Messaging & Positioning to improve your B2B win-rate

When McKinsey looked at how B2B buyers actually interact with vendors, they found something that has become a rule you cannot ignore. Customers split their time almost evenly across three types of interactions: in-person meetings, remote conversations, and digital self-service channels. This pattern, which McKinsey calls the “rule of thirds” is now consistent across industries and geographies, and it shows up at every stage of the buying journey (McKinsey).

A buyer who first encounters your business through a website, then later through a sales call, and finally through a demo with an account executive expects to hear the same message and see the same story. If your positioning shifts depending on the channel, trust quickly erodes. Messaging needs to hold steady throughout multiple touchpoints so that prospects feel they can rely on you. McKinsey’s data also shows that companies who engage across ten or more channels with consistent messaging outperform their peers, growing faster and delivering higher satisfaction (GlobeNewswire).

“B2B buyers now regularly use ten or more channels to interact with suppliers.” - TLDR, McKinsey

Why Messaging Consistency Is the Lifeline for SaaS

The SaaS buying cycle is already complex, with long evaluations and multiple decision makers involved. What creates friction is not a lack of information but a lack of coherence. When different teams in your company talk about your product in different ways, or when your website highlights value A but your sales deck only highlights value B, the story and buying experience fractures. Prospects do not have the time or patience to reconcile those differences, and the winning bidder often applies a recipe to resolve these differences for the buyer.

Consistency is what makes a product narrative powerful. It means that no matter where someone encounters you, they receive the same messaging about the problem(s) you solve, the value you create, and why your product is the right choice.

At SIGNARY, we’ve seen the impact of consistent messaging. By taking insights directly from customer discovery and using buyers’ own words to shape a messaging hierarchy, then rolling it out across every channel, we created a unified story for a client that drove a 70% increase in direct revenue attributed to returning users within twelve months. That is the effect of consistency: it multiplies the results of every other activity.

Why “Sense Making” Matters More Than Information

Gartner has spent years studying how B2B decisions are made, and one of their key insights developed into a framework they call “Sense Making” (Gartner). It is not about giving buyers every piece of information you can think of, it is about giving them the right information in a way that helps them make sense of what they are seeing.

In modern B2B sales journeys, buyers are drowning in content. Every vendor has a deck, a whitepaper, a video, and a library of customer stories, technical documentation, soulless pitch decks and collateral. The natural instinct is to compete by adding more, as buyers typically complain 'this material doesn't answer my questions' - but building more is the wrong approach. More information does not mean more clarity. In fact, it usually creates the opposite effect. Buyers begin to struggle with contradictions and noise, and instead of feeling confident in a decision, they hesitate.

Messaging & Info Overload

Gartner’s research makes the point clearly. 55 percent say that making informed trade-offs between vendors and their capabilities is difficult when they look at all the information they encounter during the buying process (StudyLib).

The psychological effect is familiar to anyone who has ever tried to choose between too many options on a restaurant menu. Instead of being enabled, you feel very stuck. You ask others at the table 'Uh, what are you having?' In B2B, that feeling is magnified because the stakes are high, the cost of getting it wrong is significant, and multiple colleagues and stakeholders need to agree on the final choice. Information overload does not create confidence, it enables paralysis.

“High quality, low regret deals happen when sellers help customers simplify the buying decision.” - TLDR, Gartner

Give Sellers the Messaging to Guide Buyers

Sellers need to be trained and supported so they can act as interpreters for the buyer. Their role is not to recite every feature and benefit, but to help buyers navigate the complexity of the market and frame decisions in a way that feels manageable.

This means enabling sales teams to have consistency. Our messaging frameworks reduce long lists of attributes into three or four clear themes and proof points that actually matter to the buyer.

It also scales into powerful sales enablement that teaches selling teams to listen for prospect confusion and respond with clarity. The B2B companies who succeed are the ones who give their sellers the right messaging playbook.

April Dunford Style Positioning

While frameworks like McKinsey’s and Gartner’s describe the environment, April Dunford provides a framework for how to actually position within it.

Her approach to positioning starts with understanding the alternatives your buyers already have in mind, then surfacing the attributes that make you different, and finally linking those attributes to specific value that buyers already care about. It is a practical way of moving from a product-focused list of features to a buyer-focused narrative.

This is not just an academic exercise. It is about discipline. Dunford is very clear that positioning is about creating clarity in the buyer’s mind, and clarity comes from context. But the method only works if you test it. It is not enough to write a positioning statement and feel good about it. You need to validate it in front of buyers, measure the response, and refine until the story you tell is the story they hear.

Positioning Lives in the Mind of the Customer

Long before Dunford, Al Ries and Jack Trout asserted that positioning is not about what you say, it is about what the customer remembers. A company cannot own its positioning by decree. It only owns it if buyers carry the same story in their heads.

That is why product marketers must behave like detectives. We need to listen closely to how customers describe our products in their own words. We need to pay attention to which claims create friction and which ones create confidence. We need to recognize that the job is not to hammer home what we want people to believe, but to uncover how they already perceive value and align with it.

“Positioning is not what you say about a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.” – TLDR, Ries & Trout

Conclusion

McKinsey’s rule of thirds shows us that buyers engage everywhere and they expect the story to hold steady across every channel. Gartner’s Sense Making reminds us that the best sellers are not the ones who say the most, but the ones who help buyers make sense of what matters. April Dunford gives us a disciplined process to craft that story, and Trout and Ries remind us that the ultimate test is whether the message lives in the buyer’s mind.

At SIGNARY, this is the standard we hold ourselves to when we build messaging for SaaS companies. It is not about clever copy or more collateral. It is about ensuring that the story is consistent wherever the buyer encounters it, that it helps them cut through the noise of the market, and that it is validated to live in their minds, not just ours. That is what makes product messaging work, and that is what makes positioning powerful.

Get in touch today if you'd like to develop and validate your B2B messaging.