The Rising Team Category Strategy: Enter Through Pain, Educate on Category Second

Category creation gets all the glory. The thought leadership pieces. The analyst briefings. The “we’re pioneering a new space” messaging that investors love. But category education kills deals when it happens too early in the buyer journey.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jennifer Dulski, CEO and Founder of Rising Team, explained how her company is building a new category—team performance platforms—without making buyers learn that category before they can buy. The sequencing is everything, and most category creators get it backwards.

The Category Creator’s Dilemma

Rising Team sits in an interesting position. They’re genuinely creating something new—a platform that combines team building, learning and development, and engagement measurement in ways that didn’t exist before. The natural instinct is to educate buyers on why this new category matters.

“We call it a team performance platform. I believe that is in some ways a new category,” Jennifer explains. “The categories that we tend to compete against are either learning and development. So learning management systems, facilitators, they hire to do trainings or team engagement, measurement and movement, and then possibly a third category, which is kind of just pure team building.”

Here’s the dilemma: if you lead with category education, you’re asking buyers to understand a new concept before they can evaluate whether you solve their problem. That’s two cognitive steps instead of one. And in B2B sales, every additional step is friction that kills deals.

The traditional category creation playbook says to educate the market. Write thought leadership. Brief analysts. Create frameworks. Build awareness of the new category so buyers understand why they need it. This works when you have massive marketing budgets and years to build the category.

Rising Team chose a different path.

The Pain Point Entry

Instead of leading with “team performance platforms,” Rising Team enters through problems buyers already recognize and are actively trying to solve.

“We often come in through one of the, if you will, jobs to be done of things like my pulse scores came back and they’re really bad. I need help moving them or I no longer have an off site budget. How do I still keep my team connected?” Jennifer notes.

Look at what’s happening in this entry motion. The buyer has a specific, acute pain:

• Pulse scores came back bad and they need to move them
• Offsite budget was eliminated but the team still needs connection
• Distributed team feels disconnected and engagement is dropping
• Psychological safety scores are concerning

These are problems buyers can articulate without any category education. A CIO doesn’t need to understand “team performance platforms” to know their cloud team feels disconnected. A VP of engineering doesn’t need category frameworks to recognize their engagement scores are declining.

The buyer is searching for solutions to specific problems they already understand. Rising Team shows up in that search with resources like their psychological safety blueprint. The entry point is the pain, not the category.

The Education Happens After Value

Here’s where Rising Team’s sequencing gets smart. They don’t avoid category education—they just delay it until after the buyer experiences value.

The typical first conversation isn’t “let me explain why team performance platforms are the future.” It’s “let me show you how we can help improve those pulse scores” or “here’s how we help distributed teams stay connected without expensive off-sites.”

The buyer evaluates Rising Team against the solutions they already know: hiring facilitators, using their learning management system, running engagement surveys, organizing team building activities. Rising Team doesn’t force them to evaluate a new category first.

But once the buyer sees Rising Team in action—once they’ve run a pilot and seen engagement scores actually improve—then the category positioning becomes relevant.

“We’re kind of a hybrid of those things because we build software that helps you run these team building sessions, you learn skills along the way. And we have a bunch of data about how we move employee engagement,” Jennifer explains.

At this point, the buyer has context. They’ve experienced what Rising Team does. Now the category education isn’t abstract—it’s explaining why what they just experienced works better than the alternatives they were considering.

The Complement Positioning

The category education Rising Team provides after initial value isn’t about displacement. It’s about complement.

“Our goal, though, is to complement those things. Like, we’re not trying to say, you know, you never want to hire a coach or facilitator. It’s just that oftentimes you can only afford that for so many people in your organization. And if you want to give something to everybody in the company, you need something more scalable to do that.”

This positioning does something subtle. It removes threat perception from existing vendors and budget owners. The CIO who just renewed their learning management system doesn’t need to defend that decision. The VP of People who brings in facilitators for executive off-sites doesn’t feel attacked.

Rising Team positions as the solution for the gap those existing solutions don’t fill: the hundreds or thousands of team members who can’t access expensive facilitators, the teams who need connection touchpoints between annual off-sites, the managers who want something more effective than generic team building.

The category education becomes “here’s why you need this in addition to what you’re already doing” rather than “here’s why everything you’re doing is wrong.”

The Data Makes Category Irrelevant

The ultimate reason Rising Team’s sequencing works is that once they have data, the category debate becomes secondary.

Their twelve-month pilots with several hundred people generate statistically significant results. Not qualitative feedback about teams feeling more connected. Actual data showing engagement scores increasing, manager effectiveness improving, and employee retention lifting.

“You can see based on the number of Rising Team sessions people run, their engagement scores go higher, their manager effectiveness scores go higher. We just got data back that shows we drive a significant lift in employee retention,” Jennifer notes about their work with Bank of Hawaii.

When a buyer is evaluating whether to expand Rising Team company-wide, finance doesn’t care about category definitions. They care about ROI. Does this platform move metrics that matter? The data answers that question regardless of what category Rising Team belongs to.

The category positioning becomes relevant for procurement (“which budget does this come from?”) and competitive analysis (“how does this compare to what we’re already using?”). But those are secondary questions that come after the value is proven, not barriers that prevent initial evaluation.

The Multi-Entry Advantage

Rising Team’s pain-first approach creates another advantage: multiple entry points into the same platform.

Because they don’t force buyers into a single category, different buyers can discover Rising Team through different pain points:

• The CMO searching for team building solutions finds them
• The VP of Engineering searching for engagement tools finds them
• The Chief Learning Officer searching for scalable development programs finds them

Each entry point leads to the same platform, the same results, the same expansion motion. But the buyer doesn’t need to understand the full scope upfront. They just need to recognize their specific pain point and see that Rising Team solves it.

The category education happens organically as they use the platform and realize it’s addressing needs beyond their initial pain point. The CMO who came in for team building discovers the learning and development value. The CLO who came in for scalable training discovers the engagement impact.

When Category Positioning Matters

This doesn’t mean category never matters. Rising Team is still building toward “team performance platform” as a recognized category. The positioning becomes important for:

Enterprise expansion discussions: When moving from division-level pilots to company-wide deployment, procurement needs to understand where this fits in the tech stack and which budget it comes from.

Competitive differentiation: When buyers are evaluating multiple solutions, category positioning helps explain why Rising Team delivers different value than traditional alternatives.

Market leadership: As the category matures, being recognized as the category leader creates advantages in awareness and inbound demand.

But all of these happen after initial traction. Category positioning is the message for the buyers who already understand what Rising Team does, not the message for buyers who are just discovering the problem.

The Underlying Principle

The insight here is about sequencing, not positioning. Rising Team isn’t avoiding category creation—they’re sequencing it correctly.

Lead with category education and you’re asking buyers to learn something new before they can evaluate whether you solve their problem. That’s friction that kills deals, especially for startups without massive brand recognition or marketing budgets.

Lead with pain point solutions and you’re meeting buyers where they already are. They understand their problem. They’re actively searching for solutions. You show up with an answer. The category education happens after they’ve experienced value and have context for why your approach is different.

This sequencing requires discipline. It means resisting the urge to educate buyers on your brilliance before solving their immediate problem. It means accepting that different buyers will think of you differently based on their entry point. It means focusing marketing on pain points rather than category ownership.

But for companies building genuinely new categories without infinite marketing budgets, it’s the difference between forcing adoption and enabling organic discovery. Rising Team chose the latter, and it’s working. Google, Cisco, Airbnb, and dozens of other companies are using the platform—most of them entered through specific pain points, not category curiosity.

The category positioning came later, after value was proven. That’s the sequence that scales.