We’re asking too much of positioning

Positioning is having a moment.

Interest in positioning has climbed sharply over the past year. It’s showing up everywhere in B2B SaaS: positioning consultants, frameworks, workshops, LinkedIn posts, founders deciding they need to “fix the positioning.”

And I understand why.

Markets are crowded. AI is making features easier to replicate. Buyers have more alternatives and less patience to figure out why your product is different. Being able to clearly explain why your product matters, who it’s for and why someone should choose you has arguably never been more important.

But there’s a problem with the positioning boom: we’re increasingly treating positioning as the strategy, when it should be the expression of one.

When growth slows, win rates decline, sales cycles get longer or a product struggles to break into a new market, “we need better positioning” is becoming an attractive diagnosis. It assumes the market opportunity is fundamentally sound and we just haven’t found the right way to articulate it yet.

Sometimes that’s true.

But sometimes the problem sits underneath the positioning. There isn’t enough active demand. The buyer doesn’t have budget. The problem isn’t urgent enough. The market is too hard to enter. The product doesn’t have a meaningful advantage. Or we simply haven’t made a clear enough decision about where to play in the first place.

Positioning can help you articulate a strong market strategy. It can’t compensate for not having one.

And that distinction matters, because the solution to weak positioning is better positioning.

The solution to a weak market strategy is making better choices.

Positioning Can’t Create What Your Strategy Is Missing

Let’s say prospects aren’t converting.

Maybe they don’t understand why your product is different. Maybe they put you in the wrong category, compare you against the wrong alternatives or simply don’t see the value you provide.

That’s a positioning problem.

But there are plenty of other reasons they might not buy.

Maybe they understand the problem perfectly well, but it’s number twelve on their priority list. Maybe the person experiencing it doesn’t have budget. Maybe what they use today is good enough. Maybe there’s no event forcing them to reconsider their current setup. Maybe your product is better, but not better enough to justify replacing something deeply embedded in the organization.

Positioning can’t create a buying trigger. It can’t give a problem budget. It can’t create an accountable buyer. It can’t make a saturated market less saturated or an entrenched incumbent easier to replace. And it can’t turn something customers find interesting into something they need to solve now.

Yet these are exactly the kinds of problems we increasingly seem to hand to positioning.

A Big Market Doesn’t Mean There’s Enough Market to Buy From

This becomes especially important when growth stalls.

You can have thousands of companies that fit your ICP and still have a market problem.

Imagine there are 20,000 companies that could theoretically buy your product. Sounds great. But 80% already have an established solution, replacement cycles happen every five years and there’s little reason to switch before the contract comes up.

Your TAM might look fantastic.

Your actual opportunity flow doesn’t.

The same thing happens in greenfield markets. There might be thousands of companies experiencing the problem, but only a small percentage encounter the trigger that makes solving it urgent enough to fund this year.

That’s not something better messaging fixes.

It means you need to understand what actually moves a company into the buying market, how often that happens and whether there are enough of those opportunities to support the growth you’re aiming for.

Positioning can help you win more of those opportunities.

It can’t create the opportunities themselves.

You Can’t Message Your Way Into Urgency

This is probably where the temptation to use positioning becomes strongest.

Customers acknowledge the problem. They like the product. Maybe they even agree your approach is better than what they do today.

But deals don’t move.

So you sharpen the messaging.

Make the pain bigger. Quantify the cost of doing nothing. Raise the stakes. Find a more provocative headline.

There’s nothing wrong with communicating consequences clearly. But there’s a difference between uncovering urgency that already exists and trying to manufacture urgency through messaging.

Sometimes customers simply don’t care enough yet.

The interesting question then isn’t “how do we make this sound more urgent?”

It’s: when do they care?

Maybe it’s when a new regulation comes into effect. When they fail an audit. When a new executive joins. When they acquire another company. When their existing solution reaches end-of-life. When a major transformation suddenly makes the old way of working unsustainable.

The same underlying problem can go from we should probably fix this eventually to we need to solve this this quarter.

Finding that buying situation is market strategy. Communicating it clearly is positioning.

Confusing the two is where things start going wrong.

The Decisions That Come Before Positioning

This is why I increasingly think companies start positioning work too early.

Before asking how to position a product, you need to understand where you’re choosing to play.

Not just an ICP made up of company size, industry and geography.

Which segment are you actually going after? Which use case gives you the strongest entry point? Who owns the problem? Who becomes accountable when it goes wrong? What causes them to act? How frequently does that trigger happen? What are they doing instead? Is this greenfield demand or are you asking them to replace something? And if it’s replacement, how entrenched is the alternative?

Then comes the second question: why should you be able to win there?

How painful is the problem in that buying situation? How well does your product solve it? Where do existing alternatives fall short? What advantage do you have that matters to the buyer? Do you have evidence that customers actually value it? Can you reach these buyers efficiently? Can you win at a price that makes the market commercially attractive?

These aren’t positioning questions.

They’re the strategic decisions positioning depends on.

The Better the Strategy, the Fewer Positioning Options Remain

And this is where there’s a bit of a paradox.

Positioning work can be incredibly useful for figuring out the options you have.

Maybe you could position around a specific use case. Maybe there’s an established category you can enter. Maybe the strongest frame is replacing an existing solution. Or maybe customers are experiencing a new problem that doesn’t fit neatly into any of those categories yet.

Those are hypotheses worth developing. But they’re not decisions you can make from positioning alone.

Imagine you sell software that helps manufacturers coordinate maintenance across their factories.

You could position it as maintenance management software. You could focus on reducing unplanned downtime. You could position against spreadsheets and manual processes. Or you could target operations leaders struggling to standardize maintenance after acquiring new factories.

All four might produce perfectly credible messaging.

But now bring in the data.

Your deal analysis shows that most of your wins happen after an acquisition or factory expansion. Your lost deals in large enterprises are dominated by deeply entrenched maintenance systems. Market analysis shows that the generic maintenance software category is mature and crowded. Customer interviews show that standardization becomes urgent when companies suddenly need to bring multiple sites onto the same operating model.

Now the options aren’t equally attractive anymore.

The positioning work helped you see the possible ways into the market. The market evidence tells you which one is worth committing to.

And once you know that, positioning becomes much less subjective.

You still need to find the clearest way to express the strategy. You need to understand the buyer’s language, choose the right frame and test whether customers interpret your message the way you intended.

But the data has already done much of the strategic narrowing for you.

Positioning Work Gives You Hypotheses. The Market Gives You the Verdict.

This is why I wouldn’t separate positioning completely from market strategy.

Positioning work often surfaces exactly the questions you need to investigate.

Who could this be for? Which problem could we own? What might customers compare us against? Which use case could give us the strongest entry point? Is there an existing category we can attach to, or are customers approaching the problem another way?

That’s valuable because you need options before you can evaluate them.

The mistake is treating the options themselves as the answer.

If you have three plausible positioning directions, the next step shouldn’t simply be deciding which one the leadership team likes most. It should be figuring out what would need to be true for each direction to work and then looking for evidence.

Look at your deals. Where do you actually win and lose? Look at the market. How many companies fit each opportunity, and how many are realistically entering a buying cycle? Look at the alternatives. Are you competing against nothing, a lightweight workaround or an incumbent with a five-year contract? Look at your customers. What happened before they started looking? Who pushed the purchase forward? Who had budget? Why did solving it become important enough to act on?

You may start with three equally compelling positioning options.

You shouldn’t end with three.

Your deal data, customer evidence, market analysis, competitive dynamics and product reality should gradually eliminate them.

Positioning helps you define the hypotheses.

Strategy is the process of finding out which one is actually true enough to bet on.

How to Approach B2B SaaS Positioning

If you’re about to start positioning work, this is the order I’d follow.

1. Decide where you play
   Which segment, which use case gives you the strongest entry point, and who owns the problem.
2. Understand what puts buyers in the market
   The trigger that makes the problem urgent, and how often it happens.
3. Know what they do instead
   Greenfield or replacement, and if it’s replacement, how entrenched the alternative is.
4. Know why you can win
   An advantage the buyer cares about, and evidence that customers actually value it.
5. Develop positioning options
   A use case, a category, a replacement frame or a new problem. Hypotheses, not decisions.
6. Test them against evidence
   Your deals, customers, market and alternatives should eliminate options until one remains.
7. Express it clearly
   In the buyer’s language, with the right frame, and check that customers read it the way you intended.

Steps 1 to 4 are market strategy. Steps 5 to 7 are positioning.

Positioning Should Amplify, Not Rescue

None of this makes positioning less important.

Great products absolutely lose because buyers don’t understand them. Companies get trapped in the wrong competitive comparison. Valuable differentiation gets buried underneath generic category language. Sales teams struggle because everyone explains the product differently.

When the market opportunity is strong but buyers aren’t seeing why you’re the right choice, better positioning can have enormous leverage.

But it works because there’s something underneath it to amplify.

A market with enough opportunity. A recognizable buying situation. A problem important enough to fund. Someone accountable for solving it. A product that fits that situation. An advantage the buyer cares about. A credible reason to choose you over doing nothing or sticking with what they already have.

Positioning makes those things easier to see.

It doesn’t create them.

Which is why I think we should be careful with the current positioning boom. Positioning deserves the attention it’s getting. But it shouldn’t become the place we send every company with a growth problem.

Sometimes your story really is the problem.

Sometimes the story is accurately describing a strategy that isn’t strong enough yet.

And the strange thing is: once you know exactly where you’re playing, what gets customers into the market, why they care, what they do instead and why you can win, positioning starts to feel surprisingly unmagical.

At that point, it’s almost a fill-out exercise.

Maybe that’s exactly how it should feel.

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