Congratulations. You’ve climbed this far, up 6 steps of the 15-step B2B marketing process. You’ve reached seventh heaven, you’re nearly half way there.

The seventh step is positioning. This revolves around how you position your company, products and services to your chosen segment or segments. This positioning is verbal, requiring the careful crafting of the right message to resonate most strongly with your prospects, strong enough to cause them to take action.

There are probably a bunch of messages you want to cram into your positioning, and it’s sometimes really hard to discount any of them. It’s natural to want to cover all the bases.

It’s not about you, however. It’s about your prospect audience, and how they view what you say. You have to put yourself in their shoes and figure out what is most important to them. A useful structure to follow is this:

[Your product or service] helps companies solve the challenge of [whatever business challenge you’re helping them fix] by [how your solution does it], which, unlike other solutions, delivers [whatever key benefits your product or service delivers] because it [say why the prospect should see your product or service as different].

The great thing about a positioning statement is that you get to de-position the competition as well, thereby promoting the fact that you can uniquely help your prospect solve their problem or capitalise on their opportunity.

When you have to come up with a short, pithy tagline to go alongside your company, product or service then you have to extend this approach and distil your positioning into only one message of a few words. In the beginning of a relationship, companies will only remember the scantest detail on what you do, so they might as well remember the most important thing, the think that will make a difference, right?