Positioning mechanics

BeginnerDuration ~25 min video + 45 min canvas workTools One page — doc or paper

The big idea: buyers decide what you’re worth by what they compare you against — and positioning is how you choose that comparison set on purpose.

The analogy

Take one car platform and build it twice. Same chassis, same engine family, largely the same parts underneath. Put a mainstream badge on one and park it in a mall showroom next to the budget sedans, and buyers expect to pay one price. Put the luxury badge on its twin and park it in the glass flagship showroom across town, and buyers happily pay nearly double — and nobody feels cheated. Toyota has been doing exactly this with Lexus for decades.

What changed? Not the metal. The badge and the showroom changed what buyers compared it against, and the comparison set decided what a fair price looks like. Nobody cross-shops a Lexus against a Vios.

WPH is the same car with a choice of badges. Call it “a Webflow agency” and it sits in the mall showroom, compared against every shop on a directory, where $50k reads as expensive. Position it as something else — deliberately — and the comparison set changes, and so does the price that feels fair. This lesson is the machine for making that choice properly, from April Dunford, who has run it more times than anyone.

Watch

Segment: 22:32–35:54 — The five-component method + the Help Scout worked examplewatch full video

Watch for: Watch how she refuses to start with 'why does everybody love our stuff' — she calls it a terrible way to begin, because it only produces opinions. Everything anchors to competitive alternatives first. Then watch how the Help Scout example turns a 'terrible market' — a million customer-service tools, one gorilla incumbent — into a winnable one by changing who the comparison is against.

Segment: 5:00–15:00 — Why 40–60% of B2B purchases end in no decisionwatch full video

Watch for: The toilet story is the buyer's-eye view of every WPH deal: an overwhelmed non-expert facing a wall of options they can't tell apart, slowly concluding that keeping the old thing is safer than choosing wrong. Catch her point that no-decision buyers rarely think the status quo is better — they just can't confidently choose.

How it works

First, the honest starting point. WPH’s positioning exists — on paper. Enterprise Webflow delivery, SE Asia presence, automotive depth, the 15-minute WebOps SLA, the “Automotive Digital Infrastructure” category thesis. But positioning lives in markdown, not in market: as late as April this year, the company’s own LinkedIn tagline still read “Your Remote Webflow Whitelabel Agency.” A buyer researching WPH today meets the old badge, not the written one. Fixing that starts with running Dunford’s machine properly.

Her definition is compact: positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. It has five components, and the order is the method. Get the order wrong and you get a brainstorm. Get it right and each answer generates the next.

Component one: competitive alternatives. Most teams hear “competition” and list lookalikes. Dunford’s question is harsher: what would the customer do if you didn’t exist? For WPH the honest answer isn’t other Webflow shops. It’s the current site limping along under the incumbent setup, the global agency retainer they already resent paying, “our dev team can handle it,” the cheap local shop — and only then, other agencies. And the biggest alternative of all is doing nothing. Dunford’s data says somewhere between 40 and 60% of B2B purchase processes end in no decision — not because buyers concluded the old thing was better, but because they couldn’t confidently make sense of their options, so waiting felt safer than choosing wrong. That’s the real enemy of a $50k proposal. Not a rival bid. The CFO-safe option of doing nothing.

Component two: unique attributes — what have we got that those alternatives don’t? Notice the order doing its job. Against other Webflow shops, WPH’s attributes look thin. Against the real list, they sharpen: an on-the-ground SE Asia presence the global agencies bill from half a world away, an automotive pattern library the in-house team would need years to build, a 15-minute SLA no cheap shop can staff. Attributes can belong to the company, not just the product — process, service model, proximity all count.

Component three: value. Walk each attribute through Dunford’s translation: so what, for the customer? The 15-minute SLA is not the value. “Your campaign page is never the bottleneck on launch day” is. Do this for every attribute and they cluster into two or three themes — provably things the alternatives can’t do, which is exactly what the “why do clients love us” brainstorm can never give you.

Component four: best-fit customers — who cares a lot? Anyone with a website could buy WPH, but value isn’t evenly craved. Her Help Scout example: every business has customer service, but only the companies who treat service as a growth driver care deeply. WPH’s version: enterprise automotive brands in PH and SEA, where the website is live retail infrastructure, launch calendars are unforgiving, and regional teams are burned by slow global-agency turnaround. That’s why the ~80-account beachhead exists.

Component five, and only now: the market category. This is the badge and the showroom — the context you place the product in so the value is obvious. People start here; Dunford calls that backwards, because without the first four components you can’t judge whether a category is any good. “Webflow agency” parks WPH in the mall showroom. “Automotive Digital Infrastructure Partner” moves it to the flagship across town, where the comparison set becomes the global retainer and the cost of infrastructure failing — and $50k reads as prudent. Same company, same attributes. The category changed what “better” and “fair price” mean.

One last move closes the loop: positioning isn’t done until it becomes a story the buyer can retell. Your champion has to justify the choice to their CEO in a room you’re not in. Weak positioning leaves them saying “they seemed good.” Strong positioning hands them “here’s how this market shakes out, here’s what matters for a company like ours, and here’s why this one.” Give them that story, or lose to no decision.

The pattern

You’re priced against your comparison set, so choose the set. Run the five in order: real alternatives → what only you have against them → so what, for the buyer → who cares most → the category that makes it all obvious. The category is the badge and the showroom. It silently sets what “better” and “a fair price” mean.

The receipts (evidence, if you want it)

• No decision: Dunford puts losses to “no decision” at ~40% of deals in the Lenny interview, and cites data at 40–60% of B2B purchase processes in the PMM keynote (PRACTITIONER, citing industry buying studies). Her framing: “we lost to the spreadsheet, we lost to pen and paper, we lost to interns.” Buyers choose the status quo because they can’t confidently choose, not because they think it’s better.
• The five-component method and the Help Scout worked example: April Dunford, Obviously Awesome (PRACTITIONER — positioning consultant, 200+ engagements).
• WPH’s positioning gap (INTERNAL audit): as of April 2026 the LinkedIn tagline read “Your Remote Webflow Whitelabel Agency,” and 42 of 80 audited posts contradicted the current positioning story.

Your one move

Write one sentence, filling every bracket with something real: “For [best-fit customer], WPH is the [category] that [value], unlike [real alternative].” Best-fit comes from the 80 accounts. The real alternative is the status quo or the global agency retainer — not another Webflow shop. Done means: the sentence exists and no bracket is a placeholder.

The needle: positioning decides which conversations you get invited into, and at what expected price. Get the comparison set right and the same two conversations are worth five times more.

Want to go further?

Expand the sentence into the full positioning canvas — one page, five numbered blocks, in Dunford’s order: competitive alternatives (with one line each on why they feel safe to the buyer), unique attributes that survive “the alternatives genuinely can’t claim this,” value translated through “so what?” into 2–3 themes, best-fit characteristics (launch cadence, regional structure, agency pain, ownership group — characteristics, not just names), and the category claim with the comparison set each candidate puts WPH into. Timebox it to 45 minutes. Where you’re unsure, write your best guess and mark it — Dunford calls the early version a positioning thesis, and a marked guess is testable where a blank isn’t. This canvas feeds the Level 1 capstone.

Terms introduced

Terms introduced in this lesson

• Competitive alternatives
• Value proposition
• Category

Each term links to the glossary, where it is defined by the way you just used it.

Check

Check yourself

1. A WPH strategy session opens with the team brainstorming "why do clients love us?" on a whiteboard. What's wrong with starting there, according to Dunford?

   It produces a pile of unverifiable opinions; until you fix the competitive alternatives, there's no way to test whether any of it is actually differentiatedClients should be in the room before the team lists any valueThe exercise should start with choosing the market category, then work backwardsNothing — differentiated value is the first component, so it's the right first step

2. A PH automotive marketing head evaluates WPH, goes quiet, and six weeks later says "we've decided to stay with our current setup for now." What most likely happened?

   The buyer concluded their current setup was genuinely betterA global agency won the deal with a bigger feature listA cheaper local shop undercut WPH on priceThe buyer couldn't confidently make sense of their options, so choosing nothing felt safer than choosing wrong — the no-decision outcome that ends 40–60% of B2B purchase processes

3. WPH pitches as "an enterprise Webflow agency." The buyer says "got it — so you're like the other Webflow shops, but pricier." Which positioning component, changed, would most directly change that comparison?

   Value — restate the same claim with stronger adjectivesBest-fit customers — narrow the target list until the objection disappearsMarket category — the context you set for the product decides what the buyer compares it against and what a fair price looks likeUnique attributes — add more capabilities to the deck

4. WPH lists its competitive alternatives for a PH automotive distributor. Which list follows Dunford's definition — "what would the customer do if we didn't exist"?

   Webflow, WordPress, and the other platforms a site could be built onThe status quo (current site limping along under the incumbent setup), the bloated global agency retainer, an in-house dev team, and the cheap local shop — then whoever makes the short listOnly the vendors that show up in the same procurement bids as WPHOther enterprise Webflow agencies, ranked by size

Check answers

You can move on when… the one-sentence position exists with every bracket filled, and you can defend each choice out loud against the question “says who?”

Mark this lesson complete

Go deeper

• April Dunford — Obviously Awesome (book): the full methodology behind this lesson, written so a team can run the exercise without hiring her. Honestly, the two talks above cover the core method; the book earns its place when you run the workshop with a group and need the step-by-step facilitation detail.
• Dunford’s own-channel deep-dive trilogy — short, single-topic follow-ups on the three steps teams fumble most: Differentiated Value, Market Category, and Testing & Execution.
• The rest of the PMM Summit keynote (20:00–35:00): her 8-part sales pitch structure — how a positioning canvas becomes an actual sales conversation. We return to it in depth in Lesson 2.7.
• Next up: 1.4 · Beachhead & the three rings — your positioning claims a market; the beachhead decides where you prove it first.