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28.04.2026<\/p>\n
Read Time: 6\u00a0Minutes<\/em><\/p>\n Hello<\/p>\n Today’s digest stems from\u00a0two earlier posts: The $50B Homepage Optimization Scam Destroying B2B<\/a> and The 2.35% Reality of B2B Websites<\/a>. If you haven’t read them, here’s what they established. B2B companies spent roughly $50 billion on website optimization last year. 9% of buyers consider vendor websites reliable. 84% of B2B sales start with a referral. The ceiling on website influence sits at 2.35% of the total addressable market on the absolute best day.<\/em><\/p>\n That’s the floor. This piece sits on top of it. If the homepage is doing 2.35% of the work in the best case, what is the rest of what gets called “positioning” actually doing, and why are CEOs paying agencies six figures to ship it?<\/p>\n So, if homepage positioning is theatre, what is positioning then? If the website is a glorified business card, what should I be paying my agency to do? If 84% of sales start with a referral and 2.35% of TAM is the website’s ceiling, what was that last redesign for?<\/p>\n Fair questions. I’d been carrying the same ones before I started writing about this. So I went back to where the word came from before I wrote anything else.<\/p>\n What I had in front of me was a language problem doing structural work. The word “positioning” is being asked to mean two different things at the same time, and almost nobody flags it. One meaning is the original cognitive concept Ries and Trout built. The other is a billable agency engagement that ends in a deck. The same word covers both, which means any conversation about positioning is actually a conversation about one or the other, and the speaker rarely specifies which.<\/p>\n Al Ries and Jack Trout published Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind<\/em> in 1981. The whole thesis sits in the subtitle. Positioning is about the buyer’s mind. Specifically, the place a brand occupies in the prospect’s memory before they ever search for a vendor. Read the book again with that frame, and the modern usage of the word starts to look strange.<\/p>\n Their original argument was specific. The book opens with a cognitive observation. The buyer’s mind already holds a ranked list for every category. Soft drinks. Rental cars. Razors. There’s a #1, a #2, a #3, and the further down the list a brand sits, the harder it is to dislodge. Avis built one of the most famous campaigns in advertising history by accepting they were #2 to Hertz and saying so out loud. That’s positioning in the original sense. A claim about the place a brand occupies in a ranked list inside the buyer’s head, and a strategic decision about which spot to fight for.<\/p>\n Read with that frame, every modern positioning workshop output looks like the wrong artifact. A Who-We-Serve statement doesn’t tell you what list you’re on. A Why-We’re-Different statement doesn’t tell you what rank you hold or who you’re displacing. The deck describes what the company wants the buyer to think. The original concept was about what the buyer already thinks, and how to move the brand up the ranked list that exists before any agency arrives.<\/p>\n Somewhere between 1981 and now, the noun moved. The word that used to describe what the buyer ends up thinking now describes what an agency hands the client at the end of an engagement. People hire firms to “do their positioning.” They run “positioning workshops.” They ship “positioning frameworks.” None of those activities happens in the buyer’s mind, which is the only place positioning, as Ries and Trout meant the word, can actually exist.<\/p>\n I noticed something else when I went looking. The word never appears alone anymore. It always wears a modifier. Homepage positioning. Product positioning. Brand positioning. Category positioning. GTM positioning. Market positioning. Strategic positioning. Each modifier dresses the word up as a different discipline, sold by different specialists, at different price points.<\/p>\n I tried to find a clean technical distinction between any two of them. I couldn’t. They share the same workshop format, the same Miro boards, the same outputs. A statement of who you serve, what you do, why you’re different. That’s it. The modifier is doing branding for the agency, rather than working for the client.<\/p>\n A noun that used to point at the buyer started pointing at the seller’s invoice. That’s the hijack. The word got moved from describing what the buyer experiences to describing what the agency sells. Once it had a price, it had to be productized. Once it was productized, it had to be split into SKUs so the same client could be sold the framework five different times.<\/p>\n I want to be fair to the practitioners. The charitable reading is that someone has to write the homepage. Someone has to choose what to say in the deck. Someone has to make the pricing page coherent. That’s real work and it matters. I get that. What I can’t get past is the conflation. Choosing what to say is copywriting. Articulating it cleanly is messaging. Picking who to sell to and what value to provide is strategy. Each of those is a separate craft with its own discipline. None of them is positioning in the original sense, because none of them, on its own, changes what’s already in the buyer’s head.<\/p>\n The previous two pieces laid out the empirical floor. 9% of buyers consider vendor websites reliable. 84% of B2B sales start with a referral. In the $2.1M anonymized redesign case, 78% of buyers couldn’t recall visiting the website before their first sales call. The few who did averaged 47 seconds. The ceiling on website influence sits at 2.35% of total addressable market on the absolute best day. That’s the floor for this conversation. I won’t re-litigate it here.<\/p>\n What I want to push on is the version of the work that gets done well. The agency that delivers a clean, fast, well-designed homepage with sharp copy. The one without seventeen value props and a stock-photo woman pointing at a laptop. The good one.<\/p>\n Even the good homepage is a business card. A credibility checkpoint. A place where a buyer, who has already heard about you somewhere else, comes to verify that you exist, that the address is real, that the product looks plausible, that the founders have last names. The 78% who couldn’t recall the visit weren’t visiting bad websites. Some of those sites are excellent. The buyers just weren’t using them as a primary input.<\/p>\n Decompose those 47 seconds. The buyer is checking a small list. Does the company exist? Are the founders real? Is there a customer logo I recognize? Is the pricing in the same order of magnitude as the budget I’ve been given? Does the product description match what my colleague described in the Slack DM? None of those checks involves the hero headline that the agency rewrote three times. None requires a positioning statement. The visit is a verification ritual against a hypothesis the buyer arrived with, and the failure mode of the visit is a missing logo or a confusing pricing tier, not a weak value prop.<\/p>\n The homepage sits downstream of the decision. The shape of the decision gets formed in rooms the homepage will never enter. Slack channels. Conference dinners. WhatsApp threads between former colleagues. A buyer who has decided to evaluate you arrives at your homepage to verify their existing hypothesis. The homepage’s job at that moment is to not break the hypothesis. That’s the bar. Don’t break the hypothesis.<\/p>\n This is where “homepage positioning” reveals itself as glorified copywriting. The agency was hired to write a hero headline, three value props, a few feature lines, a couple of CTAs, and maybe a customer logo strip. The work product is words on a page and a layout to put them in. Calling it “positioning” doesn’t change what was actually shipped. The label dresses up a copywriting deliverable in strategic vocabulary so the invoice can support a higher number.<\/p>\n I’d rather see it called what it is. Hero copy. Pricing copy. Product page copy. Each one a craft. Each one worth doing well. None of them is positioning in the sense Ries and Trout meant. The naming matters because the budget follows the name. The same work labelled positioning supports a higher number on the invoice than the same work labelled copywriting. Same Miro board. Same eight weeks. The noun does the price work.<\/p>\n Once the word “positioning” became a deliverable, it had to become a sellable deliverable. The shape of the sellable deliverable is the workshop. Two days. A Miro board. Six executives in a room. A facilitator. A stack of frameworks. An output document. An invoice somewhere between fifty thousand and five hundred thousand dollars depending on the firm.<\/p>\n I’ve sat through versions of the same workshop run by twelve different consultancies. The frameworks have different names. The Miro boards have different colour schemes. The outputs are functionally identical. A Who We Serve statement. A What We Do statement. A Why We’re Different statement. Sometimes a Category We Play In statement. Sometimes a Manifesto. Always a deck. Sometimes, a “messaging matrix” that looks suspiciously like the matrix the previous agency built two years ago.<\/p>\n That’s the supply side of the scam. There’s a workshop economy that needs the word “positioning” to keep generating sub-SKUs so the same client can be sold the framework five different times. Homepage positioning this year. Product positioning next year. Brand positioning the year after, when the new VP joins. Category positioning when the board pushes for “category creation.” Each one billed separately. Each one producing an output that looks substantively new but is structurally identical to the last one. Same questions. Different sticky notes.<\/p>\n The pitch language is where the SKU work actually happens. Strategic clarity. Brand DNA. True north. Story. Narrative architecture. Voice and tone system. Each phrase is a label dressed up to support a separate engagement. The same workshop format runs under a dozen names because each name has its own market, its own certification track, its own LinkedIn following, its own paid course. The language doesn’t describe different work. It describes different sales motions for the same work.<\/p>\n The MarTech layer sits on top. Conversion-rate-optimization tools to A\/B test the words from the workshop. Heatmaps to see if anyone reads them. Attribution dashboards to take credit when a deal closes. The whole stack assumes the homepage matters in the way the workshop output claims it does. The data on buyer behaviour says it doesn’t. The stack persists anyway because the people who own the stack also own the budget that justifies the stack.<\/p>\n I’m not accusing the practitioners of running a con. Most of them believe in what they do. The structural problem is older and quieter. The economic system has made it expensive to admit the work is mostly copywriting. So the work keeps getting called positioning. Positioning keeps fragmenting into more sub-disciplines. The budget keeps following the language. The buyer keeps making the decision somewhere else.<\/p>\n The companies that operate as if positioning lives in the buyer’s head behave differently. McKinsey runs a thirteen-billion-dollar revenue business with a website that’s a recruiting portal and a thought leadership archive. No product pages. No conversion optimization. The homepage is a credibility checkpoint. Their position is built by the people they hire, the work they ship, the alumni network, the published research, the client references that compound for forty years.<\/p>\n Palantir built a fifty-billion-dollar company with a website so minimal that journalists complained they couldn’t figure out what the company did. The position got built in classified rooms, in Pentagon meetings, and in defence industry referrals. The website was never doing the work, and they never pretended it was.<\/p>\n A boutique consulting firm in Boston I’ve cited before runs forty-seven million in revenue with seventy people and a website unchanged since 2018. The managing partner told me directly. Every dollar that could go to the website goes to making partners visible in the market instead. Conference speaking. Op-eds in trade press. Hosted dinners. Custom research. That’s where the position gets built.<\/p>\n The pattern across all three is the same. They treat the homepage as infrastructure. Their actual strategic energy goes into the activities that compound in the buyer’s mind. Repetition over years. Peer endorsement loops. Category coherence. Operator visibility in the rooms that matter. Product truth-telling in public. Customer outcomes that buyers feel comfortable claiming credit for to their boards.<\/p>\n None of those activities happens in a workshop. None of them produces a deliverable that an agency can hand you in eight weeks. They take five to ten years. They require the operators to actually be the operators, in public, repeatedly, making good work and saying clear things about it. That’s why most companies don’t do it. The slow path doesn’t produce a visible result for eighteen months. A workshop produces a deck on Friday and a Miro board on Monday, which feels more like progress, even when the deck doesn’t change anything in the buyer’s head.<\/p>\n Choosing the slow path is a posture<\/strong> The objection I hear most often is that the website does drive leads, and the dashboard shows it. The dashboard does show it. The dashboard is showing the last touch before the form fill. The last touch is the easiest thing to measure and the least informative thing to optimize. The cause of the form fill is somewhere in the previous six months of context the buyer accumulated, almost none of which is on your website. If you removed the site for a quarter, you’d lose some self-serve conversion at the bottom of the funnel. You wouldn’t lose the demand. The demand was already there. The website was the verification ritual at the end.<\/p>\n The math is clear enough that there’s a Monday morning move. Not everyone will run it. The ones who do will pull ahead.<\/p>\n Audit your last twenty deals. Pick up the phone or send the email. Ask each closed-won and closed-lost buyer one question. How did you first hear about us? Not the last touchpoint before signing. The first time the company name entered your head. Compare those answers to your CRM attribution. The gap is your measurement lie.<\/p>\n If 84% of those answers come from referrals, peer mentions, operator visibility, or “I worked with you at my last company” and your budget has 5% going to those sources and 40% going to digital, the imbalance is the problem. The first reallocation is moving budget toward the source that actually generates the input. Formal referral programs. Customer advocacy enablement. Operator visibility budget. Community investment in the rooms where buyers gather.<\/p>\n 1. Run the cut test.<\/strong> Reduce website optimization spend by half for one quarter. Just maintenance. No new features. No redesigns. No A\/B test backlog. Track lead flow, conversion rate, sales velocity, win rate. If the homepage is doing the work the agencies claim, the numbers will drop fast. If the numbers stay the same, the budget was funding theatre.<\/p>\n 2. Map the dark funnel.<\/strong> Ten post-purchase interviews with recent customers. Where did our name come up before you visited us? What Slack channel? What conference? What former colleague? Which podcast? Which AI summary? Build a heat map of the rooms your name enters before the website ever loads. That’s where your real distribution lives. Fund presence there.<\/p>\n 3. Build the referral system. <\/strong>Companies with formal referral programs see 71% higher conversion, 69% faster close times, and 86% revenue growth. Only 30% of B2B firms have one. Building it isn’t exotic work. It’s account management, plus a clear ask, plus a way for happy customers to be useful to peers without feeling like they’re shilling. The asymmetry between how much it pays back and how few companies do it is the opportunity sitting in plain sight.<\/p>\n None of this is theoretical. Every step is a question, an interview, a budget line. Most companies won’t run it because the answers will rearrange the org chart. The CMO who built her career on conversion optimization will not enjoy the conversation. The agency on retainer will not enjoy the conversation. The board, who likes the look of a redesigned site at the quarterly review, will not enjoy the conversation. The system has reasons to keep the language and the budget where they are.<\/p>\n The system isn’t your buyer. Your buyer is making the decision in the room you don’t see, based on the conversation you’ll never track, with the peer who’ll never appear in your dashboard. The work is moving the budget toward where the buyer actually is.<\/p>\n The reality hasn’t moved. The buyer’s mind is still where positioning lives. It still gets built the way it always did. In rooms most marketers never enter. Over years no quarterly plan can compress. The word just stopped pointing at it.<\/p>\n Most of the budget is funding the version of the work that has an invoice attached. The version that compounds is harder to invoice and easier to ignore. That’s the trade-off most companies make without knowing they made it.<\/p>\n Your buyers have already figured this out. They’re making decisions in group chats, verifying through peers, using AI to cut through marketing speak. The homepage is the last thing they look at, if they look at it at all. The position that determines whether you’re on the list got built years before the visit.<\/p>\n Keep the website. But ask yourself this:\u00a0“When you write the next check for ‘positioning,’ which version of the word are you paying for?”<\/p>\n\n
The word got hijacked<\/strong>
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The homepage is a glorified business card<\/strong>
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The workshop industrial complex<\/strong>
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What actually compounds<\/strong>
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It changes how a company invests every quarter. It also changes whose career advances internally. The CMO who built her case on conversion-rate-optimization wins doesn’t survive the shift. The CMO who built it on customer reference depth and category visibility does. The companies that pick the slow path almost never talk about positioning. They’re too busy doing the work that produces the position.<\/p>\n\n
The reallocation<\/strong>
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Finally<\/strong>
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