The most common symptom
When I start working with a new client, one of the first things I do is look at their website. Specifically, I look at the homepage hero: the first thing a potential customer sees.
More often than not, I find some version of this: “We help businesses streamline their operations with our award-winning platform.” Or: “Cutting-edge technology solutions for modern businesses.”
These sentences say nothing. They could apply to hundreds of companies. They give the reader no reason to stay, no reason to care, and no clear sense of who this is actually for.
That’s not a copywriting problem. It’s a positioning problem.
Why it happens
There are a few reasons I see this play out repeatedly in B2B technology businesses.
They’re too close to the product. Founders and product teams know their technology intimately. They know every feature, every use case, every technical nuance. That intimacy is an asset when building the product. It is a liability when positioning it. When you know something deeply, you struggle to see it the way a buyer does: someone who doesn’t care about your architecture, only about their problem.
They’re afraid to exclude anyone. Positioning requires choices. It requires saying “we’re for this type of customer, with this type of problem, at this stage of their journey.” That means, by definition, saying you’re not for everyone else. For founders who’ve worked hard to land any customer they can, that feels like leaving money on the table. In reality, trying to appeal to everyone is what leaves money on the table, because vague positioning means no one feels like you’re speaking directly to them.
They’ve confused positioning with messaging. Positioning is the internal work. It is the strategic decision about where you sit in the market, who you’re for, and why you’re the right choice. Messaging is how you express that externally. Most companies jump straight to messaging: writing website copy, running ads, producing content, without doing the positioning work first. The result is polished communication of a confused idea.
They benchmark against the wrong things. I regularly see B2B technology companies position themselves by looking at what their competitors say and writing something slightly different. The problem is that if your competitors have weak positioning, you’ve just anchored yourself to weakness. Good positioning starts with the customer: what they’re trying to achieve, what’s getting in their way, what they need to believe before they’ll buy. Not with the competitive landscape.
What good positioning actually looks like
Strong B2B positioning is specific enough to make some people lean in and others move on. That’s not a failure. That’s it working.
It answers three questions clearly:
The three questions your positioning must answer
Who is this for?
Not “businesses of all sizes” but a specific type of company, at a specific stage, with a specific set of priorities.
What problem does it solve?
Not features or functions, but the real-world outcome the buyer is trying to achieve and the cost of not achieving it.
Why you, not someone else?
Not “we’re experienced and passionate” because every company says that. A genuine, defensible reason why your approach produces better results for this specific buyer.
When those three things are clear, everything else gets easier. Sales conversations sharpen up. Marketing produces better results. The right customers arrive already half-convinced.
The cost of getting it wrong
Weak positioning does not just make marketing harder. It makes everything harder.
Your sales team talks to the wrong prospects and wonders why conversion rates are low. Your marketing team produces content that gets traffic but no leads. Your product team gets pulled in every direction because you are trying to serve too many different needs. Your leadership team struggles to make strategic decisions because there is no clear view of who you are and where you are going.
I have seen companies spend significant sums on advertising, websites, and campaigns before addressing the positioning problem underneath. The money produces little. The problem remains.
Where to start
If you suspect your positioning is vague, the quickest test is this: show your website to someone who does not know your business and ask them to explain back to you what you do, who it is for, and why someone would choose you over a competitor.
If they struggle, or if their answer does not match what you intended, you have a positioning problem.
The good news is that positioning is fixable. It takes honest conversation, genuine customer insight, and the willingness to make choices about who you are and who you are not. But once it is right, the clarity it creates runs through the whole business.
That is the work I do with every client before anything else. Because no amount of marketing budget fixes a positioning problem. You have to do the thinking first.