Two conversations last week, different businesses, different sectors, same problem underneath.

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The first was with a division that sells into banks. Serious business, genuinely good technology, long relationships. They have a "why us" written down, and when we read it out loud, every pillar could have been lifted straight from the companies they compete against. Trusted. Reliable. Partnership. Innovation at pace.

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The second was with a software business where the competitor knowledge lives in people's heads and a deck somebody built years ago. Their investors are already asking who they're up against and why they win. One of them grills the team on it every single time.

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They're what happens to every growing B2B business that's been busy selling, not a marketing failure.

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Why B2B all ends up sounding the same

The words get chosen carefully, by committee, usually with procurement in mind. Anything sharp gets sanded off because someone reasonably points out it might not be true for every client, or every region, or the biggest account.

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What's left is language nobody could object to. Which is also language nobody could remember.

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There's a second force at work. In a market where the products genuinely are similar, saying something distinctive feels risky, because the distinctive thing might be the thing you lose on. Safer to claim the same ground as everyone else and compete on relationship and price.

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I understand the pull of that. It's also how you end up in a procurement process where price is the only variable left.

The swap test

Take your homepage, your one-pager, or the "why us" slide from your last pitch. Put your closest competitor's name and logo on it.

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Does anything break? Does a single claim become untrue?

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If the whole thing still stands up, you haven't written positioning. You've written a category description, and your buyer is reading the same one on four other tabs.

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Run it on your sales deck too, because that's where it bites hardest.

What happens to sales when the story isn't settled

Something came up in that first conversation that founders tend to feel long before they can name it.

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The reps had started jumping straight to product. Features, screens, integrations, within about ninety seconds of the call opening.

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That isn't laziness. When there's no agreed answer to "why us" sitting above the product, every rep writes their own, and the product is the only part they can be certain is true. So the pitch defaults to specification, and the conversation becomes a comparison exercise the moment it starts.

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A muddled story doesn't stay in marketing. It arrives in every sales call, slightly different each time, and your buyer is left to reconcile it.

What actually moves it

Two things have worked repeatedly for me.

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The first is mapping honestly. Take what buyers actually care about, the real list from their mouths rather than your feature set, and score yourself and your competitors against every item. Most of the grid comes back level, which is uncomfortable and useful. What you're hunting for is the row where you're genuinely ahead and nobody else is even playing. That row is your positioning, and it's usually smaller and more specific than anyone expected.

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It'll often be something you've dismissed as obvious, because you've lived with it for years.

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The second is moving up from function to feeling. I sat in a session last week where a team reworked their value proposition, and the shift that made the room light up wasn't a new feature claim. They moved from describing what the product removes, which was accurate and dull, to describing what it gives people back. Same product, same research underneath, completely different energy in the room.

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Functional claims get compared. The feeling around them is harder to copy, because it comes from actually understanding the person on the other end.

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And say plainly who you're not for. It reads as confidence, it saves everyone time, and it's the fastest way to sound like nobody else.

The one thing to do this week

Run the swap test on your homepage. Five minutes, and you'll know immediately.

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Then write down the competitor you lose to most often, and the honest sentence explaining why you lose. Not the comfortable version. The one you'd say to a colleague in the pub.

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That sentence is where your positioning work starts, and most businesses have never written it down anywhere.

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Drop me a line and send me yours. I'll tell you whether it's a positioning problem or something else wearing its coat.

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PS. If your investors or your board have started asking who you're up against and the answer lives in people's heads, that's the moment to fix it rather than the moment to wing it. A competitor view that's owned, current and specific to each buyer type takes less time to build than people fear. Drop me a line, and I'll tell you what a useful one looks like.‍