The competitor taking your revenue has no name
Most businesses build competitive material against named rivals. Battlecards. Feature comparisons. Win-loss reviews organised around who else was in the room.
The revenue is not going there.
Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna analysed sales conversations at scale for their research published in Harvard Business Review. Their finding: 56% of no-decision losses come from buyer indecision — fear of choosing wrong — rather than genuine preference for the status quo. The remaining 44% are status quo preference. In both cases the deal went nowhere, and no competitor gained anything.
April Dunford puts the share of B2B purchase processes ending in no decision at 40% to 60%, and attributes much of it to buyers who could not confidently understand what they were evaluating.
This is a positioning problem presented as a sales problem. A buyer who cannot place a product in a category, against a clear alternative, with an obvious reason it matters to them specifically, does not choose a competitor. They stop.
Positioning determines whether a decision is possible. That is why it is a commercial system rather than a communications exercise.
What positioning actually is
Positioning is the set of decisions that establish what a product is, who it is for, and what it should be compared against.
It is not a statement. The statement is an output, and usually the least consequential one.
April Dunford's method, set out in Obviously Awesome, is the most usable version available. It is a documented practitioner method rather than an empirically validated model, and it is built from several hundred repositioning engagements. Five components, in order.
1. Competitive alternatives
What would this customer do if the product did not exist?
The answer is frequently not a competitor. It is a spreadsheet, a manual process, an internal team, an agency, or nothing at all. Starting here rather than with the product is the method's most important move, because it anchors everything downstream to how the buyer actually frames the decision.
The no-decision data explains why. If doing nothing is the most common alternative, and doing nothing never appears in the positioning, the positioning has ignored the majority of the market.
2. Unique attributes
What does this product have that the alternatives do not?
Features, capabilities, data, integrations, delivery model, structure of the team. Stated as facts, not as claims. If a competitor could write the same sentence, it is not an attribute.
3. Value
What can the customer do, because of those attributes, that they could not do before?
This is where most positioning work collapses into adjectives. "Faster" and "easier" are not value. Value is a specific capability or outcome the customer gains, ideally one they already measure.
4. Customers who care most
Which buyers care disproportionately about that value?
Not the total addressable market. The segment for whom this specific value is urgent. Dunford's argument is that positioning gets sharper as the segment narrows, and that most businesses lose deals by describing themselves in terms broad enough to interest nobody in particular.
5. Market category
What frame makes the value immediately obvious?
Category sets expectations — about price, about who buys, about what the product should do. Choosing a category the buyer already understands is usually stronger than inventing one, because invented categories require the buyer to do work before they can evaluate.
The commercial test
Positioning work is complete when it has changed at least one of three things.
Price. A different category, a different alternative set, or a narrower segment changes what the market will pay and what pricing structure fits. Positioning that leaves pricing untouched has usually not moved.
Channel. Where the buyer looks depends on what they think they are buying. A repositioning that does not change where the business shows up has not changed the frame.
Scope. Positioning determines which features matter and which are noise. It should produce a build decision and a kill decision.
Copy changes are downstream of all three. When positioning work produces new copy and nothing else, what happened was a writing exercise conducted with positioning vocabulary.
Where positioning work fails
It starts with the product. Teams list what they built, then reverse-engineer a market that would want it. This produces internally coherent positioning with no purchase in the buyer's actual decision.
The alternative set is wrong. Competitors get named, the status quo does not. Given that 40% to 60% of processes end in no decision, omitting the status quo from the alternative set removes the largest competitor from the analysis.
The segment stays broad. Narrowing feels like giving up revenue. It is the opposite: broad positioning wins fewer deals in every segment, because it is more compelling to no one than sharp positioning is to someone.
The category is invented. Creating a category is expensive and slow, and it requires the business to fund market education. Occasionally right. Usually a way of avoiding a harder comparison.
It is written by marketing alone. Positioning constrains product, pricing, and sales. Produced without those functions in the room, it will not survive contact with them.
It is never revisited. Positioning is valid for a market condition. When alternatives change or the segment matures, the positioning ages regardless of how good it was.
Sequencing: positioning is not the first step
Positioning translates a strategic choice into a market frame. It cannot substitute for the choice.
If the business has not decided where it will play and how it will win, positioning work produces an articulate description of an unmade decision. This is the most common reason a positioning project produces excitement in the room and no commercial change afterwards.
The order that works: understand what the category structurally permits, establish which customer outcomes are underserved, make the choice, then position it. Validation follows, not precedes.
Diagnostic: is the positioning working?
Six tests. Run them this week.
Ask three people in the business — one from sales, one from product, one from leadership — what the product is and who it is for. Compare the answers.
Pull the last twenty lost deals. Categorise each as lost to a named competitor, or lost to no decision. If no decision exceeds 30%, the frame is not enabling a decision.
Find the status quo in the current sales material. If the case against doing nothing is not made explicitly, the largest competitor is unaddressed.
Check whether the value statements would survive a competitor writing the same sentence. Anything that survives is not differentiating.
Identify what the positioning excludes. If no segment, use case, or feature was ruled out, no positioning decision was made.
Trace the last positioning change through to price, channel, and scope. If none of the three moved, it was a copy change.
What this produces
Correct positioning does not make a product more appealing. It makes a decision possible.
The buyer knows what they are comparing, what they lose by not moving, and whether they are the person this was built for. That clarity is worth more than persuasion, because the majority of lost revenue is not going to a rival. It is sitting in processes that stalled.
Positioning is where a strategic choice becomes commercially legible. It is a decision with a price attached, not a sentence with adjectives in it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between positioning and messaging?
Positioning is the decision about what the product is, who it serves, and what it competes against. Messaging is the expression of that decision. Messaging work that is not downstream of a positioning decision produces variations on an unresolved question.
How narrow should positioning be?
Narrow enough that a specific buyer recognises themselves immediately. The instinct to stay broad protects theoretical revenue at the cost of actual conversion. Broad positioning is less compelling in every segment it touches.
Should we create a new market category?
Rarely. Creating a category means funding market education before the business can sell into it. Choosing an existing category the buyer already understands is faster and usually stronger. Invent a category only when no existing frame makes the value legible.
How often should positioning be revisited?
When the alternative set changes, when the segment matures, or when win rates decline without a product cause. Positioning is valid for a market condition rather than indefinitely.
Who should own positioning?
Leadership, with product, sales, and marketing in the room. Positioning determines pricing, roadmap, and channel. Produced by marketing alone, it lacks the authority to change any of them.
How do we know positioning has actually changed?
Check price, channel, and scope. If none moved, the positioning did not change. New copy is evidence of writing, not of repositioning.
Our deals stall late in the process. Is that a positioning problem?
Often. Late-stage stalls usually mean the buyer was individually convinced but could not carry the case internally. That is a frame problem — the positioning did not equip the champion to explain the decision to people who were never in the room.
Sources
Dixon, M. and McKenna, T., research on buyer indecision, Harvard Business Review (2022), and The JOLT Effect
Dunford, A., Obviously Awesome; published estimates on B2B no-decision rates
Gartner research on buying-group conflict and stalled purchase processes
Edelman B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, on internal misalignment within buying groups
Structure your next phase
Zerologic works with founders and leadership teams to turn strategic choices into positioning that changes pricing, channel, and scope — not only the copy.
Talk to us: partners@zerologic.io · zerologic.io
