Pick a high stakes industry change for your positioning story

Business benefits

Convince your audience to act now by positioning your product as the solution to an industry change that puts them at risk.

Create a spreadsheet to track potential high stakes changes for your positioning strategy. Include the columns Change, Stakes, Real, Relevant, and Risky.

Gather existing customer research or conduct customer interviews to gain insights on industry changes and their impact. Track questions and answers in a customer interview spreadsheet.

Ask questions such as:

  • How did you solve the problem before our solution?
  • How is your life or industry different than it was 3 years ago? What has changed?
  • What were you struggling with before buying [product]?
  • What changed in your industry that made it imperative to do something NOW?
  • What is the ONE thing you no longer have to do or use that was once painful, inefficient, or eroding results? (Get the actual cause, not the result)
  • What is the ONE most compelling benefit you received from [product]?
  • How would you describe your world/work after using [product]?
  • What element of the solution is the MOST important or impactful to you?
  • What are the top 5 elements of the solution you value most? Specific things.
  • If you were going to provide a referral to a friend or colleague, how would you describe the change you experienced once adopting [product]?
  • How would you get a colleague to consider the solution?
  • What concrete results have you achieved?

Answer How were things different?, What were people struggling with?, and How has the industry changed? Put changes you identify in the Change column.

Use your industry knowledge, do industry research, and mine customer research to answer these questions.

Look within your industry for news stories, reports, and expert analyses to identify shifts of mindsets, culture, best practices, market conditions, or world conditions. Add these to the Change column.

Review your customer and industry research to look for commonalities and themes in the answers that may identify additional changes to add to the Change column.

For each change in the Change column, add the anticipated fallout of that change to the Stakes column.

Consider what happens when the change occurs. What happens to the winners? What happens to the losers?

For each change in the Change column, answer Yes or No in the Real, Relevant, and Risky columns.

Pick the change that has the highest stakes and is the most real, relevant, and risky.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T10:09:04Z