The repeatable system to level up your positioning
The positioning loop that great teams use to make sure the story sticks, scales, and actually drives growth.
A good story isn’t enough. You can write the sharpest narrative in your category, build a killer deck, and train your team to the script.
But if that story never makes it into how your team speaks, builds, and sells... it doesn’t matter.
Most teams treat positioning like a one-and-done project. They ship a deck, update the copy, and move on.
Great teams do more. They treat positioning like a loop. A system. A habit. Something they revisit, reinforce, and refine over time.
And when they do, positioning becomes a growth driver, not a forgotten artefact.
That’s where the Positioning Loop comes in.
It’s not a framework. It’s a cycle. One that helps you move beyond theory and actually embed positioning into your go-to-market motion - day in, day out.
The Positioning Loop has three phases:
Get clarity
Build conviction
Be consistent
Here’s how to actually do it.
Get clarity
This is where most get stuck.
You craft a compelling story that earns nods and comments until you realise it doesn’t answer the right questions.
Clarity isn’t word polish. It’s decision making.
You must define:
Exactly which customer you serve
The problems you relentlessly solve
What you're replacing, and why you're better
At Paddle, we went beyond just looking for product market fit. We started asking: is this company likely to act now? Are they feeling the urgency?
That’s what led us to focus on buyer moment fit - not just who could benefit from our product, but who was actually primed to engage now.
We built a short list of signals to help us identify these moments: had they just raised a round? Recently hired in finance or ops? Expanded into the US? Each one gave us clues that the buyer was not only a good fit, but ready for a conversation.
That changed how we told our story. We weren’t speaking to some abstract ICP. We were targeting companies in motion, and it showed up everywhere from outbound copy to demo calls.
That shift didn’t just make our messaging clearer... it made it usable. Because when you know exactly who you’re speaking to and why they care right now, every part of go-to-market gets sharper.
If your positioning doesn’t make you uncomfortable, it’s probably too safe.
Build conviction
Having clarity is one thing. Getting the team to believe is another.
Sure, you roll out the story. Slides get saved. But a few weeks in, everyone has defaulted back to old language.
Belief doesn’t live in slides. It lives in lived experience.
At Paddle, we leaned into this. To help the team believe, we invited real customers into all-hands so people could hear unfiltered quotes. We plastered those quotes on posters everywhere. We celebrated great calls and shared snippets of the language that prospects used, so reps would know what to look out for.
This was strategic reinforcement: when sales walked into the market, they’d hear exactly the pains we were teaching them to talk to. The story would feel real. They'd believe it more, pitch more robustly, and bring more energy into every conversation.
How to help conviction stick:
Turn personas into real humans. Use call clips, quotes, live stories so the pain becomes tangible
Flag every win where the new messaging was part of the success. Share that fast
Make positioning a visible part of the environment, like Slack, meetings, and even the office
You earn conviction; it can't be enforced.
Be consistent
If your message morphs every quarter, it stops being positioning. It becomes noise.
In my article on Zendesk’s positioning evolution, I charted how their narrative evolved over time, but never flipped. From scrappy startup to enterprise-friendly leader, they stuck to a single tension point: simplicity at scale in customer service. That consistency gave it strength.
Your team needs time to absorb. Your buyers need time to remember.
In When Should You Reposition Your Brand? I outlined five real reasons to change positioning. Rarely is it because you lost one deal or a competitor launched new features. Most teams only need to revisit their story every 6 to 12 months. It gives you enough signal to make deliberate decisions about how to evolve.
Consistency isn’t rigidity. It’s giving your message a fighting chance to embed.
Psst... it's a loop, remember?
Clarity builds belief.
Belief drives execution.
Execution sharpens the message.
Rinse, repeat.
The more consistently you run this loop, the more clearly you see what’s working... and what’s not.
When you stick with a story, patterns emerge. Your team stops saying "we’re not sure if it’s landing" and starts saying "this line always gets a nod" or "people get stuck here."
You move past guesswork. You gather real-world evidence. You start making sharper decisions about what to double down on, what to drop, and how to improve.
This is why the loop matters. Not just to maintain alignment, but to drive smarter iteration over time.
Positioning is a muscle. The more you run the loop, the more you understand how to grow - and how to get better.