Positioning as a Growth Lever

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome. If you're a regular listener, welcome back.

You're about to listen to an Expert Huddle where experts share their insights into topics of critical importance to our flocking awesome CMO Huddles community. In this episode, flocking awesome Bob Wright of Firebrick takes on one of the most misunderstood levers in B2B growth: positioning. He explains why product-centric messaging falls flat so often, why positioning cannot live in marketing alone, and why companies that win are the ones that name and own a problem in the market. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Hello, Huddlers. Welcome to a very special — what we're now calling — Expert Huddle, where we bring in experts on particular topics that are of interest to our CMO Huddles community. At the Super Huddle, we premiered something called the Strategy Lab. We had three different strategy labs going on — not to dis any of the others — but many folks gave a big shout out to Bob Wright, who joined us at the Strategy Lab and ran a workshop on positioning. Bob is not your average consultant. As the founder of Firebrick Consulting and a self-described positioning evangelist, he has helped hundreds of B2B tech companies clarify their positioning, differentiate in a crowded market, and build marketing strategies that actually drive growth. So today we're going deep on positioning, a little bit of portfolio evaluation. We may talk about AI washing and the make-or-break moves that can set a brand apart or sink it. And just in case you were wondering — if you want to meet Bob in person again — we have Strategy Labs in Boston, New York, Durham, and Atlanta in February, and hopefully in April in San Francisco and San Jose. Okay, well, with that, welcome, Bob. How are you and where are you on this fine day?

Bob: Thank you, Drew. I really appreciate it. I always jump at the opportunity to talk about positioning. I'm actually in the Bay Area right now, and I am actually up in Healdsburg at the moment.

Drew: Okay, which — for folks who don't know — that's sort of in the wine country area. Very, very nice place to be. So, Bob, we talked about this, but just in case our audience has to leave early, or we need to convince them to stay, let's start with the three most common mistakes that you see companies make related to positioning. If you can just list them, we can discuss them one by one.

Bob: Yeah. I think the number one mistake I see in positioning is it's all about you. It's product-centric. Your feature-function decks are not moving the needle. A conversation about how it works and the features and functions — that's the number one mistake. A product-centric narrative or story is not moving the needle. I think the second thing is marketing or the CEO going off in the corner, coming out with a positioning statement and saying, "Here's what it is," with no alignment across the organization. So what I see a lot is you end up with everybody using a different deck — misalignment, if you will. Nobody's speaking with one voice. And I would say the third thing is you don't own a problem. In other words, I always say: sell the problem, not the product. Can you place the product in the context of a problem that you own — a buyer problem that creates urgency in sales cycles? I think today, "status quo, do nothing" is, for many of our sales cycles, the real competition. So the mistakes are: product-centric messaging, no alignment, and third, you don't articulate the problem you solve.

Drew: Okay, perfect. I want to go through each of those and dive in a little. Particularly with founder-led companies — they're in love with their product. They think it's about the product; they may have come up through engineering. I see how this happens all the time. I'm wondering if we could help equip CMOs, when they confront this, to say: yes, we are selling a product, but that's not how you actually sell a product — just by talking about it. So talk a little bit about why product-centric, egocentric positioning — "it's about us" — is so problematic.

Bob: Our buyers today are being inundated with tech vendors trying to sell stuff, and particularly executive buyers who own budgets don't want another tech vendor. They frankly don't care how your product works. What's working today — the companies that are really driving growth and also category leadership — are the companies that, again, own a problem, and they're putting their feature functions in the context of a problem that their target buyer deeply cares about. That's really what's winning today in our crowded markets, which are inundated with a lot of what I would call blah blah blah.

Drew: Okay. So we're going to avoid blah blah blah and stop just talking about a product. And I mean, the irony is that whenever you do talk about a product and a feature, it's so easy to replicate, right? Your competition just says, "We've got that too." So why are you even talking to those folks?

Bob: Well, that's a great point. You don't want to get into a feature war — a feature-function war is the death knell for any technology vendor. So I think what's really being called for here is the question: why does your technology matter? Not how it works, but why do you matter? And specifically, the questions that need to be answered are: why your product, and why now — not last year, not five years ago, but why now? What's the big problem you solve? Second, how can you uniquely solve it? What is the unique combination of differentiation, strengths, and features that allow you to uniquely solve that problem? And then the third thing is: how are you going to make my life better? Can you show me a promised land? There's no conversation in there about how the product works. It's all about why you matter. And the companies that are driving growth today and also driving category leadership all focus on why you matter versus how it works.

Drew: I love the "show me the promised land" notion. I just had to repeat that so it's on the record. I feel like we get to this issue of the CEO — sort of connected to the first point — the CEO's ego being connected to the product. They might have even written the initial code, who knows. But let's talk about this notion of the CEO creating a positioning statement and the resulting misalignment. I don't think we need to identify the problem — I think everybody listening has had that experience. The question is, how do you equip CEOs and CMOs to understand both the problem, and particularly for CMOs, how do they get the CEO off their position? It doesn't matter that you're the smartest person in the room — you're not a positioning expert.

Bob: Well, it really comes down to revenue. What I typically do — most CEOs, first off, I think positioning has to be a CEO initiative and has to be sponsored by the CEO. The process is run by marketing, so the CEO has to own this and see it as a significant lever to drive valuation and maximize revenue. Now, sometimes you have founder-led companies that are very technology-oriented and they love their customers. What happens with the initial set of customers you acquire? Typically they're early adopters — the charter members, if you will — they'll buy based on features and functions. But what happens is the market shifts inevitably, and at some point in that shift to your next set of buyers, that positioning no longer works. So part of the conversation is: look, there's been a shift in the marketplace. We created this category using feature-function messaging, and now all these competitors have swooped in. We have a different buyer type, and we have to shift the way we talk about our company in order to accelerate our growth and continue to build and strengthen our category leadership.

Drew: So one thing I think we can say with certainty: if you are a CMO who believes you need to reposition the company and the CEO isn't embracing the initiative, do not move forward.

Bob: I would never do a positioning project unless the CEO is sitting in the room, because otherwise it's a failure. The other thing is, you have to have sales bought in — they need to have a seat at the table too. That's why one of the most important things for any CMO leading a positioning effort is to make it a company initiative. Positioning is not a marketing initiative. Certainly it will fuel your marketing investments, but if you do positioning right, it's going to make a huge impact on sales cycles. It's going to improve your win/loss ratio through clear differentiation. It's going to help you command a premium ACV. It's going to set up the expansion motion, and it's going to create urgency to get those medium-intent buyers off the fence and away from the status quo. It's also going to help you set product priorities and build category valuation. So the way we've seen positioning work really well is when the CMO runs the executive team through a process — you've got the product head there, the revenue head, the CEO, even customer service if they're responsible for expansion — and you get them all aligned around a single position. That's what I'm seeing help companies really drive consistency and force it out into the marketplace.

Drew: I love the power of what you're describing when you get it right — which sort of gets to the third point you made, which is about owning a problem. I think it would help at this moment to just give some real-world examples so people can see what that looks like and sounds like when you own a problem.

Bob: Yeah, absolutely. Owning a problem — in our crowded markets today, there is so much noise out there, and particularly a lot of noise about AI and features and all that sort of thing. What's important to wake the market up and distance yourself from all the other noise in the marketplace is to have a viewpoint and own a problem. When I say own a problem, I mean name the problem. For example, I'm working with an HCM client right now. We're having a conversation about how the combination of economic restructuring and the AI inflection point requires "The Great Workforce Reset." We've got another client — again, an AI client — where there is an "AI Acceleration Gap": you don't have the capabilities in your company to actually become an AI-powered business. There's another client we're working with where they're solving "The Margin Erosion Zone" — because of the combination of higher costs in the marketplace, higher capital costs, more uncertainty, geopolitical instability, and structurally higher costs that are causing a margin erosion zone for so many companies. Those are examples of business problems, if you will. And what happens is buyers are typically feeling it — they just don't have a name for it. You give it a name and they say, "Oh my god, yeah — we've got the acceleration gap. We can't go fast enough!"

Drew: What I love about this is that it's such a classic marketing concept. It goes back — I mean, the first product I worked on at an agency in New York City was Listerine. Listerine invented the notion of halitosis. They created the disease that they cured. And if you look at a lot of drug advertising, many brands have created a disease that they then solve. So that's really all we're talking about here — what's your halitosis? Which is fascinating to me, because this is not a new concept, but it's seemingly ignored consistently in B2B tech.

Bob: You know, I think we're just so conditioned otherwise. I came out of product marketing — right, and sales — and I remember in product marketing you'd spend all your time working with the engineering team and the customers, and when the product was ready the first thing you wanted to talk about was the features and functions you'd been building. That's just totally wrong. Nobody cares. As I mentioned, those feature-function decks aren't working anymore. What's really working today is: have a viewpoint, own a problem in the marketplace, set the buying criteria necessary to solve that problem, and show companies the promised land. Those are the things that are really working — as far as what I'm seeing — in terms of driving extraordinary growth and maximizing valuation today.

Drew: So I want to go back to one of the things you said earlier, which starts to get into specific challenges that CMOs face. They come to a company — and this is a classic one — the company had a product-led growth motion. They worked short sales cycles. People would come to the website, purchase a product, and things were going well. Then suddenly leadership says, "You know what, we need to move up market. We've got to get to enterprise, but we don't want to lose the folks we already have." So suddenly the company has to take what it was really good at and also become an enterprise company — because they want to continue to grow. That creates a really interesting positioning problem.

Bob: Yeah, we're very familiar with that. Okay, I'm running a successful PLG selling motion — now, to drive and maximize growth, I have to move up to the enterprise. But you don't want to sacrifice the goodness that you've built from the PLG motion. So how do you build a positioning that doesn't torpedo that revenue cash cow? The issue with product-led growth is that it's all about how it works — you just want somebody to download the thing and try it. When you move to the enterprise, your enterprise executive buyer who owns the budget may not even be using the product. You have to shift again to a value proposition. For example, we took Calendly to the enterprise. We took Notion to the enterprise. We took Postman to the enterprise — all successful PLG companies. And it's a fundamental shift from "how it works — go ahead and download it, try it out" to a new conversation about what problem you're solving at the enterprise level. You also typically have to arm your advocates or champions with a conversation they can take to their boss. For example, with Calendly — "I've got two or three people in my department using Calendly and we want to make it an enterprise standard." You have to arm them with a conversation to go to their executive boss — who probably doesn't even use it — about why it's important to standardize and drive adoption across either their department or the entire company.

Drew: Interesting. And I appreciate those specific examples, because I think it makes it easier for folks when they hear, "Oh yeah, I know Calendly — I use it as an individual, but we don't use it as a company." That is an interesting challenge. The other part of this is the looking-back part. I'm just curious — you don't want to stop selling to individuals, because often it's like a lovable success story: it started as an individual-driven thing that's now going enterprise. You don't want to kill the PLG motion or those single users even as you evolve. So I'm curious — how do you keep the original motion alive? You've got the new position, you're going after the problem you're solving, but what happens with the original product that made you successful?

Bob: Well, the PLG motion becomes a campaign — it becomes that specific selling motion to drive people to try it and sign up. But you have to make sure that when you do the enterprise positioning, it doesn't torpedo the position you have at the lower level. To me, it turns into a campaign to drive specific revenue, and then you're shifting to an enterprise conversation with a larger value proposition.

Drew: Interesting. I think it's easier said than done, but I get it now — you're going to keep fueling that motion over here. Keep doing what you're doing on the campaign basis. But overall, the positioning is going to change, and it's going to speak to a broader audience.

Bob: It's like another similar motion. A lot of companies are legacy companies, and they make a shift, right? Or they do acquisitions. The question is, you don't want to leave your customers behind. They're going, "Oh my God, you've gone from a single product company to a multi-product company. I only bought one of your products. Do you care about me? Is your investment in what I care about being diluted?" You can't leave your customers behind. So a lot of times, it's leveraging the goodness and the heritage you've built into the larger conversation about where the future is going. And we see the same thing that happens with companies that have a legacy installed base — you can't leave these people behind, so you have to build a conversation about why this matters to you. This new value proposition matters to you.

Drew: So you and I've had some fun conversations about the difference between positioning and branding. This could have been the fourth, right? And it's even — when they, you know, they're out to hire a branding firm, when they really need to think about positioning first, and they end up hiring a creative shop that really doesn't understand positioning. What's the damn difference between these two things, and why is it so important?

Bob: Yeah, I think most marketing folks and marketing executives understand the distinction between branding, positioning, and messaging. I think there's a lot of confusion at the executive level about the difference between the two. I make a very clear distinction between branding and positioning, particularly in our B2B tech world — they're both important. Branding is the corporate identity. It's the tone of the communication, it's the experience. The branding experience could last, you know, five years, seven years, a long, long time. Positioning is very different. Positioning is focused on: how do I drive revenue growth? How do I give the reps a sales tactic they can use to drive revenue growth? And how do I shape the category in my favor? So it's category shaping and driving sales cycles — it's very different from branding. Messaging is simply a communication of what the products offer. In the B2B world, it's big positioning, small branding. In the B2C world, it's big branding, small positioning, because we have considered purchases and longer sales cycles. I think they have to sit together. But one of the common mistakes I see is thinking a branding firm is going to give you a strong position, and I see that all the time. I think positioning actually informs the branding, and they need to support each other. But I don't know if any branding company is going to get the sales rep what they need for their first call to actually move the revenue needle. So, okay, that's my personal opinion.

Drew: No, it's great. And I have to ask you a question — because one of my favorites, and I don't know if there's a brand, positioning, and messaging example quite like it, but over the years, there's the P&G brand Gain, and I know that their strategic positioning, I guess is the right word, is "smell as proof of clean." And they have owned this for 40 years. In every ad, in one way or another, you'll be sniffing the clothes, and that is the proof of clean. It's sort of a magical notion and a brilliant insight — it wasn't "does it look clean," it was "does it smell clean?" And they built that brand on it. So is that a positioning?

Bob: Well, again, that's a B2C product. I think there's a very big distinction between B2C and B2B. B2B has long sales cycles and considered purchases — we've got buying groups involved. There's a lot more risk involved than just picking up a bottle of Tide that doesn't work. That's low risk. If I make a decision about my cloud infrastructure and it doesn't work, I'm out of a job. So I feel like in the B2B world, positioning rises to the occasion as the lever to actually move the needle in these very crowded markets where it's a very, very tight buying climate today. The other thing is, we've got AI coming at us right now. Every position we do has to include AI, and I feel like AI is not differentiation anymore — it's just more noise. The great AI washing is upon us. Everybody's got to have an AI position out there today, but everybody's sounding the same. So we're like in the old days of cloud when it first started — "I've got cloud, I got cloud first, I got native cloud," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're in a similar situation; it's just happening quicker and faster. From my experience, the other distinction about branding and positioning is that branding is going to last a lot longer. Your brand and your tagline may last 3, 4, 5, 7 years. Positioning is going to need to shift probably every 12, 18, or 24 months, because the market keeps changing and shifting. The competitors change, you add new features, the competitive landscape changes, your buyers change. So the positioning actually needs to evolve in a shorter refresh cycle than a brand.

Drew: Fascinating. Okay, I'm not sure how many executives appreciate the difference between those two — it's certainly clear for me now. I do want to talk about AI washing, but I don't want to do that quite yet. I want to get there, but you mentioned this notion of shaping the category, and immediately we go to the CEO saying, "I want to create a new category." And I think there's a distinction between those two ideas. What do you say when the CEO says, "We're doing something so different, we're in a new category"? How do you respond to that, and what's your counsel?

Bob: Well, I think one of the key central tenets of positioning is the category strategy. The question is: are you going to play in an existing category? Are you going to try to morph an existing category? Or are you going to try to create a new category? Those are the three options you have. Creating a new category is not for the faint of heart — the rewards are high, but the problem is it takes a lot of money and a lot of time to do it. The other issue is that with a new category, there is no budget attached to it, so you have to steal budget from other categories, which elongates sales cycles. I don't think you can build a new category unless two things happen. Number one, there's a new problem that's occurred — like, just using an example, there's the tariff problem right now. We never had that tariff variability or disruption problem before. Maybe there is a new category of software designed specifically to solve that new issue. The other thing is technology — I think AI is creating new categories. There could be whole new ways of working and new categories being created. I also believe AI is disrupting every single category today. But most of my clients — what I advise them to do is — a lot of our clients created a new category, and what happened is they were successful, and then a whole bunch of competitors came in and everybody looks the same. Their opportunity then is to set the goalposts again and reshape the category. That's what most of our clients are doing — actually reshaping the category in their favor. So you may have the XYZ category, and you just put a modifier on top of it: "We've got the accelerated XYZ," to create a distinction between you and all the other players in that category.

Drew: It's interesting because, you know, OpenAI created the category of LLMs, if you will, and it's fascinating to watch how they're jockeying right now. It's like suddenly Claude Code launches and Claude Work, or whatever, and that may very well be a morph of the category. It really is an interesting moment — now it's a feature, but it also just changes the game in terms of what non-coders can do. So we've covered category — it's worth pursuing, but hard, and you really have to have your ducks in a row. Ideally, at minimum, as a repositioning, you want to shape the category. And I guess it's worth putting a pin in that — another example of shaping the category would be great, just so that folks can really feel what you mean by that.

Bob: Yeah, for example, we did a lot of work for Workday a couple of years ago on their portfolio positioning. They've got 35 products now — they're not just a CHRO vendor. We had to shift the perception in the marketplace to also include the CFO. Oracle really owns the CIO, so they needed a position that could speak equally to all three of those executives. The other thing is, it was becoming a commodity market — Oracle, SAP, all the ERP vendors look the same, all the HCM vendors look the same. So they were getting into feature-function competition, and then you have ServiceNow come in and say, "Forget all that, we'll just do it." What we did was build a really strong position about how companies need to operate at an accelerated pace — a higher metabolic pace — because we're at this inflection point. The CFO, the CHRO, and the CIO all own that great acceleration. We had statistics showing that most companies are stuck in this "acceleration gap" — most companies are bogged down in organizational lethargy, they don't have the skills required today, and most CEOs fear their companies are going to become irrelevant if they don't change. So what's required to close that acceleration gap? We built seven success principles — things like: you have to continuously recalibrate your business through better plan-execute cycles; in an era of uncertainty you have to have more data; you have to have financial, operational, and HR data all in one data set. Those sorts of things became the success principles. We identified the problem, connected it to a set of buying criteria and success principles to solve that problem, and then connected that to their differentiation. We built a case that the old ERP model of the past won't close that acceleration gap, and while porting that ERP model to the cloud might lower your IT costs, it's not going to solve that business problem — which is the acceleration gap. That's how, in a commodity market, you can shape the category. It's a business conversation: "I've got this big acceleration gap — who doesn't, right? Here are five things you've got to do to move faster," which are business conversations, but connected back to their technology.

Drew: I appreciate that detail. 

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Drew: Okay, let's get to AI washing, and I've seen this a lot. There are a number of folks — the board is saying, and this is a really tricky one — it's a PE-backed firm, and the PE or the VC says, "You know what? Those AI-first firms are getting 12x, 20x, 50x multiples, and you're a software company right now. Let's get AI in there. Let's get AI in the headline." And you see it everywhere — every single company is adding AI to whatever their tagline was, or what they might have called a positioning statement. I know of one example where a company said the benefit of AI was "smarter intelligence" or something like that — so at least they tried to connect AI to a benefit, as opposed to just a feature. But how are you advising clients? Because this is tricky. A lot of these companies you're repositioning — yes, they want to grow the business, but they also want to sell the business. So they are conscious of this multiple factor. Help?

Bob: Yeah, I think there are a couple of things going on. Number one, you have to have an AI position in the marketplace — it's top of mind for your buyers. Everybody wants to know your AI story, your AI strategy — it is the big conversation today. The other thing is, AI companies enjoy larger valuations. What's happened now is everybody has just bolted AI onto their message, and we've ended up with what I call "the great AI washing." AI is happening faster than other inflection points like cloud, etc. — this is moving very, very fast. You have to have a position in AI. The question is: what is the emphasis of AI in your story, and what value does it serve? We're finding there are two things that really, really make a difference. Number one: name your AI. It's not generic AI, it's specialized AI. If you look at Salesforce and even ServiceNow, those companies name their AI. And I'm not talking about a cute chatbot AI — name your AI and specialize it. It's purpose-built specifically for this market, for these buyers, for these processes. The second thing — and this is why a lot of legacy players actually have a leg up on newer AI-native companies — is data. AI is less valuable if it's not trained on the right data. A lot of legacy companies have a wealth of data. Name the data: "Our specialized AI is trained on data you can't get anywhere else — the XYZ data." I'll give you an example. Coupa, a legacy software vendor that brought in a new CEO. AI's here — what do they do? They were the ones who founded the supplier data category — indirect supply data. And at that time, the jewel they had was 20 years of customer-permissioned supply data. So the CEO comes in and goes, "Oh my God, we have a data asset. This is our data moat. You can't get this data anywhere else, so we're going to create an AI capability and train it on this data." We named the data — we called it the Global Economic Data — and we connected it to a "margin erosion zone" that companies are facing. Companies have a margin erosion zone, and the good news is there's specialized AI that's arrived on the scene, trained on a unique data set, that can help you close that margin erosion zone. So I would say what I'm seeing, as far as separating from the pack, is three things: number one, determine the emphasis of AI — is it a frontal positioning or a supporting feature? Number two, name your AI if you can, or at least call it purpose-fit or specialized. Number three, name the data if that's an asset. Connect it to the value or problem. Those are the things I'm seeing that help companies separate from all this AI sameness out there.

Drew: Just for context — you mentioned Watson and Einstein, both theoretically AI-branded products, but those feel so dated and problematic now. If anything, I don't even know if Salesforce is using Einstein anymore, and IBM hasn't made as much noise with Watson of late. But I guess in both of those cases, they didn't name the data and they didn't name the purpose.

Bob: I do think Salesforce has done a pretty good job with their AI — they named it. But again, it depends on what your asset is. I don't know if their data was a true differentiating asset. For some of our clients, the data is the asset. I would look at what you're going to make the fight about, what you're going to differentiate on, and what the emphasis of AI is in your story. If you're an AI-native company, you want AI front and center — boom, boom, boom. But if you're another company, maybe you don't. Maybe AI is a supporting point for the larger conversation you're having, and it really depends on that emphasis. But please, just don't put "AI-powered this" — because that's just wallpaper now. It looks like your AI is just a bolt-on conversation.

Drew: Yeah, and if you grabbed 10 tech companies at random from Silicon Valley right now and looked at their website statements, it would all be "AI-fueled," "AI-powered," "AI-assisted," "AI-enabled," and you just go, "I have no idea why I should continue looking." Okay, we have one question for you that I want to get to: how do you go from product vision to positioning smoothly?

Bob: How do you go from product vision to positioning smoothly?

Drew: I can give you some more detail from the question so you can think about it — it's about ownership by department, and also the best technique to get alignment between vision and positioning early. So how do you position when category labels and segments are fluid or ambiguous? 

Charles: We're going through an exercise right now with the head of product and the CEO. It's a founder-led company, interestingly enough, in sort of the HCM ecosystem. We're an analytics solution. You talk about how the CEO has to be in the room, but marketing has to lead the positioning. I think everything is being built right now around the product vision, and that is kind of the kickstart to whatever I would then bring in with positioning. So I would love to hear: how do you go about making that translation? I've got a vision — which is "us out" — versus positioning, which has got to be problem finding..

Bob: Yeah, I'll try to answer that question. First off — workforce analytics, very crowded marketplace. We're going to disrupt this category, right? The question is: what are you going to differentiate on? What's your secret sauce? What are the product features and capabilities that set you apart? Get really clear about that. Here are the top three things we think we do better than anybody else — it's unique IP, it's our secret sauce, we have a different model, a different architecture, different capabilities that you can't get anywhere else. So the question is, a lot of times you look inside and say, "Okay, we're going to make the fight about these three features." Then the question is: what problem do these features solve? How can we build a case that you need these features or you'll fall behind? Name and articulate that problem. Now, what sometimes happens when you're an early-stage company is that all these capabilities aren't available yet, or they're in nascent form. Take companies on a journey — I always take companies on a journey. You can start introducing some of the features you have coming, but still manage proper expectations. We've got the great workforce reset, right? That requires a new set of workforce analytics capabilities. "We're going to take you on a journey. First thing on that journey — you've just got to get the data right. That's the first thing we're going to do. Next stage, you're going to do this. Third stage, we're going to do this. Fourth stage, you have to do this." By the time they get to the fourth stage, you'll have that capability already available. It could be something coming out next year, but it allows you to introduce those capabilities now. Put it in the context of the problem you're solving, and get clients on a journey. Say, "Look, make an investment in this platform — every investment you make is going to be a leveraged investment toward this vision and this future, to solve today's big workforce problem." Is that helpful?

Charles: It's definitely helpful. I also want a pro tip from you on — and maybe you do this for your clients — how would you go about evaluating whether you're owning the problem or your competition is owning the problem?

Bob: Yeah, what I do is I always say, that's a really great question. So the question is, can you own a room? How do you own a corner of the room in the category? The problem is, in our categories, they're very crowded. And the issue is, if your target buyer walks into the category — say, the room you're sitting in — and you and all your competitors are sitting in the middle and you look the same, that's a bad place to be, unless you're a ServiceNow or Salesforce, one of these guys, right? What they want is for everything to look the same. So their positioning strategy is, any time a new competitor enters the category, they say, "Oh, we're gonna have that in 18 months," because they want everything to look the same. Because in the absence of any clear differentiation, what's the buyer going to do? Either they'll make no decision, or they'll go with a brand-name company. It's a bad place to be for most companies. So really, what you want to do is own a very distinct corner of the room. For example, maybe you own the velocity corner of the room, right? You say, "Look, all those other competitors — great competitors, sure. Competitor XYZ? They're a legacy competitor; they're built for another time. Competitor EFG? They're a good company. They sit over there — they're for a completely different kind of buyer. And my third competitor? They solve a completely different problem. But you, Mr./Ms. Buyer — your big issue is velocity." I'm just making that up. We sit over here, and we have unique capabilities for you to own velocity. So that's what I feel is really important in positioning: what's the corner of the room you can own? What are the respective corners your competition is trying to own? And can you box them into smaller corners of the room and own a very clear, distinct corner of the room in the minds of your buyers?

Drew: Charles Groome, CMO of Insightful — thank you very much. Let's move to a big challenge that often happens after mergers. You went from a single-product story to a broader portfolio. Let's talk about portfolio-level positioning and what that means, and how do you get to that.

Bob: That is a number one topic in our industry today. There are two types of clients coming to us: AI-native clients, and ones that have a product portfolio. Inevitably, in your journey as a tech company, you'll shift from a single product to a multi-product company. A lot of companies now are growing through acquisitions, so they end up with four or five or six products, and they end up as a house of brands a lot of times, right? Typically they'll have the brand and then very good single-product positioning, but what's missing is that portfolio positioning — the "one plus one equals three." And how you know you've got a problem with your portfolio positioning: smaller competitors are eating your lunch in single-product deals, competing really strongly, and you're losing deals to these fast-moving competitors. There's no expansion motion between your products, no revenue expansion — it's really, really difficult. So portfolio positioning is a really key lever. If you have a house of brands or multiple products, you need to answer: what's the one plus one equals three? What are the commonalities between these products? Why did we buy all these companies? Why did we put them together? What's the value to a customer? And that needs to connect to the brand, but also set the context for each individual product's position.

Drew: It's so interesting — as I think about this, where my mind went was: okay, so I'm a big company, I've just acquired another one, I have to deal with a portfolio, I have to deal with the integration. If I was a single solution competing with this now-bigger product that has 18 months of integration ahead of it, I'd be going after them — maybe thinking about repositioning a little bit, like, "Look at what's going to happen to them." Is that a thing? Have companies come to you and talked about that?

Bob: Yeah. For example, we did the positioning for Cisco Secure — 17 companies coming together. When you walk up to them, nobody identifies as "a Cisco Secure person," right? They had single-product motions competing against single products. They didn't leverage the power of the combined portfolio. So what was being called for was the portfolio conversation about the big problem they saw across the portfolio. That might show up in zero trust, or in some of those other single products, but it actually helps differentiate those single-product selling motions. And the larger conversation helps you get up to an executive-level conversation, because you have a portfolio of products designed to solve this executive-level problem. You can start multiple places if you want, but every investment you make into our platform unlocks other use cases you can also leverage.

Drew: Yeah, I was actually thinking about the little guy, not the big guy. I'm thinking about all of Cisco's competitors — they could just go to town positioning around the one thing they do really well. You know, component versus composite — if we're gonna win, we win on this one specific thing. So I get it for the big guy, but I also think there's a real opportunity for smaller players that these acquisitions create for you.

Bob: Yeah, and if you're a smaller player, you've got to build a case for why "good enough" — meaning a portfolio solution — is not okay. Why is this specific problem so important that you need to go with a specialized, modern solution?

Drew: So here's a trigger we've never talked about, or at least I haven't really thought about: your largest competitor suddenly buys somebody else. That could be a trigger moment to rethink your position and say, "We have 18 months to really disrupt these guys, because it's going to take that long for the one plus one to equal three." You can talk about this bigger portfolio problem, but the truth is that company isn't going to be delivering it tomorrow.

Bob: Well, one of our clients, Informatica, was bought at a huge valuation, and they were essentially the last standalone solution in that market. They saw it as an opportunity because their large competitor was going to be so bogged down in integration issues and distracted — that provided a really clear opportunity for them to come out with a fresh message and build a case for why you'd need a specialized vendor. Particularly in the context of AI and the data world, you'd be crazy to go with anyone other than a specialized, purpose-built vendor with unique capabilities and strengths.

Drew: So interesting. So again, I think these triggers are really important, and one of the things this conversation helped me understand is that branding is a longer-term thing. If you do it right, you should be able to stick with it. I've seen this mistake happen a lot, where CMOs go in and invest in changing the colors, the visual identity, all of these things in the first six months — but the problem is actually positioning, not brand. And it's even worse when the previous CMO had just rebranded, so now you've rebranded twice in two years. No. Brand is something that should endure for five years. Positioning is something you can always stay on top of — you may have acquired somebody, a competitor may have acquired somebody — so you always have to be revisiting it, as you said, every 18 months. So what are the telltale signs that a company's positioning needs a refresh?

Bob: Yeah — every sales rep is using a different deck. That should never happen. You put your logo on your website and it looks the same as your competitor's website. Long sales cycles and no decisions. Your win/loss ratio is horrible. You're getting beaten by a particular competitor. And another one that's happening now is AI washing — not having a strong AI strategy or AI positioning, when your market and buyers are demanding it. The other thing I see a lot is acquisitions. What happens after acquisitions is everyone bemoans the past — "Oh, it was great before." But if you do positioning well, it can get people involved and invested in a shared future, get everyone aligned on a shared vision, and get them off mourning the past and focused on creating a future. And the last one: a new competitor enters your marketplace.

Drew: Interesting. I'm wondering — one of the places where acquisitions often fail is poor cultural integration between the two companies. We never really use the word "culture" in positioning, though we talk about it a lot in branding. In a positioning exercise, culture matters because the positioning won't stick if the cultures don't come together and buy into it. How does that fit into your work?

Bob: First off, if you do positioning really well, it can be a motivator for employees. We're working with a company right now — they just had a riff— and they said, "We need to get our people motivated again." When you come up with a really good story, it's like, "Oh, wow. That's why we're doing this. That's why I spend all my time at work. It's a larger mission." So sometimes in the positioning work, we actually create something called a manifesto — a set of beliefs. We may take the best of both cultures and put them in there. Things like: "We create fans, not users." "We sell outcomes, not software." "We believe the 15-year-old software is not going to cut it anymore." It's a set of beliefs and a manifesto that you may never even show customers, but it gives real energy to the combined culture and what the company stands for. I find that positioning has an impact not just on sales cycles and category, but also on employees — it can be a really strong motivator and get people excited again.

Drew: I want to encourage anyone coming to our Strategy Lab in New York, Durham, and Atlanta to definitely bring your positioning, because we'll be workshopping those with Bob — that's going to be a fun exercise. Bob has given you the criteria for what good positioning looks like, and we'll share more notes based on our conversation. I have to ask you one quick question because drinking your own champagne is important to all of us: how is Firebrick positioned?

Bob: Well, we're the world's worst marketing organization. No — how we position ourselves is very, very specialized. We do one thing and one thing only. We are exclusively for B2B tech. Specifically, our core work is positioning. We've positioned well over 400 B2B tech companies. We have a process that is the institutionalized knowledge of working in this narrow expertise over and over again. That's how we position ourselves. And it's a craft — if you're a CMO, you might do positioning once or twice a year and only a handful of times in a career. We've done it 400 times. The only thing I can talk about is positioning — so don't ask me about anything else. 

Drew: All right — well I won’t.

Alan: Is it Firebrick or "Firebrand?"

Drew:  It’s Firebrick.

Bob: Not Firebrand — come on, Alan.

Drew: I know, I know — he's trying to be clever, but it's okay. So I feel like this has been a master class, and I really appreciate it. It's funny — I've been in this business a long time, and I'll admit to occasionally confusing the differences between these things, so I'm sure others do too. I think we now have some real clarity. For folks listening who want to dig in deeper — first, what's the easiest way to connect with you?

Bob: It's bob@firebk.com.

Drew: Firebk.com — all right. One last question, and it's okay to repeat yourself if you need to. If you could give one piece of positioning advice to every B2B CMO, what would it be?

Bob: It's going to be a longer answer than you wanted. I think right now is such an exciting time to be in the B2B tech industry. We have AI coming that's going to disrupt every organization. At the same time, there's a complete economic restructuring where companies have to operate in a world of uncertainty and navigate disruption they've never faced before — the old steady-state, process-driven world is gone. Both of those forces provide an opening for B2B tech companies. I know we're in a tight buying climate right now, but those two market forces are going to drive significant investment in B2B technology that we can all benefit from. With all that said, the number one thing — and I keep repeating myself — is: sell the problem, not the product. Executive buyers do not care about how your product works, and they don't want more technology. Sell the problem, not the product.

Drew: Awesome. All right — Bob, thank you so much for joining us. For members of the CMO Huddles community, we will be doing this again. Join us on the road — go to cmohuddles.com and you can find more about the Strategy Labs.

If you're a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at cmohuddles.com.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!