Your result · The Sales Bottleneck Finder
Your bottleneck is Position
By Arshad · Published 29 July 2026
People keep asking “so what exactly do you do?”, and good prospects keep comparing you to cheaper options that aren't really comparable. That's not a marketing problem — nothing you sell has a fixed worth, and right now the buyer is choosing the yardstick you get measured against.
This is one of nine results from the free 3-minute Sales Bottleneck Finder. Haven't taken it? Find your own bottleneck.
You'll recognise this
- Buyers file you next to the cheap freelancer, the DIY tool, or the nephew who “knows computers” — and haggle accordingly.
- “Do nothing” quietly wins most of the deals you lose.
- People get what you do, but not why you specifically — the frame never does the work, so you explain, at length, every time.
- Genuinely excellent work reads as “a pricier version of something I already rejected”.
The false fixes
What people with a Position bottleneck usually try — and why it makes things worse:
“More Instagram posts.” More posts won't fix an unclear frame — you'd just be distributing the confusion more efficiently.
“A fill-in-the-blank positioning statement.” “For X who need Y, we are Z…” captures the room's hunches, hides the real choices, and produces a sentence nobody remembers. Positioning is a short process, not a template.
“A new website.” A redesign restates the old frame in nicer type. If you're on the wrong shelf, better packaging doesn't move you off it.
What changes when it's fixed
When Position is fixed, the right buyer gets it in seconds: what you are, why it matters, and why you're the one — before you say a word. Price stops being the battleground, because you're no longer standing next to the cheap lookalike. It's the difference between “freelance web designer” and “websites that fill dental appointment books”: same skills, completely different shelf.
One action today
From the book's Playbook Cards · The 5+1 Positioning Components
Positioning is five pieces worked in order, plus one:
- Competitive alternatives — what buyers would use if you vanished, including doing nothing.
- Unique attributes — what you have that those alternatives lack, with proof.
- Value — the benefit those attributes create, grouped into themes.
- Target segment — the buyers who care most about that value.
- Market category — the frame that sets their expectations.
Plus, sparingly, a relevant trend for a why-now. Start tonight with step one: write the honest list of what your best buyer would do if you vanished tomorrow. That list is the yardstick everything else gets measured against.
The five-plus-one components are April Dunford's; the order is the part most people skip.
Your map
Strangers become customers along one path. Yours is narrowing at stage 3 — and everything after it inherits the squeeze.
- 1Mindset
- 2Market
- 3Position
- 4Offer
- 5Message
- 6Attention
- 7Journey
- 8Conversation
- 9Scale
Go deeper
This is Chapter 3 of From Stranger to Sold. The book gives you this stage in full — and the eight others it connects to.
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Where this sits on the path
Position is stage 3 of 9. Upstream sits Market — you cannot frame yourself for a crowd you have not chosen; downstream sits Offer, where the frame either earns its price or does not. Read either stage, or take the test to find your own bottleneck.