How Rising Team Sells in Three Categories Without Owning Any of Them

How Rising Team Sells in Three Categories Without Owning Any of Them

Category creation sounds glamorous until you realize it means explaining what you do in every single sales conversation. Category ownership sounds strategic until you realize it means fighting entrenched competitors with decade-old budgets. Rising Team chose a third path: compete everywhere, own nothing, win anyway.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jennifer Dulski, CEO and Founder of Rising Team, explained how her team performance platform landed Fortune 500 logos by entering through pain points rather than category definitions. The strategy isn’t about avoiding the category question—it’s about sequencing it correctly.

The Category Intersection Problem

Most positioning advice assumes you’re in one category. What happens when you’re legitimately in three?

“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.”

This is positioning hell for traditional frameworks. Learning management systems have established budgets, procurement processes, and vendor relationships. Engagement platforms have executive sponsors and quarterly measurement cadences. Team building has event budgets and internal champions. Each category has its own buying motion, evaluation criteria, and competitive landscape.

Rising Team does all three. Their software helps leaders run interactive workshops (team building), teaches skills along the way (learning and development), and moves engagement metrics (employee engagement). Add an AI coach that provides personalized advice about team members, and you have something that genuinely doesn’t fit existing boxes.

The temptation is to pick a lane or create a new category and try to own it. Rising Team did neither.

Enter Through Jobs to Be Done

Here’s what actually happens in Rising Team’s sales process. A functional leader at a large company has a specific, acute problem. Their pulse scores came back bad. Their offsite budget got eliminated. Their distributed team feels disconnected and engagement is dropping. They’re searching for solutions to that specific problem.

“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.

Notice what’s not happening in this entry motion. Rising Team isn’t explaining they’re pioneering a new category called team performance platforms. They’re not positioning against learning management systems or engagement tools. They’re not educating buyers on why traditional team building fails to deliver ROI.

They’re solving an immediate problem the buyer already understands and is actively searching for solutions to. The category education happens later, after the buyer sees value.

The Complement Strategy

Most category positioning starts with displacement. You position against the incumbent category and explain why yours is better. Rising Team flips this entirely.

“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 but powerful. It removes threat perception from buyers who already have vendors in adjacent categories. 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 offsites doesn’t feel criticized. Rising Team solves the scaling problem that those solutions don’t address.

The result? Instead of fighting for budget against established categories, Rising Team captures budget that wasn’t being spent at all—the budget for middle management teams who can’t access expensive facilitators, or the teams who need connection touchpoints between annual offsites.

The Expansion Motion

The brilliant part of this strategy reveals itself in how customers expand. Rising Team typically enters through one functional or divisional leader. A CMO, CIO, or VP of engineering with both budget and acute pain.

“Sometimes it’ll be a CMO or a CIO or a VP of engineering who says, I really want something like this for my team,” Jennifer explains. These buyers run pilots with their own organizations, generate data showing improved engagement and manager effectiveness, and become internal champions.

Then the organic expansion begins.

“As an example, we have a big tech company, we have their cloud. And then just yesterday, someone from their cloud moved to a different part of the organization, says, now I want to use this over here.”

This land-and-expand motion works because Rising Team isn’t tied to a specific budget or procurement process. They’re not locked into the learning and development annual planning cycle. They’re not waiting for the next engagement survey to justify expansion. They’re solving immediate pain for individual leaders, and those leaders become evangelists who spread the platform across the organization.

The Data Unlock

Category positioning eventually matters for enterprise expansion. When you want to go from a few teams to company-wide deployment, someone needs to justify it to finance. This is where Rising Team’s approach to pilots becomes critical.

Their pilots run for twelve months with several hundred people—large enough and long enough to generate statistically significant data. Not anecdotes 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 for them,” Jennifer notes about their work with Bank of Hawaii.

This data transcends category debates. Finance doesn’t care whether you’re a learning platform or an engagement tool. They care whether you move metrics that impact the bottom line. Retention lift alone justifies the investment for most organizations.

The Category Question Revisited

So what category is Rising Team actually in? Jennifer’s answer reveals the strategy’s sophistication.

“It’s pretty interesting. We call it a team performance platform. I believe that is in some ways a new category. 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. We’re kind of a hybrid of those things.”

The “kind of hybrid” positioning has pros and cons, Jennifer acknowledges. The cons are predictable: longer sales cycles when buyers need to figure out which budget Rising Team comes from, more education required to explain what the platform does, potential confusion in market positioning.

But the pros outweigh them. By not forcing themselves into a single category, Rising Team can capture demand from multiple entry 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 data on results, and the same expansion motion. The category ambiguity that looks like weakness in positioning becomes strength in practice.

The Underlying Principle

The lesson here isn’t that category positioning doesn’t matter. It’s that sequencing matters more. For companies at the intersection of multiple established categories, forcing early category definition creates unnecessary friction.

Instead, Rising Team enters through specific jobs to be done, delivers value that transcends category definitions, and lets the data speak for itself. By the time the category conversation happens—during enterprise expansion discussions or procurement reviews—they have proof of results that makes the category debate secondary.

This approach requires discipline. It means resisting the urge to educate buyers on your category before they’ve experienced your value. It means accepting that different buyers will think of you differently. It means focusing marketing on pain points and outcomes rather than category ownership.

But for companies genuinely solving problems across multiple categories, it’s the difference between forcing your way into existing boxes and creating your own path to market. Rising Team chose the latter, and it’s working. Google, Cisco, Airbnb, and dozens of other companies use the platform—regardless of what category it technically belongs to.