If you’re the marketing leader accountable for how your business shows up, here’s a test that will tell you more about the campaigns you’re about to sign off than any positioning workshop will. Ask five people in your business “what is it we sell?” and see how many different variations come back.
We use this test with marketing teams regularly, and the results tell you exactly where your next brief is going to get stuck. Ask your sales team, your product managers, senior leadership, customer service and success, and whoever runs your campaigns. Don’t warn them first.
There’s good reason to run it. Gallup research has long established that only 41% of employees strongly agreed they knew what their company stood for and what made its brand different from competitors. This figure that fell to 37% amongst non-managers and non-executives: the people most likely to be talking to customers every day.
What ‘good’ sounds like – and what doesn’t
A team with sharp positioning answers with the same shape every time. They can explain who buys and what’s driving urgency for them right now. They can explain why the buyer needs this – not just wants it. They can explain what the buyer actually gets for their money, beyond just the feature list. And they can explain why your business is the credible one to deliver that value. They reach for proof points without hunting for them, and they can describe how they sell it, not just what they sell.
The inverse is just as telling. If five answers give you five different products, or everyone leads with features and nobody mentions outcomes, or the phrase “it depends who’s asking” comes up more than once, positioning is the problem. Products that should be selling themselves stay hidden because nobody in the business can describe them the same way twice.
This has consequences that show up long before anyone diagnoses the cause. Sign-off on campaigns takes longer, because nobody’s confident whose version of the story is right. Opportunities get missed – not because the market isn’t there, but because different teams are chasing different definitions of it. Sales and marketing drift apart, running their own narratives in parallel. And, most tellingly, if your own team can’t hold onto the proposition, the market has no chance of remembering it either.
It isn’t only an internal problem, either. Gartner’s 2025 sales research found that 74% of B2B buying teams show unhealthy conflict during the decision process, and that conflict gets harder to resolve when different stakeholders have picked up different versions of your story along the way.
It’s a simple question with a disproportionately useful answer – which is exactly why we think it deserves its own deeper look. We’ll be publishing a follow-up piece dedicated to running this test properly and reading the results, because the diagnostic is only half the story.
What good positioning tools actually look like
Consistency comes from having a small number of tools that make the proposition impossible to misremember – not from everyone trying harder to remember the pitch.
A documented value proposition is the first of these. Marketing doesn’t decide who you serve or what you stand for; that’s a leadership call. But once it’s agreed, marketing turns it into a working articulation of who you serve, what changes for them, and why you’re the credible choice to deliver it. Done properly, it’s the reference point every piece of content gets checked against before it ships. It should not be a paragraph on a slide that gets rewritten every quarter.
A messaging model sits alongside this, capturing marketing’s own translation of that agreed proposition into the language different audiences and funnel stages actually need – without letting the underlying story fragment. This is the bedrock marketing builds every campaign on. Without it, every writer, designer, and salesperson is improvising from memory, and improvisation is exactly what produces five different answers to “what is it we sell?”
Building the verbal and visual layer on top
Once the proposition and messaging model are solid, the next layer is turning them into approved techniques that people can actually pick up and use – such as signature lines, ways of visualising the value (diagrams, before/after structures, proof-point formats), and reusable components that carry the story into design.
The stakes here are higher than brand tidiness. After running eye-tracking and memory testing on B2B advertising, LinkedIn’s B2B Institute found that 81% of the ads tested failed to gain enough attention to be recalled, and concluded that logos and colours alone aren’t enough. Ownable, distinctive assets are still crucial – yet underused – in B2B.
This is where positioning and distinctive brand assets need to work together – not sit in separate documents. A diagram style, a colour used consistently for a specific claim, a recurring visual metaphor for the outcome you deliver: these become shortcuts your audience recognises before they’ve read a word. If the verbal techniques and the visual assets are built separately, you get consistency in neither. Built together, they reinforce the same story from two directions at once. This is what the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls mental availability. Distinctive assets need to be deliberately built and protected over time – not left to intuition – so they keep accumulating recognition with every use rather than starting from scratch each time.
The same proposition, executed differently by channel
A value proposition that reads well as a paragraph will fail on a landing page and fall flat on an exhibition stand – unless it’s optimised for how each channel actually gets consumed.
McKinsey’s 2026 Global B2B Pulse, based on almost 4,000 B2B decision-makers across 13 countries, puts a number on that challenge, revealing that buyers now use an average of ten channels across a single purchase. This means making the same idea survive ten different contexts. It is a case of adapting per application – not a ‘one size all’.
An event theme needs the proposition compressed into something that works on a banner and survives a thirty-second conversation on a stand.
A thought leadership piece needs it expanded, given room to argue a point of view and back it with evidence, because the reader has chosen to spend several minutes with you.
A promotional landing page needs it structured for scanning and conversion: headline, proof, one clear next step – no detours.
One proposition, three different executions, with three different roles.
That expanded format earns its keep commercially, too. Edelman and LinkedIn’s 2024 research found that 73% of decision-makers see an organisation’s thought leadership as a more trustworthy basis for judging its capabilities than its marketing materials and product sheets, and more than 75% said a piece of thought leadership had prompted them to look into a product or service they hadn’t previously considered.
ABM and the shift to personalisation at scale
Account-based marketing raises the stakes further, because this is where it gets personal. It asks for messaging tailored to specific accounts, specific stakeholders within those accounts, and the specific pain points each one cares about – without losing the coherence that got you this far.
This only works if that personalisation happens inside the value proposition canvas, not outside it. Tailoring a message to a CFO’s cost pressure versus an operations lead’s efficiency concern should mean choosing which proven proof point to lead with – not inventing new claims on the fly. ABM introduces genuine complexity: more variants, more contexts, more stakeholders to speak to directly. The businesses that handle that complexity well are the ones with a strong enough foundation that personalising doesn’t mean improvising. The evidence backs that distinction. Gartner found that buying groups were 40% less likely to complete a high-quality purchase when supplier communication was tailored to an individual’s role than when it wasn’t tailored at all, a reminder that personalisation without a shared proposition can do more harm than no personalisation at all.
That coherence also has to survive contact with people you never targeted directly. Edelman and LinkedIn’s 2025 research on hidden decision-makers found that 64% spend more than an hour a week consuming thought leadership, 55% use it to vet potential suppliers, and 71% have little or no interaction with sales. This means your proposition has to hold up in front of finance, procurement, or legal long before anyone on your target list picks up the phone.
Where AI fits: the quality question for marketing
None of this happens by hand at the scale ABM and multi-channel execution now demand, and that’s exactly where marketing’s AI problem shows up, because it’s now easy to produce ten times the variants – but just as easy to let quality slip whilst you do it. McKinsey’s same 2026 research shows why: more than 90% of organisations now personalise content across channels, but the businesses pulling ahead are four times more likely to run genuine one-to-one personalisation (20% versus 5%), and twice as likely to have adopted generative AI (44% versus 22%), citing efficiency, customer experience, and innovation as the biggest gains.
That means treating the value proposition and messaging model as living references that AI tools are pointed at directly, rather than static PDFs nobody opens after the workshop. It means guardrails that stop a generated message drifting from the approved proposition – however tempting the shortcut looks for a specific account or channel. And, increasingly, it means marketing building its own check into the process: a step – human or automated – that reviews new content against the messaging model before it ships, so speed doesn’t cost you the consistency your audience has learned to trust.
Used this way, AI doesn’t replace the judgement your team brings to positioning. It’s what lets that judgement hold at a volume manual review alone can’t keep up with. Frameworks like NIST’s Generative AI Risk Management Profile, built through public consultation, already set out the kind of governance, content provenance, and pre-deployment testing this requires. The discipline is well established – even if agent-led enforcement of it is still an emerging opportunity rather than standard practice.
One global industrial company put this into practice: it used an AI agent to articulate the value proposition for each individual lead, weighing its offer against competitors on the buying factors that mattered most, drawing every comparison from the same approved proposition rather than improvising one. The result was a 40% higher conversion rate and 30% faster lead execution once it was fully rolled out. A useful illustration that the payoff comes from AI applying a strong proposition at scale – not inventing one on the fly.
Start with the test
Before any of this is worth building, go back to the start. Ask five people what it is you sell. If the answers don’t match, that’s the foundation to fix before you build anything on top of it.
Keep an eye out for our next piece, where we go deeper into running this test and what the different answers actually tell you about where your positioning needs work.