In Dunford's method, positioning is five things you have to state about your product. What are the alternatives. What can you do that they cannot. What value does that unlock. Who cares a lot about that value. And what market context makes the value obvious to those people. Messaging, brand and the pitch deck are all downstream of it.
The dependency chain makes the order load-bearing. A capability is only differentiated relative to a real alternative. Value only counts if it traces to a capability. The value they care about defines best-fit customers, not their headcount. The category goes last because it is the only component you can judge. The right one makes your value obvious to the people you just defined.
Most teams run it backwards. They open with the category argument. They land on "the AI-native CRM for revenue teams," then back-fill the value. Dunford is blunt about that:
The objection is about measurement. Pick the category first. Nothing tells you whether it was a good pick, because nobody has defined what makes a category good yet. Which puts the weight on step one.
Her shorthand for it is blunter: what do I have to beat to win a deal. Note that step one is not a competitor list. It is what a buyer would do instead of buying you. In B2B, that is almost always the status quo. A spreadsheet. A manual process. An intern. Or nothing. That distinction gets its own page oncompetitive alternatives.
