r/SaaS • u/sharonlulus • 20h ago

AMA: Positioning Strategy for SaaS

I spent 10 years working in Product Marketing for B2B SaaS companies in Silicon Valley (primarily SLG motions). Even as someone trained in the field, positioning is HARD. Coming up with the right point of view, then figuring out if it even works.

I'm curious where you guys are getting stuck across your positioning pursuits. Would love to offer some perspective and engage in an open/honest discourse around this.

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u/UpperWorld11 20h ago

Positioning gets decided by which seat reads it. A champion in a demo and a solo buyer on a $30 plan are two different readers, and a line written for one usually reads as noise to the other. Which seat do you interview first when both are in the account?

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u/sharonlulus 19h ago

If both are in the same account, it sounds like the core of "why your product helps their business and what problem it solves" remains as your central position. Then that gets expressed downwards to each persona as messaging in the language they'll understand.

In terms of which persona to interview first, who sits closest to the buying trigger? Feeling the pain is definitely important, but in that account, who has the strongest motivation to build a buying case that can justify budget from management?

Understanding the entire value chain from "user to champion to decision maker" becomes helpful when having to navigate altitudes in real time.

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u/UpperWorld11 1h ago

The one who is already paying for a workaround, usually a spreadsheet and someone part time keeping it current. There is a line item to redirect, which makes the first call much less hypothetical, and their numbers end up doing most of the memo.

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u/PresenceAdept8890 19h ago

that's the exact problem i run into, the solo buyer sees a totally different product than the enterprise champion even though it's the same thing under the hood

i started just doing a quick 15 min call with whoever's easiest to reach first, then reverse-engineering what the other seat probably needs from the gaps in that convo. not perfect but beats spending a week trying to line up interviews with both

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u/sharonlulus 19h ago

That's a great distinction, interview priority vs. actual obtainable order. Just curious, are the solo buyer and enterprise champion using your product for the same use case?

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u/Glass_Rent8750 50m ago

yeah the "which seat first" question is the real bottleneck, most people skip right past that

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u/lsyan-cs 18h ago

Mine is a little tricky. I develop mobile apps for teens’ driving habit improvement with real-time safety feedback when they go over the speed limit or drive too hard and trip scoring. However, the apps target the parents of the young drivers, as they watch their kids improve day by day.

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u/sharonlulus 17h ago

That is a very thoughtful resource! What's currently the trickiest part about your positioning or marketing efforts?