How to position a B2B SaaS business

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 (Forrester). 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?

Most startups jump straight to writing messaging (the words) without doing the work underneath (the thinking). That's writing the ad before you know who you're selling to. Or redoing the homepage for the 3rd time this year because it will solve all your problems. It’s tempting because execution feels like progress but unfortunately it’s not and it’s slower in the long run.

Here’s the flow:

Form the right team →

Map what you're competing with →

Identify what you have that your competitor doesn't →

Validate that your customers and prospect actually care →

Find the themes →

Work out who cares most →

Define the category →

Write it down

1. Form the right team

Positioning is a business-wide exercise, not a marketing exercise. If only marketing is in the room, you'll get a document that sales ignores.

You need, at least, these 5 people:

• founder/CEO

• product lead

• sales/commercial lead

• marketing representative

• customer success lead

Small enough to make decisions. Big enough to avoid blind spots. This approach fosters buy in.

2. Map what you're competing with

Notice how it doesn’t say WHO, that’s intentional and critical to this stage. Why? Because with competitors you need to include "do nothing." 40% of lost deals go to the status quo. Meaning you list needs to include the status quo AND the shortlist of competitors. Map 3-5 real alternatives and be honest about whether you can dominate a segment or just participate.

Two main inputs:

• Internal view: What does your team believe? Where do they disagree? That divergence is important data. When HomeServe asked 100 managers what business they were in, only 11 agreed.

• Buyer view: What's actually happening in your deals? Why do buyers chose you, why didn't they, what alternatives did they consider? Most founders have never asked a lost deal why they walked away. And the CRM data is unreliable: salespeople get the full truth about win/loss reasons only 40% of the time (Anova). CRM systems tag the wrong competitor 65% of the time (Arkaro).

Within buyer research, look for three layers of urgency:

• users - who want to do their job better

• buyers - who have budgets and deadlines

• external pressure - through regulation, customer demand, market shifts (that turns "nice to have" into "must have.")

Word of caution - the evidence gap. Steps 2 (and 4) need buyer evidence most early-stage companies don't have. Most founders have never asked a lost deal why they walked away. And what your team assumes about the buyer is likely to be more wrong than right. If you don't have this evidence, everything that follows is built on guesses. If you haven’t had many deals, then fine. If you have, you need to do some win loss interviews.

3. Identify what you have, that your competition doesn’t

Don’t forget this includes vs the ‘do nothing’ status quo competitor in this evaluation.

Inventory everything.

Technical capabilities, yes. But also your customer success approach, onboarding, data infrastructure, domain expertise, pricing model, integrations, speed of iteration. Everything. Buyers take all of this into consideration. It’s tempting to only think about the moat created by your tech but that’s a software business mentality, the buyers care about the whole lot.

The list will be long. That's fine. Filtering comes next.

4. Validate that your customers and prospects actually care

This is where most positioning exercises fall apart. Your team loves your features and your offering. The only ones that count for positioning are the ones customers call out and pay money for. Internal pipe dreams don't qualify (repeat this in your head if you need to).

Two categories:

• Core competencies: Important, without these your deals will fall over. Without them, deals will die. They are not unique, they are table stakes. You need them but you can't differentiate on them.

• Unique competencies: Specific to you AND valued enough by the market that buyers will pay for them. These need to come from evidence: buyer interviews, win/loss data, customer conversations. You're looking for moments where someone says

"the reason we chose you over [alternative] was..."

No evidence yet? Get it before you finalise anything. Building positioning on assumptions is how you spend 8 years calling yourself "project management software" when your buyers use completely different words (the Basecamp story, via Bob Moesta).

49% of pricing power comes from positioning (Kantar). Getting this wrong costs you margin on every deal you win.

People are funny beasts sometimes. I’ve run into countless situations where their ‘perceived need’ during the sales process is weighted just as highly as the ones we know they’ll actually use. Be aware of this, don’t be blind and arrogant to it. If you need features to demo and sell, the product team should consider these seriously.

Word of caution - the evidence gap (again). This step is where the work from Step 2 pays off. If you skipped buyer research there, you'll be guessing here too. No amount of internal brainstorming replaces hearing a customer say "the reason we chose you was..." Get the evidence before you finalise anything.

5. Find the themes within your competencies

Validated competencies start to cluster. Individual features group into bigger stories. This is good.

Speed of deployment + pre-built integrations + self-serve setup = "time to value."

Compliance features + audit trail + data residency = "enterprise readiness."

Buyers remember themes, not feature lists. Look at which clusters form naturally. If you're forcing unrelated features into the same bucket, it won't survive a real conversation.

6. Work out who cares about these the most

With the groundwork done, segmentation becomes clearer.

Which companies, industries, departments and people care most about your unique competencies?

Look at where you win and where you lose. Your best customers (buy fast, churn least, expand most, refer others) share characteristics. Those characteristics are your target market. Their firmographics will be what you’ll be able to build target lists from when it comes to refining your demand generation engine.

This will be narrower than you're comfortable with. That's the point.

Word of caution - the courage gap. This step means saying no to potential buyers. For a startup growing revenue, narrowing feels scary. But 53% of lost deals were winnable with a fixable misstep (Corporate Visions). Trying to be relevant to everyone multiplies those missteps.

7. Define the category and document it

What category are you in? Sometimes it exists and you take a position within it. Sometimes you need a modifier ("revenue intelligence" instead of "call recording," as Gong did). Rarely should you create a new category from scratch.

Write down: who you're for (specific enough for sales to qualify), the problem you solve (buyer's language, not yours), unique competencies (validated), competitive alternatives and where you sit in the buyer's mental map.

This document becomes the single source of truth for every conversation, every hire and every product decision. When it works, it feels like clarity.

Word of caution - the alignment gap. This document needs to be used, not filed. What usually happens: marketing builds positioning in a bubble, hands it to sales, sales throws it out. If the team from Step 1 doesn't stay involved through activation, the positioning dies in a Google Doc.

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