Positioning
The company that sounds like everyone else loses to the company that doesn't.
Competitive positioning problems are incredibly difficult to catch from the inside. The signs are there, but they can easily be mistaken for symptoms of other, lesser issues. We're looking for lost deals, stalled pipelines, and a sales team that can't explain why a buyer should pick you over the competition.
Why it happens
Positioning is the foundation of go-to-market strategy.
You'll probably feel the impact of a positioning problem long before you actually see it.
Deals are stalling. The homepage sounds like everyone else's. It's obvious in hindsight, but nearly impossible to diagnose from the inside.
The longer you work inside a company, the more its language becomes invisible to you. What feels specific and differentiated to your team reads as generic to your buyers. You can't read the label from inside the jar.
An external assessment of your positioning can create clarity around what you want to own in the market, laying the foundation for a brand story that sets you apart 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"
If buyers understand the category but can't articulate why they would choose you, that's a competitive positioning gap. Late-stage price objections can be positioning issues in disguise, too. Buyers who don't see a difference often compare prices.
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 brand 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 $650 and requires no internal access to your systems or data to get started.