“Positioning is the one essential strategic foundation every business needs for sustainable growth.”

What positioning can do for your business

Stand out in the market

Drive sales & revenue

Make getting funding easier

Increase marketing effectiveness

Accelerate sales cycles

Build sustainable growth

Positioning businesses for growth

I‘m Nicole Laurence. Over the last 20 years, I’ve been helping to turn businesses around that are struggling with inefficient marketing, underperforming sales and a consequent lack of growth.

The one core issue that I have repeatedly come up against, has been poor positioning or even a total lack of it, which in turn, was the main cause of the inefficiency in marketing and sales and the lack of growth the businesses had originally hired me to fix.

Positioning is every business’s essential strategic foundation to ensure sustainable growth. It provides the path to the right customers and the most impactful communication of your business’s proposition and value.

My mission is to work with startups and SMBs to help position their businesses strategically and enable them to set up their sales and marketing teams for success, get funding and build sustainable growth.

Positioning is the essential strategic process that defines how your business, brand or product differentiates you from competitive alternatives – not just in the minds of your buyers, but in the minds of your stakeholders, investors and employees. Positioning defines how your solution stands out from the crowd, who it serves, and the unique value it provides. Effective positioning impacts funding, commercial traction, and overall growth.

Why Positioning is crucial for startup success in every growth phase.

Seed

For Seed Stage Startups a well informed and strategically defined positioning hypothesis is vital to informing strategic direction and shaping their initial brand, marketing and sales messaging.

Growth

Growth stage startups launching new products must focus on the value they can deliver and set marketing and sales up for success to drive commercial traction, satisfy stakeholders and gain additional funding.

Mature

Mature startups must sharpen their positioning to amplify brand awareness, increase positive perception and validate premium pricing and higher valuation.

Investors

Why investors should be invested in Positioning: Positioning validates market fit, mitigates risk, provides competitive advantage, fuels growth potential, and impacts higher valuation.

Positioning is a key success factor for startups

“The primary reason why companies fail is that there is little or no market for their product or service. A new company’s challenge is to create a great product and match it with an appropriate market need. Unfortunately, many companies become so blinded by what they’re trying to create that they fail to see if there are even people who are interested in their offers.”

Positioning is the first hurdle to startup success, but many entrepreneurs and marketers fail to treat it with the care they offer their general marketing and product development activities.”

“Many overlook a crucial step in the lean start-up process: researching customer needs before testing products. (…) The good news is, firms can avoid that pitfall by rigorously defining the problem they want to solve, getting one-on-one feedback from potential customers, and validating concepts with real customers in real-world settings.”

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Consulting Services

  • Not sure if you’ve nailed your Positioning? Frustrated that your sales and marketing teams don’t seem aligned? Out of sync somehow? It sounds like you may have a positioning problem.

    The first step to understanding your current positioning is to conduct a comprehensive brand and positioning audit.

    This is where we evaluate the internal and external alignment of your brand, analyse customer experience and UX, as well as your current level of differentiation.

  • Unsurprisingly my positioning workshop is not only designed to develop the best positioning for your business, it’s also where you align your core team and lay the foundation for both your sales and marketing initiatives.

    The structured workshop I carry out is based on a proven, tried and tested, not to mention successful positioning process, where together, we develop each of the five strategic elements of your positioning into a clear positioning strategy. One that will inform your strategic decision making and messaging, for efficient and sustainable growth.

  • Getting your product messaging right can be extremely challenging.

    Together with you and your team, I’ll help develop winning value propositions that clearly communicate why buyers should choose your products or services, outlining the specific solution/s your business provides and the promise of value your customers are expecting.

  • The value of having the perfect ‘elevator pitch’, with an engaging story to tell about your brand, targeted to your specific audience, cannot be underestimated. It’s huge.

    In my experience, founders and CEOs, sometimes influenced by their investor pitches, tell a different story than their team members, which can lead to confusion and an unhelpfully fuzzy perception of the business out in the market. Developing a clear and engaging brand narrative helps to align messaging across teams and build your brand’s image and equity.

  • After developing your positioning, you will have laid the foundation for your brand narrative and marketing messaging.

    To ensure your positioning strategy translates into commercial traction and sustainable growth, the next step is to develop a sales pitch that goes beyond conventional product demonstrations. This will enable your sales team to successfully sell your solutions, demonstrate their value and win in the market.

  • If you’re just entering the market you’ll naturally expect to set up both your brand and marketing for commercial success. To help with that, I offer full-service implementation of all elements of branding and marketing operations entirely focussed on the strategic foundation of your positioning.

    This includes brand and marketing/comms strategy development, operational setup and implementation across key channels such as your website, social media and CRM.

  • In my 1:1 coaching sessions I help startup and established marketing teams develop strategically-led, operational foundations and actionable insights, which will enable faster and more effective marketing and branding initiatives.

Work with me

Find out more about how we can work together. Contact me, or schedule a free 15-minute call. I look forward to hearing from you!