Positioning & category narrative

We start from how your buyers actually shortlist: comparison grids, RFP language, and the three objections that appear in every late-stage call. From there we define a wedge claim that is narrow enough to win a pilot yet honest enough to survive onboarding when the product is inevitably inspected against the promise.

Proof ladders connect that wedge to evidence your team already owns—logs, reference architectures, signed case metrics—so marketing is not inventing authority it cannot later produce under NDA. Where evidence is thin, we label the gap explicitly so sales and product can decide whether to invest in a reference build, a controlled benchmark, or a softer claim with a narrower audience.

Who this is built for

The engagement fits B2B SaaS, regulated consumer apps, data platforms, and marketplaces where a single narrative must travel through security questionnaires, partner portals, and investor decks without mutating at each hop. If your organisation is still arguing about “what category we are in,” or if regional teams publish contradictory hero copy, you are the profile we optimise for—not consumer brands that can win on tone alone.

Discovery inputs we ask for

Before workshops we ingest what already exists: win/loss notes, Gong snippets you can share, last year’s analyst briefing, and the three PDFs procurement actually opens. We do not treat discovery as a blank canvas interview; we mark up your materials with questions so stakeholders prepare answers instead of improvising in the room.

• Current homepage, pricing, and security pages plus any localised variants.
• Top five deal cycles (won or lost) with anonymised context and deal size band.
• Competitive set you lose to most often, including “do nothing” and in-house build.
• List of claims legal has rejected or watered down in the last eighteen months.

Category architecture & wedge

Category work separates the label you want from the story you can sustain: we document when you should own a new noun versus when you should win inside an existing budget line that finance already recognises. That choice affects every downstream asset—from paid keyword sets to how success measures attach in Salesforce—so we resolve it early with explicit trade-offs, not with a vote after the homepage is already coded.

Messaging hierarchies spell primary promise, supporting pillars, and proof types per audience tier (economic buyer, technical evaluator, end user). Each pillar maps to minimum evidence and maximum risk if overstated, which gives legal and security a checklist instead of a subjective “sounds strong” review.

Workshops & artefacts

Facilitated sessions align product, sales, and investor relations on one canonical storyline, then we version it into a plain-language source document with change history. Derivatives—homepage hero, sales deck spine, partner one-pagers, and executive briefing notes—are explicitly traced to that source so contradictions surface as merge requests, not as customer confusion.

Objection maps capture how competitors reposition against you and how your champions defend you in internal Slack channels, not only what appears on a battlecard PDF. We add “landmine” scenarios: what a hostile CTO asks in minute twelve of a demo, what a partner’s lawyer flags in co-marketing copy, and what a journalist could quote if they misread your changelog.

For international teams we produce a short “translation guardrails” annex: which metaphors survive localization, which numbers require country-specific footnotes, and where English-first copy should stay English to avoid accidental over-claiming in regulated markets.

Outcomes you can test

Acceptance is written around observable behaviours: fewer “what do you actually do?” threads in trials, faster legal review of public claims, and sales narratives that need fewer bespoke footnotes before a CFO signs. We recommend pre/post sampling windows and interview scripts so your RevOps team can verify impact without commissioning a brand tracker you will not read.

When you are ready to scope a programme or a single intensive sprint, we document assumptions, stakeholder roster, and decision deadlines up front so the narrative work lands inside a calendar your board already recognises. Typical arcs run eight to twelve weeks for a full category reset, or two to three weeks for a focused wedge and proof pass when the product story is mostly right but the packaging is stale.