Positioning Accelerator
Build your positioning system with collective intelligence and speed
The New Kind Positioning Accelerator is the fastest way to get the positioning answers you’re searching for.
- What do we offer customers that truly helps us stand apart?
- Why are we the right choice for them?
- What bold ideas can we build our story and rally our company around?
It’s designed to help you tackle four common strategy friction points:
- Balance internal and external perspectives.
- Sort what you know about your technology today and how to leverage that in the marketplace.
- Generate positioning ideas with future optionality baked-in.
- Prioritize decision-making to get the first positioning release live.
All with a modular system that’s easy for everyone on your team to take forward. And adapt as your markets, technology, and customers evolve.
How it works
While some strategy work needs multi-stakeholder alignment and time, others need the best answers possible within a lightning cycle. The Positioning Accelerator is built on a sprint process. Contrasted with our full process.
We start with three frameworks that act as blueprints. Each builds on the other, representing the work we’ll do together. They’ve been hardened and simplified over decades of experience with B2B tech companies with funded startups and billion-dollar enterprises. Collectively, they serve as the positioning system that will guide your sales, marketing, and visionary efforts in the future.
We facilitate a 4-part workshop series where each session progressively applies each framework to your company. We bring a “release early, release often” mentality to the strategy sessions. Each workshop further refines the answers you’re looking for.
In each workshop:
- We synthesize the inputs from the previous work.
- We propose creative leaps to generate what-if conversations, bold thinking, and idea building.
- We facilitate a session that you (and your team leads) actively participate in.
- We end each session with new and validated ideas to refine, until our last workshop.
- You end the process with a shared leadership experience, and begin the next chapter of going to market with your new high-conviction approach.
If you’ve used canvas-style models in the past, you’ll be right at home with this structure. The sessions are designed to be intensive, collaborative, and fast-moving. All together, these engagements involve an investment of $75K-$125K.
Company Positioning Map
A simple and clear mapping of how you position yourself in the market. Together we quickly seek to answer: Who is the ideal customer you’re most looking to reach? What do you offer them? Who or what are they comparing you against?
Messaging Architecture
A single-page, three-tier messaging map with three layers. First, the Visionary Way statement, a simple phrase that articulates the direction of the brand strategy and message at the highest-level. Second, the Technology (Offerings) and People Benefit statements, simple phrases that describe what the tech does and how it supports your customers. Third, the Positioning Pillar statements, 3-4 themes your company story is built on.
Overarching Brand Story
6-8 narrative slides that apply the key ideas from the Messaging Architecture and frames them into a memorable story that everyone in your company can tell. This narrative acts as the kernel for future marketing, sales, employer, and community storytelling efforts.
Prerequisites for this process
- This is for companies that have a product in market, or have a good enough idea of what it will be, that we can plan around it.
- A willingness to share current customer, market, company insights
- An openness to experiment with new ideas, this is not for the tech leader who seeks a: “I only want the one, perfect answer” approach. Instead, it’s for the leader who seeks a: “I recognize all answers have trade-offs, and I want a process to guide me to the trade-offs I’m willing to make now. ”
- A desire to join a shared process of answering questions — recognizing that there’s no final answer in this type of work. Only breakthrough steps that light the foreseeable future.
Why New Kind?
New Kind is a team of positioning experts — especially for B2B tech companies. Their Positioning Accelerator gave us fast access to their frameworks and proven processes. Together we mapped our strategy and vision into future horizons. We tested big ideas and prototyped them quickly. They helped us build the momentum to get our new story into the world.
Aileen Duplantis
Chief Marketing Officer, Zeplin