How do you use customers' own words in positioning?

Where do you find this language if you have no formal research budget?

In the calls you already have every week, and in one survey question you can set up for free.

A survey answer reads "enough with good intentions it's buckle down time". It is Tuesday, March 13, 2018, and Joanna Wiebe is reading it aloud in a live Copyhackers tutorial. "It doesn't mean it's the language to use," she says, "but my actual customer, paying customer said this, I'm going to listen to it."

The answers come from one question Wiebe, a conversion copywriter, puts on a thank-you page, right after someone buys or signs up. For Copyhackers' own Copy School it reads "What was going on in your life that brought you to join Copy School today?", and you swap in your own verb and product name. She says setup takes about seven minutes in Typeform, which she notes is free. That page had 230 responses at the time of the tutorial.

Sales calls cost nothing either, because you are already on them. The trade-off is time: Wiebe reads answers one by one, and doing the same with call recordings is slow work. Corvan Agents reads the sales calls you upload and shows what buyers keep raising, with the count and the source lines under each insight. Our piece on voice of customer research covers support tickets and onboarding chats. Whatever the source, we would read it the way Wiebe reads her survey answers.

1. Read the answers one at a time, looking for sticky language, objections, and drivers (what brought the person to say yes today).
2. Save each as a note and tag it. Wiebe's example is "I want to grow my copywriting business", tagged "grow my business".
3. Write once many notes share a tag (her hypothetical is 30), starting with the top of your page, "where you join the conversation they're already having with themselves".

What if different customers describe the problem differently?

Then you have either two kinds of customer or one phrase that is not representative, and you need more answers to tell which. Until then, any single phrase is a lead to check.

Go back to the buckle-down comment. Wiebe listens to the phrase and makes no promise to use it. A line that one customer said well is tempting to paste onto a homepage, and we would hold it until other customers say something close unprompted.

Check against customers, because a team's memory of what buyers think is weaker than it feels. Corporate Visions, which sells win-loss programs, analyzed win-loss data from more than 150,000 B2B deals and found that sellers and buyers cited different reasons for a loss 50 to 70 percent of the time. That figure covers lost deals and nothing else. Our reading is that the wording a team would pick for the buyer's problem deserves the same doubt.

How many customers have to say a thing before it counts as representative? Wiebe's 30 was a hypothetical. We have not found a sourced number, and we have none of our own.

How is positioning different from messaging?

Positioning is the decision about who your product is for and why they would pick it over the alternatives, and messaging is the wording that carries that decision onto a page.

That split is our own way of putting it, and the sourced part is narrow. April Dunford's page for her book Obviously Awesome offers a Positioning Canvas and, separately, a template for a messaging document, so she treats them as two documents.

The customers' words go mostly into the messaging, meaning the headline and the objections you answer further down the page. They reach the positioning when the phrases keep describing a problem other than the one your positioning names.

How often should positioning get revisited?

We would read the language every week and reopen the positioning itself only when the language stops matching it.

A founder who takes sales calls every week hears new evidence every week, and a positioning document written in a one-afternoon workshop has no way to absorb it.

Corporate Visions' cadence is for win-loss feedback: hear from the buyer within 30 days after a deal ends, share key findings every month, and do deeper analysis every three months. Applying the monthly step to positioning is our suggestion. Once a month, put the newest tagged phrases next to your homepage and see whether the page still sounds like them.

Wiebe's answer about her own survey is looser than ours. You do not have to ask the question for the rest of your life, she said. Ask it for now, collect the answers, then ask it again six months later or a year later.