Your category sets the value buyers compare you against.
How a no-code platform stopped being filed under “digital forms”, moved into workflow automation, and roughly tripled its average contract value.
Problem, solution, result in thirty seconds.
A bigger product in a smaller box.
The company builds a no-code platform for frontline and field teams. Customers use it to move information, approvals and work between the people doing the job and the people running the operation.
Its first use case was replacing paper and PDF forms, and that is where the market had placed it: in the digital forms category, next to much simpler and cheaper tools.
The brief was positioning. The problem was the category.
The ask was to sharpen the positioning. On the surface, it looked like a messaging problem: buyers didn't seem to understand the full value.
The deeper problem was the category. Because buyers filed the product under digital forms, they compared it with other forms tools and expected a forms-tool price. The category decided which problems Sales led with, which alternatives buyers weighed, which capabilities mattered, and what counted as a reasonable contract value. Better copy inside the wrong category would never change that.
Every commercial problem sits somewhere on this chain, from choosing the market on the left to what Sales says on the right. Decisions on the left shape everything to their right.
The company thought it needed sharper messaging. The real constraint was the category it sat in, which set the price buyers expected before a sales conversation even started.
Four decisions, in order.
I didn't start by rewriting the copy. I started with what buyers were comparing the product against.
Change the category.
I moved the competitive frame from digital forms to workflow automation. That one decision changed which alternatives buyers weighed, which problems Sales opened with, and what buyers considered a reasonable price.
Sell outcomes, not features.
I rebuilt the narrative around the operational outcomes frontline teams get: work moving faster, fewer handoffs lost, clearer approvals. I also future-proofed it against AI, so the story would still hold as AI features spread across the category.
Make pricing a value story.
The pricing tiers read like a list of features. I rewrote them around the value each tier delivers, and gave Sales competitive positioning and guidance for enterprise conversations.
Build the function to last.
I helped leadership set up a Product Marketing function, so the category, narrative and pricing logic would be owned and kept up to date after I left.
A bigger category. A bigger price.
Before and after the category change.
Roughly tripled, because buyers now compared it against workflow automation, not forms tools.
Fewer objections, because the value story came before the price.
A bigger category brings a bigger problem, and a bigger budget.
Category is not a copywriting choice.
The product didn't change. What changed was the shelf buyers found it on. Once it sat in workflow automation instead of digital forms, buyers compared it with bigger alternatives, weighed a bigger problem, and accepted a bigger price.