How do the best B2B companies get positioning agreed when product, sales and the founders all disagree?
They stop arguing about opinions and go find the buyer's view, because the only competitive alternative that matters is the one the prospect would actually pick if you did not exist, and that is a research question, not a debate. They run the exercise as a cross-functional working session rather than a marketing deliverable, with sales in the room, since sales already knows which strengths land. They also watch for product pessimism, teams get so close to their own gaps that they discount advantages customers find remarkable. And they treat positioning as something revisited as the product and market move, not carved once at launch.
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Deals with the four places positioning work actually stalls, including teams that cannot agree on their competitive alternatives. Useful once you have tried positioning and it went nowhere.
The argument for treating positioning as iterative and cross-functional rather than a one-time launch decision, which is what separates companies that keep it sharp from ones whose story rots. Also the case for reframing a market instead of accepting its boundaries.
A five step exercise you can actually run in a room this week, ending in the market frame of reference that makes your strengths obvious. This is the working session, not the theory.
The clearest single hour on how positioning, segmentation and personas differ and how they connect to the sales call. Dunford has done this with 200+ companies including Postman, so the examples are concrete.
