sales contradicted marketing. again.

Brought to you by The Art Of Positioning Podcast

You spend thousands perfecting your website copy.

Then your sales team creates their own pitch deck because the marketing materials "don't sound right for real conversations."

Your customer service team answers questions differently than your marketing team positions the solutions.

Your product team highlights features. Your marketing team sells outcomes. Your sales team focuses on price.

Finally prospects get confused.

Trust erodes.

Deals stall.

Research shows 45% of B2B buyers feel frustrated by inconsistent information across vendor channels.

When buyers can't get a straight story from your business, or they feel like they don’t know what to expect anymore, they find another business that can.

Why this happens (And why it's getting worse)

Each team thinks their perspective is correct:

• Marketing positions for market differentiation.

• Sales personalizes for individual conversations.

• Product focuses on capabilities.

• Customer service adapts to specific problems.

All logical. All wrong.

Without a unified positioning framework, each team creates their own version of your value proposition. Your business ends up with multiple personalities instead of one clear identity.

The Fix: One position, Multiple Expressions

Stop trying to align messaging. Start aligning positioning.

When everyone understands your market position—not just your talking points—they can express it consistently across different contexts.

What does that look like in play? What you can do today? 👇

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Ensure your ops, marketing, sales, and well, the whole darn team are on board with your direction with this 57-minute The Art of Positioning podcast episode with badass guests Emma Berry Cowling and Brandon Gano.

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Badass Tip

Monday Morning Implementation

Pick your positioning anchor. What's the one thing your business does that competitors can't copy? This becomes your North Star that every team references.

Audit the disconnect. Pull your homepage copy, latest sales presentation, recent support email, and product sheet. Do they sound like the same company? If not, you've found your alignment gap.

Create position-based expressions for each team:

🦘 Marketing

Translate positioning into market-facing messages that differentiate and attract.

What it looks like in practice:

If your position is "the only solution that prevents X before it happens," marketing creates content around prevention strategies, early-warning case studies, and cost-of-reaction calculators.

🦘 Sales

Use the same positioning to frame conversations around prospect-specific outcomes.

What it looks like in practice:

Same prevention positioning becomes "Based on what you've told me about your current process, here's how we'd catch that issue at the planning stage before it costs you..." Personalized but positionally consistent.

🦘 Customer service

Apply positioning to solution explanations and feature guidance.

What it looks like in practice:

When customers ask "How does this work?" CS explains features in terms of prevention capabilities: "This alert system is designed to flag potential issues 72 hours before they typically occur..."

🦘 Product

Present features as positioning proof points rather than standalone capabilities.

What it looks like in practice:

Instead of "Our dashboard has real-time monitoring," it becomes "This is how we deliver on preventing issues before they happen. Real-time monitoring that alerts you the moment early indicators appear."

Aligned teams don't just use the same words. They share the same strategic foundation. When your positioning is clear, each team can adapt their expression to their audience while maintaining your core market identity. Mixed messaging isn't a communication problem. It's a positioning problem.

Myth: Good teams naturally align around consistent messaging.

Fact: Consistent messaging requires aligned positioning that each team can express in their own context.