Author: Shira Abel Category: Enterprise Strategy URL: https://hunterandbard.com/resources/blog/what-messaging-and-positioning-can-and-cannot-do
Get your messaging right and the leads will come. It is one of the most common promises in B2B marketing, and one of the most misleading. Strong positioning will not make a stranger buy a six-figure product on first contact. What it does is more important: it keeps you from being eliminated before the conversation begins.
Messaging and positioning will not close an enterprise deal on first contact. Their actual job is survival: keeping you on the day-one shortlist where 95% of winning vendors already sit, and giving your internal champion language they can use to align a 6-to-10 person buying committee. Positioning is infrastructure for risk-averse buyers, not a demand generation shortcut. It compounds over 12 to 18 months, and its value shows up in the deals that did not stall and the committees that did not eliminate you.
Let's start with the promise someone almost certainly made you.
Maybe it was at a conference or in a pitch deck from an agency. Maybe it was a LinkedIn post that got 3,000 likes. The promise sounds something like this: "Get your messaging right, and the leads will come." Or the slightly more sophisticated version: "Nail your positioning and you'll stand out in a crowded market."
Both statements are partially true. Which makes them more dangerous than a lie.
Strong messaging and positioning will not make a stranger buy an enterprise product the first time they encounter you. If you've just been discovered, meaning you showed up in a search, got a referral, or your SDR reached out cold, there is no amount of compelling copy that closes a six-figure deal at that moment. Anyone who tells you it can is either selling you something or has never actually worked in enterprise B2B. Possibly both.
What it can do is less glamorous, and more important. But it requires understanding what's actually happening inside an enterprise buying decision, because it's almost nothing like what most people assume.
Enterprise buyers are not shopping. They are managing risk.
This is the piece that changes everything. In 1979, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published their landmark Prospect Theory paper in Econometrica, demonstrating that people evaluate potential losses roughly twice as heavily as equivalent gains. They named the principle loss aversion. In consumer purchases, a bad decision costs money and some frustration. In enterprise purchases, a bad vendor decision can cost millions in implementation failures, derail critical projects, and end careers. The asymmetry between upside and downside is enormous, and it shapes every step of how a buying committee behaves.
This is the origin of one of the most durable phrases in B2B sales: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." It was never a compliment to IBM's product. It was a precise description of how loss aversion operates at an organizational level. Buyers choose vendors who reduce their personal professional exposure, not just vendors who deliver the best features or the sharpest pitch. The implication for your messaging is significant: being better than the incumbent is often less persuasive than being safe enough to stake your reputation on. McKinsey's research on B2B branding found that strong B2B brands outperform weak ones by 20% in EBIT margin. Buyers pay a premium for brands that make their professional lives less risky.
Here is the other thing: you are never talking to one person.
Edelman cites Gartner's research on complex B2B purchases, found that the buying group includes 6 to 10 decision-makers, each arriving with 4 to 5 pieces of independent research they later share with the group. And every one of those people is evaluating your company through a completely different lens. The CFO needs a defensible ROI case that holds up under scrutiny. The head of IT is running a risk assessment: Will this break what we already have? Is it secure? Who supports it when something goes wrong? The end user wants to know if it makes their daily work meaningfully less painful. The legal and procurement team wants to know if you're going to be a contractual nightmare. The executive sponsor wants to know if choosing you makes them look forward-thinking or reckless. Sales just wants their lives to be easier, will you deliver that?
Bain & Company's research on the B2B Elements of Value drew from quantitative and qualitative customer studies across three decades. This study identified 40 distinct elements that matter to B2B buyers, spanning five categories:
The individual and inspirational categories, which include things like reduced anxiety, career development, and social responsibility, are not soft. They are the dimensions that differentiate vendors who make the shortlist from those who get eliminated. Buyers are buying a story they can tell internally to justify the decision, a narrative that makes sense to each of the stakeholders who has to say yes.
Your messaging has to work for all of them. Not simultaneously in one document, but across your entire presence. If your positioning is muddled at the top, no amount of persona-specific content fixes the problem downstream.
If you accept that enterprise buying is fundamentally about risk management across a committee of people with different fears, then the job of messaging becomes much clearer.
Messaging keeps you from being eliminated. That is its primary function. Not persuasion. Survival.
Here is how elimination actually works. Long before a formal RFP or vendor evaluation process begins, buyers build a mental model of who belongs in the conversation. This is through conference appearances, peer recommendations, thought leadership, and accumulated exposure across time. That evidence forms a rough shortlist. Vendors who don't make that shortlist don't get considered. According to The B2B Buyer Experience Report for 2025, 95% of winning vendors are already on the day one shortlist, and 80% of deals are won by the "pre-contact favorite." With first contact now happening at 61% of the journey (that's weeks faster than it was previously), the decision is effectively locked before you even engage. You are either on that list, or you don't exist. LLMs are helping determine that day one shortlist.
Weak or generic positioning accelerates elimination. If a buyer lands on your website or encounters your pitch and cannot immediately answer what does this company actually do, and who specifically is it for?, you are gone. The brain processes unclear signals as risk, and in a risk-averse environment, anything unclear gets filtered out. In many B2B sectors, half of all brands are mistaken for a competitor by buyers, meaning enormous amounts of marketing spend effectively build awareness for someone else. Undifferentiated positioning is actively expensive.
Strong positioning passes the elimination test. It gives the buyer's brain a clear, memorable category to file you in. It signals that you understand their world well enough to have earned a place in the evaluation. It does not close the deal. It keeps the door from closing on you before the conversation has a chance to begin.
Here's what good messaging genuinely delivers:
This research doesn't just explain why buyers are risk-averse. It explains why no message, however well-crafted, can compress a trust-building process that requires time. Trust in an enterprise context is not a feeling, it is a track record. It requires repeated exposure, demonstrated competence, and accumulated evidence that you will still exist and be worth dealing with 18 months after the contract is signed.
In the interest of full transparency, because the space is full of people who will tell you what you want to hear:
When founders come to us at Hunter & Bard asking about messaging and positioning work, the first conversation we have is about expectations. Strong positioning is a 12-to-18-month investment in your market presence, not a 90-day pipeline fix. It pays off in the quality of your shortlist appearances, in the efficiency of your champion's internal selling effort, and in the compounding brand equity that makes you increasingly hard for competitors to displace.
The companies that get frustrated with messaging work are almost always the ones who were told, implicitly or explicitly, that it was a demand generation shortcut. It isn't. It is infrastructure. And like all infrastructure, its value is most visible in the problems you don't have: the deals that didn't stall because your positioning was clear, the committees that didn't eliminate you because your credibility was already established, the champions who could actually close because your materials gave them something real to work with.
Your messaging is the evidence you present, over time and across every touchpoint, that you are that company.
That is genuinely difficult to build. Anyone offering you something fast is selling magic. In enterprise B2B, magic doesn't exist. But clear, honest, well-executed positioning compounds in ways that become very hard for competitors to replicate. That's worth building.
Most messaging engagements fail because they are sold as pipeline accelerators when they are actually shortlist insurance. The companies that get the most value from positioning work treat it like infrastructure: built once, maintained continuously, and measured against the deals that did not slip rather than the ones that closed faster. If your sales team is constantly re-explaining who you are to every new stakeholder in a deal, that is a positioning problem showing up in the pipeline. Fixing it upstream is almost always cheaper than absorbing it downstream.
Recommended Next Step
Hunter & Bard works with B2B technology companies to build the messaging and positioning foundations that earn enterprise trust before the first meeting, and long after the deal closes. Our two-week Sprint rebuilds the messaging architecture your buyers, their committees, and the LLMs they rely on need to put you in the deal before sales ever gets a meeting.
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.