Positioning Built From Won, Lost and Churned Interviews

We do not run positioning workshops. A room containing only your own executives produces a description of the company they would like to run, and those sentences die on contact with a buyer who has other options. Positioning here is written from transcripts: fourteen to twenty-two interviews across deals you won, deals you lost and accounts that left, all from the last four quarters, conducted in the buyer's own language by the person who then writes the positioning rather than by a research vendor who hands over a summary. Why the losses carry the work: Won-deal interviews mostly tell you what satisfied customers rationalise after the fact. Lost-deal and churn interviews tell you what the market believes about you, and in every engagement we have run there has been a gap between the two that nobody internally had named out loud. In one case a litigation practice was certain it was chosen for expertise; the losses said clients went elsewhere because the intake call took three days to happen. That finding rewrote the messaging and also rewrote the intake process, which is the more useful outcome of the two. What we produce: One positioning statement, with the competitor test applied to it: paste a competitor's name into the sentence, and if it remains true, the sentence is deleted and rewritten. A message hierarchy of three claims, each carrying a proof obligation, meaning what has to be publicly demonstrable for that claim to survive a sceptical buyer and who inside your company owns producing it. An objection library taken verbatim from the transcripts, paired with the responses that actually worked in the deals you won. A two-page document for sales, written to be spoken aloud rather than read. And a written statement of the buyers this positioning turns away, because a position that offends nobody is describing a category rather than a company. Spanish and English are both written, neither is translated: The two versions are drafted in parallel from the same transcripts. Where they diverge, the divergence is a finding rather than a translation defect: a claim that lands in English and reads as boasting in Mexican Spanish is telling you something about how the buyer relationship works here. Register is set per audience, usted for legal and financial buyers, tú for direct-to-consumer furniture, neutral LatAm Spanish only where a distinctly Mexican voice would exclude readers you need to reach. We decline: Taglines. Naming. Visual identity. Message testing on a survey panel, since the panel is not your buyer and a preference expressed by someone with no budget is not information. And positioning without the interviews, at any price, including cases where the client already holds interview recordings; we will listen to those, and we will still run our own. Not for you if: You are looking to validate a position leadership has already agreed on. We have been hired for that twice, both engagements were unpleasant for everyone involved, and if the answer is fixed then the transcripts will contradict it and you will have paid us to be ignored. Also not for pre-revenue companies, since there are no losses to interview and the losses are where the work happens. What we need from you: Named contacts at won, lost and churned accounts, and a warm introduction from someone they know. Cold outreach to lost deals gets us a response rate around fifteen percent; an introduction from their former account executive gets past sixty. That difference decides whether the engagement is worth running at all.