Earlier this year, i was doing an audit for a client that had done a lot of things right.

They had built real traction in a niche. A real foothold. A real reputation. A real reason to believe they could grow into something bigger.

And like a lot of companies that get some momentum, they started expanding. New product line. New software tool. Bigger market. Broader opportunity.

On paper, it made a ton of sense.

In practice, the story got messy.

The more time i spent reviewing decks, sitting in on pitches, looking at one-pagers, and listening to how the team talked about the business, the more obvious it became: they weren't selling one clear story anymore. They were selling a little bit of everything.

And when that happens, you don't just get inconsistent messaging. You get friction. Sales friction. Marketing friction. Pipeline friction. The kind that makes everybody feel like they are working hard, but nobody can quite explain why things aren't clicking the way they should.

This is one of the sneakiest growth problems i see in B2B. Not because teams are lazy. Not because they aren't talented. Not because they don't have enough assets, campaigns, content, or proof. But because somewhere along the way, the company expanded faster than its positioning did. And now everybody is out there describing a slightly different version of the business.

That is a problem.

Because if 5 people on your team explain what you do 5 different ways, don't tell me you have a lead problem. You have a positioning problem.

Growth creates complexity. Positioning is supposed to keep it from turning into chaos.

This client had a business that was already working in one lane. They knew how they won. They had credibility. They had traction in a niche where they could tell a pretty tight story.

Then they added new capabilities.

Again, not a bad thing. That's usually the goal.

The issue is that once a company broadens what it can do, it also has to get a lot sharper about what it wants to be known for. Those are not the same thing. What you can do and what you should lead with are very different conversations.

A lot of teams blur those together.

So instead of saying, this is what we're known for, this is who it's for, this is why we win, and this is the problem we solve better than anyone else... they start saying all of it. Every product. Every service. Every feature. Every angle. Every possible use case.

And what feels comprehensive internally lands as confusing externally.

That's what i saw in this audit.

The sales team, in particular, was trying to carry too much into the room. Instead of backing into one sharp narrative and then expanding from there, they were doing what a lot of teams do when positioning gets fuzzy: they were pitching the whole kitchen sink.

A little of this. A little of that. A bit of legacy credibility. A bit of future vision. A bit of new category language. A bit of product detail. A bit of software.

Nothing they were saying was technically wrong, which is what makes this so tricky. It wasn't wrong. It just wasn't anchored.

And when a pitch isn't anchored, it changes depending on the audience, the rep, the room, and the energy of the conversation. That's when you start hearing different versions of the company from one meeting to the next. That's when marketing starts writing one-pagers backward. That's when decks look polished, but don't really hold together. That's when the team starts producing "stuff" instead of building a story.

This is why random acts of marketing show up.

Marketing usually gets blamed for this late. Sales usually feels it first.

Because sales is right there in the room when the message falls flat. They're watching buyers nod politely. They're watching prospects ask a question that should have already been answered. They're watching the conversation drift because nobody really landed the core story cleanly.

So what happens next? They adjust. Then adjust again. Then add more slides, more proof, more language, more explanation, more context.

Marketing sees that and tries to support it.

So now marketing is building one-pagers, messaging docs, email copy, campaign language, sales enablement pieces, landing pages, and product sheets based on what feels needed in the moment. Again, not because they're bad at their jobs. Because they're trying to serve motion without a real positioning spine.

That creates what i call random acts of marketing.

Not random because they are careless. Random because they are disconnected.

One headline here. A feature-benefit sheet there. A campaign around this product. A page around that audience. A deck for this use case. A story for that vertical.

Some of it is good. Some of it even performs. But it doesn't compound the way it should, because it's being built backward. Not from: this is our company positioning, these are our product positions, this is the market context, this is what we want to own in the mind of the buyer.

But from: we need something for this conversation right now.

That is a very expensive way to grow.

Because you stay busy. You keep shipping. You can point to output. But the market never gets one clean, repeatable understanding of who you are. And if the market can't repeat your story back to itself, your growth gets a lot harder than it needs to be.

Positioning is not your tagline.

This is where i think a lot of people still get twisted up.

They hear "positioning" and immediately think headline, tagline, homepage copy, brand statement, elevator pitch.

Those things matter. But they come after positioning, not before.

April Dunford has been saying this for years, and she's right. Positioning is not the clever sentence you workshop at the end. It is the strategic foundation underneath the sentence. It's the decision about what alternatives you are really up against, what is actually different about you, why that difference matters, who cares most about that value, and what market context makes that value obvious.

That's why weak positioning creates messy messaging. Because messaging is downstream. If the team hasn't made the hard positioning decisions, then every function starts filling in the blanks on its own.

Sales sharpens the outcome. Marketing broadens the promise. Product explains the mechanism. Support usually ends up telling the truth.

And now the company sounds different depending on which door the buyer walks through.

Homepage? One story. Sales deck? Another story. Discovery call? Slightly different story. Follow-up email? A fourth version.

That is not a messaging issue anymore.

That is positioning drift.

A simple 90-minute exercise that will tell you if this is happening at your company.

This isn't my framework. April Dunford has one of the clearest positioning models out there, and if your team has gotten a little too broad, a little too feature-heavy, or a little too messy in how you talk about the business, this is a really good exercise.

You can do it in about 90 minutes with one or two people who actually understand the business well. Not a giant committee. Not twelve people on Zoom. A small group that can be honest.

Here are the five things i would work through.

Start here. Not, "who are all the competitors in our market?" That's too broad.

Ask this instead: if we didn't exist, what would this buyer do?

That answer is usually more revealing.

They might stay with the status quo. They might patch together two vendors. They might use spreadsheets. They might keep using a legacy solution that kind of works. They might do nothing at all.

That is your real competitive context.

And if your team hasn't agreed on that, they are probably telling the wrong story already, because positioning gets weak fast when you're talking like you're competing with everybody. You aren't.

You're competing against what buyers believe is good enough right now.

Next question: what do we do that is actually different?

Not, "what features do we have?" Different question.

Lots of companies have features. Very few have thought clearly about which capabilities actually separate them from the alternatives that matter.

This is where teams often start listing everything. Don't. You are not building a product inventory. You are identifying the handful of things that materially change the conversation.

What is unique? What is hard to replicate? What actually gives you leverage? What helps you win in the deals you are best suited to win?

Now ask the most important follow-up question in positioning: So what?

What does that difference actually do for the buyer? What gets easier, faster, safer, more profitable, less painful, less fragmented, or more predictable because of what you do?

This is where a lot of teams stay too close to the feature. They describe the thing. They don't translate the value.

And that gap is exactly why buyers hear a pitch and think, okay... but why should i care?

If your team can't move cleanly from capability to value, the market will make up its own interpretation. That's dangerous.

Not every possible customer. Not every segment you could theoretically sell into. The customers who care the most about the value you uniquely create.

This is where positioning gets sharper. Because once you know who really values your difference, your story tightens up naturally. Your examples get better. Your proof gets stronger. Your sales conversations get cleaner. Your marketing gets more specific.

A lot of inconsistent messaging starts because teams are trying to sound relevant to too many people at once. That usually waters down the story.

This is the part people skip past too quickly.

What market are you actually asking buyers to place you in?

Because the category frame shapes how people understand your value. If you broaden too fast, you can accidentally make yourself harder to understand. If you stay too narrow, you can undersell what you've become.

This is where growing companies especially get into trouble. They used to fit neatly into one category. Then they expanded. Now they are in between. Not fully the old thing. Not clearly the new thing. And not disciplined enough yet to explain the bridge.

That's where the confusion lives. Not in the product. In the frame.

And here is the part most teams don't love.

When you do this well, you usually discover the issue is not that the team needs better copy. It's that the company hasn't made enough strategic decisions.

That's why the story keeps changing. Because people are improvising around ambiguity.

Sales is trying to make it land. Marketing is trying to make it useful. Leadership is trying to make it ambitious. Product is trying to make it accurate.

Everybody is solving for their own pressure.

And the buyer feels all of it.

This is why i think some of the best positioning insight in a company often lives in sales calls and support conversations. Sales can feel where the pitch gets muddy. Support can hear where the expectation broke. Customer success can usually tell you which promise actually matters once someone buys.

That is useful information. A lot more useful than sitting in a conference room trying to invent a prettier sentence.

It is whether the company sounds like one company.

That is the test.

Can your homepage, deck, discovery call, nurture sequence, and follow-up email all tell the same basic truth? Not the exact same words. Not robotic consistency. Just the same truth. The same frame. The same core story.

Because buyers do not experience your company in a tidy internal org chart. They experience it as a sequence. A scroll. A click. A pitch. A follow-up. A demo. A handoff.

And if the meaning changes as they move through that sequence, trust gets weaker.

Not always dramatically. Sometimes just enough to create hesitation. Enough to make deals take longer. Enough to make interest feel softer. Enough to make the sales team say, "these leads aren't very qualified." Enough to make marketing think they need more top-of-funnel. Enough to keep everybody busy fixing symptoms.

When the deeper issue is simple:

everybody on the team is selling a slightly different company.

If any of this feels familiar, don't start with another campaign. Don't start with another homepage rewrite. Don't start with another sales enablement sprint.

Start with the story.

Ask 5 people on your team to answer these questions:

Then compare the answers.

If they drift, there is your problem. Not the whole problem, but a very important one. Because more demand does not fix a company that explains itself differently every time someone opens their mouth. It just sends more people into the confusion faster.

And that is a brutal way to grow.

If you want help pressure-testing your positioning, reply and send me the sentence your team keeps tripping over.

Usually that's where the real work starts.

See you next week.

Javy

P.S. — Is there a topic or strategy that you’d like me to unpack? Drop me a line. Let me know what you’re thinking of. And, I’ll get it queued up for an upcoming newsletter.

A few months ago, I joined TheeDigital's GrowthCast to talk about a mistake a lot of companies still make: they think they have a branding problem when what they really have is a positioning problem.

We got into differentiation, narrative engineering, and why strong positioning is less about sounding polished and more about making a clear strategic choice the market can actually understand. If your team is struggling to explain why you win without sounding like everyone else, this one is worth your time.

Listen it here.

If your team keeps arguing about lead quality, odds are you don't really have a lead problem. You have a definition problem.

This playbook breaks down how to classify leads by intent, tie each tier to the right next action, and create a feedback loop sales and marketing can actually use. It's a good follow-on to this week's newsletter because clear positioning should lead to clearer qualification, cleaner handoffs, and better pipeline conversations.

Read it here.