Inspiration for positioning to win
To figure out how to position yourself, it helps to have an infinite sense of perspective.
PositioningPositioning yourself is about making a comparison that establishes why you are better than either a specific alternative or all alternatives. Customers always have alternatives. What makes yours better? It depends on the customer, what you have to offer, the circumstances, and any number of additional things.
To figure out how to position yourself, it helps to have an infinite sense of perspective. There are many, many ways to turn things around and different directions to look at them from. For starters, how you position “yourself” depends on what you mean. Are you positioning your:
- Company
- Team
- Offering
- Staff
- Self
- Or some other point of contact between you and the customer?
The list below will help you find inspiration for different ways to position yourself. One important consideration is that before you can position yourself as better, you may need to position yourself as different. Positioning yourself as the same, only a little better, is a weak strategy.
To help inspire you to find the differences that make you better, we’ve also provided a list of opposites. One way to use this list is to find a word that relates to your competition, and then be the opposite. Another way to use it is to take words from the second list and use them to modify the words from the positioning list.
The goal of lists like these is not to contain every possible attribute, but to focus on the attributes that are related to your proposals. Customization to reflect the nature of your business is highly recommended.
Things to position your company, self, and offering against:
- Competition
- Trends
- Events
- Capability
- Capacity
- Qualifications
- Performance
- Preferences
- Culture
- Habits
- Style
- Size
- Speed
- Efficiency
- Responsiveness
- Price
- Quality
- Experience
- Risk
- Transition
- Incumbency
- Compliance
- Value
- Scalability
- Sustainability
- ROI
- Methodologies
- Partnership
- Location
- Technology
- Plans
- Missions
- Goals
- Security
- Safety
- Assessments
- Readiness
- Training
- Issues
- Environment
- Deadlines
Modifiers and Opposites:
- Past/ future
- High/ low
- Innovative/ low risk
- Fast/ slow
- Responsive/ deliberate
- Small/ large
- Specialized/ generalized
- Singular/ combination
- Best/ worst
- Physical/ virtual
- New/ established
- JIT/ continuous
- Collaborative/ independent
- Same/different
- Objective/ subjective
- Change/ stability
- Predictable/ unpredictable
- Traditional/ exciting
- Included/ excluded
- Formal/ informal
- Difficult/ easy
- Sufficient/ insufficient
- Complete/ incomplete
- Now/ later
- Clear/ complicated
- Flexible/ rigid
- Strong/ weak
- Strategic/ tactical
- Minimum/ maximum
- Isolated/ accessible
- Consensus driven/ authoritarian
Access to premium content items is limited to PropLIBRARY Subscribers
A subscription to PropLIBRARY unlocks hundreds of premium content items including recipes, forms, checklists, and more to make it easy to turn our recommendations into winning proposals. Subscribers can also use MustWin Now, our online proposal content planning tool.
