When sales are slowing, tighten your positioning

Budgets across the country are being slashed in response to the macroeconomic pressures facing the nation’s businesses and consumers. The responses are often tactical, casting the sales and marketing net ever wider in search of a paying customer.

However, this is a strategic problem, not a tactical one, because of the most important aspect of the situation - your customers have changed.

The deteriorating economic climate is not evenly distributed. It has very different impacts on sectors of the population, ranging from ‘severe’ to ‘not at all’. For every business that means segments are on the move, changing in shape, size, and opportunity. New purchase drivers are emerging, customers are switching tack, trading up and down, and some are becoming open to new solutions entirely, making ‘sharper’ rather than ‘broader’ a more effective response.

It’s an intriguing time for those looking to grow market share. Whether you sell software, holidays, cars, or home loans, the economic context is reshaping the customer landscape and, therefore, the relative strength or weakness of your position in that marketplace.

Reassess your market positioning

Your positioning (not to be confused with longer-term things like brand vision, purpose, identity or tagline, etc.) is about making sales today. It is the answer to the central question for a connected and effective sales and marketing strategy:

What makes our product/service a better choice than the alternatives for our best-fit customers?

The answer gives you a clear and compelling platform to find and win that customer.

Here is a B2B company landing its positioning well:

 Kurtosys. A cloud-based financial data platform based in the UK.

Positioning: Pain-free Investment data and insight delivery.

Benefit led sales and marketing

With the platform “Pain-free,” the team offers a compelling benefit to answer their segment’s pain point. It’s clear and links the sales and marketing narrative together. Of course they have a long list of other features, but they have focused on the one their customers care about most.

Here is B2C example.

Elizabeth Street - A retail and entertainment precinct in Belgravia, owned and recently renovated by The Grosvenor Estate in UK.

Positioning – The prettiest street in London.

The prettiest and most instagramable street in London

Driving footfall in a city groaning with must-see destinations is hard. TGE has built their positioning for Elizabeth Street around a differentiating feature—flowers. They have lined up the retailers and other stakeholders in the precinct to participate in the positioning. Dubbing it ‘the prettiest street in London’ makes it a must-have picture for Instagram-obsessed travellers. Doesn’t it make you want to go and visit this spot when you are next there… and you have probably never even heard of it before?

Flower power

So now it’s your turn

Take a moment to answer the positioning question for your product, platform or service.

Was it easy? Is your answer sharply focused on and relevant to the segment? Hopefully, it wasn’t a spray-and-pray laundry list of parity offerings in the hope something sticks.

Now, try it again, factoring in the economic climate and shifting customer segments.

1)     What is the differentiated benefit of your offering?

2)     Which customer segments will value that more in the current market environment?

3)     What alternative choices could those customers make?

What changes? In a world where customers are more considered and careful about spending, the strength and clarity of that argument are more important than ever.

Your positioning isn’t fixed, you can change it

It is a common mistake to think a position can’t or shouldn’t change. Your 10-year vision might be locked in, but your argument as to why a customer should choose your product today over and above their other options absolutely can.

It's not a task of rethinking the whole brand or admitting to the CEO you made a mistake a year ago when you commissioned an ad campaign. The world has changed, and being prepared to acknowledge that and move with the times is what leadership should be. So work out what you think the argument should be and put it in front of some customers - let your sales team try it out with a new script, or test some different messaging in the marketing.

The bottom line is that if your narrative is stalling, sharpen it; if it is helping you grow market share, stick with it.

My third example today is of a business division that adjusted its positioning to respond to a changing marketplace.

 I worked with Marks & Spencer in London in the early 2000s. At the time, the womenswear division was struggling. The market was down, and M&S was down even more.

 The more premium brands were seen as more fashionable and selling a broader product mix at higher prices, while the cheaper brands offered similar products at lower prices. M&S was stranded in the middle, and so footfall and sales in that department were hard to find.

We needed to attract customers who would pay a little more back into the stores.

A new positioning strategy that reframed our products put us back in the game.

The team chose their primary segment and then found a new way to win with them. They bravely switched away from trying to appeal to those higher-value customers by offering them higher-end products. Instead, we leveraged our core strength ‘a perception of quality’, and reframed the lower end products as part of what makes a great outfit. M&S provides high-quality staple clothes (white shirts, black skirts, etc.) that every woman needs in her wardrobe to pair with other items to create her outfits. It was essentially a value strategy framed as a quality one.

The range's positioning became ‘The Perfect’.

We ran super stylish women’s wear ads for ‘The perfect white shirt’, ‘The perfect black pants’, etc. There was always a supporting proof point about what made the particular product special and so worth the premium.

‘The Perfect’ positioning was elegant and met the segment’s needs. Women felt that they were blending quality and fashionable items to create their outfits - a smart way to spend your clothing budget when times were tighter. This platform drew our intended segment of customers into the stores, and sales grew.

Summing up

It is the customer who will determine your business performance during an economic downturn.

The foundation of that success is built on a tight positioning: ‘What makes our product/service a better choice than the alternatives for our best-fit customers?’.

When sales are stalling because customers are asking more questions and choosing alternative pathways, then this is the right time to think of a better argument.

And if you need some support unpacking that call me. I’ll help you.