---

name: competitive-positioning
description: "Develop positioning that changes the buyer's economics — not a feature list that's indistinguishable from every competitor's one-pager."

/competitive-positioning

Feature-benefit messaging is indistinguishable from competitors because most PMMs start with the product and work backward to the buyer. The buyer doesn't start with your product. They start with a problem they're currently solving with something else — and they're tolerating it because switching feels hard. This skill forces you to map the buyer's actual world before you write a single positioning line, then builds the case for why the status quo is the real competitor.

Target Buyer Profile — specific, not a persona template:

• Job title and actual decision-making role (economic buyer, technical buyer, champion — pick one for this positioning exercise)
• Their current toolchain for the problem you solve — name the actual products
• How they measure success in their job. Not "drive revenue" — "hit quota without hiring more SDRs"
• The one thing about their current workflow that they complain about in Slack but tolerate anyway
• What a failure looks like for them personally — the scenario they're trying to avoid

The Status Quo — how do they currently solve this problem:

• Walk through their current workflow step by step. Where is the friction?
• What does it cost them — in time, money, errors, headcount?
• What have they tried that didn't work?
• What does "good enough" look like to them? (This is the real threshold you need to clear — not perfection)
• Why haven't they switched to something better yet? Name the real blockers — switching cost, political inertia, procurement friction.

Unmet Needs and Incorrect Assumptions — 3-4:

• What does the buyer currently believe about this problem that is subtly wrong?
• What do they think they want vs what actually solves it?
• What are they not measuring that they should be?
• What assumption are competitors making about buyer behavior that your product disproves?

Positioning Against the Status Quo

Complete this with specific language, not placeholders:

"For [specific buyer] who [current painful workflow], [product name] is the [category] that [specific outcome they care about] — unlike [the status quo approach], which [specific thing that sucks about it], because [the capability that makes the difference]."

This is the positioning statement. Every other message is derived from it.

Proof Points — the evidence that makes the claim credible:

• 2-3 customer stories that show the before/after economics (quantified)
• A technical or product differentiator that competitors cannot claim in 12 months
• A benchmark, certification, or third-party validation that removes risk from the buying decision
• The objection this positioning will face ("but can't we just use X?") — and the answer

Sales Enablement Translation

• The 60-second version of this positioning for a cold call
• The discovery question that reveals whether the buyer has this problem
• The handle for the most common objection

Rules

1. Positioning against "the status quo" is almost always more powerful than positioning against competitors. Start there.
2. The positioning statement must be falsifiable — if everything you're claiming is true of your top competitor, rewrite it.
3. Proof points must be quantified. "Customers save time" is not a proof point.
4. One positioning statement per buyer type. Different buyers, different statements.
5. If the sales team wouldn't use this language in a real conversation, it's not real positioning.

The output of this skill is a positioning brief — one statement, three proof points, and the discovery question that confirms the buyer has the problem. Sales can run with it the same day.