Every owner I work with loves their business. They love how it works, they know every part of it, and they’d like a statistic that says they’re number one. Their buyers don’t care about any of that. A buyer wants to know one thing: what your business will do for theirs.
That gap is where brand positioning lives. I’ve spent years closing it, first for enterprise technology companies selling to boards and C-level executives, and now as a brand positioning consultant for growing businesses. This is what I’ve learned about getting it right.
Branding is the whole identity of your company: the name, the logo, the colors, the typography, the voice, the messaging, and the experience a customer has with you. Its job is to make you recognizable, memorable and trusted.
Brand positioning is a smaller and more deliberate piece of that. It decides where you stand against your competitors and why a specific buyer should pick you. It’s built from four things: your value proposition, a clear definition of who you’re for, an honest look at the competition, and the promise you’re prepared to keep.
The way I explain it to clients: branding builds the character, and positioning decides which stage that character performs on so it stands out from the rest of the cast. The goal is to own a specific piece of real estate in your buyer’s mind, such as being the affordable, approachable option in a market full of expensive, serious competitors.
A tool I use for this is a positioning map. Pick two things your buyers care about, price and speed for example, plot yourself and your competitors on them, and look for the empty corner. If there isn’t one, your positioning has work to do.
When a business tells me sales have stalled, the first thing I look at is what they’re actually putting in front of buyers. Is it a list of functions and features? Or is it a specific problem, and the specific value of solving it?
Feature lists are the most common sign of a positioning problem. They feel thorough to the owner, because the owner knows what every feature does. To a buyer they’re noise, because the buyer has to do the work of figuring out why any of it matters to them. Most won’t bother.
Good brand messaging puts the value as close to the buying decision as it can go. It names a problem the buyer can’t ignore, and it says what changes for them when it’s solved. It’s also what gets you found on Google and in AI answers, because search engines and AI assistants repeat the clearest description of what you do.
I saw this for years in cybersecurity. Vendors talked about what their product did, how it did it, and what it protected. Meanwhile the people who signed off on the purchase were looking at their bank balances and the bottom line, and above them the board was asking what any of it meant for the value of the company.
When a sales conversation started with functionality, the only person interested was a technologist. I call those “tea and biscuits meetings.” Everyone has a pleasant chat about something that interests them, and nothing happens. Nobody in that room is going to pick up the phone and get a deal signed.
So the work was always the same. We boiled the messaging down from “here’s what it does” to “here’s what’s in it for you”, from the buyer’s side of the table. That changed the conversations salespeople had with customers, and especially with C-level executives, who mostly aren’t technologists. They run businesses. They want to know how something will help theirs.
When I led a team of business development reps working on Tanium’s behalf, Tanium already had strong messaging. The reps’ opening line was about the technology: a solution that could identify millions of devices on a network in seconds. That’s impressive, and it’s a description of how the product works.
We moved the opening to what it could save a client, backed by a real customer case study. In that case the product was rolled out in a day, and within that day the customer found close to a million dollars in software licenses it had planned to buy and turned out not to need. Leading with that number made executives ask the question we wanted: how did it do that? Once they asked, the technology became interesting, and a sale became possible.
Across the enterprise messaging rebuilds I’ve run, two mistakes came up again and again.
The first was claiming to be number one. The number one IT security company. The number one networking company. Everyone says it, so nobody hears it.
The second was going too deep into how the thing worked. If something gets implemented in days, that’s worth saying. How it gets implemented in days doesn’t matter to the person you’re talking to. Moving the conversation from how it was done to what happened, and how that changed the business, was the core of every rebuild.
This applies to almost any business, not just enterprise software. Nobody cares about your business. They care about how your business can help theirs.
At one startup, I became global head of process development and training and helped mentor leadership at the Dallas office. The company grew from a small office to more than 200 people. Positioning was part of what drove that: reps who could explain the value succeeded on the phones, their clients’ campaigns grew, and the company hired more people to handle them.
I trained business development reps, first in the UK and then mostly in the US, and I had to get each one live on the phones within three days. Most arrived thinking, “This is terrifyingly complex technology. How do I even talk about it?”
What worked was a simple story. I looked for the version that said “this can make or save you a million dollars. Would you like to know how?” Ask anyone that and they want to know more. The figure changes from client to client. What matters is finding the one metric your buyer cares about most.
We also changed how reps thought about the call. We taught reps to treat a meeting request as buying an executive’s time, so they could show that person how to make or save money. That shift made reps confident, and buyers buy from confident people. The same goes for owners. Once an owner can say what they do in a way their audience gets straight away, their confidence goes up, and so do their sales. (This is the core of the sales and SDR enablement work I do today.)
A dental practice I’m working with now treats the whole family, adults included. But its name was Smile Design Kids, so anyone who saw it assumed only children could be patients. The name was turning adults away before they read a word.
Renaming it Smile Design Family Dentistry opens the practice to every adult in the households it already serves. That one change means rewording the website and every other digital asset. The practice knew the rename was needed. What they didn’t know was how much work came with it. My job was to lay out exactly what needed to change, where, how, and in what order, and to get it done quickly. They’re great dentists. Digital marketing isn’t their job, and it shouldn’t be. (More on how I work with practices on dental and orthodontic marketing.)
One client had a business name that made sense, and a tagline that made it sound like they delivered pizza. Everything else in their branding was abstract enough that it didn’t describe what they did either. Changing the whole brand wasn’t an option. So we made sure the website, every digital asset and even the swag said plainly what they did, how they did it, and what it was worth to the buyer. The sales team then carried that same message into their outreach to C-level executives and the law firms they worked with.
This is the trap of choosing form over function. A brand can look great to its owner, with lovely words and colors, and mean nothing to the people it’s meant for.
I’ve done the same work for Hawkline Video, and at ChartSquad as VP Marketing. In both cases the job was to pull scattered messages into one consistent story that made sense to the audiences each business needed to reach.
For Joe Mas, one of my mentors, the work went further. We rebuilt his business plan so his skills were aimed at an audience that would use them, in a way that was worth more to him.
It’s the old problem of not seeing the wood for the trees. You know every detail of your product or service. Squeezing all of that into a 15-second explanation is hard, and deciding which part matters most to your buyer is harder.
I struggle with it myself as I build CairnsCom. What matters most to people right now? What can I do for someone that they can’t easily do themselves? You’re also deep in the admin and management of running the business, and you built it from the ground up, so you’re emotionally attached to every part of it. Someone from outside the business is often the only one who can see what a buyer sees.
The other common pattern in growing businesses: the owner tries to run every part of the business personally. They might be great at starting and running a company, but are they also great at selling it, marketing it, running efficient operations, and setting up a CRM that joins sales, marketing and operations together? Having the right people in the right lanes matters, and so does the owner staying out of the lanes that aren’t theirs.
A marketing agency will run campaigns. What it usually won’t do is look at the whole business: the positioning, the sales conversations, the systems behind them, and how each one affects the others.
I work as a business consultant for growing businesses, and that whole view is the point. My background runs across technology, marketing, sales and operations, so I can see where a business is losing buyers and fix it at the source. If the problem is the message, I fix the message. If it’s a CRM that doesn’t connect sales and marketing, I fix that. You get one senior person across all of it, working from Valencia, Spain with clients in the US, UK and Europe, instead of a team of specialists you have to coordinate yourself. For some clients that becomes an ongoing fractional CMO role.
Explain what your business does, and what it’s worth to the person you’re talking to, in 15 seconds or less.
Try it on someone outside your industry. If they understand it without knowing your technology, and it sounds valuable to them, your positioning is working. If you have to explain it like they’re five and still lose them, that’s the gap to close first.
If you’d like help closing it, book a call with me. I’ll tell you what I’d change and why. Read more about how I work on brand positioning or about me.
Brand positioning is the deliberate choice of where your business stands against its competitors in a specific buyer’s mind, and why that buyer should choose you. It rests on a value proposition, a defined audience, a competitive analysis and a brand promise.
Branding is your whole identity: name, logo, colors, voice and customer experience. Positioning is the part of your branding strategy that sets you apart from competitors for a specific audience.
A brand positioning consultant finds the value your buyers care about, writes the messaging that leads with it, and makes sure your website, sales conversations and other assets say the same thing. At CairnsCom that also covers the sales and systems work that puts the message to use.
Explain your business and its value in 15 seconds to someone outside your industry. If they understand it and see the value without technical knowledge, your positioning is working.