TL;DR
If you're not the category leader, competing on features is a losing game. You win B2B deals by taking a different position in the market, understanding your buyer better than anyone else, and knowing exactly how your messaging lands on them.
The sameness problem in B2B
There have never been as many B2B companies as there are today. Most companies in any given category look the same and do pretty much the same things.
Sameness is pervasive. The majority don't have enough money (nor ideas) to win on innovation but play the X+1 feature game anyway. "We do everything they do, plus this one thing." Buyers see right through it.
Winners in this saturated world are doing something different. They're taking a distinct position in the market, and selling from that angle.
1. Take a different position in the market
Don't compete on features. If your core concept isn't working, rework the narrative and the description of the product rather than adding new stuff.
Make sure you're building a product that competes because it occupies a different space in the market. Not a slightly better version of the leader.
Start by knowing the other players (mainly the leaders), how they're positioning themselves, what the key target audience and use case is. Pay attention to the messaging they use, what they focus on as their key differentiator.
Then choose your customer. The ability to innovate on customer value at high speed must be a core capability of your company. It's impossible to do so if your company is targeting all revenues indiscriminately. If you treat all revenues as equally desirable, you don't have a strategy. Target a defensible market segment, create a business model that wins against competitors going after the same segment.
Overlap with the category giant minimally. Only go for their least profitable customer segments where they won't fight you. If you take on the category leader directly, they are in a position to crush you. Go where they're weakest or where they simply don't care enough to compete.
Then focus on increasing your customer value and lowering your cost to serve for that select group. By being very particular about the customers you serve, you can build a 10x solution for them. To win, your company has to be the best at something. You can be better if you are targeting better.
Tip
To get inside the very limited consideration set of the buyer, you need to commit to solving the specific jobs-to-be-done in their mind. Build up mental availability for that use case. In B2B, that means showing up in the exact context where they're feeling the pain -- not just running ads.
2. Understand your target buyer better than your competitors
If you know what your buyers want and how they want it, you have a massive advantage. Companies that invest in learning what resonates with the people they're trying to influence come out ahead.
It's very difficult to be objectively better while you also cannot be objectively worse. So you need to win by being more relevant, timely, and doing better marketing. This starts with really knowing what matters to your buyers and what they don't care about.
What you need to know about each ICP
For each of your ideal customer profiles, you need clear answers to these questions:
| Question | Why it matters for B2B sales |
|---|---|
| What pains are they trying to avoid? | Shapes your cold outreach and ad copy |
| What gains are they trying to get? | Drives your value proposition |
| What are their jobs to be done? | Tells you what to build and what to say |
| How do they measure success? What metric is their boss asking for? | Lets you speak their language in sales calls |
| Which channels are they using? | Tells you where to show up |
| How much are they willing to pay? | Sets your pricing and packaging |
If you know these things, your website copy, outreach emails, and sales decks start matching what the buyer actually cares about. They become more clear, more relevant, more specific. That's what "compelling" really means in B2B.
Building a B2B buyer research process
Most B2B companies skip this work. They guess what buyers want based on internal brainstorming sessions and competitor websites. That's how you end up sounding like everyone else.
A better approach:
- Interview 10 recent customers. Ask why they bought. The real reason, not the polite one. What almost stopped them? What made them pick you over the other option they were considering?
- Interview 5 lost deals. Ask what tipped the decision. Was it price, features, trust, or something else entirely?
- Read your support tickets and sales call transcripts. The language your buyers use to describe their problems is the language your website should use. Not your internal jargon.
Do this once a quarter and you'll have better positioning data than 90% of your competitors.
3. Know how your messaging is actually landing
You can only improve what you can measure. If you don't know how your positioning, messaging, and marketing are landing on the intended buyer, you're making decisions blind.
You need to know what your target buyer thinks and feels when they come across your messaging. Are they leaning in: "this is exactly what I need"? Or are they skimming past and moving on to the next tab?
Odds are, you don't know. We can measure every click and scroll on the website, but measuring how effective the actual words are is much harder. Most B2B companies never do it.
There are 3 major parts of your messaging to evaluate.
Value proposition
A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered. It's the primary reason a prospect should buy from you.
You want to validate whether the TL;DR of your pitch is as compelling as it can be:
- Why are people buying from you? Ask your customers who recently signed.
- Why are people choosing not to buy from you? Ask your target market.
On your site, your value proposition is the main thing you need to test. Get it right and your pipeline changes. The less known your company is, the better your value proposition needs to be.
Your value proposition has 3 components:
| Component | Question it answers | Example |
|---|---|---|
| What you are | The category you're in | "Sales engagement platform" |
| What problem you solve | The pain point you address | "Reps waste 5 hours/week on manual follow-ups" |
| Why you're different | Why choose you over alternatives | "Built for teams under 20 reps who need speed, not complexity" |
A value proposition should make someone say "Tell me more" or "How do you do that?" or "I want it."
Sales and marketing messaging
Messaging is the key message you want to communicate to your audience. Copy is you elaborating on those messages, finding the best words to communicate it. Copy is the manifestation of messaging -- it's what buyers actually see.
To compete and win, you need to know what in your messaging is hitting home, and what's missing the mark. What is truly resonating with buyers and capturing their attention? What do they see as table stakes? What do they not care about at all?
Understanding this lets you double down on what works and cut what doesn't. You also learn about messaging hierarchy -- what matters most and least -- which should be reflected in the order of content blocks on your site, your pitch decks, and your outreach sequences.
Most B2B messaging is a "meh." Because companies don't test it.
5 heuristics to assess your messaging:
| Heuristic | What to ask |
|---|---|
| Clarity | Do they get it? After reading everything, what's still unclear? A confused buyer doesn't buy. |
| Relevance | Does it align with their priorities right now? If it's not about what's important to them today, it won't work. |
| Value | Do they want it? Don't just describe features. Make a case for how your product delivers the outcome they're after. |
| Differentiation | Why choose you? Is it clear why they'd go with you instead of the other 3 tools they're evaluating? |
| Brand perception | Do you come across the way you want to? Professional? Scrappy? Enterprise-ready? |
Differentiation in practice
Your value proposition and messaging might be spot on, but what if everyone else is saying the same thing? They probably are. After all, sameness is the default in B2B.
If you look at the top 20 websites in large B2B categories, they all pretty much say the exact same things. The buyer in that case will choose either the best known -- the category leader -- or the cheapest.
You need to be clearly different and/or better to win more deals.
When your ideal prospect is on your site, they should be able to figure out relatively easily how you're different. This starts with choosing a differentiated position in the market and knowing more about the market and the buyer than other players.
Important
Differentiation is not a line of copy you write. It has to include your overall product and brand focus. You must be actually different (focused), and then communicate that. A key part of your strategy is figuring out how to focus on a space in a way that encourages others to play elsewhere.
How this plays out in B2B sales cycles
All three of these compound in the sales process. When a prospect gets on a demo call with your team, you can feel the difference.
Sharp positioning means the prospect already gets what you do before the call starts. Your rep doesn't waste the first 10 minutes explaining the category.
Deep buyer knowledge means your rep can speak to exact pain points and metrics. "You're probably spending X hours on Y" lands harder than a generic feature walkthrough.
Tested messaging means your website and outreach already did the heavy lifting. The prospect shows up warm.
Most B2B sales struggles trace back to positioning. The pipeline reflects whatever story you're telling the market.
Common positioning mistakes in B2B
A few patterns we see over and over with startups that are struggling to close:
Trying to be everything for everyone. Your website says you serve "teams of all sizes across all industries." That means you serve no one in particular. Buyers want to feel like you built this for them.
Leading with features instead of outcomes. "AI-powered workflow automation with 200+ integrations" tells the buyer nothing about what changes in their day-to-day. Lead with the outcome, then explain the mechanism.
Copying the category leader's messaging. If you use the same words as the market leader, you're just reinforcing their position. You become a cheaper, less trusted version of them. Find different words for a different angle.
Never talking to actual buyers. If the last time you talked to a customer about why they bought was 6 months ago, your positioning is probably stale. Markets move. Buyer priorities shift.
Where to start
If you're reading this and thinking "we have a positioning problem," here's the order of operations:
- Audit your current positioning. Read your homepage, your pitch deck, and your top 3 outreach templates. Are they saying the same thing? Are they saying something different from competitors?
- Talk to 10 customers and 5 lost deals. This gives you the raw material for everything else.
- Pick your segment. Narrow down to the customer you can serve 10x better than the category leader. Write your positioning for that person specifically.
- Test your messaging. Send your new homepage copy to 5 people in your ICP. Ask them what's clear, what's confusing, and whether they'd take a meeting. Iterate based on what you hear.
This isn't a 6-month project. You can do a meaningful positioning reset in 2-3 weeks if you commit to it.
Stuck on positioning and watching deals slip to competitors? Book a free 15-minute call and we'll tell you honestly whether we can help.
Written by
Josh Brown
AI & Automation Strategist
Josh works at the intersection of AI and go-to-market. He builds custom AI workflows, automation pipelines, and AI agents that handle the repetitive parts of outreach, content production, and customer support -- so your team can focus on the work that actually moves the needle. He's also deep in B2C go-to-market strategy. If your team is drowning in manual work, or if you want to ship an AI-powered workflow but don't know where to start, Josh will design, build, and train it with you.
