The Positioning Sprint
One core positioning statement the company owns, and the audience variations to carry it.
Positioning & Go-to-Market
What are you really selling?
Your team has forty five versions of the answer and none of them is the one. Everyone is improvising. This is the engagement that ends that.
Sound familiar?
A company that cannot say what it does cannot be sold by anyone but its founder.
Two people from the same company describe it two different ways in the same week. A new hire takes four months to sound credible. Every deal moves at the speed of whoever is most senior in the room, because nobody else can carry the story.
This is not a design problem and a new deck will not fix it. Nobody hires an outside voice because their product is weak. They hire one because they have stopped being able to hear their own story.
The engagement
Two shapes, depending on how far you need it to travel.
The Go-to-Market Pack
Everything in the sprint, plus the route to market: who to sell to, and how to open the conversation.
Included
Sprint
GTM Pack
Core positioning statement
✓
✓
One line overview & 30 second version
✓
✓
Audience variations
✓
✓
Written record of the decisions
✓
✓
Target & partner filter
–
✓
Channel plan
–
✓
First contact language
–
✓
Website messaging, page by page
–
✓
Neither of these is a deck. If you need one afterwards, that gets quoted separately.
The evidence
Before and after, in words.
No slides. No design. Just the sentence a company was using, and the sentence it uses now.
Omegro. Enterprise asset management holding company, heading into acquisition conversations. Named, not anonymised: the permission already exists and this pair is already live on the case study below.
Before
"We back great people and help good businesses grow across our portfolio."
After
The home for enterprise asset management leaders, and the operating system behind them.
That is the deliverable. Everything else is downstream of it.
In their words
The result clients talk about.
"Not a pretty deck, but strategic messaging built to resonate in high stakes deals."
How it works
Ninety minutes, then the writing.
Bring whatever you already have: transcripts, old decks, the twenty versions of the pitch. Most of the answer is already in it, just not in one place.
01
Ninety minutes
Clarity Session
Pre-work sent ahead so nobody arrives cold. You talk raw, we listen for the sentence underneath.
02
Live, not circulated
Decide in the room
The positioning gets locked as it lands. Not reopened by email next month.
03
The pack
Write it down
The statement, the hierarchy, the audience variations, written, not verbal.
04
Pressure tested
Three rounds
Being wrong in a specific way beats being vaguely right, so we sharpen it three times.
The Go-to-Market Pack starts differently: a discovery session first, since the route to market is a bigger conversation than one sentence.
Questions, answered
Positioning sprint questions, answered.
What is a positioning sprint?
Two weeks, starting with a ninety minute session, ending with one sentence your company owns and the messaging hierarchy underneath it. Written, not verbal.
What is the difference between positioning and messaging?
Positioning is the decision about what you are and who you are for. Messaging is how you say it, to each audience, in each situation. You cannot do the second one properly until the first one is settled, which is why most messaging projects fail.
What do I actually receive?
A document. Core positioning statement, one line overview, thirty second version, and the variations by audience. In the go-to-market tier you also get the target filter, the channel plan, the first contact language and the website messaging page by page.
How long does it take?
Two weeks from commencement for the sprint. Commencement means the invoice is settled and the session is in the calendar, not the day you approve the proposal. The Go-to-Market Pack is scoped after a discovery session, so the timeline depends on how far the work has to travel.
How much does it cost?
The Positioning Sprint is priced on scope, agreed before we start, not billed by the hour. The Go-to-Market Pack is quoted after a discovery session, once we know how far the message needs to travel. Ask on the call and you will have a number before you hang up.
Do I need a new deck or a new website afterwards?
Often, and that gets quoted separately. Do not buy either until the message is settled, because you will pay to build it twice.
What if my team already has messaging?
Most do. The problem is usually that there are fifteen versions of it and no agreement on which one is right. That is a faster engagement than starting from nothing.
Who needs to be in the session?
Whoever can make the decision. If the person who has to approve the sentence is not in the room, you will run this twice.