Your desired positioning isn’t necessarily your market opportunity

The company is evolving. The product is getting more sophisticated. AI is everywhere. The leadership team or the board wants the company to feel modern, innovative and AI-native. Strategic rather than tactical.

Naturally, that starts to influence the positioning. Sooner or later, someone says it: “We don’t want to be seen as just a [boring existing category] anymore.”

It’s an understandable ambition, and sometimes the right one. But wanting to be seen differently doesn’t mean there’s a market opportunity there.

What you want to be known for, and what you can win

There are two different questions hiding in most positioning discussions.

• Desired positioning
  What do we want customers to associate us with?
• Positioning opportunity
  What valuable position can we credibly occupy in the mind of a specific buyer?

The first one is a choice. The second one is constrained by reality: the problems customers have, how urgent those problems are, what buyers already think of you, the alternatives they’re comparing you with, what they’re willing to pay for, where there’s room in the competitive landscape, and whether they believe you can deliver.

You can decide what you say. You can’t simply decide what buyers will believe or care about.

The company is often ahead of the buyer

This happens a lot in software, for a simple reason. Inside the company, people spend all day thinking about the product and the market. They see where the technology is heading. They see the roadmap. They talk to analysts, competitors and the most sophisticated customers.

A new buyer doesn’t. They might simply be thinking:

• “Our documents are a mess.”
• “Nobody can find anything.”
• “We’re spending too much time doing this manually.”

Meanwhile, the company is talking about AI readiness, intelligent knowledge infrastructure and autonomous workflows.

Neither perspective is necessarily wrong. They’re just at different stages. The company describes where the market is going. The buyer describes where they are today. And buyers buy from where they are.

It’s the same pull that makes companies rewrite their homepage around AI, and it costs them in the same way: the buyer no longer recognizes their own problem on the page.

Your best customers can make this worse

This is the part that catches companies out.

When you test a new direction with your long-term customers, they often understand the sophisticated story completely. Of course they do. They’ve used your product for three years. Their processes have matured. They’ve run into new problems. They understand your category, and some of them are already using your newest functionality.

That creates dangerous validation: “Customers love this direction.”

Yes. Which customers?

The positioning that resonates with a mature customer isn’t automatically the positioning that makes a new prospect recognize themselves and buy. Your best customers have been on a journey with you. Your next customer hasn’t started it yet.

Winning customers and growing them can need different stories

That doesn’t mean you have to choose between the simple story and the ambitious one. They can both be right, at different moments.

To win new customers, you may need to anchor on the problem they already recognize and the trigger that already makes them buy. Once someone is a customer, the story can grow with their understanding: more sophisticated use cases, broader value, more strategic importance, new products.

That isn’t inconsistent positioning. It’s accepting that understanding develops over time.

The mistake is starting all the way on the right: leading with the strategic vision for buyers who are still on the left, with a problem they can name and want solved.

Test the opportunity, not only the message

When teams test new positioning, they usually test the message. Does it resonate? Do people like it? Does it sound better than what we have?

Those are useful questions, but they come later. First, test whether there’s an opportunity behind it:

• Who already cares about this?
  Not who should care, but who does today.
• How urgently do they care?
  A problem buyers recognize but can live with rarely turns into a buying cycle. Urgency often decides more than the size of the market.
• What are they doing about it today?
  That’s what you’ll really be compared with, and it’s often not a competitor at all.
• Is there budget?
  And whose budget is it?
• What triggers them to act?
  A position without a buying trigger waits a long time for buyers.
• Do they naturally describe the problem this way?
  If buyers have to learn your words first, you’ll have to teach the market before you can sell to it.
• Do they believe we’re the company to solve it?
  A position you can’t credibly claim yet is an aspiration, not a position.

Without these answers, you can end up perfecting the wording of a position that doesn’t have much commercial opportunity behind it.

You can still choose where you want to go

None of this is an argument against aspirational positioning. A company can deliberately move toward a new position, and sometimes it has to.

But then be clear about the difference between where you can win today and where you want to be known tomorrow.

If you want the second one, more than the message has to move. The product, your go-to-market, your proof points, your customer base and sometimes even the market itself need to move with you. Calling it your positioning doesn’t make that shift happen.

Earn the position

Companies naturally want their positioning to reflect where they’re going. Buyers meet you from where they are.

Great positioning finds the overlap.

Your desired positioning tells you what you want to become known for. Your positioning opportunity tells you what buyers are ready to believe, care about and buy from you today.

Sometimes they’re the same. When they’re not, don’t confuse ambition with evidence.

Where I can helpPositioning & Differentiation