Positioning and the Power of Words

I'm continually interested in the means by which words are used within various startup situations. It's often called "positioning" or "managing perception" and at times, it seems to veer on the side of a pure lie. The art of using words to your advantage is a powerful force in business circles and can spin out of control quickly.

Going on since the beginning, when the serpent deceived Eve by twisting God's words, this type of subtelty is de rigueur in business. There are several methods to this, most of which revolves around leaving out crucial facts, or modifying phrasing such that some specific emphasis is avoided or left out entirely.

This phenomenon is most interesting in startups, particularly those that sell to larger businesses. Since such an enterprise requires credibility to make a purchase, even purchases less than some perceived risk amount, business viability and stability are critical components in those decisions. And having been on the other side of that decision process, I know those factors differentiate between who makes the list for the next meeting and who doesn't.

So how do you establish credibility in this situation? Here is where we see this subtlety emerge - initially beginning as harmless positioning and eventually leading to massive hyperbole and cringing engineers who sit in sales meetings thinking, "please, please don't let anyone ask about what he just said!". Or you fight and scrape to establish small user groups with the folks that will let you... it's a tough road. When your sales decision process has to go through an IT department, face it - you're looking at a long sales cycle - as a startup relying heavily on cash flow, that's daggers.

But I think there's way more to it than that. It has a lot to do with your identity, market product/market fit, and your ability to recognize and remove objections during the process. There's a significant difference between hyperbole and recognizing and removing objections. This difference is founded in the most pure logic - the ability to create a series of facts and arguments that alleviate fears and position you around them. In the startup environment, having this talent (I call it a talent) is critical. Ideally, you want to take the shortest path to a definitive "NO". It's often been said that "Getting to YES!" is most important, but as a startup, "Getting to NO" as fast as possible is equally as important. Asking the questions that draw out the NO early and fast and working through the objections that force your prospect to say NO minimize your time outlay and give you more opportunities to land prospects and customers that are more likely to buy.

This mentality allows you to identify the objections you just can't win on - if your prospect is looking for an established base of 10MM users and $10MM revenues, well, that ain't you - walk away and find someone who is looking for you. Don't tell any stories to stretch out there. If they're looking for whiz-bang feature #1047, and you don't have it, don't lie about it. Position it in the future if it is in your future, but don't say you have it just to get to the next step. It all ends up bad going down that road.

I'll discuss identity and how that aligns with product/market fit in another post, "Be You."