Market Selection and Positioning

As part of your Go-to-Market Strategy, Stage One produces a set of concise plans that become guides for launching and building your business.

Corporate Mission and Positioning

This is a succinct statement of corporate mission that includes technology, markets and basic value propositions for customers. Your mission serves as a guiding light and sanity check for all market selection, prospect profiling and positioning claims. After crafting your mission statement, it is also important to develop a corporate positioning platform similar to the product platform described below.

Market Segmentation and Selection

Before beginning any marketing and sales efforts, you must know what groups will be most receptive to your product. A Stage One market segmentation and selection report is a three- to six-page document that summarizes the basic value propositions you offer various market segments, as well as associated opportunities and risks.

If you have a business product, Stage One may segment the market by industry, company size and/or geographic distribution. Sometimes, it is also valuable to determine how the structure of a prospects' IT function—centralized, divisional, geographical or otherwise—affects how they consume your product. Such an effort often includes looking at enterprise software and information usage patterns by corporate function, role or title.

If you have a consumer product, we may segment the general population by income, age, sex, occupation, education, race, household structure, region or other demographic variables. If possible, it may also be valuable to examine consumers’ activities, interests, lifestyles and other usage patterns.

Product Positioning Platform

A Stage One positioning platform is a one- to two-page document that focuses on a specific product or service and clarifies:

  • The technology and market forces that drive the market
  • The business value propositions you offer customer
  • The audiences that find your product compelling and why
  • Key features of your product or service
  • Unique differentiators that you can use to your advantage

The pearls of wisdom contained in a product’s positioning platform should be available at all times to team members creating materials, presentations, lead generation programs and other marketing vehicles. For that reason, the positioning platform is a living document that should be tuned on an ongoing basis with new information you have learned from customers, analysts, journal articles, competitors and intuition. Depending on your product, it may be necessary to create positioning platforms for each of the target markets you select.

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