Every company has a positioning document. Most collect dust in a Google Drive folder somewhere, last updated six months ago by someone who has since left. And yet, when deals stall or win rates drop, the first thing leadership asks for is "better messaging."
Positioning is a discipline. The companies that treat it as a living practice consistently win, and the ones that let it sit as a static artifact are always playing catch-up.
Start With ICP. Real ICP, Not Aspirational ICP.
The foundation of strong positioning is a ruthlessly honest Ideal Customer Profile. Most teams get this wrong. They define their ICP based on who they wish would buy their product instead of where they consistently win with speed and scale.
Kustomer is an Agentic CX platform, which means we sit at an interesting intersection. Buyers come in with very different intentions:
- Some want to purchase AI capabilities and bolt them onto existing infrastructure
- Some want a full support platform to replace what they have
- Some want both, a single consolidated solution that handles the whole CX stack
Each of those buyers has different urgency, different evaluation criteria, and a different definition of value. Without a clear ICP, you end up chasing all three and closing none of them efficiently.
To get sharp, we built a full account table and sorted every account into one of three buckets:
- Take: Where we win repeatedly, with speed and confidence
- Consider: Accounts with potential that require more effort or fit imperfectly
- Toss: Accounts that feel winnable on the surface but drain pipeline velocity and rarely close on terms that work for us
That exercise was clarifying in ways that a typical ICP doc never is. When you put every account in a row and force a call, the patterns become obvious fast. We doubled down on high-volume, high-urgency CX teams and got disciplined about walking away from everything else.
The discipline is in saying no to the segments where you can win sometimes and focusing on the segments where you win repeatedly.
When your ICP is tight, everything downstream gets easier. Messaging gets sharper. Sales qualifies faster. Marketing spend concentrates where it matters. A broad ICP feels safe, but it is actually the riskiest move you can make because it dilutes everything.
Competitive Intel Starts With a Map
Most competitive programs collapse into feature grids. Ours started with a different question: who are we actually competing against and what kind of company are they?
We mapped the landscape into three distinct categories:
- Legacy incumbents: Deep enterprise roots, long implementation cycles, and architectures built before AI was a serious consideration
- New age AI standalone platforms: Fast-moving and automation-led, but point solutions without the broader CX infrastructure to support complex operations
- Consolidated all-in-one platforms: Built to handle the full customer experience stack without requiring buyers to assemble a patchwork of tools. That is where Kustomer sits.
Once we had that map, we ran a full SWOT analysis on each category rather than going feature by feature. That approach surfaced something more useful than a checklist. It revealed the structural limitations of each player type:
- Legacy vendors carry technical debt that makes true AI integration slow and brittle
- Standalone AI tools solve narrow problems well but create fragmentation at scale
- Consolidated platforms carry more complexity upfront but compound in value over time
The goal was never to show buyers where we have more checkboxes filled in. It was to help them understand why the category of solution matters as much as the solution itself. When buyers are evaluating with that lens, the conversation shifts entirely.
Voice of Customer Is Oxygen
Customer insight is the oxygen of product marketing. It keeps the entire function grounded in reality. And yet, most teams treat it like a quarterly exercise they dust off for a slide deck.
We gather customer voice through multiple channels:
- Win/loss interviews
- Gong call analysis
- Case studies
- Power user interviews tied to specific capabilities
That last one has been some of the most valuable research we have done. We identify customers who have gone deep on a specific capability, use it constantly, and have strong opinions about why it works for them. We interview them specifically about that capability, not about Kustomer broadly.
What those conversations revealed was that workflows are the most important capability in our platform. Customers who build and rely on workflows become deeply embedded in how Kustomer operates. Workflows are what increases stickiness and what makes a departure genuinely painful to contemplate. That insight did not come from a survey. It came from sitting with the people who use the product every day and asking the right questions.
The pattern I see in strong PMM teams is that customer voice is woven into every decision, not siloed into a research report that gets shared once and forgotten. When your positioning is continuously informed by what real buyers say, think, and feel, it stays sharp. When it is based on internal assumptions, it drifts.
Where AI Changes the Game
Here is where the discipline has fundamentally shifted: AI makes it possible to keep this flywheel moving without burning out your team.
We are building AI agents to automate the parts of this work that used to be purely manual:
- Win/loss analysis that once took weeks of synthesis now runs continuously, surfacing patterns from Gong calls, support tickets, and sales notes in near real time
- Competitive monitoring agents watch for product updates, pricing changes, and new messaging from rivals and flag what matters
- Positioning documents get drafted, versioned, and updated based on live signal rather than scheduled quarterly reviews
The judgment still sits with the PMM. AI handles the collection and synthesis so the team can spend its time on what actually requires human thinking: deciding what the insight means, how to act on it, and what to say. That division of labor is what makes the flywheel sustainable at speed.
If you are not building AI-assisted workflows into your positioning practice, you are doing this on hard mode.
The Flywheel Effect
Here is how positioning becomes a discipline: you build it as a flywheel. Customer insights sharpen your positioning. Positioning drives go-to-market execution. Go-to-market fuels enablement. Enablement surfaces more customer insights. The cycle repeats.
With AI in the loop, that cycle moves faster and stays more current. You stop doing big "positioning refreshes" once a year because the inputs never stop flowing and the synthesis never stops either.