Hello hello 👋🏽,

Welcome to the 23rd edition of Marketers Help Marketers.

Positioning is the one thing that makes everything else in marketing easier, and the one thing most marketing teams never fully own. Not because they do not care about it, but because by the time a marketer arrives at a company, it has usually already been decided. By the founder. By an investor who pushed a workshop. By a consultant who came in for six weeks and left behind a deck. The marketer inherits the output and gets on with execution. And somewhere in that handover, the most important question in marketing, what do we actually stand for and who are we really for, gets treated as answered when it has barely been asked.

That is the conversation I wanted to have with Silky Agarwal, and this newsletter is the result of it.

Silky is a positioning and messaging consultant for pre-scale B2B SaaS companies. She has advised 40+ B2B SaaS companies, built her own proprietary Position Your Customer™ framework from the learnings of that work, and brings 13 years of experience in B2B SaaS go-to-market strategy. She previously headed marketing for enterprise software products and holds an MBA in Communications with a major in customer insights from MICA.

We went deep. I had so many aha moments in this conversation, and I think you will too.

Silky starts with something most positioning conversations skip entirely: the question of timing. Specifically, whether a company is actually ready to do this work at all.

She often gets inquiries from founders who are pre-revenue or are still figuring out the head and tail of their product. These founders are able to describe the space, articulate the gap, explain the value prop. But none of that had met the market yet. And Silky's take on that was clear: all of it is still fantasy. Not because the idea is bad, but because it is at best, merely a working hypothesis of what the world needs. Her signal for readiness is simple: at least one customer is paying for your product and renewing of their own volition. That is the moment you know you have built something worth positioning. Until then, the product is still being iterated, and any positioning you build on top of that is likely to change anyway.

The flip side of this, though, is equally important. Because most of the marketers reading this are not pre-product or pre-revenue. They are past that first milestone, somewhere in the messy middle: a few customers, some traction, but the next ten or fifty just are not coming. And that is actually the moment when positioning work needs to become the first question on the desk every morning, not a future agenda item.

Silky put it this way: if you have your first customers renewing but cannot seem to replicate them, that is when you stop trying to scale and start trying to test.

These are not questions you answer once and move on from. They are the questions you should be living in when growth stalls.

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When I asked Silky what broken positioning looks like from the inside, she did not reach for a framework. She described a pendulum.

On one side: talk features, sell to users, position the product as a point solution. On the other side: talk outcomes, sell to decision-makers, position the full platform. The pendulum is not meant to show two valid strategic choices. It is meant to show what a company looks like when there is no shared positioning anchor and different functions are pulling in completely opposite directions.

In practice, this is what that looks like. The sales team is on calls selling features because features feel concrete and defensible under pressure. Meanwhile, the marketing team is doing exactly what good marketing practice says to do: leading with value and outcomes on the website, because that is what buyers actually respond to. The founder watches both, gives both room to run, and quietly hopes something sticks. Nothing sticks. They cancel each other out, and by the time anyone notices, the instinct is to blame whoever is easier to blame, which is usually marketing.

And that's exactly how companies end up saying things like "we're a product-led company," or "we don't really do marketing," or "relationships and referrals are what work for us." These are not strategic positions. They are what organisations say when they have lost faith in marketing as a function, and they usually stop short of asking whether the function ever had what it needed to work in the first place.

There is a second symptom that comes up alongside this one, and it is worth mentioning: competitive anxiety that has no basis in buyer reality. Silky made a sharp observation about founders who spend significant energy watching well-funded competitors and mirroring what they see. (What is that company doing on its website this week? What messaging are they leading with?) The frustration, she noted, comes when you copy the approach and it does not work. And the reason it does not work is that positioning cannot be imported. It has to come from within. It can be informed by what is happening outside, but it has to be rooted in what is true about your product and your customers specifically, not in what a better-funded company is doing on their homepage.

The third diagnostic Silky pointed to is proximity. Regardless of background or experience, no one can see their own product the way a first-time buyer does. Silky said this about herself without any hesitation: the hardest positioning project she has ever worked on is her own. She still does not know whether her position is fully right. The detachment required to view your company as an outsider is genuinely difficult, and the closer you are to what you built, the harder it becomes. It is a structural problem that affects everyone, and the answer is not to try harder to be objective. It is to build mechanisms that give you an outside perspective, and to have the self-awareness to know you need them in the first place.

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Silky’s Position Your Customer framework holds that, instead of telling buyers why your product is different, you tell them why they are different.

To understand why this reframe matters, it helps to walk through what product positioning actually produces from the buyer's side of the table.

Imagine you are evaluating two solutions in the same category.

Both solutions have told you something true. Both have given you a concrete reason. Both have, in the traditional sense, successfully positioned their products. And you are still confused.

Because what you are now being asked to do is figure out whether user-based pricing matters more to you than implementation simplicity. That is a question of preference. It is personal and contextual, and it depends on factors neither solution asked about. So what do you do when the positioning has confused you rather than clarified the decision?

You fall back on what you actually trust: reviews, brand recognition, and price. You pick the one that feels more reliable or more affordable, and you call it a decision. But you did not decide based on positioning. You decided despite it.

Silky's point is that if this is the default outcome of product positioning, then for a pre-scale B2B SaaS company without deep pockets or brand equity, competing this way is a slow bleed. You cannot win a price fight against a well-funded competitor. You cannot out-shout them on awareness. So you need a different frame entirely.

The Position Your Customer™ framework says: instead of differentiating your product from theirs, differentiate your customer from everyone else. Find what is specifically true about the kind of company that gets the most value from what you do, and make that the centre of your positioning.

Silky shared an example of a pricing consultant she worked with. The consultant's clients were B2B SaaS companies with genuinely complex products: sold to startup clients on one end and Fortune 100 clients on the other, with wildly different monetization needs and no single pricing model that could span them. Standard consulting methods and fixed-price frameworks did not fit them. Through the positioning work, the angle that emerged was not "we do pricing strategy better than McKinsey." It was: if your product is complex, your pricing needs to be handled differently, and this is the expert who specialises in exactly that.

What changed with that framing is the nature of the buying decision. The buyer is no longer weighing one consulting firm's methodology against another's. They are recognising themselves in the positioning:

yes, our product is complex,

yes, our pricing situation is non-standard, and

yes, that is why the general-purpose approach has not worked.

The decision stops being about preference and becomes almost obvious. As Silky put it, the reason for buying is now rooted in the buyer's own self-image, which is undebatable and irrefutable. The customer cannot argue themselves out of their own reality.

That is what you are building toward when you position the customer: not a more persuasive pitch, but a clearer mirror.

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Walk into almost any positioning or ICP conversation, and you will hear the same opening questions.

Which vertical are we going after? What is the revenue range? How many employees? Which geography? 

These feel like the right starting questions because they produce a tidy output: a definition, a slide, a list of target accounts you can load into your prospecting tool and start working.

But Silky has a contrary take that challenges that approach. She connects firmographic ICP thinking to the same underlying dynamic that causes companies to underinvest in marketing insights broadly. The reasoning goes like this: when you define your ICP based on what your CRM can filter and what your sales team can easily prospect against, you are making insight decisions based on the limits of your tools, not based on what actually predicts fit. The CRM has fields for annual revenue, industry, headcount, and geography. So your ICP has annual revenue, industry, headcount, and geography.

The tool shaped the thinking, not the other way around, and it is baked into almost every sales and marketing platform in the market.

The contrast she draws is with what happened in B2C decades ago. There was a period where B2C targeting was entirely demographic: income, age, gender. And then a wave of customer insight research exposed how much that lens was missing. The person who saves for five months to buy an iPhone before they can afford it is not high-income. The person who will choose a phone over a vacation is not being driven by purchasing power. They are being driven by identity, by what it means to them to own that product, by what they want to signal to the people around them. None of that is captured in a demographic field. B2B is still, largely, operating the way B2C did before that shift happened.

The practical consequence shows up in a specific and recognisable way. A lead comes in that matches every firmographic criterion: right vertical, right size, right geography. And then the founder or a senior salesperson, someone who has been selling this product for years, looks at it and says: no, they will not buy from us. Do not spend time on that one. What is happening there is that those people have developed an intuition about fit that goes beyond what any CRM field captures. They have noticed something, a signal about the company's situation, its growth trajectory, its internal dynamics, the way it talks about its problems, that distinguishes it from the companies that look identical on paper but behave completely differently as customers. That hidden insight, Silky argues, belongs in your positioning work, not just in the heads of your most experienced people.

This is what Silky means by niche versus cage. A niche is a point from which you can expand in any direction. A cage forces you to be less than what you are. And the difference between the two almost always comes down to whether the dimension was chosen before or after the positioning work. When you start with "we are going after mid-market retail SaaS," you have already decided that vertical is the right lens. But what if it is not? What if the real pattern in your best customers has nothing to do with what they sell and everything to do with how they grow, or how they buy, or what kind of problem they are willing to pay to solve? Picking a dimension before the positioning work tells you which dimension to pick is how a niche becomes a cage.

So how do you find the right one?

The practical exercise Silky uses is a best and worst customers list. Not personas, not hypothetical profiles: actual company names. One list of companies you would not want to serve again if you had the choice, and one list of companies you never want to lose. Then you look at what dimension separates them, and the instruction is to resist the obvious categories. Both lists might have healthcare companies in them. Both might have fintechs. The dimension is probably something less visible: whether the company is in a transactional business or a relationship-driven one, whether their product is simple or complex, whether they think of communication as a notification or as a strategic asset. Finding that dimension is harder than picking a vertical, but it is the kind of focus that actually compounds.

Her pointed summary: let your positioning choose your ICP. The dimension you segment on should be a conclusion, not a starting assumption.

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When positioning is not working and the pressure is building, there is a very predictable response. 

Add more. 

More claims on the homepage. 

More differentiators in the deck. 

More proof points in the sequence. 

This pattern is not new, but AI has accelerated it in a specific way. Copywriting is now among the fastest and cheapest things to produce. What used to be an exclusive and time-consuming project, a website copy overhaul, a messaging refresh, a new homepage hero, can now be knocked out in a prompt. And because iteration is cheap, the temptation to iterate rather than investigate has never been stronger. Some companies have built systems where the homepage copy changes dynamically based on scraped Reddit threads and community forums, fed through a prompt, piped into a CMS, updated on demand. They call it customer insight. They call it personalisation.

Silky calls it shopping.

The shopping mindset is: if X does not work, try Y. If Y does not work, try Z. Iteration is not bad. You have to test. But there is a version of testing that is driven by genuine discovery, where each change is a hypothesis and the goal is to get closer to something true, and there is a version that is driven by avoidance, where the speed of iteration becomes a substitute for the harder work of sitting with the question long enough to actually answer it.

The thing about the shopping mindset is that it feels like progress because there is always movement. 

A new homepage. A revised sequence. A repositioned deck. 

But none of it accumulates if there is no underlying answer to build from. You cannot compound on a foundation you have decided to replace every quarter.

Silky used an analogy that I genuinely loved: Think of your positioning as the center of a circle.

In the early stages, your entire job is to find that center. Not to try different circles, not to pick a radius and start drawing, but to ask, with each iteration: is this my center? Am I closer or further away than last time? Once you find it, everything else grows outward from it, and the center stays fixed. Salesforce found their center in CRM. Every platform, every cloud, every acquisition since has grown out from that point. The center held. That is what you are working toward, and the path there is not faster iteration. It is more honest investigation.

The version of this that Silky contrasted it with was also worth sitting with: when positioning is actually sorted, marketing gets genuinely easier. You are not starting from zero every time you write a piece of content or respond to an objection. When someone asks what your company does, you do not need a protocol or a boilerplate. The answer is just obvious. You stop agonising over what to say, and you start thinking about how to say it differently this time. That shift, from what to how, is what creativity in marketing actually feels like. And it only becomes available once the center is found.

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A lot of marketers reading this will recognise this situation. The founder did a positioning exercise before you arrived, or before you had a seat at the table. Maybe an investor pushed it. Maybe they worked through a framework template on their own. Maybe they pulled something out of an AI tool and felt that was sufficient. There is now a commandment, and you are asked to execute on it. And you can see, from where you sit, that something is not quite right.

The copy is not landing. The ICP definition is too broad and too rigid at the same time. The sales team has started rephrasing things on calls because the official message does not hold up under real objections. You know something is off. But making that case requires a particular kind of groundwork, and that groundwork starts earlier than most marketers expect.

It starts with the product.

Building a genuine, intimate understanding of the product you are marketing is not optional groundwork. It is the thing that everything else in marketing is built on top of. Not at a surface level, not just enough to write a feature summary, but deeply enough that you could walk someone through what the product does, how it works, what problems each part of it solves, and where its limits are. Silky's point on this was direct: you cannot credibly weigh in on positioning for a product you do not fully understand. And the gap between how well most B2B SaaS marketers know their product and how well they need to know it is wider than most people admit.

This is not about being able to give a demo or configure a technical setup. It is about knowing every part of the product with enough clarity that when a conversation about positioning, messaging, or customer fit comes up, you are bringing first-hand product observations into the room, not Chinese whispers. That credibility is what earns you a voice in a conversation that, in many companies, has historically happened without marketing in it.

The second layer is customer proximity, and this one is a structural problem in most B2B companies that is worth naming plainly. Marketers want to sit in on sales calls, run their own customer interviews, listen to how buyers actually describe the problem they are trying to solve. The pushback is almost universal: go through the sales team, they know the customers best. And so marketers end up writing copy for people they have never spoken to, based on second-hand notes from people whose job is to handle objections and close deals, not to extract positioning signals. Sales looks at every conversation through the lens of what will move this deal forward. That is the right lens for sales. It is not the same lens a marketer needs, and relying on it as your only source of customer truth is how positioning ends up built on assumption rather than reality. Push for access where you can. Listen to recordings if live calls are not available. The closer you get to the customer's actual words, the sharper your positioning instincts will become.

Once you have done that work, the internal case for revisiting positioning becomes much easier to make. And the way to make it is through numbers, not opinions. Silky's framing: treat your founder the way you would treat a customer. Speak in their language, and their language is numbers. Conversion rate before the last revamp, conversion rate now. Dollars spent on the website refresh, change in lead quality afterward. When you lay out those figures without editorialising and let them point to the question that nobody wants to ask, whether what we are saying is actually landing, you create the conditions for a real conversation. And if you were the one who ran the last initiative that did not move the numbers, acknowledge it. Question yourself before they question you. A founder is far more likely to listen to a marketer who walks in with data and a hard question than to one who walks in with a point of view and nothing to back it up.

When Silky is working with founders to pressure-test whether their current positioning is actually doing its job, she asks them to honestly rate their sales conversations against a set of questions. They are worth sitting with yourself too:

If the honest answers to those questions are uncomfortable, that discomfort is the data. It is also the foundation of the case you need to build.

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The reason positioning is genuinely hard to sell internally is that there is no straight line from the work to the outcome. This is not a flaw specific to positioning. It is the fundamental attribution problem that sits behind almost every marketing investment. But it hits positioning particularly hard because the timescales are long and the signals are diffused.

The leading indicators, things like lead quantity, lead quality, and the nature of sales conversations, will start shifting within weeks to a couple of months if the positioning is landing. The lagging indicators, ACV and churn, will not tell you much for at least two to three years after a deal closes. All of the business metrics are eventually influenced by positioning, which sounds good until you realise it also means you cannot point to any one of them and say definitively: that moved because of what we changed in our messaging.

This is why Silky's framing of positioning as a hypothesis rather than a declaration is so practically useful. If you treat it as a declaration, you need the whole organisation to buy in before you can test it. And if the whole organisation buys in and the first rollout does not perform, you have lost the room. They either cling to the new direction out of sunk cost, or they revert and stop trusting you. Neither outcome helps.

The better sequence is to test in the places where you already have autonomy, before asking for organisational commitment. Every marketer has some scope they own: an outbound sequence, a landing page, a social post cadence, a webinar. These are the right testing grounds. Change the message in your next email campaign. Run a different angle on a landing page for four weeks. Compare before and after on the metrics you are already tracking for those channels. A month for outbound, two months for a website, depending on traffic. The timeline varies by touchpoint, but the principle is consistent: build evidence before you ask for belief.

There is a tension that does not get talked about enough in this context. Staying close to positioning as a live question, rather than something that was sorted two years ago, means occasionally challenging things that seem to be approved from the top. Most marketers are measured on output and consistency: things go out on time, the calendar is full, the numbers are moving in a broadly acceptable direction. Positioning thinking asks you to periodically step back from all of that and ask whether the foundation is still right, even when nothing is visibly broken. That is not a comfortable habit to build, especially in environments where slowing down to question things can look like you are not producing. But the marketers who do it, who stay genuinely curious about whether the message is landing and why, tend to develop an instinct for positioning that becomes one of the harder things to replicate. It builds slowly and then becomes indispensable.

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Something Silky said near the end of our conversation has stayed with me since we spoke.

She described the whole positioning journey as a search for the center of a circle, not a rebrand, not a messaging refresh, but a genuine search for something true.

And the thing about a search is that it requires the patience to stay with a question long enough to actually answer it, rather than moving on to the next thing the moment the discomfort of not knowing gets uncomfortable.

The companies that get positioning wrong treat it like a tactic. They change it when it is not working fast enough. They automate it when it feels slow. They delegate it when it feels abstract. Each time they do that, they get further from the center rather than closer to it, and the motion looks like action while producing very little accumulation.

The companies that get it right treat it as a question they keep asking, honestly, at every stage of growth. 

“Who is our customer, really? What are they trying to solve that nobody else is naming correctly? What does our product do for them that they could not get another way? What does the market keep telling us that we have not quite been ready to hear?” 

That question does not get a final answer. Your product evolves. Your customers evolve. The market shifts. But there is a version of your positioning that is grounded and honest and clear, and it makes every other marketing decision easier once you find it.

A few things to carry into this week:

I want to hear from you. Reply and tell me: is positioning something you have actively worked on at your company, inherited without full context, or somewhere in between? And if you have been in the room when it goes wrong, what did it look like?

Have a great week ahead. ✨

Your marketer friend,

Mita ✌🏽