Insights from Bob Wright, Co-Founder of Firebrick Consulting — drawn from positioning sessions with senior B2B CMOs across four CMO Huddles Strategy Labs.
What do GitLab, Workday, Calendly, Postman, and Verifone have in common? Beyond their obvious differences in size, market, and product, they've each built a market position that shapes how buyers think before a sales conversation even begins.
Bob Wright has seen the inside of more than 300 B2B tech positioning engagements as co-founder of Firebrick Consulting. Across four CMO Huddles Strategy Labs held with senior B2B marketing leaders, he shared the same set of principles — and every real-world positioning challenge that came up in the room traced back to one of them.
These aren't soft marketing concepts. They're structural decisions that determine whether your company competes on its own terms or gets dragged into everyone else's RFP process. Here are the five pillars Wright comes back to, consistently, across every engagement.
The 5 B2B Positioning Pillars
1. Have a Viewpoint
2. Name the Problem
3. Build Buying Criteria
4. Position for the Executive Buyer
5. Make the Buyer the Hero
PILLAR 1: Have a Viewpoint
This is where Wright starts every time, and it's the pillar most B2B companies are missing. Having a viewpoint means taking a stand about something your buyers deeply care about. Not a product opinion, but a market opinion. A perspective on where the industry is headed, what's broken in the current approach, or why a new problem demands a fundamentally different solution.
"Every category leader, every disruptor making any significant impact on growth and valuation has a viewpoint," Wright says. "They own a problem. They take a corner of the room."
The viewpoint doesn't have to be radical. It can be as simple as: The old approach was built for another era, and the convergence of these specific market dynamics has created a new problem that old solutions can't solve. That structure is the scaffolding on which every strong B2B position Wright has built is constructed.
At Strategy Lab sessions, fewer than half the CMOs in the room raised their hand when asked whether their company had a genuine point of view. Most had messaging. Some had a brand voice. Almost none had a market stance. That gap is where competitors step in and shape the category conversation instead.
"Have a viewpoint. Own a problem. Take a corner of the room. If you're bunched in the middle of the category, the buyer either goes with the brand-name player or makes no decision at all."
— Bob Wright, Co-Founder, Firebrick Consulting
PILLAR 2: Name the Problem (Not the Product)
This is the pillar Wright repeats most emphatically, and it's the one that creates the most friction internally. The instinct in most B2B tech companies (especially founder-led and engineering-driven ones) is to lead with the product: What it does, how it works, what it's built on.
Wright is unambiguous about why this fails.
"If you're explaining, you're losing," he told CMOs across every city. "People get problems. Nobody wants to sit through a feature-function deck."
Naming the problem means giving the pain point a label that's specific enough to be recognizable and broad enough to resonate across your ICP. The margin erosion zone. The payment complexity trap. The acceleration gap. The application integrity crisis.
These names do something generic messaging cannot: They make buyers feel understood before they've seen your product, because you've put precise language to something they've been experiencing but haven't been able to articulate.
The tactical implication is counterintuitive: Don't spend your energy naming your category. Analysts will name the category. Spend your energy naming the problem. The company that owns the problem name owns the conversation, and that tends to hold even when competitors try to copy the language.
Wright also applies this to AI positioning, where the stakes are particularly high right now. "’AI-powered’ is not differentiation—it's just more noise," he says. "Name your AI. Call it specialized and purpose-built for something specific. And if you have proprietary data, name that too. Civic DNA. Global economic data. The data asset is what AI-native competitors can't replicate."
"Buyers buy from pain and problems. Name the problem; not the category, not the product. The company that names the problem owns the conversation."
— Bob Wright, Co-Founder, Firebrick Consulting
PILLAR 3: Build Buying Criteria in Your Favor
Naming the problem is the opening move. The next one is defining what solving that problem actually requires, and making sure those requirements map directly to your differentiators.
Wright calls these success principles: The five to seven things a company must do, or have, to solve the named problem. They function as a framework for buyers and a competitive moat for you. If the success principles are well-constructed, a buyer who reads them and evaluates vendors against them will find that your solution is the only logical fit.
"Ask yourself: If the buying criteria was based on these three capabilities, we'd win every single time. What are those?" Wright says. "Then build the case that the only way to solve the problem is to have that unique combination. Make the fight about that."
This is also where the narrative arc closes. Market dynamics create a named problem. Traditional approaches were built for another era and can't solve it. The new success principles define what's required. And then your company enters as the logical answer to a case you've already made, not as one of ten options in a feature comparison.
Wright is clear that the success principles aren't just for the sales deck. They're the mechanism for shaping how analysts write about the category, how buyers write their RFPs, and how influencers inside a buying committee evaluate options. Get there first, and you've already won half the deal.
PILLAR 4: Position for the Executive Buyer (Even If You're Not There Yet)
One of Wright's most consistent observations across the Strategy Labs: B2B tech companies almost universally call too low in the sales cycle. They end up in conversations with practitioners and IT managers who are sympathetic but not empowered—and who get sent back down the org chart the moment they try to escalate.
His prescription is to build positioning for the executive buyer regardless of where you're currently getting meetings.
"All category leaders own an executive buyer," Wright says. "Bigger budgets live with bigger yes-people. Even if you can't call at the executive level today, you want to arm your coach with the conversation."
The distinction between an executive-level position and a practitioner-level position is concrete. An executive-level position speaks to a named business problem, connects it to market dynamics and competitive risk, and shows the buyer what their world looks like on the other side—the promised land.
A practitioner-level position explains how the product works. The practitioner may love the demo. The CFO needs the story.
This pillar also reinforces why the problem-first framework matters so much at the enterprise. A compelling named problem with clear success principles can survive the journey up the org chart. A feature-function pitch cannot. Give your champion something worth repeating in the boardroom, and you'll start winning deals at levels you couldn't previously reach.
"Position to the one person whose yes overrides everyone else's no. That's usually an executive, and they have the money. Give your coach the story to take up — not just the deck."
— Bob Wright, Co-Founder, Firebrick Consulting
PILLAR 5: Make the Buyer the Hero
The final pillar is two-sided: The content of great positioning and the discipline to protect it.
On content: Strong B2B positioning doesn't just describe a problem and offer a solution. It takes the buyer on a journey to a promised land—a vivid picture of what their professional life looks like once the problem is solved.
“How do you make me a hero?” Wright frames it as the third and most important question a buyer is silently asking. "Show me the promised land. Then I'll ask you how it works."
Making the buyer the hero means the position is built around their success, not your capabilities. The named problem is a problem they face. The success principles are things they need to do. The promised land is where they arrive, with your solution as the vehicle. Your company's differentiators serve that story—they don't lead it.
On Discipline: Wright is equally emphatic that great positioning is worthless without organizational commitment to it. Activation is not a launch announcement. It's months of internal enablement, consistent external execution, and a feedback loop with the revenue team. And critically, it requires resisting the pressure—particularly from founders and product leaders—to iterate the message every quarter.
"Positioning is not code," Wright says. "Don't iterate it. Stick with it. Put a feedback loop in place with your CRO and look at patterns across at least a couple of quarters before you consider changing it."
The companies that win with positioning are the ones that have the organizational discipline to stay on message long enough for it to shape the market—not just the next sales deck.
"How do you make me a hero? That's the question your buyer is asking. Answer it—then show the promised land. And once you have the story, stick with it. Positioning is not code. Don't iterate it." — Bob Wright, Co-Founder, Firebrick Consulting
The Through Line
What makes these five pillars a system rather than a checklist? They're sequential.
A viewpoint without a named problem is just opinion. A named problem without success principles is incomplete. Success principles that don't connect to an executive buyer conversation don't unlock budget. And none of it compounds unless the organization commits to it with discipline over time.
The CMOs who brought their positioning challenges to these Strategy Labs—from early-stage AI-native companies to PE-backed portfolios to legacy brands navigating AI disruption—were working through different versions of the same question:
How do we stop competing on features and start shaping the conversation?
The answer, across all four cities, was the same:
Have a viewpoint. Name the problem. Build the buying criteria in your favor. Position for the executive. Make the buyer the hero. Then stick with it.
Want to work through your positioning with fellow B2B CMOs? Join us at the next CMO Huddles Strategy Lab. Learn more at cmohuddles.com
CMO Huddles is the peer community for B2B CMOs, running regular Strategy Labs, Huddle webinars, and events designed to help senior marketing leaders solve the hardest problems in B2B. Bob Wright and Firebrick Consulting are valued contributors to the CMO Huddles community.
For more, listen to Bob's insights on his episode Renegade Marketers Unite.
The five pillars consistently separate B2B category leaders from the rest. First, have a genuine market viewpoint (a stand on what's broken or changing that your buyers care about). Second, name the problem rather than the product. Third, build the buying criteria in your favor through success principles that map to your differentiators. Fourth, position for the executive buyer, even if you're currently calling lower. Fifth, make the buyer the hero and commit to the story with organizational discipline over time.
Three measurement buckets matter. First, sales cycle metrics: win/loss ratio, average contract value, sales cycle length, and how often your team reaches executive buyers with budget authority. Second, category signals: are analysts starting to use your language, and is the market beginning to frame the problem the way you do? Third, internal consistency: can every employee give the same answer when asked what the company does? All three together tell you whether the positioning is compounding — or just sitting in a deck.
'Owning a corner of the room' means occupying a clear, distinct position in your market category so that buyers can immediately differentiate you from competitors. When buyers enter a category and everyone looks the same — same claims, same features, same language — they default to the brand-name player or make no decision at all. A distinct corner means your target buyer understands that competitor A solves a different problem, competitor B serves a different buyer, and you are specifically built for their situation and their problem.
A positioning viewpoint is a market stance, not a product opinion. Start by identifying what has changed in your buyers' world — market dynamics, regulatory shifts, technology inflection points — and what problem that change has created or amplified. Then articulate why existing approaches are inadequate for solving that new problem. The viewpoint is the argument that connects market change to a specific problem that only your approach can solve. Companies that struggle to articulate a viewpoint usually haven't yet clearly defined the problem they own.
Success principles are the five to seven things a company must do or have in order to solve the named problem — expressed as buyer requirements, not product features. They function as a buying criteria framework: if buyers evaluate vendors against your success principles, your solution should be the natural winner. To develop them, identify what capabilities a buyer would need to fully solve the problem, then verify that your differentiators map to those requirements better than competitors. Think of it as writing the McKinsey version of what solving this problem actually requires.
Three measurement buckets matter. First, sales cycle metrics: win/loss ratio, average contract value, sales cycle length, and how often your team reaches executive buyers with budget authority. Second, category signals: are analysts starting to use your language, and is the market beginning to frame the problem the way you do? Third, internal consistency: can every employee give the same answer when asked what the company does? All three together tell you whether the positioning is compounding — or just sitting in a deck.