sense when you think about it. If the positioning was genuinely different - meaning the competitors were different, the capabilities were different, and there was utterly different differentiated value for each segment - you would have a big problem on your hands. In this case, the features each segment would want from you and the roadmap of features you would need to build to stay differentiated would be different. In essence, you would need to fork the product into two different products in the future to keep everyone happy. This is a product strategy problem masquerading as a positioning problem.

You might tailor some content for certain purposes.

Because the positioning is the same, the core marketing messaging will be the same, but you will likely create tailored content for certain purposes. If we think about what we want to say on the home page, for example, we would likely have messaging that works across all of our target segments. That doesn’t mean we won’t ever want to create specific content for a segment - often, we will. We will likely have marketing campaigns aimed at a specific segment, and in those campaigns (and the content we create to support them), we might use segment-specific terminology or reference a customer in that segment. Our core value proposition would be the same, but we might express it in a segment-specific way.

Common positioning, common sales deck, tailored customer examples

Similarly, we would have a common core sales pitch deck based on our positioning, and the bulk of that deck is likely to be the same across segments. However, if we reference a customer case study in the “proof” step of a pitch, we would want to use an example that matches the prospect we are pitching to. That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have more tailored sales content for follow-up conversations with a prospect (particularly for larger deals with long sales cycles), but the first pitch would always start with our core story.

C/ Multiple personas

Lastly, we have the issue of multiple personas. We have all heard the statistic that a typical enterprise B2B software deal has 5-8 stakeholders involved in the decision. In the early part of my career, I was taught that we should create personas for every one of those stakeholders. For each one, we would try to determine the persona’s interests, goals, objectives, and pain points. We sometimes attempted to create value propositions for each persona.

The more I worked on actual enterprise deals, however, the more I realized that the personas we created were pretty useless except one. That was the persona of the “champion” of the deal.

Focus on the Champion

Typically, the champion is the person who is tasked to lead the effort to recommend a solution to the economic buyer (the person who holds the budget and has final approval). The champion typically leads early sales calls and decides which vendors get on the shortlist. One of the key tasks the champion takes on is getting buy-in from all of the other stakeholders that need to agree to move the deal forward (often including IT, purchasing, security, legal, end-users, etc.).

The champion has the power to make a deal happen. Everyone else on the deal team has the power to kill a deal. Our positioning must resonate for the champion - if it doesn’t, we don’t make it to the later stages of a deal where the other personas even get involved. Once a deal is cooking, part of our job as a vendor is to help the champion handle the objections of all of the other stakeholders. In short - we don’t need positioning for each stakeholder. We need positioning for the champion and good objection handling for everyone else.

Summary

I think teams can really overthink aspects of their positioning that do not have to be as complex as they might look on the surface. Whenever someone on the team asks - “Do we need separate positioning for this?” - we need to slow down and ask ourselves why that may or may not be true. The simpler we can keep our positioning, the stronger it will be and the easier it will be for the team to make it real in the market.

Here’s a link to the podcast where I covered some of this stuff.

Positioning with April Dunford

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