Before You Go to Market.
Get the Positioning Right.
Part 2 of the GTM Strategy Beyond the Template Series
By Catherine Mak, Founder of ZILU Consultancy | Fractional CMO with 20+ years leading marketing across financial services, B2B scaleups and growth businesses
Most businesses assume they have a clear proposition. They have a tagline. They have an About page. They have a pitch deck. They have a sales script.
Every founder I have ever worked with has a version of the same conversation with me at some point.
They have built something they genuinely believe in. They have a target market in mind. They have a sense of who the competition is. And they are ready — or feel ready — to go to market.
What they often do not have is a single, coherent proposition, in the same language, emphasising the same things, to the same audience.
I often think:
A strong proposition is where the founder’s ambition meets the buyer’s reality.
That's why, before we look into channel strategies, fix the positioning and proposition first, then everything can fall into place.
Why the Proposition Problem Is Harder Than It Looks
When I start working with a new client on a GTM strategy, one of the first things I do is interview the key stakeholders separately. Founder. Product lead. Head of sales. Marketing lead. Sometimes the investors, whose pitch deck often contains the clearest version of the market thesis you will find anywhere in the business.
What I am looking for is not confirmation of the official story. I am looking for where the stories diverge — because that divergence is almost always where the real work is.
The founder's version is usually about the macro-opportunity : where the market is going, what is broken about the status quo, why now is the right moment. That is the vision story. It is compelling. It is necessary. But it rarely translates directly into what a buyer needs to hear on a Tuesday afternoon when they are deciding whether to respond to a sales email.
The product team's version is usually about capability: what is new, what is proprietary, what the technology can do that nothing else can. That is the features story. It matters, but only after the buyer has already decided the problem is worth solving and that you might be the right person to solve it.
The sales team's version is the most useful raw material of all, and the one that gets used least. They are in the market every day. They hear what prospects actually say - the real objections, the real comparisons, the real language buyers use when they describe the problem. That intelligence is gold. In most businesses, it never makes it from the CRM notes into the proposition.
And marketing, sometimes skip the discovery work and often ends up crafting language around the wrong insight, or polishing a message that sounds impressive but does not land with the people who matter.
A proposition that excites the boardroom but confuses the buyer is not a proposition. It is internal alignment masquerading as a market message. — Catherine Mak, Founder, ZILU Consultancy
The Five Inputs That Feed a Real Proposition
Before any language is written, any tagline is tested, or any campaign brief is produced, five things need to be understood clearly. Not assumed. Not inherited from the pitch deck. Actually investigated.
The founder's ambition and market thesis. Why does this business exist? What is genuinely broken in the market that this product or service is designed to fix? Why now — what has changed in the world that makes this the right moment? This is the north star. It should inform everything that follows, but it should not become the customer-facing message unfiltered. Founders see the opportunity. Buyers feel the problem. Those are different frames.
The customer's actual pain — not the theoretical one. The most common proposition mistake is building a message around a problem the business believes the customer has, rather than one the customer is actively experiencing and frustrated by. Strategyzer's Value Proposition Design framework is blunt about this: if you have to convince someone they have a problem, you probably do not have product-market fit. The pain needs to be real, felt and urgent enough that a buyer recognises it immediately when you name it. If your pitch needs ten slides to explain why the problem exists, you are already in trouble.
What the sales team hears every day. The first-hand account of market sentiment, common objections, recurring questions and the language buyers actually use is the single most underused input in proposition development. Sales conversations are where the theory of the market meets the reality of it. The gap between what the website says and what the sales team hears in calls is frequently the exact gap the proposition needs to close.
The competitive reality. Not what you think your differentiation is — what a buyer would conclude if they evaluated you alongside three alternatives with equivalent time and information. Where do you genuinely win? Where are you weaker? What are competitors claiming, and is that claim credible? The strongest propositions do not try to win on every dimension. They identify the one or two areas of genuine superiority and make those the commercial story.
The evidence. What proof exists that the product does what it claims? Customer outcomes. Data. Independent validation. Case studies. Early results. A proposition built on claims alone is a proposition that will not survive the scrutiny of a sceptical journalist, an enterprise procurement team or an AI tool trying to decide whether to recommend you. The evidence is not a supporting document for the proposition. It is part of the proposition.
Where It Gets Complicated: Commoditised Categories and Category Creation
The five inputs above will produce a strong proposition in most cases. But two specific situations require a different emphasis.
When the category is commoditised. Financial services is the clearest example. The product differences between many banking, insurance or wealth management offerings are genuinely small — pricing, features, terms. In these markets, the proposition is rarely the product. It is the brand story, the trust signals, the personality and the relationship. What makes a customer choose one provider over another with broadly similar terms is often something much harder to copy: a sense that this organisation understands me, acts with integrity, and will be there when things go wrong. That story is built over time, through every customer interaction and every piece of communication, not through a single campaign message.
When you are trying to own a category. If the ambition is to be the defining voice in a new or emerging space — to lead the conversation, attract the media attention and secure the speaking opportunities that come with genuine thought leadership — the proposition question shifts. It is no longer just about what your product does. It is about what you uniquely understand about where the market is going. The insight has to be original enough, and credible enough, to make a journalist think "that is a perspective I have not heard before." Founders who achieve this are not just selling a product. They are building a point of view that the market organises itself around.
In both cases, the work of getting the proposition right is the same. But what you are building it around is different.
How to Get It to One Clear Story
The practical problem with gathering insight from five different stakeholders with five different frames is that you end up with more raw material than you know what to do with.
Thát's how we land with that proposition statement, trying-to-say-everything to everyone, but end up saying nothing to no one.
The discipline is to make a deliberate choice about what the proposition is optimised for.
One primary audience segment.
One core problem they experience.
One reason your solution is better than the alternatives for that specific problem.
One proof point that makes the claim credible.
That is it.
Everything else can live in the supporting material — the product pages, the sales decks, the FAQs, the case studies.
The core proposition has to be simple enough that someone can repeat it back to you without looking at it again.
The test of a good proposition is whether a buyer who read it once, three days ago, can still remember what you do and why it matters to them. — Catherine Mak, Founder, ZILU Consultancy
A useful way to test it: take the proposition out of the office. Say it to someone who does not work in the business, does not know the market, and has no incentive to be kind about it. Ask them what they understood. Ask them what questions they still have. The questions they ask are the gaps the proposition has not closed.
It's not sexy but it's absolutely insightful.
The Proposition Is Not the Finish Line
Getting the proposition right is the foundation of a go-to-market strategy. It is not the whole strategy.
What the proposition does is give everything else something coherent to work from.
The PR story.
The content programme.
The paid media targeting.
The sales script.
The LinkedIn positioning.
The LLM visibility architecture — which we covered in episode one of this series. All of these perform better when they are built from a clear, validated, consistent single story.
And they all underperform when they are not.
The most common reason a launch lands flat is not that the channels were wrong, the budget was too small or the timing was off. More often than not, the positioning and proposition were not clear enough for your core target audience.
In the next episode of this series, Rajin and I go into PR and communications — and specifically how PR helps validate and sharpen the proposition further, through the conversations with journalists, analysts and the community that tell you what is landing and what is not.
Because the proposition is ready for testing when work is done and the key stakeholders sign it off, but it is nailed only when the market validates it and your buyers resonate with it.
Frequently Asked Questions: Building Your GTM Proposition
Who should be involved in developing the proposition? Every senior stakeholder who touches the customer or the market — founder, product, sales, marketing. Not to reach consensus by committee, but to surface the full picture before a single person or team synthesises it into one story. Consensus is not the goal. Clarity is.
How do you know when the proposition is ready? When a buyer outside your organisation can hear it once and immediately recognise the problem it describes, understand what makes your solution different, and have a reason to believe the claim. Not when the internal team is happy with the wording.
What if the team cannot agree on one message? The disagreement is the diagnostic. Where stakeholders diverge on the proposition is almost always where the real strategic question sits — usually about who the primary audience is or what the company actually does best. That question needs to be answered before the proposition can be written.
How often should a proposition be reviewed? Whenever the market changes significantly, when new competitive alternatives emerge, when the product evolves materially, or when sales feedback consistently points to a message that is not landing. A proposition is not a permanent document. It is a working hypothesis about what the market needs to hear — and it should be tested continuously.
Catherine Mak is Founder of ZILU Consultancy. She works as a Fractional CMO with growth-stage businesses, scaleups and organisations developing go-to-market strategy. This article is part of the GTM Strategy Series: Beyond the Template.
→ Read Episode 1: LLM Visibility Is Not a Shortcut. It Is a Trust Architecture.
→ Read Episode 3: PR Is Not a Launch Activity. It Is a GTM Foundation.
If you are struggling with your GTM proposition, or wondering if your recent repositioning lands well with your buyers, book a free discovery call for our Positioning and AI visibility Sprint, we are happy to hear your problem and share our perspective.