The Positioning Problem Nobody Wants to Admit
We can both agree that you know your company’s business. Starting there, can you state your company’s primary value proposition in one clear sentence?
Now ask the same question of your colleagues in sales, finance and customer service, and see how closely the answers line up.
If you experience uncomfortable hemming and hawing and differences between responses, you have an internal problem. And that is also a problem for every stakeholder on the buying team sizing up your products and services against your competitors.
Only 4% Have Clarity
In a Bain survey of more than 1,100 senior executives across 18 industries, only 4% of respondents said that their company has a clear, consistently understood value proposition.
Almost half of the survey respondents named unclear product or service differentiation as their biggest barrier to growth. And that gap is costly for revenue growth. According to Bain, companies with clear positioning outpaced those without it by 7 points in 2025.
The Money Doesn’t Follow the Insight
The value of differentiation is clear, but putting money behind it is another matter.
Current budgets are split 70% demand generation and 25% brand support, even though marketers say their ideal mix is closer to 50% demand generation and 40% brand.
The reason for the gap may be reflected by Gartner’s research, which predicts that more than 40% of CMOs who push for larger brand budgets will lose influence with the C-suite by 2027 because of an inability to prove return on investment. This leaves CMOs in a very tough spot.
What Actually Gets You Shortlisted
About 90% of B2B buyers ultimately purchase from their Day 1 list, according to Bain’s companion research. That is the shortlist a buyer already has in mind before formal evaluation even starts.
So, though CMOs are disincentivized from prioritizing it, branding is what earns a company a place on that list. Where marketers get stuck is proving that connection. Brand awareness is often the metric marketers use to make the case, but awareness alone doesn’t hold value with the C-suite. The markers that carry more weight are win rates against named competitors and revenue growth. Let’s look at the mechanism behind why those numbers move when positioning gets sharper.
The shortlist gets built by the buyer committee, not just one person. Gartner research shows these groups now range from five to 16 people across as many as four functions, and these members often have sharply differing priorities. The team typically includes target stakeholders who will actually use the product alongside procurement, finance and IT, all weighing risk, and each brings a different set of concerns to the table.
What enables a divided committee to find consensus before anyone starts comparing features, is a consistent value proposition. A clear, repeated claim about who you serve and why reads as low risk to every function at the table, whatever their priority; and this is why brand reputation, trust and perceived risk carry more weight than product features at this point. A company that cannot give a consistent answer to why it wins sends a mixed signal that a risk-averse committee filters out before evaluation starts.
AI Raised the Stakes
The committee dynamic was already hard enough to navigate. The stakes just got higher.
More than four in 10 B2B buyers now say AI has surfaced vendors on their shortlist they would not have otherwise considered, and seven in 10 use AI at some point in vendor selection.
This presents a new twist on the understanding that the Day 1 list is built on top-of-mind recall tied to a vendor’s positioning. Now, we know it is also influenced by AI summarizing whatever a company has put out into the world. This makes a consistent, clearly stated value proposition a filtering mechanism that is now more important than ever.
Positioning Is the Layer Branding Often Skips
This speaks to another problem with branding I have observed: marketers may think they’ve earned a distinctive position by having a recognizable logo, color palette, voice and possibly even a sharp tagline, especially once it’s paired with personalization. While nice to have, they do not constitute a brand in and of themselves. I have written before about how this same blind spot compounds inside account-based marketing specifically, where personalization without a clear underlying position just scales the confusion faster.
CMOs are set up to fall short regardless of brand artifacts and personalization, because none of that articulates what should be the foundational layer underneath: the defensible claim about who you are for and why you win against competitors.
Knowing what makes you different and what makes you win needs to be at the core of your personalized messaging and nurture streams.
Where That Leaves You
Go back to the question this piece opened with. Ask your team to finish the sentence: “We win because…” If you get one answer, you are already ahead of 96% of the market. If you get five, you have identified a growth constraint underlying everything else on your roadmap.
A useful next step: Compare the answers across your team. The gaps will tell you where sharper positioning can bring greater clarity to your brand, your go-to-market strategy and the buying experience.
Key Takeaways
- Only 4% of B2B companies have a value proposition their own team agrees on.
- According to Bain research, companies with clear positioning grew 7 points faster than everyone else.
- Brand budgets stay underfunded because leadership does not see the value, and that is because measurement is misaligned.
- AI is now part of who makes a buyer’s shortlist, which raises the cost of staying unclear.
- Positioning is the layer under brand work most companies never finish.
