Card payments · UK SME · 2021

Dojo: positioning an online product inside an in-person payments company.

SECTOR

Card payments

MARKET

UK hospitality and retail

COMPANY

Dojo

ROLE APPLIED FOR

Product marketing manager, online payments

DATE

Nov 2021

Fintech & Payments

The situation

The brief said plainly that the team was not sure how to position it.

Dojo sold card machines to UK small and mid-sized businesses, thousands of them, mostly hospitality and retail. Covid pushed those businesses to take payments remotely, and Dojo had built the pieces to let them: raw APIs for developers, and a checkout plugin for a business that already has a website but does not sell on it.

The brief said plainly that the team was not sure how to position it. It asked four things: the positioning and the reasoning behind it, which of three sales channels to prioritise, how the product fits the existing portfolio, and what else I would want to know.

One week, from outside, with no access to their data.

01 · What this engagement produced

7 of 34 outputs

Research

Competition

Segment, position and price

Message

Launch and enable

Measure and maintain

Solid is what a week from outside produced. Dashed needed their numbers.

02 · The decision

Which product the new one is sold next to.

An online payments product from a terminal company can be sold as a new thing or as an extension of the thing the customer already has. Both are defensible. Only one of them uses the fact that thousands of these businesses already run a Dojo device.

Struck

A standalone online payments product

Puts a first release against Stripe and Adyen on their own ground, with no reason to pick it.

Struck

Lead with a new, larger segment

Chases turnover the company has never served while the existing base is the warm one.

Chosen

One more way to be paid, on the same dashboard

Table, counter or a code scanned at the table, all three landing in one place.

The nine competitors all led on speed and simplicity, so speed was the price of entry. What was left to differentiate on was the integration, seven-day human support, short contracts and the dashboard.

03 · What the week produced

What a week from outside came to.

competitor pitches read line by line

sales channels ranked

ways to pay, drawn as one journey

Competitor claims are their own published taglines as they stood in November 2021.

04 · What I built

4 workstreams

Four workstreams, from the competitive read to the portfolio fit.

01What the competition already claimsNine pitches, read as one page.

02 Competition

Paypal, Stripe, Square, Adyen, Checkout, Amazon Pay, Worldline, Mollie and Sunday, taglines and value claims side by side
Fast, simple, secure and global appear in nearly all of them, which makes them price of entry rather than a difference
What nobody in the set claimed: integration with a card machine the merchant already owns, and a human on the phone seven days a week

02The positioningFive customer problems, five answers.

03 Segment, position & price · 04 Message

Written as problem to answer pairs: simple and secure payments saves time, integration with the terminal makes the day more efficient, seven-day support and remote assistance is peace of mind, PCI is compliance, the dashboard is growth
Four pillars carried into a single line for the page: simple and secure, integrated, reliable, insights
The difference stated plainly: simple and secure like everyone else, plus integrated payments, insights, short contracts and human support

03Channel priorityField agents first, and the reason.

05 Launch & enable

Field agents first: an established sales force with a track record, in direct contact with the existing customer base, in the target industries
Digital second, and only after the content exists: positioning, case studies, feature pages, demo videos, documentation
POS partners last, because the existing agreements and integrations were not visible from outside

04How it fits the portfolioOne restaurant, three ways to pay.

03 Segment, position & price

The same customer pays at the table on the device, at the counter, or by scanning a code that opens the online payment page
All three transactions arrive in one dashboard, which is the argument for buying the second product from the same company
The gain stated as time saved for the restaurant and one more way for its customer to pay, not as a revenue promise I could not size

05 · The judgment call

Ending on the questions instead of the recommendation.

The last slide was a list of what I did not have: API setup time, the maturity of their content and where they ranked, conversion rates and acquisition cost and churn, sales cycle time and cross-sell rates, and the terms of the POS partner network.

A channel recommendation without conversion data is a hypothesis. Naming it as one costs a slide. Being confidently wrong about it costs a quarter.

06 · What this proves

Competition first, table stakes named, channels ranked.

I read the competition first.

Nine pitches before a word of ours.

I separate price of entry from difference.

Fast and secure were table stakes in 2021.

I rank channels on evidence.

The warm base and the proven sales force first.

I name what I was missing.

The final slide was the data I did not have.

Scope

Briefed by the company. One week, unpaid, answered from public material with no access to their customers or their numbers.