You’re in a meeting and the VP of Sales or the CEO says, “But if we say that on the website, we’ll alienate half the market!” I’ve been there more than I’d like to admit.
For years, B2B companies have relied on vague positioning in literature and on their websites to close more deals. The idea is that if a prospect walks in the door unsure whether you’re the right fit, a good salesperson can shapeshift the pitch on the spot – emphasizing whatever matters most to that particular buyer.
So historically, positioning in the marketplace wasn’t an asset; it was a liability. The sales team was the real positioning engine.
That era was coming to an end before AI started changing B2B buyers’ habits. It’s all but dead today.
Your best buyer is an informed buyer, and they have done their homework. They’ve paid attention to who gets talked about and who is present at industry events. They have a curated shortlist they prune through research before they take a single action resulting in a conversation with a salesperson. And now, that research includes some quality time with Copilot, ChatGPT, or the LLM of their choice.
Let’s discuss what this means for you and your brand.
The Chocolate Problem
The other day I was at the B2B Marketing Breakfast in Madison, WI, and Ryan Olestro shared the best analogy with me (Ryan said he stole it from somewhere else, but I still want to credit him with sharing it).
Ask someone what brand comes to mind when they think “chocolate.” Most people will say the same thing: Hershey’s. Now ask them what brand comes to mind for a Valentine’s Day gift for someone they love. Suddenly Hershey’s disappears from the list entirely. You’ll hear Lindt, Ghirardelli, maybe a local chocolatier – brands that occupy a completely different position in people’s minds.
Hershey’s isn’t hurt by this. It doesn’t lose sleep over not being the answer to the Valentine’s Day question, because it has thoroughly, unmistakably cemented itself as the default answer to s’mores, Halloween candy, and many other chocolate questions.
Lindt executives don’t stress that they aren’t anyone’s go-to for s’mores, either. That’s what strong positioning looks like: not being everything to everyone, but being the obvious answer to someone.
This is exactly what happens when a buyer interacts with an AI during vendor discovery. The buyer isn’t typing “chocolate.” They’re typing the equivalent of “chocolate for a romantic gift, under $30, from a brand that feels premium.” That context is what allows the AI to match vendor to need, and do so precisely. It’s also what excludes anyone whose positioning doesn’t clearly correspond to that context.
Vague B2B brands don’t get excluded from AI recommendations because buyers dislike them, because they lack PR coverage, or because their SEO team isn’t optimizing for AI. They get excluded because the AI simply has nothing specific to match them on. Positioning isn’t a constraint in this world. In AI, it’s the mechanism that makes you findable at all.
Pole Position: Winning Before the Race Even Starts
In auto racing, time trials determine the starting grid. The fastest qualifying cars line up at the front, with the fastest of all taking “pole position.” But everyone knows pole position doesn’t guarantee a win. Plenty of races have been lost from the front row.
B2B buying doesn’t work that way. According to research from 6sense, roughly 95% of buyers ultimately purchase from a brand that was already on their shortlist when they began the formal buying process. In other words: Once you’re in the consideration set early, you very rarely get replaced.
That means the real competition in B2B isn’t happening inside the AI’s recommendation engine. It’s happening before the buyer ever opens that conversation. If you’ve built strong, consistent positioning in your ideal buyer’s mind ahead of time, something remarkable happens: Instead of passively waiting to see if the AI recommends you, the buyer proactively asks the AI, “What do you think of [Your Brand]?” You get pulled into the shortlist by name, regardless of whether the AI would have surfaced you organically.
That’s pole position in B2B, and unlike racing, it’s a lead that tends to hold.
These Aren’t Two Separate Strategies – They’re One Discipline
It would be easy to read the last two sections as describing a tradeoff: optimize for AI matching, or build brand awareness with humans ahead of time. In reality, they’re the same work.
Consistent positioning – reflected across your website, your content, customer reviews, and the media you put into the world – does two things simultaneously:
- It builds mental ownership of a category with human buyers, so you’re already top of mind before they’re actively shopping.
- It gives AI crawlers, search indexes, and even the models themselves a clear, repeated signal about what you do and who you’re for.
There’s no split effort required. The same disciplined, consistent message compounds across every touchpoint, working on buyers and machines at the same time.
”But Won’t This Shrink Our Market?”
This is usually where the internal resistance shows up. Often, a sales-minded VP, CEO, or founder worries that clear positioning means turning away good-fit prospects who fall outside the niche.
It’s worth separating the fear from what actually happens.
Clear positioning doesn’t just filter out bad-fit leads before they reach your funnel. It pre-qualifies the leads that do come in. Buyers who reach out already believe you’re the right vendor for their specific situation, because your positioning aligned with what they value before they ever spoke with you. You stop losing deals mid-cycle when a prospect suddenly discovers, three calls in, that a competitor is actually the better fit. The sales team’s job shifts from convincing to confirming – and closing.
Does this mean fewer leads? Honestly, it often does at first. Does it mean dramatically higher close rates? Unequivocally, yes.
Beyond close rates, there’s often a pricing benefit, too. Strong, specific positioning generally supports premium pricing, because buyers aren’t comparing you on price. Instead, they’re comparing you on fit – and you’re the clear answer. The exception, of course, is if your positioning is explicitly built around being the low-cost option. But in that case, the strong alignment of your brand with low-cost leadership will dramatically increase lead and deal flow.
Regardless of the metric, staying vague costs you. Without a clear position, sales loses more deals and has to play the price card to close them, killing margins.
What Staunch Positioning Actually Looks Like: BambooHR
BambooHR is a good real-world example of what it looks like to commit to a position rather than trying to serve everyone.
The HR software space is crowded and fragmented. ADP dominates enterprise-grade payroll and compliance, but it’s complex and often overwhelming for smaller companies. Gusto and Rippling fight over simplicity and payroll for small teams. UKG focuses on workforce analytics and labor management at scale.
Instead of fighting any of them head-on, BambooHR picked a lane: small and medium-sized businesses that care about culture. Their positioning, captured in the line “set people free to do great work,” leaned into performance management, employee engagement, and company culture rather than competing on payroll complexity or enterprise feature depth.
That specificity is what let them scale from around 30 employees to well over 1,000. Companies didn’t choose BambooHR in spite of its narrower focus. They chose it because that focus was exactly what they needed.
Narrowing their position didn’t shrink the opportunity. It sharpened it.
Building Pole Position Doesn’t Have to Be Expensive
There’s one more piece of this that’s easy to overlook: Building that pre-market positioning advantage requires staying in front of your audience consistently, over time. Most advertising infrastructure isn’t built for that.
Platforms like Meta, Google, and LinkedIn are largely built around consumer-scale advertising logic: Rotate impressions across a broad audience, and avoid showing the same person the same ad too many times. That’s the opposite of what B2B positioning requires.
B2B doesn’t need reach. It needs repetition against a small, precise audience. When you niche down into a real position, your ideal-fit audience often isn’t measured in millions. More likely, it’s a few hundred or thousand of exactly the right people. And staying consistently visible to an audience that size, across platforms, is far more affordable than most B2B marketers assume.
This is the biggest gap Path3 was built to close. Path3 is a self-service B2B advertising platform that lets marketers run effective campaigns across LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and the broader web without needing to become an expert in each one individually. We let you sidestep fighting the platforms’ default logic of never repeating impressions to the same person or someone who isn’t in market this week (but very well could be next week). For a B2B brand with a real position to defend, that’s the difference between hoping to be discovered and building the pole-position advantage that wins the race before it starts.
The Bottom Line
Positioning used to be optional in B2B. It was something layered on top of a strong sales team, and deployed when it was convenient. In a world where AI increasingly drives discovery and shortlisting, positioning isn’t optional anymore. It’s the foundation everything else depends on.
The brands that win won’t be the ones trying to stay broadly appealing to everyone. They’ll be the ones that pick their lane, own it consistently everywhere – on their website, in their content, at trade shows, and through advertising – and show up clearly enough that both buyers and AI already know exactly who they are before the conversation even starts.
Question for you: What’s the one sentence your ideal buyer would use to describe exactly what you’re the best in the world at?
Got it? Now, are you consistently telling that story to the people who need to hear it? Are you making your brand the obvious solution – one companies like theirs would be idiots to ignore? If not, here’s your chance to do something big.