Positioning From Evidence: How Product Marketers Find the Claim They Can Win On

Sooner or later every product marketer gets the same job: decide the one claim the company leads with. It goes on the homepage, into the first sales call, and onto every battlecard. Too often it comes out of a workshop, chosen by whoever argued best, and then it meets buyers who have already done their own reading.

Buyers are quick to drop a vendor that sounds like the others. In Gartner Digital Markets' 2024 survey of 2,499 software buyers, 41% named a lack of clear product differentiation among the top three reasons they dropped a vendor from consideration, and 42% named confusing or contradictory product materials.[1] There is also less room to make the case: in G2's 2024 survey of more than 1,900 software buyers, 49% had only one to three products on their shortlist, up from 33% a year earlier.[2]

And buyers check your claim somewhere you do not control. In TrustRadius's 2023 survey, only 15% of technology buyers consulted vendors' marketing collateral, while 75% of vendors used it, and 54% of buyers consult user reviews during the buying journey.[3] Your claim will be tested against what customers write about you and your rivals, whether you test it first or not.

Lead with the claim buyers can check and still believe, that rivals cannot say back to you, and that your won deals already prove.

Four sources, four questions

Positioning from evidence means answering four questions before anyone drafts a headline. Each has its own source, and none of them is your own opinion of the product.

• Reviews. Where do buyers praise you, and where do they complain about the alternatives?
• Rival claims. What does each competitor say about itself, and do its own customers agree?
• Win/loss by segment. In which deal sizes, industries, company sizes, and buyer roles do you already win, and against whom?
• Whitespace. Where does the market have more buyers than vendors, and more complaints than answers?

This work often lands on marketing. In Crayon's 2026 State of Competitive Intelligence, marketing owns the compete function at 42% of companies, more than any other function, and the most-cited sources are internal knowledge (54%), competitor websites (48%), and win/loss insights (36%).[4] Reviews and market data do not make that top three, yet they are the two sources that show what buyers will believe and where there is room to say it.

Steps 1 and 2: Read the buyers, then the rivals

Step 1: Map praise and complaints by capability

Reviews are where buyers go to check a vendor's story. In the Gartner Digital Markets survey, customer reviews and ratings were the content buyers used most to inform a purchase (46%), buyers read 10 reviews on average before deciding, and 54% named commentary on what users like and dislike among the three things that matter most in a review.[1]

Read the reviews of your product and of each rival you meet in deals. For every capability buyers mention, note three things: praise or complaint, for which product, and what kind of buyer said it (company size, industry, and role). The result is a simple grid, with capabilities down the side, products across the top, and praise and complaints in each cell. Mark the cells where buyers praise you and complain about a rival on the same capability. Those are your candidate claims.

In PYRAMYD: on a tracked competitor's Customers tab in Competitors › Competitor 360, choosing one of its products opens a review summary: review volume, average score, who writes the reviews by seniority and company size, and the main praise and complaint themes. Competitors › Win/Loss › Competitive looks up any market player for its top features by review score, why buyers leave it, and what they consider alongside it. APEX finds the reviews that discuss a capability by meaning, not keyword, and quotes them with their sources.

Step 2: Write down what each rival claims, then test it

Collect each competitor's lead claim from its homepage, pricing page, and comparison pages, and note the themes in its press coverage. Then set each claim against that rival's own reviews. A rival that leads with ease of use while its reviewers complain about setup has left you an opening. A rival whose reviewers confirm its claim holds that ground, and making the same claim puts you back in the crowd you were trying to leave.

In PYRAMYD: the Narrative card on a competitor's Pulse tab reads its press coverage over 90 days or six months and shows the tone, the themes, and its share of voice against your other tracked competitors, with press articles kept apart from the competitor's own announcements. The test of each claim against the rival's reviews is yours to run, in the grid from step 1.

Steps 3 and 4: Where the claim wins, and where there is room

Step 3: Find the segments where the claim already wins

A claim earns its place when it shows up in won deals. Pull the closed deals from the last few quarters and split them by deal size, buyer industry, company size, and buyer role. Look for the segments where your win rate is highest, the segments where one rival keeps beating you, and the reasons buyers gave. A claim that wins mid-market deals can lose enterprise ones, where a different buyer signs.

Two cautions. A segment needs enough deals to mean anything: a win rate built on four deals is an anecdote. And the fields have to exist: if your CRM does not record the buyer's industry or role, the split cannot be made, so fixing those fields is part of the work.

In PYRAMYD: Competitors › Win/Loss › Segments breaks closed deals down by deal-size band, buyer industry, company size, and buyer persona, each with its win rate and lost revenue. It reads the closed deals in your CRM, brought in when you sync, and the industry, size, and persona views stay empty until your deals carry those fields.

Step 4: Check that the market has room for it

A claim can be true, confirmed in reviews, and backed by won deals, and still be the wrong one to lead with if the part of the market it speaks to is crowded. Before you commit, check where demand outruns supply: categories with many active buyers for each vendor, and buyers in your target segment who are less satisfied with what they have.

In PYRAMYD: Markets › Market 360 defines a market from up to five categories, narrowed by industry, country, and role. Its Competition tab ranks up to eight categories in that market by buyer demand per vendor and by the satisfaction gaps of reviewers inside the market, and it leaves out cells too thin to score rather than guessing.

Choose the claim, then put it to work

With the four sources in hand, score each candidate claim on four tests, one point each:

• Buyers praise it in your reviews and complain about it in at least one rival's.
• No rival leads with it, or the rival that does is contradicted by its own reviews.
• It shows up in won deals, in a segment you want more of.
• The market has room for it: high demand per vendor, or unhappy buyers, in the categories it speaks to.

Lead with the claim that scores highest in the segment you most want to win, and write it as one sentence a buyer could check: what you do better, for whom, and the proof. Keep the runners-up. They become proof points, answers to objections, and messages for other segments.

Then arm the field. A claim that never reaches a sales call is only a slogan.

In PYRAMYD: Competitors › Battlecards generates a battlecard for your product against a rival, with an optional customer, a linked deal, and an additional instruction, such as the claim you chose. On the card, the Capabilities tab compares the two products feature by feature, from review or APEX scores, with filters for where you win and where they win; the Proof tab sets out the rival's strengths with counters and your weaknesses with mitigations; and the Evidence and confidence fold lists the numbered sources behind the card. Usage and readers then shows which tabs and sections your reps actually open.

Evidence first, then the headline

Most positioning work starts with the headline and goes looking for proof. Reverse the order. Read the reviews, the rival claims, the deals, and the market first, and the claim you can win on is usually already there: in the cells where buyers praise you and doubt a rival, inside a segment where you already win, and in a part of the market with room. Run the four steps again each quarter, or when a rival changes its message, and update the brief when the evidence moves.