Your product is live. Demos are booked. The pitch deck is sharp. But when prospects compare you to competitors, they shrug. When your sales team explains what you do, they stumble. When you ask customers why they chose you, their answers are all over the place.
This isn't a sales problem. It's a positioning problem.
And no, it won't fix itself when you hit Series B. The longer you operate without clear positioning, the harder it becomes to define your space, own your narrative, and win deals consistently. The good news? A strategic positioning workshop can cut through the noise in days not quarters.
Here's how the best B2B SaaS companies use positioning workshops to find their exact place in the market and build a go-to-market strategy that actually converts.
Why Most B2B SaaS Startups Get Positioning Wrong
Most founders think positioning is what you say about your product. It's not.
Positioning is what your market believes about where your product fits and who it's for. It's the mental real estate you occupy in your buyer's mind when they're evaluating solutions. And here's the brutal truth: if you're not intentionally shaping that perception, your competitors are doing it for you.
From the founder's perspective, positioning feels like an identity crisis. You've built something you believe in, but the market keeps comparing you to tools that solve completely different problems. From the investor's lens, weak positioning is a GTM execution risk that caps valuation potential, no matter how strong the product is.
Three positioning mistakes that kill GTM velocity:
"We're better" positioning: You're faster, cheaper, or have more features. So what? Your buyers don't care about features, they care about outcomes. If your positioning leads with capabilities instead of value, you're asking prospects to do the translation work themselves. They won't.
When a logistics startup we worked with positioned as "better route optimization," they struggled. When they repositioned as "the only platform that pays drivers fairly while cutting fuel costs 18-25%," deals closed 40% faster.
"We're for everyone" positioning: The fastest way to be irrelevant is to try to be everything to everyone. Broad positioning forces your sales team to customize the pitch for every single call, kills messaging consistency, and makes your marketing impossibly expensive. Without sharp customer segmentation, you're burning budget on the wrong accounts.
"We're different" positioning (without context): Being different means nothing if buyers can't map that difference to a problem they actually have. Differentiation without clear value is just noise.
The result? Longer sales cycles. Lower win rates. A GTM motion that grinds instead of scales.
What a Positioning Workshop Actually Does
A positioning workshop isn't a branding exercise or a messaging refresh. It's a strategic forcing function that aligns your entire go-to-market around a single, defensible truth: who you win with, why you win, and how you prove it.
Here's what happens when you run this the right way:
1. You Identify the Real Problem You Solve
Not the problem you think you solve. Not the one investors loved in your pitch. The problem that actually makes buyers pull out their credit cards.
The best positioning workshops start with brutal honesty about the gap between what you want to be known for and what the market actually values. This is where customer interviews, win/loss analysis, and competitive intelligence converge to show you the truth.
"Most startups discover they're solving a different problem than they thought. The workshop forces you to listen to what the market is actually telling you."
The question you're answering: What job is your product being hired to do and by whom?
This is the foundation of achieving product-market fit. You can't hit PMF if you're unclear on the job your product performs.
2. You Map Your Competitive Landscape (Honestly)
Most competitive analyses are trash. They focus on feature parity tables and pricing comparisons that don't reflect how buyers actually make decisions.
A real competitive positioning exercise forces you to answer:
Question | Why It Matters |
Who do buyers compare you to? | Reveals your actual competitive set, not who you think you compete with |
What alternatives exist if buyers do nothing? | Shows whether you're fighting status quo or other vendors |
Where do competitors own mindshare? | Exposes the narratives you need to counter or avoid |
What gaps exist that no one is addressing? | Uncovers white space opportunities for differentiation |
The goal isn't to be "better" than competitors. It's to be different in a way that matters to a specific segment.
From a customer's journey perspective, they're not evaluating features, they're trying to minimize risk while solving a painful problem. Your positioning needs to address both the functional outcome and the emotional/political stakes of the buying decision.
3. You Define Your Market Fit (Specifically)
Here's where vague becomes valuable. Instead of "mid-market SaaS companies," you walk out with positioning like:
"We're built for Series A-B SaaS companies with $2M-$10M ARR that have outgrown HubSpot but can't justify Salesforce and need outbound motion, not just inbound."
That level of specificity does three things:
Your sales team knows exactly who to target
Your marketing can speak to precise pain points
Your product roadmap gets clear prioritization signals
The deliverable: A crystal-clear ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) that becomes the filter for every GTM decision you make going forward. This isn't just marketing fluff, it's the starting point for effective revenue operations that actually scales.
4. You Craft a Positioning Statement That Travels
This isn't a tagline. It's not your homepage hero copy. A positioning statement is an internal alignment tool that answers:
For [target customer]
Who [statement of need or opportunity]
Our product is a [product category]
That [key benefit, reason to buy]
Unlike [primary competitive alternative]
Our product [statement of primary differentiation]
When done right, this becomes the North Star for every piece of sales collateral, every product demo, every cold email, every ad you run. It's the throughline that makes your entire go-to-market strategy coherent.
At a Series A fintech company we advised, the positioning statement transformed from "modern payment infrastructure" to "the only payment rail that settles B2B transactions in under 2 hours without credit risk built for freight brokers processing $500K+ monthly." Revenue predictability improved by approximately 35-45% within 90 days.
The Positioning Workshop Process That Actually Works
Running an effective positioning workshop isn't about locking your team in a room for eight hours with a whiteboard. It's about structured discovery, facilitated debate, and ruthless prioritization.
Here's the playbook we use at Phi Consulting:
Pre-Workshop: Gather the Evidence
Before you start positioning, you need data. Real data. Not opinions.
Customer interviews (both champions and churned accounts)
Win/loss analysis from closed deals
Sales call recordings and objection patterns
Competitive intel (what do prospects say they're evaluating you against?)
Market research (category trends, buyer behavior shifts)
Why this matters: Positioning based on gut feel is how you end up rebuilding it six months later. Positioning based on evidence is how you build a moat.
Workshop Day 1: Problem Definition & Competitive Mapping
This is where you get uncomfortable. You're confronting the gap between your vision and market reality.
Key exercises:
Jobs-to-be-Done mapping: What functional, emotional, and social jobs are buyers hiring your product to do?
Competitive positioning matrix: Plot yourself and competitors on axes that matter to buyers (not to you)
Category definition: Are you creating a new category, redefining an existing one, or winning within established boundaries?
The output? A shared understanding of where the market sees you today vs. where you need to be.
From an operational perspective, this is where cross-functional teams: sales, product, marketing, customer success align on a single truth. No more siloed narratives.
Workshop Day 2: Positioning Statements & GTM Implications
Now you build. You're translating insights into strategic decisions.
Key deliverables:
Refined ICP with decision-maker personas
Positioning statement (the internal alignment tool)
Value proposition messaging (the external narrative)
GTM channel strategy tied to positioning (outbound vs. inbound, PLG vs. sales-led)
Competitive battlecards
The real test: If your sales team can't articulate your positioning in 30 seconds after this workshop, it's not done yet.
At a growth-stage logistics startup, we ran this workshop and discovered their sales team was pitching "compliance software" while buyers were actually hiring them to "avoid $50K+ DOT fines." The repositioning cut sales cycles from 90 days to roughly 45-60 days.
Post-Workshop: Operationalize & Validate
Positioning doesn't matter if it stays in a deck. It needs to live in your:
Pitch decks
Website copy
Cold email sequences
Demo scripts
Pricing pages
Sales enablement materials
Then you validate. Run A/B tests on messaging. Track which positioning angles drive meetings vs. no-shows. Monitor win rates by segment.
Positioning is a hypothesis. The market tells you if you're right.
The ROI of Getting Positioning Right
When you nail positioning, everything downstream gets easier. Here's what changes:
Sales cycles compress. Clear positioning means prospects self-qualify faster. They either see themselves in your narrative or they don't and that clarity shortens time-to-close.
Win rates climb. You stop competing on price and start competing on fit. When buyers understand exactly why you're the right choice for them, deals close at higher ASPs with less friction.
Marketing spend becomes efficient. Precise positioning lets you narrow targeting, speak to specific pain points, and measure what actually drives pipeline. No more spray-and-pray campaigns.
Product roadmap gets focused. When you know who you're building for and what problem you're solving, feature prioritization becomes obvious. You stop chasing shiny objects and start deepening your moat.
Retention improves. Customers who bought based on accurate positioning stick around. They got what they expected. They see the value. They expand.
One of our clients, a freight tech SaaS at $200K ARR, ran a positioning workshop with us and repositioned from "logistics software" to "fleet payment optimization platform for mid-sized trucking companies." Revenue hit $1.5M within nine months. Not because the product changed. Because the market finally understood where they fit.
This kind of GTM execution success compounds over time. Early positioning clarity means every dollar you invest in growth works harder.
When You Need a Positioning Workshop (The Checklist)
You need to run a positioning workshop if:
✓ Your sales team describes your product differently every time
✓ Prospects compare you to competitors you didn't expect
✓ Win/loss data shows no clear pattern in why you win or lose
✓ Your messaging tries to appeal to too many buyer types
✓ You're pivoting, launching a new product, or entering a new market
✓ You raised a new round and need to scale GTM fast
✓ Churn is high because customers didn't get what they expected
✓ You're struggling to align sales execution with your GTM vision
The right time to do this? Before you scale go-to-market. Scaling bad positioning just means burning cash faster.
Final Thought: Positioning Is Strategy, Not Creative
Here's what separates the startups that scale from the ones that stall: clarity.
Clarity on who you're for. Clarity on what problem you solve. Clarity on why you win.
A positioning workshop gives you that clarity. It's not a one-time exercise, it's the foundation of every GTM decision you'll make. And when your positioning is sharp, your go-to-market strategy becomes a competitive weapon instead of a cost center.
The startups that win aren't always the ones with the best product. They're the ones the market understands.
Ready to find your position in the market? At Phi Consulting, we run positioning workshops as part of our GTM consulting that turn market confusion into GTM clarity - fast. From discovery to deployment, we help B2B SaaS startups define their space and own it.
Book a Free GTM Audit and let's map out where your product actually belongs.
