Every B2B marketing program has an implicit positioning. The question is whether it was developed deliberately or inherited by default from whatever the founders said in the early pitch decks, whatever the first salesperson led with, and whatever the website happened to say when it was last updated two years ago.
Inherited positioning is almost always wrong. It describes the product rather than the buyer’s problem. It uses language the company is comfortable with rather than language the buyer uses. And it makes claims every competitor can also make, which means it differentiates nothing.
Deliberate positioning work is one of the highest-leverage investments a B2B marketing team can make — and one of the most consistently skipped.
What Positioning Actually Is
Positioning is the answer to a specific question in the buyer’s mind: why should I choose you over the alternatives?
It’s not a tagline. It’s not a mission statement. It’s not a list of features. It’s a clear, credible, and differentiated answer to the question every buyer is asking before they engage with a vendor.
Good positioning is specific to a buyer, addresses a real problem that buyer has, and makes a claim that’s both true and not equally true of your competitors. That last criterion is the hardest — and the one most positioning exercises fail.
Why Positioning Work Gets Skipped
It’s Uncomfortable
Good positioning requires making choices about who you’re not for. Saying your product is ideal for mid-market B2B companies with 50 to 250 employees means acknowledging it’s not ideal for enterprise organizations or SMBs. Most leadership teams resist that specificity — they don’t want to rule anyone out.
The result is positioning so broad it says nothing. “We help businesses grow.” “We deliver results.” “We’re a trusted partner.” These statements are true for almost every company in every category — which means they’re differentiated from nothing.
Nobody Owns It
Positioning exists at the intersection of product, sales, and marketing. Because it crosses functions, it often falls through the gaps. Product says one thing. Sales says another. Marketing builds campaigns around a third. The buyer encounters three different stories and trusts none of them.
Effective positioning requires someone to own it — and that person is usually the CMO, making it by default a marketing leadership responsibility.
The Work Is Slow
Positioning development — done properly — involves customer research, competitive analysis, internal alignment work, and iterative testing. It takes weeks or months to do correctly. Most marketing organizations are under pressure to produce campaigns now, which makes the foundational work feel like it can wait.
It can’t. Every campaign built on unclear positioning is an experiment with no control — you can’t learn from the results because you don’t know what you were testing.
What Good Positioning Work Looks Like
Start With the Buyer, Not the Product
The most common positioning mistake is starting with what the company does and working outward. Start instead with the buyer: who they are, what problem they’re experiencing, what solutions they’ve already tried, and what’s kept those solutions from fully working.
Your positioning should fit into the gap between what they’ve tried and what they actually need. That gap is where differentiation lives.
Test Against Competitive Claims
Before committing to a positioning statement, check every claim against your competitors. If three of your four competitors can make the same claim credibly, the claim isn’t differentiating. Keep refining until you’ve found the intersection of true, provable, and unique to you.
Get Sales in the Room
The sales team has the most current, unfiltered view of how buyers describe their problems, what questions they ask, and what they say when they choose a competitor instead of you. That intelligence is essential input to positioning work. A positioning exercise done without sales input produces language marketing likes and buyers don’t recognize.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should a B2B company revisit its positioning?
When the business significantly changes — new product lines, new markets, meaningful shifts in the competitive landscape, or evidence that the current positioning isn’t resonating with buyers. Positioning shouldn’t be revised every year for its own sake, but it should be treated as a living hypothesis: regularly tested against buyer feedback and competitive reality, not assumed to be permanently correct.
What’s the most common positioning mistake in B2B marketing?
Leading with product features rather than buyer outcomes. “We offer X capability with Y integration” is a feature description. “We help [specific buyer] achieve [specific outcome] without [specific pain]” is positioning. Buyers don’t buy features. They buy outcomes — and positioning that speaks to outcomes converts better at every stage of the funnel.
How does positioning affect paid media performance?
Directly. Paid media tests your positioning at scale — it shows you which messages generate click-throughs from the right buyers and which ones don’t. Poor positioning produces high impression volume and low conversion rates, because the message is reaching the right people and not resonating. Strong positioning produces lower cost-per-click, higher conversion rates, and better quality leads, because the message is doing the qualification work before the buyer clicks.
Can an agency help with positioning, or is this internal work?
Both — the best positioning work combines internal knowledge with external perspective. The company has the product expertise and the customer relationships. A good agency brings competitive market intelligence, buyer insight from adjacent categories, and the external perspective that helps identify what the company is too close to see. The work should be collaborative, not delegated entirely to either side.
The Foundation Everything Else Is Built On
A marketing program without clear positioning is a collection of campaigns with no connective tissue. The ads say one thing. The website says another. The sales deck says a third. And the buyer, encountering all three inconsistencies, learns not to trust any of them.
Positioning work isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t produce a tangible deliverable that looks impressive in a status update. But it’s the work that makes every subsequent marketing dollar more effective — and the absence of it is what makes marketing programs that look active and feel expensive produce results that consistently disappoint.
[If you want help doing the positioning work your program needs, let’s talk.]
About the Author
Dan Enrico has spent nearly two decades doing one thing: building marketing programs that produce results senior leaders can take to their board. As Vice President of Strategy at DSM, he works directly with CMOs and marketing leaders across New Jersey and nationally to find where marketing investment is falling short, uncover where the real growth opportunity lives, and build the integrated strategy to go after it. Dan doesn’t wait to be told what to do. He shows up with a point of view, backs it with data, and stays accountable to the outcome. That’s the standard he holds himself to — and the standard every DSM client should expect.