SaaS Positioning: The Ultimate Guide
Blogs, newsletters, podcasts, and social media are awash with people making big promises about hacks and tricks to get your software in front of more people and 10x your leads.
But the key to good SaaS marketing isn’t hacks and tricks, it’s getting the basics right.
And one of the most important of these is also one of the most commonly overlooked — positioning.
A lot of marketers and startups skip this process altogether, or treat it more like a formality than something they actually believe will make the difference.
Which is great news for anyone who takes their positioning seriously.
This guide will get you started on defining, refining, and improving your positioning, including ways to review your existing marketing.
Let’s fucking go!
What is positioning?
There are plenty of boring, wordy definitions of positioning out there already. But I’m not writing a textbook, so here’s my simple definition framed for SaaS:
Positioning is the art of talking about your software in a way that makes your ideal customers sign up and subscribe.
Like most marketing, it’s all about communication. Positioning is the high-level framing of your message, which then trickles down into all other areas of your sales and marketing.
It’s the answer to the question “why should I buy that?”
For example, Slack's positioning can be summed up into something like this:
“Slack is the messaging app for teams that replaces email by organising conversations into searchable, topic-based channels.”
(Anyone who’s ever used Slack in a corporate setting knows this is bullshit, and it just becomes another thing to check on top of email, but this is how they position themselves)
The point is that your messaging should communicate clearly why someone should buy from you rather than a competitor.
Why is positioning so important for SaaS?
Positioning might just seem like another bit of marketing bullshit (and there’s enough of that), but it’s actually far more important than most people realise.
The key is in that last sentence from the last section about buying from you instead of your competitors.
SaaS is insanely competitive. There are tens of thousands of SaaS options, and on average companies only use 112. I’m not a statistician, but I’ve crunched the numbers and concluded that this means it’s really fucking hard to stand out.
And standing out starts with your positioning.
Once you’ve nailed your positioning, it will inform your messaging, tone of voice, style, content, copy, and everything in between.
It’ll impact the communication your sales folk have with prospects, and it’ll factor into conversations with potential investors.
If it’s done well, it can be your silver bullet. But if it’s done badly, it’ll make your life so much harder.
Speaking of which…
The problem with the ‘positioning statement’
The biggest mistake people make when defining their positioning is seeing it as something they should do, rather than something they need to do right.
In most cases, it’s boiled down to writing a positioning statement, like the one below, kindly and unknowingly provided by Zendesk:
Companies will book a meeting, then for two hours discuss how everyone collectively wants to fill in each gap in this template. Then by the end of two hours they have something everyone is happy with, and never look at again.
That’s because positioning isn’t about how people inside the company see the software. It’s about how your customers see it.
It doesn’t matter what Matt from accounts thinks. He has his own biases based mostly on the existing messaging.
Another problem is that a positioning statement like this is fucking horrible to read. Let me fill this in for Slack:
For teams drowning in chaotic email threads that need a faster, more organised way to communicate, Slack is a team messaging platform that replaces email by organising conversations into searchable, topic-based channels. Unlike email or generic chat apps, our product keeps work streamlined, reduces noise, and integrates with the tools teams already use.
Do you feel inspired to use Slack? Or did you get bored half way through and skip to this sentence?
That’s because trying to force your positioning into a tidy paragraph just makes it feel formulaic and stunted. It also reads like ChatGPT just vomited it out.
Your positioning needs to be customer-driven, focused on solving their problems and building belief in your software.
It doesn’t matter how it’s written or presented, it only matters whether or not it does its job.
How to define, refine, and improve your SaaS positioning
Target market
The first part of defining your positioning is by having a clear idea in your head of what your target market or Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) looks like. This should be as specific as possible, especially if you’re a new or relatively new company.
Here are some things to consider when putting together your ICP, split into a couple categories:
Who they are:
Industry
Sub-niche
Company size
Location
How they operate:
Existing tech stack
Buying process
Where people tend to struggle with this is that nagging voice in the back of your head asking “Aren’t we isolating ourselves from a large part of the market?”. And it’s a fair question. But the problem with trying to appeal to everyone is that you end up appealing to no-one.
By being more specific with your targeting, you can address more specific pain points, which is the key to standing out.
You can always go broader later on, but you won’t get that chance if you start too broad.
Voice of Customer (VoC) research
Remember when I said this process should be customer-focused, well this is where you actually listen to your customers.
The aim here is to clearly understand the problems your customers are facing and how you solve them. These are the ‘pain points’ that will feed directly into defining your positioning.
The best way to conduct VoC research is to get customers on calls to essentially interview them about their experience with your software. This allows you to ask follow-up questions, get clarification, and consider tone of voice, body language, etc.
But this is also a big process. It’s not always easy to get customers onto a call like this, and even when you do it takes a lot of time to organise, prepare, record the interviews, analyse them, etc.
If you don’t have the time for this, there are some pretty solid alternatives:
Review mining: Sites like G2, Capterra, and TrustPilot are great for this
Testimonials: Gathering testimonials is great for social proof AND for collecting VoC data
Case studies: If you’ve already talked to customers for case studies, you’ll likely have plenty of valuable data
Surveys, questionnaires, and sales calls: Basically, any time you talk to customers or ask them questions, they’ve probably dropped some gems
It doesn’t necessarily matter where you find this information, the important thing is to look at it impartially, pulling out as much useful information as you can.
Note: If you’re just starting out and don’t have any existing customers, you should instead research the customers of your closest competitors
The Positioning Belief Triangle
The problem with most resources on positioning is that they don’t really offer a method for evaluating how good your existing positioning actually is.
This is where the Positioning Belief Triangle (PBT) makes your life much easier.
The PBT is a way to look at your positioning that tells you how effective it is likely to be, based on what you make your audience believe.
This doesn’t just help you evaluate existing positioning, though. It also gives you a process of defining your new messaging.
You just tweak the angle a bit to turn them into questions…
What problem do your customers have that’s worth solving?
How do you solve that problem?
Why is your solution better than the alternatives?
Your job in defining your positioning is answering these questions. Not by discussing this internally, but by using the insights you’ve gathered from your customers.
Go through that data, pull out everything that could answer those questions, look for trends, etc. If you’re lucky, it’ll become apparent pretty quickly.
And what happens a lot is that you realise your customers don’t see you the same way you see yourself. They might talk about you in different terms, highlight surprising benefits and features, or even see you as the solution to a problem you never thought of.
Your job is to take all that in, and position yourselves accordingly.
Review and iterate
Like most things in marketing, positioning isn’t a one-and-done process. The more you grow, and the more customers you have, the more data you’ll have to help you refine your process.
Every year (or every six months if you’re a newer SaaS), run through this process again. It’ll get quicker every time, but the focus is on identifying where your positioning doesn't quite match how your customers are talking about you.
Happy positioning!
What to do next
Need help defining, refining, and improving your positioning? Book a discovery chat with me to discuss how I can help.
For more SaaS marketing and growth insights, check out the SaaSy as Fuck Podcast
Wanna message me to tell me I’m an idiot and you don’t agree with this blog? Send me a message on LinkedIn!
