What are the most important parts of product positioning? How do you get the rest of the company aligned on positioning?

Going to cop out on this one a little bit (all the parts are important!) and just tell you how we did it at HubSpot. There are many ways to slice it but our approach has worked really well for us.

We always start with the change in the world. How people are different today, where they are headed and why. This is a great set up and will quickly give your positioning context and root it in a specific market and audience.

We then talk about how businesses (or whoever your persona is) has to adapt to those changes. This should establish some very serious stakes and not be related to your product at all. Higher level strategy about what the ideal way to approach it is.

From there we talk about how hard it is to do this, the tools you’d need, the strategy you’d need, and anything else that shows it’s very hard.

At that point we’re really well set up to introduce our product and solution.

If I had to pick one thing I love right now, it’d be a single page mock story. A narrative driven doc that walks the read through the above, but through the lens of an actual (made up) person. Those docs are fun to read, communicate all the important bits, and get people excited (which translates to buy-in).

If I had to pick one thing, it is your core value proposition. Everyone should understand what your solution/benefit statement is. We use this format "We help you, so you can..". Secondly, everyone should know what makes your product unique - why are you different/better than your competitors.

Next, you want to make sure that people really know your elevator pitch - this does not have to be the long, detailed pitch but the quick elevator pitch you would want them to use if they were, lets say at a dinner party and their friend asked where they work -- what do you want them to say?

I mentioned this in an earlier questions, but you need to treat messaging like an internal campaign. You have do the work around rolling it out to customers, but you also need to roll this out internally.

• Make sure you bring key stakeholders along the journey - get their feedback in developing it so they are bought in from the start and feel a sense of ownership
• Make sure you have a well-thought out rollout plan - deliver the message in different formats and deliver it over time to ensure it lands
• Make it fun and engaging - swag also helps! We created stickers with our new messaging (but you can do Tshirts, etc)
• Make the information easy to access and available for self-serve

There's very little I can say that someone like April Dunford hasn't said better and I find her approach relevant across b2b (where she developed it) and b2c. The following homework is required, in my experince, to generate a high-value positioning that can drive messaging, brand, and all gtm strategy, planning and execution:

• Hopefully, you've got some customers who really love your product and it's essential to understand what they think is so amazing about it. 
• Understand your true competition - if these customers didn't have you to solve their problem, who would they turn to?
• Perform an objective and very sober comparision between your product and those competitors. What is truly different and unique about your product? Think functionally here. We know how hard this can be and how much pressure there can be on us to exaggerate our differentiation. We must resist - the business needs us to be truth-tellers. 
• Play our role as translators and describe those functional/feature differences in terms of the benefits and value they provide customers. What's the point of our differentiation? What does it enable that nothing else can?
• Identify the segment(s) who will care about unlocking that value.
• Help that segment understand who you are by picking a frame of reference for the category you play in that makes conceptual sense to them. Here, it's really worth just picking up Obviously Awesome for the discussion strategic choices in picking marketing categories. 

In terms of alignment, the number one thing we can do is stop saying things like "product marketing owns positioning". This doesn't help anyone. Instead, make it a team sport. When you can help everyone in the business to be a truth-teller and get everyone sharing the same set of assumptions, you'll be amazed at how much of the usual back and forth between product/sales/marketing goes away. 

Make your key stakeholders accountable to the creation and success of positioning and listen their feedback after you launch. You're most likely going to change positioning frequently and look at each change as an opportunity to build better alignment.

The most important aspects of product positioning are to have a thorough understanding the customer and the competition. Your positioning statement expresses a benefit that solves a pressing customer problem, and needs to be unique – you are making a claim no other competitor is making.

The most effective way to get the rest of the company aligned behind your positioning is to involve as many stakeholders as possible through the process. Start by creating a team of four to six key stakeholders who are tasked with creating new positioning.

As team members brainstorm positioning options, they share their ideas with other stakeholders who need to buy into the final result. Once the team is confident that its work is supported throughout the company, get management approval to insure management team members use the proposed positioning.