What Is B2B Positioning? A Framework for Owning Your Hill

Most companies have a tagline. Few have a position. Ellie Victor, CEO of ZOOM Marketing, on the discipline that separates category leaders from everyone else.

Quick Summary

• Positioning is two things: The hill you want to own, and what you make a thing about on that hill. Most companies only do one.
• You cannot get buy-in without data from prospects.
• If your leadership team gives different answers when asked what your company stands for, you have a positioning problem worth solving now.

Here is a fast diagnostic you can run tomorrow. Hand index cards to your leadership team. Ask each person to write down two things: What category the company is in, and what they most want the market to associate you with. Collect the cards. Read the answers out loud.

"If the leadership team doesn't agree, what does that mean?" Ellie Victor asked a room of senior B2B CMOs at a recent CMO Huddles Strategy Lab. "They're all executing against their own idea."

Victor is CEO of ZOOM Marketing, a positioning consultancy with a client list that includes Snowflake, TiVo, Franklin Covey, and Poly.ai. She has worked with Snowflake four times through its evolution from startup to category leader. 

Her definition of positioning is blunt: Own a hill, and define what matters to win on it. 

What Is B2B Positioning? The Two-Part Definition

Positioning is not a tagline, a mission statement, or a category label assigned to you by an analyst. It is a durable, testable claim your competitors cannot or will not make credibly.

Victor's definition is in two parts: Own a hill, and define what matters to win on it. The two parts are inseparable. You can be on the right hill and still lose because you haven't defined the terms of competition. You can have a sharp differentiator and still lose because you haven't staked out the space that makes it matter.

If someone removed your brand name from your positioning statement, could a competitor say it? If yes, it's a description. Not a position.

Part One: The Hill You Want to Own

The hill is the space you want to claim. Some people think of this as a category, but Victor prefers the hill metaphor because it has dimension. You can stand on top of it, plant a flag, see the adjacent hills, and know who is trying to take yours.

The critical shift: Analyst categories no longer define the game. Gartner's Magic Quadrant used to set the criteria, and when you competed on those criteria, you played on someone else's terms. Today, companies that win define their own hill.

"Nobody is worried about trying to fit into a Magic Quadrant," Victor told the group. "They're trying to figure out what space they want to own, what idea they want to own."

That shift matters because it changes who controls the terms of evaluation. Every positioning decision flows the question of whether you’re you playing on your terms or someone else's.

One practical test for CMOs to try: Can you describe the hill you want to own specifically for the next two years? Not a hill five years in the future or the whole mountain range, but the hill you can credibly claim with the technology and proof points you have or are building right now.

"Be very clear about the space you want to own in the next two years. Don't think about it five years out. Don't worry about getting pigeonholed, because the good thing about positioning is it happens every couple of years."

— Ellie Victor, CEO, ZOOM Marketing

Part Two: What You Make a Thing About

Owning the hill is the what. What you make a thing about is the how. It is the specific claim you stake within that space. The thing you want your category measured on. The criteria you want buyers using when they evaluate options.

Victor's test: If you removed your brand name from the statement, could a competitor say it? If so, it’s not a position, it’s a description.

To qualify, three things need to be true:

1. You have an advantage on it today, at least relative to your most direct competitors. 
2. Your roadmap keeps building that advantage over time. 
3. Your competitors cannot or will not make the same claim credibly.

The Snowflake Test Case

When ZOOM Marketing first worked with Snowflake in 2016, they were a startup competing against Teradata (a $2.5B incumbent), Amazon, and Google. In the brainstorm, one idea had real energy behind it. It turned out to be the one that bombed, and only 30 percent of customers and prospects liked or really liked it.

The idea that won—”data warehouse built for the cloud”—scored 90 percent. 

"That might sound super long and boring looking back," Victor says, "but it gave them a chance to talk about something familiar." 

The word data warehouse grounded buyers in something they already understood. Built for the cloud was the new thing, and it let Snowflake define exactly what that meant: Separating compute from storage, per-second pricing, and data sharing across silos. Nobody else was making noise about those three things together.

Snowflake has since repositioned twice more, moving from Data Cloud to AI Data Cloud. Each time, they defined what to make a thing about. Each time, the game was played on their terms.

The AI-Specific Wrinkle

Victor notes that positioning around AI requires particular care. Unlike any other technology in recent memory, AI carries a subtle fear of job displacement. How you talk about what your product does and who it's for lands differently than any other product claim. Words and phrases carry emotional weight that internal teams often underestimate until they test them with real buyers.

"Whatever it is you're making a thing about, you should be able to continue to make a thing about it for a couple of years. Today you have features and capability that give you an edge. Your roadmap continues to give you that edge."

— Ellie Victor, CEO, ZOOM Marketing

The "Something Old, Something New" Rule

One of the more useful principles Victor draws from hundreds of positioning tests: Entirely new language almost never wins. The brain resists unfamiliar things. When a buyer encounters a phrase with no existing mental folder, processing slows. Attention drifts. The message gets treated as noise.

This is why buzzwords fail even when the underlying idea is genuinely new. The language feels like tech speak because the brain cannot quickly place it anywhere familiar.

Victor's rule: Something old, something new. Take a word the market already has a folder for (like a category name, a job title, a familiar technology), then add the word that says what is different about you.

TiVo is the clearest example. Video Recorder was old. Digital was new. DVR. The brain accepted it instantly, and the new thing—watching TV on your schedule—had a familiar container to live in.

The same logic applies to Snowflake: Data warehouse was old. Built for the cloud was new. The familiar container made the new claim legible, and the new claim gave Snowflake room to define the terms of competition.

Five Signs It's Time to Reposition

Victor is clear that positioning is not permanent. Category leaders redefine their position every two to three years. Markets move. Buying groups shift. AI disrupts entire categories. The signals that it's time to reposition are usually visible before they're fatal.

1. Your leadership team gives different answers. 

Hand out index cards. Ask each person to write down your category and your differentiator. If the answers vary, execution will vary.

2. Win rates are declining.

If you used to win 35 percent of competitive deals and now you're winning 20 percent, something has shifted. A competitor has repositioned in a way that's working. The market moved and your story didn't.

3. You're not getting invited into enough deals. 

Before the close rate is a leading indicator, the invite rate is. If prospects aren't putting you in the evaluation set, they don't have a folder for you.

4. A new buying group has emerged. 

The people who used to champion your product have been sidelined, and a new decision-making center has formed. Your position has value with the old group and little relevance with the new one.

5. The hill has moved. 

Your category still exists, but the energy and investment have shifted somewhere adjacent. You're winning within a shrinking conversation.

Why Positioning Fails: The Buy-In Problem

Victor has worked on positioning projects in some form since early in her career, first at a PR agency. She describes those early projects as almost always failing, and for a consistent reason: The work could never get the client to actually commit to it.

The problem was not the quality of the positioning, it was the process. 

If a small team develops positioning and presents it to leadership for approval, the CRO finds something missing, the CTO says it doesn't match the product vision, and the CEO defers to whoever spoke last. The project stalls, gets revised by committee, and produces something long enough that nobody can remember it.

In response, Victor implemented two fixes into ZOOM Marketing's process:

Start with the leadership team's ideas. 

If you develop positioning externally and then present it as "the answer," the CTO will reject it as not matching their vision. If you start with their ideas, test them, and come back with evidence, they feel invested in the process. Getting shot down becomes "here's what we learned" rather than "here's what we disagree with."

Test with prospects, not just customers. 

Customers have already bought from you, so they'll be generous. Prospects, however, are people who have no reason to give you the benefit of the doubt. They're a real test of whether positioning will drive growth. 

"It's always the last meeting you had that carries way too much weight," Victor says. "Market data gives you something broader to stand behind."

⚠  If your CEO is not the sponsor of the positioning process, not just an approver but an active participant, do not start. This is not a marketing exercise. Marketing shepherds the process. The CEO owns the outcome.

How ZOOM Marketing's Three-Step Process Works

For those who want to understand what a rigorous positioning process actually looks like, Victor describes three steps.

Step one: Internal Brainstorm 

Every leader brings their best thinking: Their candidate for the hill, and what to make a thing about. The brainstorm runs as a "yes, and" session. Ideas build. By the end, a new set of concepts has emerged that no single person brought in.

Step two: Customer Validation. 

The top ideas go to your best customers. Not for approval, but for stress-testing. Typically, four of the ideas bomb and two survive. But four new ideas also emerge from the conversations. This is expected. The customers' job is not to invent your positioning but to sharpen it.

Step three: Prospect Testing 

The refined ideas go to a survey panel of prospects matching your ICP. This is where the real data lives. Prospects score each idea: liked it, really liked it, or didn't. The score distribution tells you what will drive growth and what will fall flat in the market. Winning ideas typically score in the 80-90 percent range. Anything below 50 percent is usually dead.

"When you can put in front of your CEO that 150 prospects liked this and didn't like this, and here's why," Victor says, "you have actual data to move the conversation forward. It's not just the last meeting that carries too much weight."

How Often Should You Reposition?

The average S&P 500 company lifespan has dropped from 60 years in the 1950s to 15-20 years today. Markets move. Buying groups shift. AI is disrupting entire categories. Category leaders don't wait for the signs to become obvious. They reposition before the hill shrinks.

The goal is not to start over. It's to evolve. Amazon did not stop being Amazon when it stopped being a bookstore. Salesforce did not stop being Salesforce when it expanded beyond CRM. Tableau did not stop owning data visualization when it moved upmarket. Each company evolved from a position of earned strength to the next hill.

"Don't worry about getting pigeonholed," Victor says. "The good thing about positioning is it happens every couple of years."

The companies that win don't wait for the hill to shift. They choose it.

Join the CMO Huddles community to access Strategy Labs, Expert Huddles, and peer conversations with executive B2B marketing leaders. 

Ellie Victor is CEO of ZOOM Marketing, a positioning consultancy that has worked with Snowflake, TiVo, Franklin Covey, and hundreds of other B2B technology companies. She facilitated multiple CMO Huddles Positioning Strategy Labs in 2026.

FAQs on B2B Positioning