Position yourself or be positioned!
We observe so many fantastic innovations within #SaaS tech and #greentech scale-ups. Many brilliant innovations and visionary founders solve a problem that current providers are not solving well enough for a specific target audience.
"Build it, and they will come" doesn't work.
First of all, you need to sell the problem you are solving (that current providers aren't) and then position yourself as the player solving this problem. A company that defines the space or category/subcategory is best placed to dominate it. Companies that dominate their category enjoy significant market leadership up to 70%+.
Do you remember the blackberry:) they owned the category for smartphones. They had defined the category of smartphones around smart emailing. Until Apple sold a problem blackberry was not solving. Ok, great I have smart access and management to my email, but I still need to carry a camera, log in to my computer, go online to manage everything else, etc. Understanding the digital and online macro trends, Steve jobs re-defines the smartphone category through "applications" and that you can "manage" your life on your phone. The rest is history.
By creating a new category, Jobs disrupted the old one. He managed to condition the market to accept his vision.
He DID NOT try and sell how the iPhone features were better. He did not position Apple in the Blackberry category and try to sell how his product was better. He sold the problem and carved out a NEW category that solved a problem no one was solving.
We see so many brilliant innovations trying to sell their products and features. By doing so, they are positioning their products into existing categories and subcategories (that someone else is dominating), explaining how they are better. They miss a huge opportunity to carve out a NEW category or sub-category and dominate it. Create the future you want, NOT what anyone else has already described, and enjoy the abundance of success this generates.
Salesforce did not disrupt Sibel (at the time, the dominant CRM provider). Marc Benioff created a new category that Sibel couldn't play in. The new category made people see the problem with the old category. Again the rest is history.
In our GTM (Go-To-Market) design workshops, we help SaaS and Green Tech scale-ups with defining and carving out their category or subcategory through a highly strategic exercise with #targeting #positioning and #messaging for #enterprise deals and #megadeals,
