Why Positioning Matters More Than You Think

Rewritten September 2026. Same argument, same examples, fewer dashes.

Ask ten B2B software companies what they do and you’ll get ten answers, half of them jargon and the rest so vague they could be describing anything. That isn’t a messaging problem. Messaging is what you write once you know what you are. The problem sits underneath it.

Positioning is the set of decisions about what the product is, who it’s for, what it replaces and why anyone should care. Skip them, or leave them half made, and every sales call opens with ten minutes of clarification, every campaign brief opens with an argument, and the website gets rewritten each quarter by whoever’s most annoyed with it that month. I’ve been the first product marketer into three companies and found roughly that state in each. It’s rarely because anyone’s bad at their job. It’s because nobody’s been made to choose.

This is what those choices are, two ways of making them, four companies that made them well, and the ways I see them go wrong most often.

What positioning is, and what it isn’t

It isn’t the tagline. It isn’t the feature list, or the one-liner on slide two of the deck, or the paragraph on the website that begins “we believe”. Those are outputs. Positioning is what they’re built on: the answers to who this is for, what problem it solves, what kind of product it is, and why it beats whatever they’re doing now.

Without those answers the messaging gets messy, the sales team wings it, and the product feels generic even when it isn’t. The difference shows up side by side. “A flexible collaboration tool for modern teams” tells you nothing, and I’ve read it on about 40 homepages. “For product teams of five to 50 who’ve outgrown a shared doc, Flowbase is a lightweight planning tool that keeps priorities visible without adding process” tells you in one sentence whether it’s for you, and if it isn’t, you can leave.

In B2B software every market is crowded and every buyer is busy, so if you don’t decide what you are, the buyer will decide for you, in about eight seconds, and usually by lumping you in with whichever competitor they saw last.

The six decisions

Positioning isn’t magic and it isn’t vibes. It’s six decisions. Skip any of them and the product ends up sounding like every other intuitive, scalable, AI-powered platform out there.

1. The customer

Not “everyone”. Not “startups”. Not “businesses of all sizes”. A specific person with a job title you can picture, who has the problem you solve and is losing time or money to it this week. If you can’t picture them, nothing downstream will work, because every other decision is made on their behalf.

2. The problem

What’s broken in their day. This isn’t what the product does; it’s what it fixes. A useful signal is a workaround: if they’ve been running the thing in a spreadsheet, or in Notion, or in someone’s head, the pain is real and they’ve already priced it.

3. The category

What kind of thing you are, in the words they’d use. Buyers need a folder to put you in. CRM, data tool, workflow thing, whatever it is. If you don’t hand them a folder they’ll pick one themselves, usually the wrong one, and you’ll spend the first call climbing out of it. Don’t be clever here. Plain beats clever every time this comes up.

4. The outcome

What they can finally do once they’ve got it. Not the feature, the result. “Five hours a week back” lands. “Streamlined operations” is noise that every competitor makes too.

5. The difference

Why you, over the next tab they’ve got open. What you have that nobody else does, or do so much better it amounts to the same thing. “Easy to use” isn’t a differentiator because everyone says it. The thing your competitors can’t say is.

6. The proof

Numbers, logos, quotes, or at the very least a demo that does what the website claims. Buyers are sceptical, and they should be. If you can’t back a claim up yet, make a smaller one.

Get those six settled and everything else gets easier: website copy, sales decks, campaigns, the investor deck. Leave them unsettled and you’ll be “clarifying” what the product does on every call until someone decides to rebrand, which fixes nothing and costs six months.

Two frameworks, in the right order

Both of these are decades old in framework years and both still work. The trick is the order.

Geoffrey Moore’s template

From Crossing the Chasm. One sentence, six slots:

For [customer] who [has this problem], [product] is a [category] that [delivers this benefit]. Unlike [the alternative], it [does this differently].

Filled in, it looks like this: for growth-stage SaaS teams sick of juggling tools, FlowUp is a project management platform that replaces docs, tasks and spreadsheets with one connected workspace. Unlike Asana or Trello, it’s built for speed and near-zero setup.

Its whole value is that you can’t fill it in without deciding things. Put “everyone” in the first slot and watch the rest of the sentence fall over.

April Dunford’s method

From Obviously Awesome. Dunford runs it the other way round: start with what makes you different and work backwards to the market.

1. Competitive alternatives. What would customers use if you didn’t exist? Spreadsheets count. Doing nothing counts.
2. Unique attributes. What have you got that those alternatives haven’t?
3. Value. What do those attributes let the customer do?
4. Who cares most. Which kind of customer loses sleep over that value?
5. Market category. What kind of product are you, in their words?
6. Trends, optionally. Is something changing that makes you more relevant now than two years ago?

It’s slower than Moore, and it’s the one that produces positioning you didn’t have when you sat down, because it makes you look at what the customer would do instead of you rather than what you’d like them to think.

Which one

Both. Dunford to think, Moore to check. If the Dunford work won’t compress into Moore’s sentence, you haven’t finished. If the Moore sentence came easily, you’ve probably described the product rather than positioned it, and going back through Dunford will show you where.

Four companies that got it right

You don’t learn this from frameworks. You learn it from companies that made the decisions well, particularly in B2B software, where the pull towards sounding like everyone else is strong.

Slack

Slack never called itself a chat tool. It went after internal email, which everybody hated already, and sold the way out.

• Customer: teams stuck in reply-all chains and standing meetings.
• Problem: email was slow, messy and never built for a team working in real time.
• Category: team communication platform.
• Outcome: everyone in the loop, faster, in one place.
• Difference: channels, real-time messages, and it plugged into everything.
• Proof: people say “Slack me”. Nobody ever said “email me” with any enthusiasm.

They didn’t explain the features. They painted the old way as broken and themselves as the fix. The bit to take: if the thing you replace is universally disliked, sell the escape rather than the tool.

HubSpot

HubSpot didn’t try to beat the marketing suites of 2010 on features. It called them outbound, named the alternative inbound, wrote the playbook, and sold the software to run it.

• Customer: SMB marketers tired of paying for ads and cold lists that went nowhere.
• Problem: expensive outbound, shrinking returns.
• Category: inbound marketing platform, a term they coined.
• Outcome: leads that come to you because you were useful first.
• Difference: content, SEO, CRM and automation in one tool sized for small teams.
• Proof: a movement, a certification, a conference, and eventually a listed company.

The product was fine. The story was the business. The bit to take: if you have a different point of view about how the job should be done, name it, and make your product the way to do it.

Notion

Most tools go narrow. Notion went wide and made it work by selling flexibility rather than any one function.

• Customer: product teams, startups and creatives running five tools that don’t talk to each other.
• Problem: notes in Docs, tasks in Trello, the wiki in Confluence, the actual plan in someone’s head.
• Category: all-in-one workspace.
• Outcome: one place that becomes whatever the team needs it to be.
• Difference: the building-block model. Docs, wikis, boards and databases from the same parts.
• Proof: organic growth, a template economy, and a community that does the marketing.

Notion didn’t try to be the best notes app or the best task manager. It offered a blank canvas and let users make it theirs, which competitors weren’t even attempting. The bit to take: if flexibility is the product, show what people build with it rather than saying “flexible”.

Snowflake

Snowflake could have been another cloud data warehouse. It reframed the category instead.

• Customer: enterprises on expensive, hard-to-scale legacy data stacks.
• Problem: data in silos, poor performance, sharing that needed a project plan.
• Category: the Data Cloud, a phrase they invented to step away from “warehouse” and “lake”.
• Outcome: store, query and share data across teams and clouds without the friction.
• Difference: storage and compute decoupled, cross-cloud, secure sharing built in.
• Proof: a $3.4bn IPO and a reputation as the default for modern data infrastructure.

They led with a new frame rather than a feature list. “Data Cloud” was a claim about how data should work, and the product backed it. The bit to take: if the technology really is different, rename the problem and let the product be the obvious answer to the new version of it.

What they have in common

Each positioned against a real, painful status quo, for a specific user, in a frame that felt fresh and was easy to repeat, with a benefit that outran the feature list and proof behind it. None of them had “scalable AI-powered platform” anywhere near the top of the homepage. Those are old examples now, and there are better ones in niches nobody writes up, but the pattern holds.

Where it goes wrong

Most positioning isn’t bad because people are lazy. It’s bad because they try to say too much, decide too little, or copy what’s already there.

Trying to be for everyone. “For all industries and team sizes” is believed by no one and remembered by no one. Pick the customer you win most often and speak to them. You can widen later, after you’ve won somewhere.

Features instead of outcomes. Nobody cares that you have dashboards, use AI, or support integrations. They care what they get. “Customisable reporting module” is a yawn; “reporting in a morning instead of a week” is a meeting. Translate every feature by asking what it lets the user do better, faster or with less pain.

No villain. If you’re not positioned against something, an old tool, a bad process, a broken system, you’re describing rather than positioning. “A scalable platform that empowers teams” is every SaaS product ever made. Name the enemy. Email, spreadsheets, the incumbent, the way it was done before you.

Words a competitor could use. Read five sites in your category and you’ll find all-in-one, seamless, intuitive, transform and powerful on every one of them. If you’d be happy swapping homepages with a competitor, that’s the problem, and it’s a bigger one than the copy. Use plain language, lifted where you can from customer interviews. The test I use is crude: could a competitor say this sentence with a straight face? If yes, cut it and keep digging until you find one they couldn’t.

A new category with no story. Renaming yourself “the something cloud” or “a platform for revenue orchestration” doesn’t make you original, it makes you confusing. New category means a new story with three parts: what’s broken about the old way, why the current category can’t fix it, and what’s changed in the market that makes your approach make sense now.

Claims you can’t back. “10x productivity” and “trusted by the world’s best teams” mean nothing without receipts. Buyers assume you’re exaggerating; prove you aren’t, or make the claim smaller until you can.

Different stories from different teams. Sales says one thing, marketing another, and the product does a third. Mixed messages kill trust faster than a bad product does. Once the positioning is decided, write it down, share it, and make it the thing every deck and page gets checked against.

Weak positioning is a tax on growth. It slows marketing, sales and adoption at the same time, quietly, in a way nobody can quite point at. Strong positioning feels obvious in hindsight, which is a decent test: if yours needs a paragraph of explanation, it isn’t finished.

The bit that’s changed since I first wrote this

Since about 2024 most B2B websites have been written, or at least first-drafted, by the same handful of models, and it shows: the same cadence, the same pivots, the same six adjectives. That makes positioning worth more, not less. When every site sounds the same, the one that stands out is the one that made a specific decision about who it’s for and said it plainly. I’d go further. Within a couple of years the ability to write one sentence a competitor couldn’t will be the most valuable thing a product marketer does, and most of the rest of the job will be plumbing. The timing is a guess.

Where to start

If your audience can’t say what you do, who it’s for, and why it’s better than whatever they’re doing already, you don’t have a copy problem. You have four decisions to make: who we’re for, what pain we solve, what category we belong in, and why we’re different. Get those right and the rest, sales decks, campaigns, even the fundraising narrative, gets easier because people get it.

And if you’re a junior marketer waiting for someone senior to own this, don’t. Write a draft Moore sentence for your product this afternoon, with the customer you actually win rather than the one you’d like to. Show it to two salespeople and one customer and see which word they argue with. That word is where the work is.