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Last week we pulled your business out of your resume. Took a file in a folder and made it into an action plan.
This week we sharpen it.
Most positioning fails the same test. Open LinkedIn. Read your headline. Ask how many other people could credibly use the exact same words. If the answer is more than 50, you have a category label. Not positioning.
Five prompts this week to sharpen up. Paste into Claude. Do one a day.
Prompt 1: The Throughline Extraction
Your positioning starts with the pattern, not the title. Titles describe what you did. The throughline describes what you're for.
Here are the roles, projects, and companies from my career:
[PASTE YOUR BACKGROUND OR RESUME]
Ignore the titles. Ignore the industries. Tell me:
1. What kind of problem shows up in every role?
2. What kind of work did I keep doing even when it wasn't my job?
3. What do colleagues come to me for across different companies?
4. What specific skill or instinct got sharper every time I changed jobs?
Name the throughline that connects all of it.
Prompt 2: The Problem You Notice First
The best positioning names a problem the reader didn't know had a name. Your career taught you to see something specific. Naming it is your angle.
Based on my career, describe the specific type of problem I notice before anyone else in the room.
- What do I see immediately that my peers miss?
- What makes me lean forward in a meeting?
- What breaks my focus when I see it done badly?
- What question do I instinctively ask that others don't think to ask?
Give me the problem, not a category. Be specific about the texture of it.
Prompt 3: The 500 People Test
Category labels are invisible. A sharp bio stops the scroll. If your headline could belong to anyone in your industry, it belongs to no one. Including you.
Here is my current bio or LinkedIn headline:
[PASTE IT]
Tell me honestly:
- How many other professionals could use this exact same headline and it would still be accurate?
- Which words in this bio are category labels instead of positioning?
- What specific detail from my career is missing that would make this mine and nobody else's?
Rewrite it specific to my experience so it would be hard for anyone else on LinkedIn to credibly make the same claim.
Prompt 4: The Specificity Ladder
Positioning isn't a category you pick. It's a constraint stack you build. Each layer cuts another slice of the market that isn't yours, which leaves the slice that is.
Here is my current positioning statement:
[PASTE IT]
Run it through a specificity ladder. Write 5 versions, each one adding one new constraint:
Version 1: My current positioning.
Version 2: Add the specific audience I serve.
Version 3: Add the specific problem I solve.
Version 4: Add the specific moment in their journey when they come to me.
Version 5: Add the specific mechanism or approach I use.
Make version 5 sharp enough that only I could credibly claim it.
Prompt 5: The Conference Test
I love this one. How many times have you been to a conference and had to answer ‘the question.’ Yikes. The conference test is the truest pressure test for positioning. If you can't say it in one sentence to a stranger at a conference, it won't survive a scroll on LinkedIn either.
Imagine I'm at an industry conference and someone asks what I do. I have one sentence.
Based on the throughline you identified earlier, draft
3 single-sentence introductions I could use. Each one must:
- Name the specific audience I serve
- Name the specific outcome I produce
- Feel like something only I could say based on my background
Then tell me which of the three is sharpest and why.
The CMO Take
After two decades running marketing teams, I can tell you the real gap isn't talent. It's the corporate language people carry out the door. You learned to describe your work in ways the organization approved of, what they put in the job description that you were framed and put on the wall. The market doesn't care about any of that. Sharpen up. Don't niche down. You are the niche.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has a newsletter.
Yeah. That Arnold Schwarzenegger.
So do Codie Sanchez, Scott Galloway, Colin & Samir, Shaan Puri, and Jay Shetty. And none of them are doing it for fun. They're doing it because a list you own compounds in ways that social media never will.
beehiiv is where they built it. You can start yours for 30% off your first 3 months with code PLATFORM30. Start building today.
Go Deeper
Prompt Deep Dive: Positioning and Differentiation takes every prompt in this phase and stacks them into a complete positioning system. Frameworks, examples, and the exact sequence I use with clients. $17 on the Beehiiv store.
Before you go...
See you next Wednesday!
Keep building,
Tuck