Part two of a five-part series on building a B2B marketing function from scratch.

In my first fortnight I asked a lot of people the same simple question. What problem do we solve, and for whom. I got a different answer almost every time. Sellers described one thing, customer service managers another, the product team a third, and not one of them was wrong exactly. They were each describing a different facet of the same thing, with no agreed version anyone could rally behind.

That is not a small thing to fix, but it is the thing to fix, before a single campaign, a single hire, a single pound of spend. If your own people cannot agree what you do, your buyers have no chance. A confused market does not buy. It waits for someone clearer to come along.

This series is about building a GTM from scratch. Before the plumbing, the demand or the brand, there is the story. This post is about getting it right, the positioning everything else stands on.

The hero trap

The company was the hero of every story it told. The product was clever, the team were proud of it, and so every slide, every page, every pitch was about us. Our features. Our architecture. Our roadmap. Our journey. The customer’s problem turned up somewhere near the end, if at all.

This is incredibly common, and it is almost always a symptom of a founder-led or product-led culture. People who build brilliant things naturally talk about the thing they built. It is not arrogance, it is gravity. The closer you sit to the product, the harder it is to see it from the outside, through the eyes of someone who does not care how it works and only cares what it does for them.

It is a tough conversation to have with a room of clever people, and tougher still with a founder. You are telling them, politely, that the thing they are proudest of has been pointed in the wrong direction. The trick is not to make it a criticism. It is to make it a reframe. We are not the hero of this story. The customer is. We are the guide who helps them win. That is not a smaller role, it is the role that actually sells. Show people that and most of them get there fast, founders included.

Flip the ICP

The first concrete move was the ICP. We had been chasing whoever happened to be buying, which is not a strategy, it is a habit dressed up as one. So we flipped it. Away from anyone with a pulse and a budget, toward the specific people we genuinely solved a painful problem for. The ones where the product was not a nice-to-have but an obvious yes, where the pain was sharp enough that they were already out looking for a fix.

You find them in the data you already have. Look at your best customers, the ones who renew without a fuss and expand on their own. What do they have in common. What was on fire when they bought, the compelling event that made it urgent. Then talk to them, and talk to the deals you lost, because the losses tell you who you are not for, which is just as useful as knowing who you are.

For us that meant a genuine shift. We had leaned heavily into defence and government. A real fit, but the cycles were long and the budgets were under pressure, so deals dragged. So we kept that base and deliberately opened up the enterprise alongside it. The product was built for a mature, specialist function. For a smaller or less mature organisation it was a luxury they could not really use, because they did not yet have the team or the buyer it was designed for. Chasing them would have been chasing our own tails, so we pointed instead at where the right buyer actually existed.

Narrowing who you are for feels like giving something up. It is the opposite. With a small sales team and a smaller budget, focus is the only edge you have. A precise message to the right hundred accounts beats a vague one to ten thousand, every time, and it costs a fraction of the money and the energy.

Find the real buyer

There was a subtler problem too, in who we spoke to inside an account. Our sellers were genuinely good with the practitioners and end users, the people who lived in the product day to day. They were far less comfortable taking the conversation up the chain, to the senior decision-makers who held the budget and signed. Call it confidence, call it ability, probably a bit of both. That is not a stick to beat anyone with, it is a job to do.

So we did the job. Work out who the real buyer is, what they actually care about at their level, which is rarely what the end user cares about, and what proof moves them. The user wants to know it works. The decision maker wants to know it is worth the budget, the risk and impact to the business. Get clear on that gap and you can arm the team to have the harder, higher conversation with a fighting chance, instead of staying comfortable a level too low and wondering why the deals stall.

Two or three pillars, not twenty

With the ICP agreed, we built the messaging around their pain, not our features. Two or three pillars, no more. Each one a problem we solved better than anyone, framed in the customer’s words rather than ours, and pressure-tested with our own subject matter experts so they held up under real scrutiny rather than marketing wishful thinking. If an expert on your own team winces at a claim, a buyer will too, and the experts are the ones who keep you honest.

Two or three is the discipline, and it is hard, because everyone wants ten. Every team has a pet feature they want top billing. But ten messages is the same as none, because nobody, including your own people, can hold ten in their head. Three, repeated everywhere, beats ten said once. Pick the few that matter most to the buyer you just chose, and have the nerve to let the rest go.

Arm the people who carry it

Pillars on a slide change nothing on their own. So we turned them into personas and playbooks the sales team could actually use. The pain each persona feels, the language they use for it, the proof that we fix it, the objections they will raise and honest answers to them. All of it in their hands before they walked into a room, not buried in a folder nobody opens.

I cannot control what comes out of a seller’s mouth on a call or in a meeting. Nobody can, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not sat in on enough of them. But I can make sure they walked in with the clearest possible story and the best possible chance of winning. That is the job. Provide a story, give them the proofpoints, make it easy to tell, then get out of the way and let them sell.

What changes

When everyone tells the same story, and that story is about the customer rather than you, something quiet but enormous happens. The website, the deck, the cold email, the conference chat and the analyst briefing all start pulling in the same direction. The message stops cancelling itself out and starts to compound. A buyer hears a consistent version of the same useful thing in three different places, and consistency reads as credibility.

Get the story right and everything downstream works harder, every pound and every hour. Get it wrong and you are just making noise, loudly and expensively, and no amount of demand spend will save you.

Next in the series, the unglamorous plumbing nobody blogs about, and why a function nobody can measure is a function nobody trusts.

Godspeed.