Your sales team is missing quota. Marketing keeps generating leads that go nowhere. Deals are stalling. Competitors are winning. Customers say you’re “too expensive” or “not the right fit.”
What do you do?
Most companies assume they have a sales execution problem. They throw more money at sales training, invest in ABM, tweak their CRM, or push for more aggressive outreach. But none of it moves the needle.
Because the problem isn’t sales. It’s positioning.
If your company isn’t meeting revenue targets, chances are your customers don’t fully understand what category you’re in, how you’re different, or why you matter. Without clarity on these three elements, sales teams are forced to convince rather than close. That’s not a sales problem. That’s a positioning failure.
Positioning is the Hardest—and Most Misunderstood—Part of B2B Growth
Most companies think they have positioning figured out. They don’t.
The mistake is in how positioning is defined. Many companies confuse it with branding, assuming a good logo and tagline will create differentiation. Others believe positioning is just messaging—a clever slogan that will magically generate demand. Some think it’s about sales enablement, hoping a well-trained sales team can compensate for poor positioning. And then there are companies that focus too much on product marketing, pushing features rather than clear outcomes.
But positioning is the foundation of demand, growth, and revenue. If it’s unclear, everything else breaks.
How Weak Positioning Kills Growth
A lack of clear positioning slows sales cycles, weakens pricing power, and forces marketing and sales to operate in silos.
Consider this: Your sales team has a great first call. The prospect sounds interested, asks for a proposal, and then… nothing. Weeks pass. Follow-ups are met with “we’re still evaluating.” Six months later, the prospect buys from a competitor. The deal didn’t die because of a weak sales process. It stalled because your positioning didn’t create urgency.
Or take the common scenario where a prospect seems engaged, but ultimately chooses a larger, more established competitor. Even if your product is better, and your pricing is more competitive, they still hesitate. This isn’t a sales execution problem—it’s a risk perception problem. When your positioning doesn’t de-risk the decision for buyers, they default to the safe choice.
Weak positioning also leads to pricing pressure. When buyers don’t see meaningful differentiation, they resort to price comparisons. If sales teams keep hearing, “We love it, but can you lower the price?” it’s because the buyer hasn’t perceived enough unique value. Without strong positioning, sales teams are forced into discounting battles, leading to eroded margins and stalled growth.
Positioning and Market Maturity: Are You Fighting the Right Battle?
One critical factor that affects positioning—yet is often overlooked—is market maturity. Companies operating in well-defined, mature categories require a different positioning strategy than those creating a new category or entering an emerging space.
In mature markets, buyers already have an established mental model for solutions like yours. They know what your product does, and they likely already use something similar. Your challenge here is differentiation—making sure buyers perceive you as superior in a way that truly matters. Simply saying “we’re better” isn’t enough; you need to create a compelling reason to switch.
In emerging markets, buyers may not even realize they need a solution yet. The challenge here isn’t just differentiation—it’s education. If your category isn’t well understood, you need to define the problem first. Otherwise, buyers won’t know how to evaluate your offering, and they’ll default to familiar alternatives.
If your positioning doesn’t align with market maturity, you’ll struggle. In a mature market, focusing too much on category creation can make you seem like an unproven risk. In an emerging market, if you position yourself as just a better version of a legacy solution, buyers may evaluate you by the wrong standards.
Positioning and Buying Committees: The Ultimate Test
B2B sales are rarely about convincing a single person. Most deals go through a buying committee, where multiple stakeholders, each with different priorities, influence the decision. The CFO is focused on ROI, cost savings, and risk reduction. The IT team cares about compliance, security, and integration. The end users want ease of use and efficiency. And the internal champion—the person pushing for your solution—needs a strong business case to win over the rest of the group.
If your positioning only speaks to one of these stakeholders, the deal is likely to stall. A CFO might love the cost savings, but if IT sees integration challenges, they will veto the deal. A marketing leader might be excited about the platform’s automation capabilities, but if the operations team sees it as a burden, adoption will fail.
The key is to ensure your positioning resonates across the buying committee. Your internal champion should have the right narrative to sell your solution internally. If your messaging doesn’t align across decision-makers, sales teams will spend their time fighting internal objections rather than closing deals.
The Cost of Internal Misalignment: Positioning is Not Just a Marketing Problem
One of the biggest reasons positioning efforts fail is internal misalignment. Even if leadership believes the positioning is clear, if sales, marketing, and product teams aren’t reinforcing the same narrative, confusion spreads—both internally and externally.
Sales teams end up improvising their own explanations, leading to inconsistent messaging. Marketing teams create demand for the wrong audience, attracting leads that don’t convert. Product teams build features that don’t align with the true market need.
To fix this, positioning needs to be more than a marketing initiative. Every team must be trained on it. Sales, marketing, and product teams should all align on who the company serves, what differentiates it, and why it matters. Without this, positioning remains an abstract idea rather than a revenue-driving force.
What Happens When Positioning is Strong
When positioning is dialed in, companies don’t just sell—they win without a fight. The best-positioned companies stop responding to RFPs and start setting the agenda. Sales teams don’t waste time convincing hesitant buyers. Instead, they engage with prospects who already understand the value and are ready to move forward. Competitors become irrelevant because buyers don’t even consider them as viable alternatives. Marketing stops wasting budget on leads that will never convert.
How to Fix Your Positioning (Before Blaming Sales)
Start by defining your competitive frame of reference. What category are you in? What should buyers compare you to? If you don’t define this, the market will—and they might put you in the wrong category. Next, focus on differentiation that actually matters. Buyers don’t care about vague claims like “AI-powered” or “innovative.” They care about clear, outcome-driven differences that solve real problems.
From there, align your messaging across the entire buying committee. Does the CFO see a financial impact? Does IT see a seamless implementation? Does the end user see ease of use? And finally, reinforce your positioning in the market. Buyers don’t just choose the best product—they choose the product they remember. If your company isn’t consistently visible in the right channels, you won’t be top of mind when the buying decision happens.
What Happens If You Ignore This?
If you continue operating with weak positioning, the consequences are clear. Your best salespeople will leave. No one wants to work at a company where selling is a constant uphill battle. Your marketing spend will be wasted, attracting the wrong leads and fueling a cycle of frustration between sales and marketing. Worst of all, you will lose market share without realizing it. While you’re busy refining your messaging and tweaking your sales process, competitors with stronger positioning will dominate the market.
The choice is simple. Fix your positioning now and build a revenue engine that fuels itself, or ignore it and watch your pipeline shrink, your deals slow down, and your competitors pull ahead.
