Positioning for security and resilience companies
Security, risk, and resilience buyers are professionally skeptical and shop in a crowded field. Positioning is what makes them able to describe you accurately to someone else. Most startup positioning fails that test.
What is positioning for a security or resilience company?
Positioning is the decision about which buyer you are for, what you are the obvious choice for, and what alternative you are compared against. In security it is constrained by verifiability: any claim that cannot survive a technical evaluation is just copy.
Positioning is the decision about which buyer you are for, what you are the obvious choice for, and which alternative you are being compared against. In security it carries an extra constraint: any claim that cannot survive a technical evaluation is just copy.
What makes security positioning different?
The evaluation includes people expert in finding risk.
That changes what positioning can be. It has to be specific enough to be tested and true enough to survive the test. Aspirational positioning gets found out in a proof of concept, and the cost lands on the deal itself.
What is the decision made from?
4 inputs, tested against real customers rather than settled in a leadership workshop.
- The buyer. Which person or group has the budget and the urgency.
- The alternative. What they would otherwise pick, including doing nothing.
- The proof. What you can actually demonstrate today.
- The language. Words your best customers already use, taken verbatim from calls.
How do you know it is working?
Customers describe you the way you describe yourself, without prompting.
The other tell is internal: sellers stop improvising the opening. If 4 people give 4 versions of who you are for, the decision has not been made yet.
How long does it take?
4 to 8 weeks for a company with customers to interview.
Supporting reading
- Naming a category that doesn't exist yet.Positioning · 6 min
- One global message no longer survives the AI market.Positioning · 6 min
- The government read Anthropic's positioning and believed it.Positioning · 5 min
- Danger positioning is a loan with high interest.Positioning · 5 min
- Hugging Face got breached and wrote the language everyone else is using.Positioning · 5 min
What people ask
How long does positioning work take?
Four to eight weeks for a company with customers to interview. The interviews are the constraint.
Who should own positioning in a startup?
The founder or CEO decides it; marketing articulates and defends it. Positioning delegated entirely to marketing tends not to survive the first sales objection.
Do we need a new category to stand out?
Usually not. Most companies win by being unmistakably specific inside an existing category the buyer already funds.
How do we position for both practitioners and the board?
One problem statement, expressed in two registers, with the same underlying claim. Different messages for each audience is how companies end up sounding like two companies. More in one message, fragmenting market.