Positioning
The company that sounds like everyone else loses to the company that doesn't.
Most B2B companies have a competitive positioning problem they can't see from the inside. The symptoms show up in lost deals, stalled pipelines, and a sales team that can't consistently articulate why a buyer should choose you over the obvious alternative.
Why it happens
Positioning is the most foundational element of B2B go-to-market strategy.
When competitive positioning breaks down, it shows up in predictable places. Your homepage sounds like your competitors'. Your sales team describes the product differently than your marketing does. Deals stall at the "why us" stage. Buyers might even say you're too expensive without really understanding what they'd be paying for.
These aren't surface-level messaging problems. They're product positioning problems, and they're almost impossible to see from the inside.
When you've been working inside a company, its language slowly becomes invisible to you. The terms you use, the value claims you lead with, the way you describe what makes you different, all starts to feel obvious and specific when it's actually generic and interchangeable to your buyers. You can't read the label from inside the jar.
This is where outside perspective is essential. A structured external read of your B2B brand positioning can surface things that internal teams miss. Combined with clarity about what you want to stand for, that outside view becomes the foundation for positioning that holds up from the homepage to the sales conversation.
The Signals
How to tell if your positioning is the problem.
Your headline could belong to any company in your category
If you swapped your company name for a competitor's and the homepage still made sense, your positioning isn't doing its job. Strong B2B positioning makes your homepage unmistakably yours and gives buyers a reason to keep reading.
Deals stall at "why you" rather than "why this solution"
When buyers understand the category but struggle to articulate why your company specifically, that's a competitive positioning gap. Late-stage price objections are often positioning problems in disguise. Buyers who can't feel the difference will often default to comparing on price.
Marketing and sales describe the product differently
When B2B brand positioning isn't clear and consistent, every person fills the gap with their own interpretation. The result is a fragmented market presence that undermines trust at every touchpoint, from your website to sales decks, discovery calls to proposals.
You're winning on relationships rather than differentiation
If your best salespeople close deals because of who they know rather than what you stand for, you don't have a repeatable go-to-market motion. You have a competitive positioning problem just waiting to bite you when those individuals leave.
The diagnostic
How we assess B2B competitive positioning
The Brand Positioning & Differentiation pillar is one of eight areas assessed in the GTM diagnostic. It examines whether your competitive positioning is genuinely differentiated or just a copy-paste of a competitor.
The assessment looks at your market position from the outside in, examining how your positioning reads across your website, your sales materials, your competitive landscape, and your category as a whole. It identifies whether you've staked out territory competitors can't claim, and whether that is actually visible in the way you go to market.
That external read gets combined with your own perspective on what you want to stand for. The gap between those two things is where the most useful B2B positioning strategy work happens, revealing blind spots and gaps between who you want to be and how you're really perceived. You can't read the label from inside the jar. The diagnostic reads it for you.
Because positioning sits upstream of almost every other GTM problem, this pillar is often where the most impactful diagnostic findings emerge. Weak competitive positioning makes your messaging harder to write, demand harder to sustain, and pipeline harder to predict.
You can't read the label from inside the jar. The most important thing about how you're positioned in the market is often the last thing you'd think to question, and the first thing an outside diagnostic surfaces.
Find out if positioning is what's actually broken.
The GTM diagnostic assesses your B2B competitive positioning alongside seven other pillars, giving you a complete picture of where the problem lives rather than where it's showing up. The lite diagnostic starts at $500 and requires no internal access to your systems or data to get started.