Positioning Statement: Template, Formula and B2B Examples

Geoffrey Moore published the best-known positioning statement template in Crossing the Chasm in 1991. It's still the one most teams start from, and it still works.

The trouble is how it gets filled in. A lot of positioning statements are written in a workshop, from the company's point of view, with a difference nobody could check. They look tidy on a slide and change nothing on the homepage.

This guide gives you the formula in two lengths, five steps to write one for a B2B company, examples from three well-known brands, a download, and the tests that tell you whether your statement is any good before you build a website on it.

What a Positioning Statement Is, and What It Isn't

A positioning statement records one strategic choice: the place you want to hold in a specific buyer's mind compared with the alternatives they'd otherwise choose. It's written for your own team, so the website, the sales deck and every email start from the same point.

It isn't a tagline, a mission statement or a feature list. Buyers rarely see it word for word. They see what's written from it.

That's a useful test in itself. If you'd be happy to put your positioning statement on the homepage as it stands, it's probably a slogan. A real one is usually a bit clunky, very specific, and slightly uncomfortable, because it says who you're not for.

One r/Entrepreneur user described the payoff of getting it right, once it's turned into homepage copy:

The same post warns that a statement isn't once and done, and that you'll probably end up "iterating 50-100 times". I'd put the number lower for most established companies, but the point stands. Expect several drafts.

The Positioning Statement Formula: Fill-In Template

There are two common versions. Use the short one to get started, and the long one when your main problem is being compared with the wrong alternative.

Short version:

Long version, after Geoffrey Moore's template in Crossing the Chasm, which adds the alternative. TechTarget's summary of Moore's template gives it as three parts, ending with "Unlike (primary competitive alternative), our product (statement of primary differentiation)."

For B2B, the "Unlike" line does the most work. The main alternative often isn't a competitor at all. It's doing nothing, doing it in-house, or asking an AI tool.

If you'd like to hear Moore himself on the idea underneath the template, Udacity's free App Marketing course, built with Google, includes a short clip of him on value propositions.

Play Video (Loads YouTube)

Positioning Statement vs Value Proposition vs Mission Statement

These three get mixed up all the time. The difference is who they're for and what they answer.

In practice, the positioning statement comes first. Each value proposition is then a version of it for one offer or one buyer. If your value propositions contradict each other, that's usually because there's no positioning statement above them.

How to Write a Positioning Statement in 5 Steps (B2B)

Work through these in order. Each step uses the answer to the one before it.

1. Name the buyer and the trigger. Write the role, company type and size you sell to, and the event that makes them look for help. If two people on the team write different answers, stop and settle this first.
2. Write the need in the buyer's words. Take the phrase from recent sales calls or interviews, not from your own marketing. Five to eight recent buyers are usually enough to hear the pattern.
3. Choose the category. Pick the shelf buyers already put you on: a category they search for or name when they describe the problem. A new category name costs years of explaining.
4. State the benefit and the difference. Write the outcome the buyer gets, then what makes you different from the alternative they'd otherwise choose, including doing nothing, doing it in-house or using AI tools.
5. Attach the proof. Add the evidence that makes the difference believable: a named result, a published method, a price, a guarantee. If there's no proof, the difference is a hope. Cut it or find the evidence.

Step five is the one most teams skip. In the UK it also has a regulatory edge. Under rule 3.7 of the CAP Code, explained in the ASA's substantiation guidance, marketers "must hold documentary evidence" for objective claims before they publish them. A difference you can't prove shouldn't be in the statement, because it'll end up on the website.

The order here borrows from April Dunford's method. On her site she defines positioning as how a product "is different and better than alternatives for a particular set of customers". Her process starts with the alternatives and ends with the category. This short clip walks through her five steps:

Play Video (Loads YouTube)

Dunford's book Obviously Awesome is the standard reference for this, and you'll see it recommended everywhere. Lenny Rachitsky's description is typical:

Worked example (our own): For founder-led B2B companies facing a go-to-market decision, ThriveFinity is the decision-support studio that gives a sourced answer at a published price. Unlike a consultant or an AI chat tool, every paid deliverable names its sources and is signed by a named verifier.

You can check each part of that against our own pages. The prices are published. The verifier is named. Whether it's a good position is a separate question, but it's a provable one.

Some teams keep a fuller positioning document behind the one-sentence statement. One product marketer shared their structure on r/ProductMarketing:

That's a sensible layout. The statement is the summary, and a document like this holds the evidence behind each part.

Before and after: tightening a weak statement

Here's a made-up example to show the kind of edits the five steps produce. It isn't a real company.

Before: "For growing businesses, Acme is an innovative, AI-powered platform that helps teams work smarter and achieve more."

Every part of that fails. "Growing businesses" isn't a buyer. "Innovative, AI-powered platform" isn't a category anyone searches for. "Work smarter and achieve more" isn't a benefit you could measure, and there's no proof or alternative at all.

After: "For finance directors at UK accountancy practices with 20 to 100 staff who lose days each month chasing client documents, Acme is a client document portal that cuts month-end chasing by giving clients one place to upload. Unlike email and shared drives, every request is tracked and chased automatically."

It's longer and less elegant. It's also far more useful. A salesperson knows who to call. A designer knows what the homepage has to say first. And every claim in it can be checked, which means the proof step is now a to-do list instead of a hope.

If you'd only fill in one part properly, make it the trigger. "Who lose days each month chasing client documents" tells everyone in the business when a buyer is ready to talk.

Real Brand Examples, Annotated

Companies don't usually publish their internal positioning statements, but their homepage headlines are where the position shows. Here's how three well-known B2B brands' public wording (checked 10 October 2026) maps to the formula.

Two patterns are worth copying. Each names a category buyers already understand instead of inventing one. And each puts proof close to the claim: a payments volume, a customer count.

Notice what the headlines leave out, too. None names a competitor. The difference is carried by the category and the proof. That works for companies this size because buyers already know who they're up against. A smaller B2B company usually has to say more about the alternative, which is why the "Unlike" line matters more for you than it does for Stripe.

How Long Should a Positioning Statement Be?

One to three sentences. As a rule of thumb, if it needs more than about 50 words, it's trying to serve more than one buyer or claim more than one difference.

Write a separate statement for each distinct segment, rather than one that tries to cover them all. A company selling to both law firms and accountancy practices may well need two statements. Each will be shorter and sharper than the combined version.

Length is a symptom, though. A long statement usually means a choice hasn't been made yet. Cutting words won't fix that. Choosing the buyer will.

Why Your Statement Has to Work Without You in the Room

Most B2B buyers now do their research without talking to a salesperson. So whatever gets written from your positioning statement has to explain you on its own.

A Gartner survey of 645 B2B buyers, released in May 2026, found that most prefer to buy without a rep, and that nearly half had used generative AI in a recent purchase, mainly to research vendors and products.

The same survey found 69% of buyers still prefer to check AI-generated insights with a sales rep. So reps haven't gone away. They just come in later, after the buyer has already formed a view from your website, a forwarded deck and whatever an AI tool said about you.

That's where a clear positioning statement pays for itself. If every page, profile and deck is written from the same sentence, the picture a buyer pieces together on their own is the right one. If not, they'll piece together three different companies.

And they won't give you long. Jakob Nielsen's 2011 analysis for Nielsen Norman Group concluded that "you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds" to earn more of a visitor's attention. The statement is what makes that ten seconds possible.

In practice, each piece of the statement turns into a piece of copy. The target customer and trigger become the first line of outbound emails. The category and benefit become the homepage headline and the first sentence under it. The "Unlike" line becomes the comparison slide in the sales deck. The proof becomes the logos, numbers and case studies you place next to the claim.

If you can't trace a line on your homepage back to part of the statement, ask what it's doing there. Sometimes the answer is that it's useful. More often it's left over from the last rewrite.

How to Test It With Buyers Before You Use It

A positioning statement is a hypothesis until buyers react to it. Run these checks before you rebuild anything on top of it.

• Read-back test: read it to five to eight recent buyers. Do they recognise themselves, their need and the alternative they considered?
• Sales test: can each salesperson say it without a slide, in their own words, and get the same meaning across?
• Proof test: could a sceptical buyer check the difference? If not, find the evidence or change the claim.
• Segment test: the target customer should be one segment, chosen through proper segmentation and targeting. "Businesses" isn't a segment.
• Map test: plot yourself and the alternatives on a market positioning map. The statement should match where buyers would put you.
• Win/loss test: do recent wins match the target customer, and do losses cluster outside it?

If the statement fails, the problem is usually upstream, in the choice of buyer or category. Our guide to B2B positioning for established companies covers that process end to end. If you're not sure positioning is even the issue, is your B2B positioning wrong? lists the warning signs and the other causes to rule out first.

Common Positioning Statement Mistakes

Most weak statements fail in one of a handful of ways. They're easy to spot once you know them.

• The target is "everyone". "For businesses that want to grow" describes every business. Name a role, a company type and a trigger.
• The need is your feature. "Who need AI-powered analytics" is your product talking. Buyers need to stop losing deals, close the books faster or pass an audit.
• The category is invented. If buyers wouldn't type it into a search box, they won't know what to compare you with.
• The difference is a claim nobody can check. "Best-in-class" and "trusted by leading firms" aren't differences. They're adjectives. Our guide to proof claims on B2B websites shows how to replace them.
• The alternative is missing. Without an "Unlike" line, buyers will pick the comparison for you, and they'll often pick the cheapest one.
• It describes the company you want to be. Position for what you can deliver now. Put the vision somewhere else.

A statement with none of these problems still might not be right. But it'll be specific enough to test, and that's the point.

Download the Template

The positioning statement template (plain text) includes both formulas, a fill-in-the-blanks worksheet and the checks above. Copy it into your planning document and fill in each part from evidence you can point to.

If you'd like to check your inputs first, the free Positioning Probe scores your position across market, buyers, competitors and trends, and ends with a one-sentence statement built only on the answers you can evidence.

Where ThriveFinity fits

We write positioning statements as part of paid work, and every one is built from sourced evidence and signed off by a named verifier.

• Decision Brief (£749): with the Positioning & Messaging lens, it produces a category frame, differentiation map, value proposition and message house for one decision. See the Decision Brief.
• Go-to-Market Build (£3,999, 10 days): positioning, a 5-page website, a 20-slide sales deck and a 3-email sequence, all written from one statement. See the Go-to-Market Build.

Prices exclude applicable taxes. We're not the right choice if you just want a tagline or a naming exercise. A copywriter or brand studio will do that better. And if you already have a statement that passes the tests above, you don't need us for this part.

Pranav Unni

Founder · ThriveFinity Connect on LinkedIn →

Pranav Unni is the founder and lead verifier of ThriveFinity. He reads and signs every paid deliverable personally, and writes about go-to-market decisions for established B2B companies.