Conifer Consulting

More on Successful Positioning

Today we met with one of our clients, a leading software infrastructure player, who we had helped  reposition a key product in 2005. This repositioning was a significant shift because our work recommended moving the focus from a well established albeit entrenched market to a smaller market segment. This strategy would enable them to focus on solving a major customer pain in a clearly superior and differentiated way.

Successfully Implementing Positioning in Organizations

by Reena Kapoor

I've now worked on several strategic positioning projects for clients and have come to the realization that the harder part is not developing strong positioning for companies or their products.  The greater challenge actually lies in implementing it successfully. Don't get me wrong.  Developing strong, distinctive and meaningful positioning is crucial.  And, contrary to popular belief, it actually takes effort and skill to create it.  Sridhar Ramanathan — a dear friend & partner — of Pacifica Group actually wrote a blog entry describing the characteristics of good positioning. He's right on.

But I am sure you've heard the countless stories where a lot of time was spent and a fancy positioning was created only to gather dust.  While positioning can be targeted at any stakeholder, for the purpose of this article, I am going to focus on positioning targeted at customers.  I want to talk about how and what determines that a positioning will be successfully implemented.  Some of it has to do with the development process, some with characteristics of the output and some with your internal company workflows. 

Marketing to Small & Medium Business

by Reena Kapoor

I went to a NorCal-BMA breakfast on March 20th where Drew Meyer (Senior Product Marketing Manager at Network Appliance’s StoreVault division) spoke about selling to SMB – a hot topic among many enterprise companies looking to expand their footprint into this space.  Drew spoke about his experiences in selling to this segment and his findings made a lot of sense.  There was good discussion about this segment (if we can call it that).  I’ve worked now with a couple of clients who sell to SMBs and I want to share some thoughts with you based on this talk and my own experience. Tell me if this resonates.