Positioning is what a company wants the market to believe. Buyers act on the picture created when those claims meet customer evidence, independent opinion, analyst understanding and lived experience. In high-value B2B technology decisions, that external picture often carries more weight than the vendor’s chosen words.
A few weeks ago, I spoke with a technology company that wanted to change how its market understood its work. The technology was good, the company was growing, and the argument made sense. The problem was that their language required everyone else to make the same intellectual leap they had already made internally.
When you spend every day inside a company, its evolution feels obvious. You know why the product changed, which customers started buying it and which deals changed your thinking. By the time somebody rewrites the positioning, the new story can feel self-evident.
Then you tell it to someone who hasn’t been on that journey, and they look at you as if you’ve invented a new branch of physics.
My advice was simple: don’t make the market learn your science before it can understand your value. There was nothing wrong with the technology. The company was simply asking outsiders to travel too far, too quickly, from what they already understood.
I’ve spent enough time around technology companies to think this is one of the more expensive misunderstandings in B2B. We assume that when a company changes, the market somehow receives the update. It doesn’t.
The market is usually running an older version of you
This is particularly visible in Analyst Relations because analysts have long memories. Brief an analyst today, and you are not presenting on a blank sheet of paper. They may have met your company three years ago, spoken with competitors last week and spent yesterday advising enterprise buyers.
You arrive with 20 beautifully designed slides explaining the new you. They arrive with a mental model built over several years. Sometimes those two things barely resemble one another.
I recently worked with another company trying to move what has traditionally been considered a developer tool into a more strategic conversation around governance and enterprise risk. I liked the argument and thought it was probably where part of the market was heading.
But “where the market is heading” and “how the market buys today” are two different things.
You cannot PowerPoint your way across that gap. If the company wants to become part of a CIO-level decision, eventually CIO-level buyers have to treat it that way. Customers need to explain why they bought it. Contracts should begin to reflect it. Analysts need to hear the pattern from their own clients.
Evidence slowly catches up with ambition. Until then, it is positioning.
That distinction has been rattling around in my head because we spend enormous amounts of time discussing what companies say about themselves and surprisingly little looking at how everybody else reaches a conclusion about them.
A half-million-euro buyer has other people to answer to
Buying €20 software is easy. You like it, the reviews seem fine, and the credit card comes out. Put another four or five zeroes on the decision and the room becomes crowded.
Architecture has an opinion. Security appears. Procurement certainly appears. Legal may want a word. Someone asks for customer references. Somebody remembers a disastrous implementation at their previous employer. A consultant is already in the account. Eventually somebody asks whether Gartner, Forrester, IDC or another specialist actually knows the company.
One conversation with a software company stuck with me because the customer story behind a major deal was better than any generic security claim they could have made. Several executives on the customer side had previously lived through a very public software supply-chain incident. They had no intention of being responsible for allowing something similar to happen again.
Suddenly the purchase wasn’t really about another feature comparison. It was about defending a decision.
The higher the cost and consequence of getting something wrong, the more the buyer looks outside the vendor for confidence. This is where my own world of Analyst Relations becomes interesting, although perhaps not for the reason people assume.
Companies understandably care about getting into reports. I’ve spent much of my career helping them do exactly that. But some of the most valuable analyst influence I’ve seen never appeared in a report and was never visible to the vendor.
An enterprise buyer calls an analyst: “We’re looking at these three companies. What do you know?”
There is an enormous difference between “I’ve heard of them” and “I’ve known them for two years, spoken with the management several times, understand the customers they’re winning, and here are the questions I would ask.”
No quadrant required.
The analyst isn’t making the purchase. They are lending accumulated knowledge and credibility to somebody who has to make it. Once I started looking at it that way, AR became part of a much more interesting question.
Who does the buyer trust when you aren’t in the room?
Years ago, you could draw reasonably clean lines around who influenced a technology purchase. Marketing did its thing. PR dealt with journalists. AR dealt with analysts. Customer marketing collected references. Sales managed the account. Procurement arrived at the appropriate moment to ruin everybody’s afternoon.
Reality was never that tidy, but organisationally it was close enough. That world is disappearing.
A buyer can now move between an analyst inquiry, a former colleague, G2, Google, Reddit, a vendor website and ChatGPT before the salesperson has even worked out that the account is active. Customer experiences become searchable. Analyst terminology escapes the research firms. Peer reviews surface in search. Journalists quote analysts. AI systems reconstruct information from across the lot.
We see this in our own business. Customer reviews I once considered mainly useful as social proof have become far more interesting because they are independent descriptions of what clients think they bought from us. Read enough of them and patterns appear. Sometimes those patterns describe the company better than the company describes itself.
If dozens of customers independently describe you using similar language while your website says something different, which version is the market more likely to believe? I’d put my money on the customers.
This is why nobody buys your positioning
I don’t mean positioning is useless. A company needs to decide what it stands for, which problems it solves and where it belongs. Without that, everybody tells a different story.
But positioning is an input. It isn’t the outcome.
The outcome is the picture that forms in somebody else’s head after your claims collide with their experience, other people’s experience, independent opinion and the evidence they find.
For a long time, I’ve looked at one part of that process through the lens of Analyst Relations. The longer I do this, the more convinced I become that the interesting subject is the process itself: how does a market decide what a company is? How quickly does that perception change when the company changes? Who has enough credibility to alter it? And what happens when machines increasingly sit between the person asking the question and the evidence from which the answer is constructed?
I don’t have a neat three-step framework for that. I’m suspicious of people who already do. But I do know that telling the market something doesn’t make it true, and even making it true doesn’t guarantee the market knows.
Somewhere between those two things sit reputation, evidence, influence and trust. For companies selling expensive technology, that space is becoming more important, not less.
So perhaps the question I would put to a management team isn’t, “Are you happy with your positioning?”
I’d ask something more uncomfortable:
If none of you was allowed in the room, what would everybody else say about your company?
Because that’s probably closer to what your buyer is buying.
An earlier version of this article was published by Bram Weerts on LinkedIn.
The market does not update itself.
Kea helps B2B technology companies understand how the market currently sees them and build the analyst relationships, evidence and engagement required to change that view.