How a company like ours should define ICP, USP and positioning

Picture two shop windows on the same street. One has a sign that says “we sell things people need.” The other says “specialty coffee equipment for people who roast their own beans.” You already know which one you’d actually walk into, even though the first shop might sell exactly what you want too.

That’s positioning in one image. Most companies are the first shop window, and they wonder why nobody stops.

We see the same pattern in almost every company we talk to, including, for a long time, our own. Everyone can technically serve almost anyone, so the website tries to speak to everyone, and it ends up landing with no one in particular. Nobody actively decides this. It happens gradually, one extra sentence at a time, added every time someone worries a phrase might exclude a potential customer. The fix is almost never to add another sentence that covers the gap. It’s to remove the ones that are already blurring the picture.

The fix starts with three questions that sound simple and rarely get answered honestly.

Who is your ICP, your ideal customer profile, specifically enough that you could name three companies that fit it right now. Not an industry. Not a company size range. The actual type of organisation that gets the most value from what you do, fastest, with the least convincing needed.

What is your USP, the one reason someone picks you over the next option that could technically do the same job. If the honest answer is “we’re reliable and know our stuff,” that’s not a USP, it’s the baseline every competitor also claims.

And what is your positioning, the specific position you occupy in the customer’s head once they’ve compared you to two or three alternatives. Positioning isn’t what you say about yourself. It’s what’s left in someone’s memory a week later.

The challenge isn’t figuring these three things out in the abstract. It’s the discomfort of saying no to revenue that technically fits but doesn’t reinforce who you actually are. Every “we also do that” dilutes the sentence that was supposed to make you memorable. In practice, this is where most positioning work actually stalls, not on strategy, but on the willingness to turn down a client who doesn’t fit the profile, even when the pipeline looks thin that month.

The benefit shows up before it shows up in revenue. A sales conversation gets shorter when the person on the other side already suspected you were the right fit before the call started. Content gets easier to write because there’s one audience to write for instead of five. And referrals get more accurate, because the people recommending you actually know who to recommend you to.

None of this needs a rebrand or a strategy offsite to start. Write down, honestly, the three customers you’ve done your best work for. Find what they actually had in common before you worked with them, not after. Take the sentence you currently use to describe what you do, and cut every word a competitor could say about themselves too. What’s left is closer to your real positioning than any workshop exercise will get you.

Do that once, properly, and the rest of your marketing gets easier by default. Skip it, and every campaign, every piece of content and every sales call keeps working harder than it needs to, compensating for a message that was never actually aimed at anyone.