Here’s a common frustration we hear from our clients.
Their team works hard to deliver the best-quality work. Check.
Their sales team presents well, and their client relationships hold up under time and pressure. Check.
So why does a competitor with half their track record keep winning the work instead of them?
It’s super frustrating; it’s like watching the girl of your dreams in 11th grade routinely pick the wrong guy. Remember that feeling?
If it helps, for our clients, it’s rarely a skills gap. More often, it’s a clarity gap between three things that should be working together: market positioning, website, and what a sales team actually says.
More often, leadership can articulate the differentiator in a hallway conversation, but the website buries it under generic language about “quality” and “partnership,” and the sales deck says something slightly different again. To a buyer comparing vendors, this creates confusing noise about your brand and offer.
Noise has never won anyone’s confidence.
Research on B2B buyer behavior backs this up, too: prospects form a preliminary opinion of a vendor, place them in a category, and form an early preference before they ever visit the website or speak to sales. If your positioning isn’t doing that work up front, your sales team is closing deals your marketing should have already opened.
Three Quick Wins You Can Act on This Week
1. Ask your team about your differentiator. Ask five people on your leadership team to describe your firm’s core differentiator in one sentence, unprompted. If you get five different answers, that’s your website’s actual problem, not the design.
2. Check your last five losses.Not the deals you won, the ones you lost to a specific competitor. Strong positioning comes down to four things: who your buyer is, the urgent problem they have, your proof, and the outcome you promise. Your losses will tell you which of those four might be fuzzy for prospects.
3. Hand your sales team one sentence, not a slide deck.If your collateral requires a 20-minute walkthrough to explain what makes you different, it’s not helping them. Effective sales enablement fits in the first two minutes of a call.
Here’s some good news: none of this requires a rebrand. It requires making the same true thing easy to say, consistently, at every touchpoint a buyer encounters before they ever pick up the phone. This is what clear market positioning does for a business.
If you need help clarifying your market positioning, let’s discuss how our Marketing Blueprint can help.
Do you need help
talking to your
perfect clients?
