Author: Shira Abel Category: Enterprise Strategy URL: https://hunterandbard.com/resources/blog/positioning-messaging-storytelling
Positioning is the foundation. Messaging is the framing, wiring, and plumbing. Storytelling is the design and finishes. Each layer does different work, each depends on the one beneath it, and when something feels off in enterprise sales, the problem is almost always in one specific layer.
Positioning, messaging, and storytelling are not the same thing. Positioning is the foundation that defines where you are in the market and who you serve. Messaging is the framing that turns that position into shared language for every stakeholder on the buying committee. Storytelling is the finish that makes the message memorable enough to travel inside meetings you are not in.
Thanks to living in an area with seismic activity and many hills, the foundations of homes here can often be problematic. When we were looking to buy a home I always brought a marble with me. If the place felt slightly off, I’d put the marble on the ground to see where it went and how fast. Some homes were very obviously off and I didn’t need the marble. The others felt slightly off, so I would check to see how the marble moved. You could see if there were gaps between the cabinets at the walls, if the walls were plumb, but not if there was mold or problems on the roof or under the house. The finishes were obvious though, you could see how much care was taken by the owners. And this was how you judged when deciding if it was worth it or not to buy.
The same is true for your buyers. When something feels off about your positioning, messaging, or story, they can’t always name what it is but they feel it. And in enterprise sales, that unease is enough to stall a deal or send someone back to a competitor. The truth is that positioning, messaging, and storytelling are not the same thing, and treating them like they are is one of the most expensive mistakes a complex-product company can make.
Think of it this way. Together, positioning, messaging, and storytelling make the home where the written and verbal side of your brand lives. Positioning is the foundation. Messaging is the framing, wiring, and plumbing. Storytelling is the design and finishes. Each layer does different work. Each layer depends on the one beneath it. And when something feels off the problem is almost always in one specific layer.
Positioning is the foundation. Messaging is the framing. Storytelling is the finish buyers remember and repeat. The mistake many companies make is treating all three as one thing. That works fine until it doesn’t. When your messaging isn’t landing, your stories aren’t traveling, and you have copy that sounds fine but doesn’t move the needle, it’s hard to diagnose because the symptoms look the same regardless of which layer is actually broken.
Enterprise purchases involve buying committees. Your value has to make sense to everyone on that committee, not just the champion who is helping you sell inside the enterprise. That makes getting the layers right more important.
Here is what each layer does and how to tell them apart.
The foundation determines what everything else can be. You can dress up a house with beautiful finishes, but if the foundation is cracked the wrong base conditions will amplify damage. The same is true for your brand. Positioning strategy is the strategic decision about where your company sits in the market and in the buyer’s mind, and everything else you build rests on it.
It answers basic but genuinely difficult questions:
Strategy is what you say No to. Being everything to everyone is basically being for no one.
That matters because buyers do not evaluate companies in a vacuum. They sort, compare, and categorize. They decide, often within minutes, whether you are a tool, a platform, a point solution, a premium option, a risky bet, or a cheaper substitute for something they already know.
I worked with a company that had been describing itself in a way that made it sound like a cheaper, lower-end solution in a known category. But that was not what the company was. The product was not low-end. The market they served was not looking for cheap. But the framing put them in the wrong mental box, and once a buyer puts you in the wrong box, you spend the rest of the conversation fighting that assumption instead of making your actual case.
The work was not “better words.” The work was repositioning.
We changed the messaging to be focused on being a specialized solution for a smaller, underserved market. Once the foundation was repoured in the right place, the messaging and stories built on top of it finally held. That is what positioning does. It gives every other layer something solid to stand on.
Once the foundation is set, messaging is the layer that makes the structure functional. Think of it as the framing, wiring, and plumbing. It is not visible on the surface, but everything that works in the house runs through it. Without it, nothing functions. And when it is built wrong, the problems show up everywhere even if the foundation beneath it is solid.
Messaging turns positioning into usable language for the people who need to understand, believe, approve, defend, implement, renew, or expand the purchase. This is where companies often get tangled. The brilliant person leading demand gen has a completely different skillset required to be great at positioning, messaging, and storytelling. Occasionally someone will be good at all of them, but in my long career I’ve found it rare to be in one person. They are very different skillsets.
A clear messaging architecture is the connective layer between the company’s strategic position and the specific people who need to act on it. I call it the Single Source of Truth. It’s the architecture that keeps language consistent across everyone who sells, explains, or defends the product.
The CFO does not need the same explanation as the VP of Engineering. The economic buyer, the technical evaluator, the day-to-day user, the procurement team, and the internal champion may all be looking at the same product, but they are not evaluating the same value. Research has identified dozens of different forms of value in business buying, ranging from functional value like cost reduction and scalability to more individual concerns like reduced anxiety and reputational assurance.
Good messaging does not turn the company into something different for every stakeholder. That would create chaos. It keeps the position consistent while making the value legible to each person in the buying process. It gives sales a shared language and a clear architecture.
This is also why messaging cannot stop at clever copy. The buyer’s journey is not linear. Many B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, which raises the stakes for the material they consume before and between sales conversations. Your website design and messaging has to hold up in those spaces: when the buyer is reading your site alone at 10pm, comparing you to two alternatives, forwarding a deck to a colleague, or trying to explain why you belong on the shortlist.
Storytelling does a different job than messaging. Messaging explains what is true. Storytelling helps people remember it and repeat it. In enterprise sales, some of the most important conversations happen when you are not there. Your champion hears the pitch, joins three other meetings, talks to their CFO, and then tries to explain why this vendor should stay in the conversation. Your message has to survive that process.
If the foundation and the framing are solid but the design is missing, the house is functional but not memorable. Nobody takes pictures of exposed drywall. Nobody shares a story about a floorplan. The design is what makes the space livable, recognizable, and feel good. It’s what makes someone say “this is the place.”
A feature list usually won’t do this. A generic value proposition typically won’t either. A line like “we help companies unlock transformation across the enterprise” should be retired permanently, period.
One of my favorite professors at Kellogg was Craig Wortmann. He teaches that both marketers and salespeople are inherently storytellers, and that the job is learning to tell the right story, at the right time, for the right reason. Marketing tells stories at scale across channels to build the brand and attract the right accounts. Sales tells stories one-to-one or one-to-committee to move a specific deal. Those are different storytelling moments that require different skills, but the underlying principle is the same: a story gives the buyer something substantial to hold onto, something that shows what changed, why it mattered, who cared, and what became possible after.
There is a real difference between saying “we improve operational visibility across cross-functional teams” and telling the story of a regional operations leader who had three teams using three different systems, spent every Monday reconciling conflicting reports, and finally had one version of the truth ready before the executive meeting. The first may be accurate. The second gets attention and is easier, and more fun, to retell.
That is the job of storytelling in B2B. It is not decoration added after the serious strategy work is done. In complex sales, storytelling is part of how the strategy moves through an organization, which is why sales narratives and revenue enablement belong on the same shelf as positioning and messaging, not on a separate one.
This is also where most case studies fail. They are technically correct and completely forgettable. They document the implementation, list the results, add a quote, and call it a story. A story is not a sequence of facts. It has tension, context, and a before and after that shows why the decision mattered to real people inside a real company. If the buyer cannot remember it, they cannot repeat it. If they cannot repeat it, it cannot help them build internal consensus.
The foundation gives the market a way to understand you. The framing gives everyone in the buying process a working language. The design gives the buyer something to carry into the next room. Said more directly: positioning defines where you are in the market and who you serve, messaging translates that position into usable language, and storytelling makes the message memorable enough to travel.
When the three layers work together, the company becomes easier to understand. Not because the product became simple, but because the explanation became sharper.
That matters because complexity is not the enemy in enterprise sales. Enterprise buyers buy complex things all the time: infrastructure, security platforms, data systems, AI products, operational software that touches multiple teams and carries real implementation risk. The issue is not complexity, it’s clarity.
The work has to happen at the right layer for things to be clear. If you want to go deeper on what messaging and positioning can and cannot do for a complex product, see our companion piece on the limits of messaging work, and for how this plays out in the post-LLM funnel, read The ABM Marketing Funnel Became a Martini Pipeline.
At Hunter & Bard, we work across all three layers because these problems don’t show up in neat boxes.
Our job is to help companies understand which kind of work they actually need, then build the strategy and materials to support it. That can mean positioning strategy, messaging architecture, sales narratives, website copy, case studies, founder language, or customer stories. The format depends on the business need.
The goal is consistent: make complex value clear so prospects can trust, buy, and repeat internally. Because in enterprise sales, being understood once is not enough.
Work With Us
Hunter & Bard helps technical and complex-product companies clarify positioning, build messaging architecture, and create stories buyers can repeat inside the buying committee.
Hunter & Bard is a San Francisco-based B2B strategy consultancy founded in 2011 by Shira Abel. We help deep-tech and enterprise SaaS companies fix their positioning, sharpen their messaging, and close $100K+ deals.
We work with B2B leaders who are tired of being overlooked, underestimated, or mistaken for their competitors. Our specialty is turning complex, technical products into clear, compelling stories that win enterprise deals.
We believe that perception drives revenue. If your buyers can't tell you apart from the next vendor in 30 seconds, you have a positioning problem — not a marketing problem. We fix that.
Perception = (Story × Visibility) ÷ Noise
This framework drives everything we do. Your story has to be sharp. Your visibility has to be strategic. And you have to cut through the noise — not add to it.
Shira Abel — Founder & CEO. Kellogg MBA. 20+ years in B2B marketing. Former CMO. Keynote speaker. Published in Forbes, HuffPost, and Wired. Specialist in enterprise positioning and perception strategy.
Daina Reed — Founding Designer & Partner. 15+ years in product and brand design. Former Senior Product Designer at Dun & Bradstreet. Specialist in enterprise UX, visual identity, and design systems.