Most companies treat their category like a birthplace. You don't choose it; you're delivered into it. You sell CRM software, or project management, or analytics, and from that moment the rules are written for you. The competitors are named. The features are table stakes. The buyer arrives with a checklist someone else built, and your whole job — supposedly — is to win more boxes than the company across the street.
This is the quiet tragedy of how most teams think about positioning. They treat it as a noun: a slot, a spot on a grid, a coordinate you occupy and defend. "Where do we sit in the market?" is a real estate question, and real estate is fixed. You can renovate. You can't relocate the lot.
But the best positioning isn't a place you occupy. It's a thing you do. And more critically, it's a thing you do cross-functionally, bringing strategy, product, development and marketing teams together, each with a full seat at the table.
Positioning is a verb. It's the act of changing the question buyers ask before they ever start comparing answers. Because here's what almost everyone misses: a category is just a question that has hardened into a habit. "Which CRM should we install?" feels like a fact about the world. It isn't. It's a question someone taught the market to ask — and a question can be replaced.
A category is just a question that has hardened into a habit. And a question can be replaced.
The companies that break out don't win the comparison. They retire it. They walk in, change what the buyer is even trying to decide, and by the time the old players realize the conversation has moved, it's already happening on terms that favor the company that moved it.
Here's how the move works, and three companies who made it.
The Framework: Change the Question, Grow the Answer
Every category trains its buyers to ask a particular question. Reframing it takes three moves.
1. Name the Inherited Question
What does your category teach every buyer to ask before they've met you? It's usually so embedded it sounds like common sense. That's the tell. The inherited question is the water everyone's swimming in — and it almost always quietly favors the incumbent, because the incumbent helped write it.
Example: When Slack arrived, the inherited question in workplace tools was "Which team chat app should we use?" — a question that dropped Slack into a crowded field of instant-messaging clones, judged on features, where the buyer barely cared who won.
2. Find the Better Question
This is the one that, if buyers asked it, you'd already be the obvious answer — and the leader would suddenly look slow, bloated, or beside the point. Not a question you can technically answer better. A question the market should have been asking all along, that you happen to be built for.
Example: Slack stopped competing on chat features and asked a bigger one: "What if we could kill internal email?" Suddenly the rival wasn't another messaging app — it was the overflowing inbox everyone already hated. Against that question, Slack was the answer and the status quo was the problem.
3. Grow the Question, Not the Share
Here's the part that separates positioning from a clever tagline. You don't whisper the new question to win one deal. You repeat it — in your product, your content, your events, your pricing — until the market adopts it as the default. You're not carving a bigger slice. You're baking a bigger pie and putting your name on the recipe.
Example: Slack made "less email" the whole story — in its onboarding, its pitch, even the milestone stats it shared about how much internal email customers had eliminated. The phrase "email killer" became the market's shorthand, and Slack owned the question it had planted.
Three other major companies ran this same play. None of them won by being a better version of what already existed. And today, they're household (or office) names.
Salesforce: "Why Install Software at All?"
In 1999, the question every business asked was settled: which enterprise software should we buy, install, and maintain? That was the entire frame. CRM meant a heavy on-premise system, a procurement cycle measured in quarters, an IT team to babysit it, and a price tag that locked you in for years. The competition was about whose software was more powerful.
Marc Benioff didn't try to build more powerful software. He attacked the verb in the question. Salesforce launched with a logo of the word "SOFTWARE" inside a red circle with a line through it — No Software — and a message anyone could feel in their gut: nobody actually wants to buy software, install it, configure it, and maintain it. They want the outcome. Deliver it through a browser, on subscription, and the entire apparatus of installation and ownership simply evaporates.
The inherited question was "which software do we install?" Benioff replaced it with "why install software at all?" Against that question, the incumbents' greatest asset — their massive, deeply installed, heavily customized on-premise suites — became their greatest liability overnight. They couldn't credibly answer "why own software?" because owning software was their whole business.
Salesforce didn't fight for share of the on-premise CRM market. It made on-premise the wrong answer to a better question, and grew the cloud market it now led. The company went public in 2004 and became one of the defining enterprise software companies of the era — not by selling better CRM, but by ending the assumption that you buy CRM the old way at all.
HubSpot: "How Do We Get Found Instead of Buying Attention?"
By the mid-2000s, marketing had its own settled question: how do we buy more attention? Marketing meant interruption — ads, cold calls, direct mail, trade-show booths, telemarketers. The job was to push your message out in front of people who weren't asking for it, and the way to do more marketing was to buy more interruption.
In 2006, two founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, noticed the ground had shifted under that question. People had learned to tune interruption out. Meanwhile, the same buyers were actively searching — on Google, on blogs, on social media — for answers. So Halligan and Shah named a different motion: instead of pushing your message out, pull customers in by being the thing they find when they go looking. They gave it a name — inbound marketing — and then did something most companies forget to do. They grew the question.
They wrote the literal book — Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs — in 2009. They built a blog, a certification program, and eventually INBOUND, a conference that turned a positioning idea into a movement with a membership. They taught a generation of marketers to ask a new question: not "how do we buy more attention?" but "how do we earn it?"
The genius is that the new question made HubSpot the obvious answer and made the old playbook look not just expensive but embarrassing. By the time HubSpot went public in 2014 at a valuation north of a billion dollars, "inbound" wasn't HubSpot's tagline. It was an entire category's vocabulary — one HubSpot authored and led.
Gong: "How Do We Turn Conversations into Revenue?"
Gong's move is the cleanest of the three, because you can watch it happen on a single day.
Founded in 2015, Gong grew up inside a category called conversation intelligence — software that records and analyzes sales calls. The inherited question there was narrow: which call-recording tool should we use? It's a tooling question. It lands you in a feature fight, sold to a sales-ops manager, valued like a utility.
For about three years, Gong lived in that category. Then, on October 8, 2019, it left on purpose. The company declared a new category — revenue intelligence — built on a bigger claim: every customer conversation is data, and that data, aggregated, becomes a single source of truth about your entire revenue engine. Not "which tool records our calls?" but "how do we turn what customers actually say into revenue?"
That reframe changed everything about the deal. The buyer moved from sales-ops manager to revenue leader. The budget moved from tooling line to strategic platform. And the competition — every conversation-intelligence vendor — was suddenly answering the wrong, smaller question.
Then Gong grew the question relentlessly. Within roughly eighteen months, essentially every competitor was using the term "revenue intelligence." Forrester published its first Wave on it. Gartner issued its first market report on it. A phrase that drew zero Google searches in October 2019 was generating thousands a month. Gong didn't win the conversation-intelligence category. It abandoned it, named a larger one, and grew into the leader of a market it had defined — a company later valued in the billions.
How to Make the Move Yourself
You don't need a category-creation budget to think this way. You need to interrogate the question you've accepted. Start here:
- Find the inherited question. Listen to how prospects describe what they're shopping for. The words they use — the comparison they assume they're making — are the inherited question. If buyers arrive already comparing you feature-for-feature against an incumbent, you've accepted their question. Write it down in plain language. Naming it is half the work.
- Ask what question would make you the obvious answer. Not a question you can answer marginally better — a question that reframes what the buyer is even trying to accomplish, where your strengths become the point and the leader's strengths become baggage. Salesforce made "ownership" baggage. Gong made "it's just a recording tool" baggage. What's the question that turns your competitor's biggest asset into dead weight?
- Pressure-test it for truth. Reframing only works if the new question is more honest than the old one — if it names something buyers already half-feel but haven't had words for. "No software" worked because everyone secretly hated maintaining software. "Inbound" worked because everyone was already ignoring ads. A reframe that's merely clever gets exposed in the first demo. A reframe that's true spreads on its own.
- Then commit to growing it. A new question is worthless if you mention it once. It has to show up everywhere you do — your homepage, your sales conversations, your content, the way you name your own product. You're not running a campaign. You're teaching a market to think differently, which means saying the same true thing until the market says it back to you.
The Takeaway
The category you're in feels like a fact. It's a question someone else taught your buyers to ask — and questions can be retired.
Stop asking where you sit. Start asking what your buyers should be asking. Then build the company, and the market, that makes your answers inevitable. Positioning isn't a place. It's a move. Make it.
