The best positioning is not built. It is discovered.

Across five articles, I explained that the wrong positioning is expensive, that you cannot see it from inside the company, and that price is almost always innocent. All very interesting, you might say, but ultimately just words. Fair enough. So I am closing this series with a real case, without a company name because the name is not what matters to you.

The problem: negotiations ending in discounts

A manufacturing company in north-eastern Italy, producing industrial machinery, had generated solid revenue for years but lived with an irritating feeling: every negotiation ended with a discount. The sales team always came back with the same phrase — “we are more expensive” — and the response was always the same: trim the price, squeeze the margin, secure the order. More of a ritual than a strategy.

On the website and in sales presentations, they said what everyone else said: lower consumption, environmental responsibility and finishing quality. All perfectly valid. And very similar to what the other six competitors were saying. Then we went to listen to real customers, and when you ask customers why they chose you, they say things marketing would never dare to write.

The value customers recognised

They did not talk about the environment. They talked about money, but not the money in the quotation: real money. Less wasted material, machines that stopped less often, service that arrived before downtime became costly, and used equipment that still retained value at the end of its working life. Once everything was put in sequence — purchase, operation, maintenance and disposal — total cost of ownership revealed what the price tag concealed: these machines were the most expensive to buy and the least expensive to own.

The remarkable thing was that this information had always been there, in plain sight. Inside the company, however, nobody saw it as a value worth communicating. They considered it normal. “But that is the minimum; that is simply how our machines work.” This is the best positioning a company has and fails to use: the advantage it takes for granted because it experiences it every day, while for the customer it is precisely the reason for paying more.

Repositioning the offer

Repositioning did not require a new product or a new brand. It was more straightforward: they stopped selling what everyone else sold and started selling the reason customers genuinely chose them. The message was rewritten around total cost rather than purchase price, sales materials were rebuilt, and the offer was packaged so that the advantage became visible before the quotation, not afterwards. In short, they stopped apologising for the price and started explaining what was inside it.

The results after six months

The results after six months: the average discount fell by 20 percentage points. The closing rate rose from 10% to 20%. Cost per lead decreased by 30% because the message finally attracted the right people rather than everyone. And, not a minor detail, the sales team stopped coming back saying, “we are more expensive”.

The point is not that we were particularly clever. The company already had everything: the competitive lever, customers who recognised it, and even the numbers needed to prove it. What it lacked was someone outside the company who could point it out, because from the inside it looked obvious. That is almost always how it works: the best positioning is not built; it is discovered.

This concludes the series. If these six articles have made you wonder whether you are also taking for granted the very thing customers choose you for, send me a DM. I will review your positioning and tell you where I believe the unused lever may be. In the worst-case scenario, I will confirm that you are already doing everything right. Unlikely. But it would be excellent news.