As a business scales, positioning becomes simultaneously harder to agree on and codify and increasingly more important. In most organizations, if you ask ten people what the business does and who it does it for, you’ll often get ten different answers. Those answers might be close to one another, and they might even use some of the same language, but they won’t be exactly the same. Over time, this becomes a problem.

In the beginning, if the delta between the definitions is small enough, it might not be an issue. If sales and marketing, as an example, are at least directionally correct in their own interpretations of the business’s positioning, your customer base probably won’t notice. But over time, as more people are added to the team, and as your products and services scale, the ways in which people describe the business will start to diverge.

When positioning isn’t clearly defined, people begin to fill in the blanks themselves. Your sales team tells one story. Your marketing team tells another. And each of your other teams do the same. Each version of that story may sound reasonable (and even true) on its own, but taken together, they contrast or conflict. Worse, they cause confusion.

At its core, positioning is an act of clarity. It’s a process of naming what’s true about your business so everyone, inside and outside the organization, can see it the same way.

Seeing the Patterns Over Time

I’ve written before that at the start of business’s lifecycle, clarity often feels like a luxury. Early-stage companies are often happy to take any business they can get. The goal in those early months and years is survival, and excluding any customer segment at all can feel like self-destruction.

But as a business operates over time, patterns start to emerge. You notice which clients you serve best, which offerings create the most impact, and which kinds of work drain more energy than they deliver. Those patterns are signals. Positioning is the process of reading those signals and realigning the entire organization around them.

When you boil it down, the best positioning statements are observational—they describe what’s already true about the business when it’s operating at its best. The idea is that you don’t invent this clarity, you simply uncover it. You remove, as Michaelangelo supposedly put it, everything that’s not David.

Finding Internal and External Clarity

When you solidify your positioning, it helps both internally and externally. Internally, it aligns teams around a shared understanding of what the company stands for and who it’s built to serve. Externally, it makes the brand recognizable. Every marketing message, sales call, and customer interaction starts to reinforce the same truth.

But the questions as ever, is where to start. If you’re not sure whether your organization is clear on its positioning, here are three simple things you can do right now:

1. Ask five people inside the company what the business does, who it serves, and why it matters. Write down their answers.

2. Ask five people outside the company—customers, partners, or peers—the same question. Write down their answers and compare the two sets of responses.

3. Synthesize what you heard into a draft positioning statement. Look for the overlap between internal and external answers. That’s where your organization’s truth lives.

Clarity doesn’t come from guessing—it comes from listening, comparing, and refining until everyone can describe the business the same way. When you do that, positioning stops being a marketing exercise and starts becoming a tool that aligns teams, sharpens strategy, and builds confidence at every level of the organization. Because when everyone can see the business clearly, they can finally move it in the same direction.