Many teams position around what sounds compelling instead of what’s true. It works for a moment — demos spike and early reactions look positive. However, the gap between the pitch and the product is always evident during onboarding. That gap is where credibility breaks.
A chocolate ad struck me as funny — and not in the good could-go-viral way. It claimed a piece of chocolate could make women instantly more attracted to men. It even showed videos of women eating it and becoming flirtatious. The copy warned that it contained oxylurexin, a concentrated form of oxytocin so powerful that the FDA was forcing them to stop sales permanently, so act fast.
The FDA never reviewed oxylurexin. And although the company claims to offer a 60-day money-back guarantee, I doubt the funds will be forthcoming. It was all a cleverly marketed scam. This one ad is everything that’s wrong with marketing today.
The danger of selling what you can’t deliver
The chocolate scam follows advice I hear constantly from marketing coaches and thought leader wannabes. “Sell what sells. Build demand first. You can build the deliverable later.” In other words, cash now, product later.
It’s short-term thinking at its worst. At first, it looks like it’s working — more demo requests, better focus group scores and a CEO who loves how bold it sounds. But you’re playing with gasoline next to a propane tank and you’re holding a lit match. It will all come back to haunt you.
You’re creating high customer churn by promising something you don’t know how to and likely can’t deliver and you’re destroying your brand reputation in the process. Those customers who walk away don’t do so quietly. They tell their network, which makes them more sensitive to anything that even resembles a scam.
Dig deeper: If your value prop sounds like everyone else’s, you’ve already lost
I see this pattern constantly. A company positions its platform as “AI-powered sales intelligence that identifies your best opportunities.” What they actually deliver is a database with basic scoring — useful, but requiring significant analyst time to extract value.
Sales doesn’t clarify because, if you squint, it could work that way. Customers sign up expecting automation — but get disappointed. Within three to six months, they leave and tell everyone.
These companies rarely break the eight-figure mark. When they do, it’s because the founding team has personally muscled every deal or because customers are trapped in annual contracts, marking calendar days until they can escape.
Positioning that works
The solution is simple. Marketing, sales and product rely on each other the same way your heart, lungs and liver do. In the body, these organs constantly send and receive chemical signals, adjusting and responding to the needs of each other. But I don’t see anything similar happening inside most companies.
I see the opposite. Somewhere between 50 and 100 employees, those signals stop being transmitted or received. It’s not malicious. People get busy and slip into survival mode. Marketing stops listening to product. Product treats sales’ customer feedback as an annoyance to deal with later, if at all. Sales promises whatever it takes to close the deal, leaving product to clean up the mess. The fix has four parts.
Listen and respond
This sounds obvious until you look back and realize it’s been months since:
- Sales and marketing sat in on a product roadmap conversation.
- Product joined a sales call to hear what prospects are actually looking for.
- Sales brought customer delivery issues back to marketing to adjust messaging.
The companies that learn to listen and respond — and treat it as a nonnegotiable part of the culture, done reliably every month or quarter at scale — are the ones that get positioning right in the long term.
Map your positioning to the buyer’s journey
Recognizing bad positioning isn’t enough. You have to replace it with positioning that meets customers in the time and place most likely to trigger a purchase. That’s why mapping your message to the buyer’s journey matters. While everyone frames the journey a little differently, I find Bob Moesta’s definition to be the best for long-term thinking.
It begins with a moment of struggle when the customer realizes their current solution no longer solves the problem. That first thought leads to passive looking, where customers have their radar up but aren’t investing time, money or energy into finding a replacement.
When the solution fails again, they move into active looking, culminating in a deciding phase where they weigh tradeoffs. After they choose, they move into onboarding, where expectations and reality must align or the customer will churn. The final phase is where the customer consistently chooses you over alternatives.
Dig deeper: If it tells the right story, brand fuels demand
Effective positioning meets customers where they are and shows them you understand their pain and can solve it with such clarity that they’d say, “That’s exactly what I’m dealing with.”
The struggling moment gives you the what. The active looking phase shows you the where. The tradeoffs customers weigh reveal how to frame your solution against alternatives. These are all core components of strong positioning.
Offer customers proof, not promises
In a world where people are selling chocolate that claims it will make women instantly attracted to you, people no longer respond to “trust us.” Neither do the three carefully curated case studies on your website. They’re looking for social proof en masse.
Your positioning needs to be backed by substantial, verifiable evidence, such as dozens of case studies or hundreds of user-generated reviews or testimonials. Even customer logos matter because they signal that you’re serving the market at scale, not just a handful of early believers.
As companies shift from early adopters to the mass market, buying psychology changes completely. Early adopters will take a leap of faith — that’s what makes them early adopters. However, mass market customers want a well-worn path that dozens, if not hundreds, of others have walked successfully before them.
Define the positioning floor
There’s a simple internal rule teams can adopt that has an outsized impact: the positioning floor. It’s a commitment to undersell and overdeliver every time by never promising more than a set percentage of what the product can deliver today. That might mean:
- Saving surprise-and-delight features for onboarding.
- Positioning around the minimum time saved.
- Making claims that hold true for 80% of customers in their first 30 days.
The positioning floor protects brand credibility and lets you expand upward as the product evolves. It also forces marketing and product into a constant feedback loop. Any time marketing tiptoes near that edge, product knows where to build next.
Dig deeper: 3 GTM principles to help emerging products gain traction
What disciplined positioning makes possible
Look at how Dropbox positioned itself during its growth phase. It didn’t promise “revolutionary cloud storage that will transform how teams collaborate.” It positioned around “your stuff, anywhere” — a simple, almost boring promise. But it was backed by millions of users who could vouch for exactly that experience. The positioning was so specific and proven that it instantly passed everyone’s scam radar.
That’s the power of positioning built on a solid floor. Dropbox knew what it could deliver to every user, every time. It positioned to that, delivered consistently and let the exceeding expectations turn customers into advocates, then used that advocacy to scale quickly.
The companies that last don’t position for what sells in the demo. They position for what they can reliably deliver at scale. It feels less exciting in the pitch deck. But it builds the one thing that actually compounds over time — trust.
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