You can:
- be clear on the value you provide
- show the transformation
- speak directly to the right people
- feel genuinely proud of how you talk about your work…
… and still notice that something isn’t connecting the way you expected.
People understand what you do, but they don’t immediately understand why your approach is the one they should choose. You hop on a discovery call and find yourself clarifying things you thought were obvious. Then the warm lead who seemed excited last week suddenly pumps the brakes.
And you? Well, you’re left wondering…
This is what happens when you’re communicating your value instead of your differentiated value.
April Dunford talks about this often, and she’s right. Clarity explains what you do. Differentiation helps buyers understand why it matters compared to the other options already in their head.
Before we go deeper, take this (and any business advice) with a grain of salt. Your stage of business influences how deeply you need to go here. Early-stage founders still need these foundations, just not at the level of complexity that a multi-person team or a company with multiple offers will need.
If you truly have no alternatives or substitutes, feel free to bow out here.
If you don’t have a monopoly, keep reading. →
Why clarity isn’t enough
Your buyers are not evaluating you in a vacuum.
They’re comparing your message to everything else that could solve their problem. Sometimes that comparison is fair. Often it’s not.
They stack you next to someone offering something completely different. Or a cheaper option. Or whatever feels familiar. And then there’s the option that quietly wins the most: doing nothing.
The difference between “value” and “differentiated value” becomes obvious in service businesses.
A brand strategy studio might say:
• Your brand finally looks as capable as your work really is.
• You stop repeating yourself because everyone understands what you do, and why it matters.
• Your best-fit clients find you faster and convert sooner.
But every studio says this.
Their differentiated value might be that they specialize in rebrands during mergers and acquisitions, the moments where brand equity, politics, and timelines are high stakes. Now they’re not competing with “brand studios.” They’re competing for a specific, risk-filled moment where precision matters.
The same thing happens with a leadership development firm.
Their value might sound like:
• Your leaders stop avoiding tough conversations and start navigating them with confidence.
• Your people feel heard, and stay longer, because their managers finally know how to lead them well.
• Your teams quit wasting time in confusion and start producing results you can measure.
But their differentiated value might be that they help technical leaders transition into cross-functional roles without losing credibility with their technical peers. That’s a completely different category in the buyer’s mind.
Differentiated value is the contrast buyers use to make confident decisions. When that contrast isn’t clear, people default to the lowest-risk, most familiar option. And that’s rarely the one you want them to choose.
There are three components behind strong positioning, and it only works when all three are in place.
- defining who you are
- knowing your competition
- deeply understanding your audience
Defining who you are
Most people try to fix their marketing by jumping into tactics like better copy, running more ads, or tweaking headlines.
But tactics only work when the foundation underneath them is aligned. That foundation starts with defining who you are in a way that holds up outside your inner circle.
Many teams describe themselves as mission-driven or values-led. Yet when I ask people across the organization to articulate those things, I get different answers. Or someone has to dig around to even find where those definitions live.
That’s what happens when the business has relied on trust and reputation. The work has always spoken for itself. You didn’t need to articulate your identity with precision because clients translated it for you.
As you reach a broader audience, you need internal alignment before you can create external clarity.
Defining who you are means grounding your business in the principles, strengths, and perspectives that don’t change as you grow. Things like:
• the beliefs that guide how you operate
• the problems you’re uniquely equipped to solve
• the way you communicate, partner, and support
• the identity you want people to associate with your brand
Taking the time to define your mission, vision, and values might not sound very sexy, but it’s part of how you attract clients who already trust you before the call even starts.
(Think “love at first swipe,” but for B2B buyers.)
You can feel when a company has done this well. Patagonia is an obvious example, and that’s the point. Everyone knows what they stand for. Their mission isn’t buried in a deck. It’s visible in their products, activism, supply chain decisions, and the way their team talks about the company.
You don’t have to guess their values.
That alignment is what makes positioning work. When your foundations are clear, everything that comes after them—your messaging, your content, your sales conversations—becomes clearer too.
Plenty of teams technically did this work during a rebrand or business plan. If you had to go hunting for the file… it doesn’t count.
The comparisons you don’t see, but your buyers do
The next piece of positioning is understanding what your audience is comparing you to. And this is where most businesses unintentionally drift into wishful thinking rather than reality.
A lot of teams feel confident about what sets them apart because their clients tell them so. This comes up in almost every discovery or strategy call I run. “Our clients always say we’re so different from the agency they used before because of X.” “Our clients tell us we’re so much better than their last consultant because of Y.”
And while that feedback feels validating, it is not differentiation. It’s comparison to the thing that wasn’t working.
Your clients are comparing you to the provider they intentionally left. That’s a completely irrelevant anchor when you’re trying to understand your actual position in the market.
It tells you nothing about:
- who’s winning the conversations you’re not in
- the alternatives your next best-fit prospect is weighing
- why someone might choose a different direction
Your buyers decide who your competitors are, not you.
They’re not comparing you to a neat row of category peers. They’re comparing you to whatever feels familiar, low risk, and emotionally manageable.
Sometimes that comparison is another provider. Sometimes it’s a tool, a template, or an internal team. Sometimes it’s the story they’re telling themselves about whether solving the problem is even worth it right now.
And sometimes it’s the option that wins far more often than people want to admit: waiting.
This is why understanding your competitive landscape matters. Because there are three types of competitors shaping how your audience interprets your value. If you’re only paying attention to the first one, your positioning is already at a disadvantage.
Direct competitors
These are the obvious alternatives: the short list of service providers someone might hire when they’re actively trying to solve the problem you solve.
Your offers and price points are probably similar, and your promise is too. This puts you in the same mental bucket.
Your positioning needs to help buyers understand not just what you do, but why your way is the most relevant, lowest-risk, highest-confidence choice for them (especially when every other option appears equal on paper).
Indirect competitors
Indirect competitors are the options your audience sees as viable substitutes, even if they aren’t true equivalents. This group is wider and far more influential. It also includes lots of options you’ve probably never even considered.
Indirect competitors include tools, templates, DIY fixes, internal teams, adjacent services, and anything your buyer sees as “good enough for now.”
For example, a fractional CFO firm is competing with things like:
- The COO who “used to manage budgets at their last company”
- QuickBooks add-ons that promise automated insights
- A custom GPT, LedgerLouie, who spits out smart–sounding financial advice and cash-flow projections
None of these options actually replace a fractional CFO, but buyers absolutely consider them.
This is also where status quo lives. “Let’s just keep doing what we’re doing,” feels familiar, safe, and predictable, even if it doesn’t work well.
Indirect competitors shape expectations long before a buyer ever talks to you. They influence what someone thinks your work should cost, how long it should take, and how hard it should be–even when those expectations are completely misaligned with reality.
Inaction
And then there’s our trusty friend, inaction. The competitor most teams have never even considered, but easily the most appealing one in the mix.
Inaction is the decision to revisit later or deprioritize the problem entirely. And it wins more decisions than any competitor you’ve ever named in a slide deck.
People choose inaction when the problem doesn’t feel urgent, when the risk of choosing wrong feels too high, or when the cost of staying the same hasn’t been clearly articulated. And this is where it gets tricky. You have to make staying put feel heavier than taking action without crossing into fear-based or exploitative tactics that compromise your integrity.
If you don’t understand these three categories, the real comparison points, your positioning won’t reflect the actual decisions your buyer is making.
An example: 1 brand, all 3 types of competitors
Imagine a leadership development firm that specializes in helping technical leaders transition into cross-functional leadership without losing credibility.
Here’s what their real competitive landscape looks like.
Direct competitors: Other leadership development providers offering communication training, executive coaching, or performance work.
Indirect competitors:
- internal HR or L&D running ad hoc training
- generic online leadership programs
- management books and frameworks
- AI leadership tools
- Status quo: promoting technical leaders and hoping they “grow into the role.”
Inaction:
- delaying development until there’s a conflict
- pushing it to next quarter
- deprioritizing because “the team is busy.”
This is what your audience is really comparing you to–your real competition. And your positioning has to speak into the landscape they’re actually navigating, not the one you wish they were.
(Really) knowing your audience and ICPs
If there is one thing you do above anything else, it’s this: your audience needs to feel seen, valued, and understood.
This is where most positioning work gets oversimplified.
Knowing your audience means more than knowing who buys from you. You have to go beyond demographics, job titles, and surface-level pain points.
It means understanding the deeper motivations, pressures, and decision-making dynamics that shape whether someone chooses you at all.
Your broader audience is the group you could reach. Your ICP (Ideal Client Profile) is the specific buyer your approach is built for.
That difference is where resonance lives.
Where depth comes from
To get this level of clarity, I pull from:
• customer surveys
• client interviews
• the places your audience already spends time
• the exact language they use
• the patterns underneath the words
Because “what they want” and “why they want it” are not the same thing.
(And this is also how you discover who your actual competitors are. Instead of guessing or relying on old assumptions, you hear the comparison points directly from your best-fit clients.)
Most teams struggle to get this level of clarity on their own because you’re too close to your own expertise. You fill in gaps your audience would never fill and you don’t realize you’re doing it.
An example: Peloton’s real ICP
Most people think Peloton’s audience is anyone who wants to work out at home.
That’s the broad audience. Peloton’s ICP is much more specific.
Peloton is designed for high-achieving, time-strapped professionals who want:
• accountability without scheduling around a studio
• measurable progress
• coaching without decision fatigue
• community and a sense of belonging
• motivation that comes from identity, not willpower
Everything Peloton does is engineered around that buyer’s psychology, from their instructors’ teaching styles to the way the leaderboard gamifies progress to the subscription model that rewards consistency.
If Peloton had tried to appeal to “everyone who exercises,” the brand wouldn’t work.
What this all points to
When you zoom out, positioning isn’t about frameworks or categories. It’s about accuracy and specificity. The way you talk about your work needs to reflect the reality of what your best-fit clients need, how they make decisions, and what they’re comparing you against.
Most businesses skip this step because things have “worked” well enough. They grew through referrals and their clients love them. They assume the message is clear because the people closest to them already understand it.
But clarity inside your ecosystem doesn’t guarantee clarity outside it. And reach requires a different kind of precision.
The real insight is this: your marketing only works as well as your positioning allows it to.
Your next step
If you’re reading this and realizing you’ve defined pieces of your positioning, but not the whole picture, here’s the simplest place to start:
Choose one offer and ask five of your best-fit clients what alternatives they considered before choosing you.
Not why they loved working with you or what makes you “better” than who they left. But what else was legitimately on the table: tools, people, templates, DIY, status quo, all of it.
Most of the time, the answers surprise people. And those answers tell you exactly where your positioning needs to evolve.
If you want help interpreting what you hear, I’m happy to walk through it with you.
