Sergio Iacobucci
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Free B2B SaaS Positioning Guide
This guide is going to take you through a step by step process that, with the right people and impetus will take you from good to great. B2B SaaS positioning is hard so go easy on yourself as you work through this, I’ve tried to keep it super actionable pulling from all the best techniques and processes available in product marketing.
The symptoms you’ll see in your business
You don’t wake up thinking “we have a positioning problem.” You wake up thinking about pipeline, close rates and ultimately revenue growth. There’s either not enough pipeline or the close rates are poor, sometimes you have both. But positioning problems don’t announce themselves. They show up as drag, longed out pipeline that moves in a sluggish manner. Just not enough deals all moving a little slowly.
These are the things you hear before you realise the story is the issue:
“Our founder closes deals nobody else can.”
The pitch works from the person who built it. When the founder is in the room, it works, so they get dragged to every big deal going. Everyone else wings a unique version they like the most, with slides from every era. The issue here is that the story lives in one person’s head and hasn’t been turned into something repeatable.
“We need three calls before the prospect gets it.”
If a qualified buyer needs three meetings to understand what you do, you’re educating, not selling. Most buyers won’t sit through that. They have six other vendors and 27 touchpoints before a decision (Gartner). This should be clicking on the first call, within the first few minutes.
“It used to work but it’s slowing down.”
The messaging that landed your first 20 customers was built on instinct and a hyper-reactivity to the market. That early majority usually do not represent the main market, as any of you will know if you’ve read Crossing the Chasm. The market is moving and your positioning isn’t, you have some research and catch up to do.
“Prospects nod but don’t convert.”
They say they get it. Then they go quiet. 40% of B2B deals are lost to no decision at all (not to a competitor, to inertia). The buyer had pain but couldn’t build a strong enough case internally. Your story didn’t hit the mark. The prospect was more worried about messing up than missing out.
“The sales team is going off-script.”
They’re not lazy. The script doesn’t match what they hear from buyers. Only 35% of reps believe marketing knows what content they need (Strategic ABM). They do this out of necessity and what’s been produced for them isn’t passing their test (there’s multiple reasons this could be the case).
“We tell our story differently depending on who’s in the room.”
Some inconsistency is natural. Customisation can be good. But if the team can’t agree on what you do, who it’s for and why someone should pick you: that’s not flexibility. 67% of buyers say inconsistent messaging is a top reason for disliking a vendor (Demand Gen Report).
Did three or more of these resonate with you?
Then you have a positioning problem. No amount of new channels or new hires fixes it until the foundations underneath is solid.
What actually is positioning?
Positioning defines the specific value you generate for a specific set of customers. Not what your product does in the abstract. What it does for someone in particular, better than the alternatives they’re considering. Don’t forget 40% of the time the alternative is ‘do nothing’ which means ‘accept the status quo’.
It’s the context that makes your product make sense.
Notion launched in 2013 as a no-code app builder. Nearly died. Relaunched in 2016 as an “all-in-one workspace.” Same technology. Different context. That’s a $10B+ business today.
Positioning is not a tagline. It’s the foundation that your pipeline, close rates, customer success and product direction sit on.
Why is positioning so important?
92% of B2B buyers start with at least one vendor already in mind. 41% have a single preferred vendor before any evaluation begins (Forrester, 2024). 95% of the time, the winner was on the buyer’s day-one shortlist (6sense).
The fight isn’t in your sales calls.
It’s before: when the buyer is researching, checking your website, scanning your LinkedIn, reading analyst reports and deciding whether you’re relevant.
Your buyer is building a shortlist that needs to look informed when they bring it back to the business. If your story is unclear or sounds like the three other vendors they’re evaluating, you won’t make it. You’ll never know you were excluded because you never got a seat at the table. There will just be this draaaag that doesn’t feel like the rocketship business you intended it to be.
Is there one buyer? No. Usually 10-11 stakeholders, each with their own priorities. In 79% of purchases, the CFO makes the final call (G2). Your story needs to survive translation through many complicated layers.
However, you must start with your champion
The person who found you and will carry your case internally. Make the story so clear they can repeat it without you in the room. Arm them with what they need to defend your solution when you’re not there. Once you’ve nailed this then build for the subsequent buyers in the buying group.
And remember: 40% of deals go to “no decision.” Not a competitor. Staying with the status quo. The conviction to act comes from a story that makes doing nothing feel more expensive than changing.
What is the best process for getting my positioning right?
You run a positioning workshop. Not a marketing offsite: a working session where founder, product, sales, marketing and customer success sit down and work through what you’re competing with (including “do nothing”, which takes 40% of lost deals), what you have that the alternatives don’t, which of those things buyers have paid real money for and who cares about them most. Then it all gets written down in a document the whole business uses.
Why a workshop and not a marketing project? Because positioning built by one team gets ignored by everyone else. When HomeServe asked 100 managers what business they were in, only 11 agreed. A few sessions with the right five people fixes that, and it’ll get you further than a third homepage rewrite this year.
I’ve written up the full process step by step, including the exact team, the inputs and the filters: How to run a B2B SaaS positioning workshop.
The unfair advantage you probably don’t have
Slack’s team used their own product for three years before launching. Linear’s founders built a tool because they hated Jira. Stripe’s founders kept hitting the same wall with online payments. These companies nailed positioning because the founders were the buyer.
Most B2B startups don’t have this. A fintech selling to compliance teams is not a compliance team. If you’re not selling to people like you, you need to earn that understanding through research.
That’s the gap that this process fills.
One last thing
Only 29% of B2B companies have a formal messaging process (Corporate Visions). 12% don’t have one at all.
If you’ve read this far, you take it seriously. The process above will get you a long way, especially the buyer research in Steps 2 and 4.
If you want help with it (particularly the win/loss research most teams struggle to run themselves): that’s what Dialog does. We build positioning from buyer evidence, not meeting room assumptions.
sergio@thedialog.co.uk
