ACT PlaybookPlaybook: Create the Engine
Messaging & Positioning: How people find and remember you
Positioning decides where you compete and how you win, and messaging turns that decision into the words your team and your website use with every buyer.
Why It Matters
Positioning comes before messaging
Buyers use market categories as mental shortcuts. The category you are filed under decides what they compare you with and which buying criteria they apply, long before anyone reads your tagline.
A new tagline cannot fix a product that looks like every alternative to the buyer. So the ACT Playbook decides the position first and writes the messages second.
Key Benefits
What a clear position enables
Get compared with the right alternatives
The market category decides who you compete against in the buyer’s head. Choose it on purpose, and you set the buying criteria in your favor.
Make your advantage obvious in seconds
Buyers understand what you offer and why it beats their current alternative before they ever talk to you.
Win on the criteria where you are strongest
One clear way to win, backed by proof, gives your team a message it can defend in every competitive deal.
Tell one story from website to sales deck
Website, outreach, sales deck, and AI-generated content all draw from the same approved messages.
Give buyers a reason to switch now
Persona messages address what pulls buyers toward you and what holds them back, so deals keep moving.
How It Works
Five decisions, in this order
- 1
Agree on one vocabulary
Founders, sales, and marketing use the same terms: market category, competitive alternative, differentiated value, and proof.
- 2
Decide how you play in the market category
Start from what best-fit customers would do without you, then choose to compete, specialize, or create a new category.
- 3
Decide how you win
Pick one primary attack vector, such as vertical depth or faster time to value, and add at most two supporting ones when the evidence supports them.
- 4
Decide how you talk about it
Turn the position into a company story, a messaging matrix for the market, and messages for every persona.
- 5
Keep it consistent
Agree who owns the position and who may change it, so website, sales deck, and content stay aligned.
Where You Play
Compete, specialize, or create
Compete
Win in an existing category
Use when: Buyers already understand and budget for the category, and you beat the alternatives on criteria they already use.
Main risk: The leader sets the rules and makes you look like a weaker copy.
Specialize
Win a defensible segment of an existing category
Use when: A recognizable segment has needs the category leader serves poorly, which makes it the default for early-stage companies.
Main risk: The segment is too small or easy for the leader to absorb.
Create
Establish a new category
Use when: Existing categories lead to the wrong comparisons, and you can fund educating the market.
Main risk: Better-funded followers harvest the education you paid for.
How you win: pick your attack vector
The strategy says where you play, the attack vector says how you win there. Choose one primary vector and at most two supporting ones.
- Vertical specialization
- Workflows, data, and compliance built for one industry
- Persona specialization
- Built for one role that general tools serve poorly
- Use-case specialization
- Solves one workflow far better than a broad suite
- Performance
- Measurably faster, more accurate, or more scalable
- Simplicity
- Removes complexity, specialists, or training
- Price or business model
- Different pricing, packaging, or economics
- Faster time to value
- Value in days or weeks instead of months
- Distribution or ecosystem
- Reaches buyers through a marketplace, partner, or platform they already use
- Trust and compliance
- Certifications, data residency, security, and auditability
- Consolidation
- Replaces several point tools with one integrated solution
- Service and implementation
- Delivers the outcome with expertise on top of the software
- Proprietary data or network effects
- Gets better with usage or holds data others cannot access
Your positioning statement
For [best-fit customer], we are the [market category] that delivers [differentiated value], unlike [actual alternative], because [unique capability].
If you can fill it without generic words, your position is ready for messaging.
How You Talk About It
Messaging on three levels, one story
Company
Golden Circle
Why do we exist and what do we stand for?
A company story from why you exist, to how you act on that belief, to what you offer.
Market
Messaging matrix
How do we express our position consistently?
One message per audience and use case, filled from your value architecture: pain, desired value, capabilities, metric, proof, and the main objection.
Persona
Jobs to be Done
Why does this buyer switch now?
The functional, social, and emotional job of each persona, and the forces that decide whether they switch.
What moves a buyer to switch
Every buyer pays for a transformation: from the situation they are stuck in today to the outcome your product gives them. Persona messages make that before and after explicit, in the buyer’s own words. A deal moves when push and pull outweigh anxiety and habit, and stalled deals usually fail on the forces against change, so the promise needs proof and a small first step to land.
Today
The current situation
Toward change
Push of the situation, moves the buyer toward change
Name the current pain and its cost in the buyer’s own words.
Pull of the new solution, moves the buyer toward change
Make the transformation concrete: the outcome they get and how they will measure it.
Against change
Anxiety about the new, holds the buyer back
Reduce the risk with proof, a clear onboarding, and references.
Habit of the present, holds the buyer back
Show what the status quo costs and make the first step small.
With your product
The transformation
Your Website
Your website is your first sales conversation
Buyers research on their own and build their shortlist before they talk to anyone, often with an AI assistant. Your website is the first thing they see of your company, so it has to speak their language and give them a clear next step.
The website audit checks your site against your position and your value architecture, and turns the findings into a prioritized list of fixes. It looks at five things:
A story buyers recognize
Within seconds, visitors see their own problem and a plan to solve it, with the customer as the hero of the story and your company as the guide.
Every buying job covered
Buyers identify the problem, explore solutions, build requirements, select a supplier, validate the choice, and build consensus internally. Your site needs content for each of these jobs.
The language of every persona
Each persona finds the pain and the outcome they care about, in their own words. Product language and feature lists without a payoff get flagged.
A clear next step on every page
Every page has one primary call to action and a defined path to the next page, so interest turns into conversations.
Found by search engines and AI assistants
Pages per persona and customer profile that search engines understand, and answers AI assistants quote when buyers research their shortlist (SEO, GEO, and AEO).
Your People on LinkedIn
Your founder’s profile is a landing page too
Buyers check the people before they check the product. When a prospect looks up your founder or your sales lead on LinkedIn, the profile has to answer one question right away: can this person help me?
The profile check reviews the LinkedIn profiles of your key people against your position and turns them into a landing page for each of them. It looks at five things:
A headline that states your value
Lead with what you do for whom, in the words your buyers search for, instead of your job title. For example: "I help [audience] [achieve result] | [proof]".
An about section that tells the buyer’s story
Open with the problem your audience faces, then show how you solve it, back it with results in numbers, and end with a clear next step.
Experience written as results
For the last two or three roles, describe what changed because of your work, with measurable outcomes, instead of listing responsibilities.
Proof in the featured section
Three to five items that build trust: a free resource, your best post, a media appearance, a case study, and a link to book a call.
The same keywords as your company
Headline, about section, and skills use the terms from your position and value architecture, so the people and the company tell the same story.
Keep Reading
Put your message to work in every deal
Positioning and messaging carry into the sales motion and into how you qualify every opportunity.
Find out how clear your position is today
Take the free Value Architecture & Sales Motion Assessment. It shows which parts are already in place and where to start.