Why Your B2B Positioning Is Costing You More Than You Think — And How to Fix It

Published on bigmoves.marketing/blog

Half of all B2B startups fail within five years. The industry's instinct is to blame product-market fit, competitive pressure, or economic headwinds. But a closer look at how B2B markets actually work right now points to a different culprit — one that is hiding in plain sight.

The problem, more often than not, is positioning. Specifically, it is positioning that was built for a world that no longer exists.

As Paul Evans, Founder and Chief Positioning Engineer at V2RION, put it in a recent Forbes Business Council piece: "We're trying to solve 2025's business challenges with a marketing concept that hasn't evolved since 1981."

That is worth sitting with for a moment. The foundational framework most B2B companies still use for positioning — built on Al Ries and Jack Trout's 1981 book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind — was designed for an era of stable competitive landscapes, slow-moving markets, and buyers who depended almost entirely on vendor-provided information to make decisions. That world is gone.

This article is a practical guide for B2B marketers, startup founders, product managers, and sales and marketing leaders who want to understand what has changed, why it matters, and what to do about it.

The New Reality of B2B Buying

Before you can fix your positioning, you need to understand the environment your buyers are actually operating in. The data paints a vivid picture — and it is more complex than most teams acknowledge.

Buying committees have grown dramatically

According to Forrester's State of Business Buying 2024 report, the average B2B purchase now involves 13 stakeholders, with nearly 89% of purchases crossing two or more departments. Gartner research puts the typical buying group for complex solutions at 6 to 10 decision-makers, each arriving with four to five pieces of independent research gathered before any vendor conversation begins. For enterprise deals, some studies show committees of 15 to 17 cross-functional stakeholders.

This means your positioning is rarely evaluated by one person in one moment. It is being assessed simultaneously by a CFO weighing ROI, an IT lead assessing integration risk, a legal team looking for liability exposure, and end users imagining their daily workflow. Each of them carries different assumptions, priorities, and language — and each of them must arrive at the same "yes."

If your messaging is not structured to work across that entire group, it is structurally failing before anyone picks up the phone.

Buyers have already decided before you know they exist

Perhaps the most important shift in B2B buying behaviour is how far the decision-making process advances before a vendor is ever contacted.

Research from 6Sense's 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report found that buyers contact sellers at around the 61% mark of their buying journey — roughly six to seven weeks earlier than in 2024, but still well past the halfway point. More significantly, 95% of the time the winning vendor is already on the Day One shortlist, and four out of five deals are ultimately won by the vendor the buyer already preferred before first contact.

You are not winning in the sales conversation. You are winning — or losing — in the research phase. And if your positioning is unclear, generic, or misaligned with how buyers describe their problem, you will never appear on that shortlist.

AI has entered the research process — and it is summarising your message without you

This is the dimension of modern B2B buying that many teams have been slowest to account for.

According to Forrester's buyer research, 89% of B2B buyers have adopted generative AI as a top source of self-guided information. 6Sense's 2025 data puts the figure at 94% of buyers using LLMs during their buying process. G2's 2025 Buyer Behavior Report found that nearly 8 in 10 respondents say AI search has changed how they conduct research, with 29% now starting their research via LLMs more often than Google.

According to Responsive's Inside the Buyer's Mind report, nearly two-thirds of B2B buyers use generative AI as much as or more than traditional search when researching vendors. In the technology sector specifically, that figure reaches 80%.

What this means for positioning is profound. Your first impression with a prospective buyer is increasingly a machine-generated summary of your company, synthesised from your website, your content, your reviews, and your digital footprint. Abstract metaphors, clever wordplay, and vague value claims do not survive that translation. Positioning must now be clear, structured, and semantically coherent enough to be accurately interpreted and summarised by an AI model — while simultaneously persuading a human reader.

That is a genuinely new challenge, and most positioning frameworks were not designed for it.

Buyers are dissatisfied — and deals are stalling

Alongside all of this complexity, Forrester's 2024 data found that 86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process, and 81% of buyers express dissatisfaction with their chosen providers.

Stalled deals are not primarily a sales problem. According to the same research, internal complexity — not vendor performance — is the top reason purchases fail to move forward. When buyers cannot build internal consensus around a vendor, it is often because the vendor's messaging does not give individual stakeholders the language they need to make the case to the rest of the committee.

Your positioning is, in many ways, the internal sales tool your buyers use to sell your solution to each other. If it does not give them that, the deal stalls.

The Legacy Trap: Why the Old Framework No Longer Works

The positioning discipline codified by Ries and Trout was built on one central idea: occupy a distinct mental position in the mind of your target customer. The approach was brilliant — for 1981.

At that time, companies could run a two-day positioning workshop, craft a single compelling message, and reasonably expect it to hold for years. The competitive landscape shifted slowly. Buyers relied on vendor-provided materials. Word spread through industry publications and trade shows.

Today, markets shift monthly. Competitors emerge in weeks. A generative AI tool can summarise and compare your entire product against five alternatives in under a minute. And according to Dentsu's 2024 research, 68% of B2B buyers agree that "many of the brands I see at work have very similar marketing and communications messages — they all sound and act the same."

Sameness is not a creative problem. It is a positioning problem.

Most companies respond to this challenge with surface-level fixes: a website refresh, updated copy, a new messaging framework delivered in a two-day workshop. They treat positioning as a one-and-done project rather than an ongoing operating capability.

Norwest's 2024 B2B Sales and Marketing Benchmark Report, based on surveys of 195 sales and marketing leaders, found that positioning and differentiation topped the list of challenges for B2B companies — and that product marketing was the number one skill leaders planned to hire for in the following twelve months. Only 52% of organisations have a clearly defined value proposition that truly differentiates them from competitors.

And from a study of 446 B2B SaaS companies, ProductLed's 2025 State of B2B SaaS report found that 40.2% of companies struggle to position themselves as the obvious choice in their market. Nearly half.

The problem is not that these companies have bad products. The problem is that their positioning has not kept pace with the complexity of the market they operate in.

The Five Pillars of Intelligent Positioning

What separates the companies gaining ground right now from those watching pipeline dry up is not a better product or a bigger budget. It is a more sophisticated, systematic approach to positioning — one that Evans describes as "Positioning Engineering."

Unlike traditional positioning work, which produces a document, Positioning Engineering produces an operating system: a structured, continuously updated set of frameworks that governs how a company presents itself across every channel and touchpoint. Here are the five pillars that define it.

1. Distinctive Voice: Own Your Language

The goal of distinctive voice is not to sound different for the sake of it. It is to develop language that is genuinely ownable — specific enough to belong to you, resonant enough to stick in the minds of your buyers, and differentiated enough that it cannot be easily copied by a generic competitor.

Generic positioning language — "we help companies grow," "AI-powered solutions," "the platform that does it all" — is invisible. It is processed and immediately forgotten because it matches dozens of other messages the buyer has already encountered.

Distinctive voice means using the specific language your best customers use to describe their pain, their goals, and the outcomes they are looking for. It means making concrete promises instead of vague claims. It means being specific about who you serve, what you do, and what happens when you do it.

Dentsu's research found that 52% of B2B purchase drivers in 2024 were personal — rooted in how the buyer feels about the decision, whether it aligns with their values, and whether it helps them look capable in front of their own stakeholders. Messaging that speaks only to business outcomes and feature lists misses more than half of what drives the decision.

2. Discoverable Presence: Built for Both Human and AI Audiences

As outlined above, your positioning now needs to work in two environments simultaneously: in the mind of a human reader, and in the structured interpretation of an AI model.

For human buyers, discoverability means being present in the channels and formats they actually use during independent research: review platforms like G2 and TrustRadius, peer communities, LinkedIn, thought leadership content, and third-party analyst coverage.

77% of B2B buyers read user reviews during decision-making, and over half speak directly with current users before purchasing. 61% of decision-makers are more likely to engage with vendors who offer strong thought leadership.

For AI audiences, discoverability means structuring your content with semantic clarity. This includes clear, direct answers to buyer questions, consistent use of your category language across all digital properties, and content that is written for natural language understanding rather than keyword density alone. When a buyer asks an LLM to compare solutions in your category, the vendors with the clearest, most structured digital presence are the ones that appear — and appear accurately.

3. Directional Clarity: One Message, Activated Across the Whole Go-to-Market

One of the most common and costly positioning failures in B2B is the gap between what marketing says, what sales says, and what the product actually delivers.

When these three are misaligned, buyers pick up on the inconsistency. Trust erodes. The deal becomes harder to close. And internally, it creates friction between teams that should be working together.

Directional clarity means embedding your positioning into the actual workflows of every customer-facing team — not as a slide deck they receive once, but as a living framework that shapes how sales conversations are structured, how proposals are written, how customer success communicates value, and how product roadmap decisions are explained.

This is how positioning moves from a strategic aspiration to a commercial reality.

4. Dual-Challenge Readiness: Persuasive to Humans, Structured for AI

This pillar builds directly on the AI dimension introduced earlier. It deserves its own category because the two requirements — emotional resonance for human buyers, and structural clarity for AI interpretation — can sometimes pull in opposite directions.

Great storytelling relies on metaphor, narrative arc, and emotional language. AI systems interpret information more reliably when it is direct, categorically clear, and free from ambiguity. The positioning challenge of the current era is to do both.

This is achievable. It simply requires a deliberate approach: structuring key messages so that the essential claim is immediately clear (for AI), while the surrounding narrative adds the human dimension — context, proof, emotional stakes — that builds trust with a real decision-maker.

Companies that get this right will show up more accurately in AI-generated summaries and more compellingly in human conversations. Companies that ignore it are leaving both channels underserved.

5. Dynamic Adaptation: Positioning as a Living System

Perhaps the most important mindset shift in Positioning Engineering is treating positioning as a continuous practice rather than a periodic project.

Markets change. New competitors emerge. Your best customers find new ways to describe the value they get from you. Buyer language evolves. The problems that felt urgent last year may have changed. A positioning framework built for your market eighteen months ago may be subtly misaligned with your market today.

Most best-in-class marketing teams now refresh their brand and positioning strategy on a quarterly or annual basis — treating it as a data-informed discipline rather than a creative exercise that happens once every few years.

Dynamic adaptation means building the feedback loops to make this possible: win/loss interview programmes, ongoing customer language research, competitive monitoring, and regular cross-functional reviews of how positioning is landing in actual conversations.

A Practical Positioning Audit: Where to Start Today

Theory without action serves no one. If you are reading this and recognising your own company in the challenges described, here is a grounded starting point.

Start by listening before changing anything. Pull the transcripts from your last ten to fifteen sales calls and customer conversations. Look for the language your buyers use to describe their problem — not the language you use. The gap between those two things is your most important positioning data point.

Test your positioning for specificity. Complete this sentence out loud: "We are the only company that gives [specific audience] the ability to [specific outcome] without [specific trade-off]." If you cannot complete it clearly and confidently, your positioning needs work. This test, adapted from Norwest's "onlyness" framework, cuts through vague value claims faster than almost anything else.

Audit your digital footprint for AI interpretability. Ask a general-purpose LLM: "What does [your company name] do, and what kind of company should consider using them?" The answer it gives is approximately what a buyer-facing AI summary looks like. If the response is vague, incorrect, or missing what makes you distinct, that is a positioning and content gap — not just an SEO problem.

Map your message across your buying committee. For each major stakeholder role in your typical deal — the economic buyer, the technical evaluator, the end user, the legal or procurement gatekeeper — ask: does our current messaging give this person what they need to make a decision and advocate for it internally? Where the answer is no, you have a positioning gap that directly affects deal velocity.

Measure consistency across channels. Conduct a quick audit comparing your website homepage, your LinkedIn company page, your most recent sales deck, and how your top SDR opens a cold outreach. If these four tell meaningfully different stories, you have a directional clarity problem — and buyers are noticing even when they cannot name it.

The Commercial Upside of Getting This Right

It is worth being direct about what is actually at stake here, because positioning can feel abstract compared to pipeline metrics and revenue targets.

Buyers who rate content as "extremely influential" are 131% more likely to purchase. Industry expertise outranks price as a purchase driver in final B2B decisions, according to Responsive's 2025 research. Gartner reports that 75% of B2B technology buyers expected to experience "buyer pessimism" in 2024, driven by outdated go-to-market models colliding with new buying behaviour.

The companies investing now in systematic, engineered positioning are not just improving their marketing. They are making their sales conversations more effective, their customer success more credible, their renewals more defensible, and their market position more durable.

They are also making it substantially easier for an AI model to find them, represent them accurately, and recommend them to the buyers who need exactly what they offer.

In a market where 95% of buyers purchase from their Day One shortlist, the companies that invest in being clearly positioned before the buyer starts looking are the ones winning most of the deals being made right now.

Closing Thought

The good news in all of this is that positioning is not fixed. It is not determined by your category, your product maturity, or your budget. It is a craft — one that can be learned, refined, and systematically improved.

If your pipeline has slowed, your win rates have dropped, or your deals are taking longer to close than they used to, the cause may not be your product, your pricing, or your sales team. It may simply be that your positioning has not kept pace with a market that has moved further and faster than most people realise.

The question worth asking today is not "do we have a positioning statement?" Almost every B2B company does. The question worth asking is: "Is our positioning engineered to work in the market our buyers actually inhabit — right now?"

If you are not certain of the answer, that is where the work begins.

Sources

1. Paul Evans, Forbes Business Council — How To Reboot Your Product Positioning In Today's B2B Market (October 2025) — forbes.com
2. Forrester — The State of Business Buying, 2024 — forrester.com
3. Forrester — B2B Buyer Adoption of Generative AI — forrester.com
4. 6Sense — The B2B Buyer Experience Report 2025 — 6sense.com
5. G2 — 2025 Buyer Behavior Report: AI Now Means Always Included — businesswire.com
6. Responsive — Inside the Buyer's Mind: What Shapes B2B Decisions Today (2025) — responsive.io
7. Norwest Venture Partners — 2024 B2B Sales and Marketing Benchmark Report — nvp.com
8. ProductLed — State of B2B SaaS 2025: Analysis of 446 Companies — productled.com
9. Sopro — 68 B2B Buyer Statistics for 2025 — sopro.io
10. Traction Complete — Mapping the B2B Buying Committee: 10 Roles, Strategies and Best Practices — tractioncomplete.com
11. Hyperbound — 2025 B2B Sales Performance Benchmark Report — hyperbound.ai
12. KLIQ Interactive — Ultimate B2B Marketing Reports & Benchmarks 2025–2026 — kliqinteractive.com
13. Demand Gen Report — GenAI Overtakes Search for a Quarter of B2B Buyers (2025) — demandgenreport.com
14. Luxid Group — How AI Is Transforming the B2B Buyer Journey — luxidgroup.com
15. Smart Connections PR — Navigating B2B Tech Brand Positioning in a Saturated Market — smartconnectionspr.com
16. TrustRadius — Bridging the Trust Gap: B2B Tech Buying in the Age of AI (2025) — solutions.trustradius.com
17. TechnologyAdvice — 25+ B2B Tech Buyer Stats Marketers Need to Know in 2025 — technologyadvice.com
18. Corporate Visions — B2B Buying Behavior in 2026: 57 Stats and Five Hard Truths — corporatevisions.com

This article was written for bigmoves.marketing/blog. If you found it useful, share it with a B2B marketer or founder who is wrestling with how to position their company in a market that keeps moving.

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