Key takeaways
- Buyers build their shortlist before they talk to anyone, and the vendor on that first shortlist wins the vast majority of deals.
- Pricing power comes from being seen as meaningfully different, not from being cheaper.
- Only a small share of your market is buying at any moment. The rest decide who they will call later, based on who they remember.
- Becoming the obvious choice is a sequence: pick who you serve, name the problem you solve best, prove it, and say it the same way everywhere.
Most service businesses lose deals they never knew existed. A buyer searched, read, asked a colleague or an AI assistant, and settled on three names. If yours was not one of them, there was no proposal to lose. There was simply no conversation.
That is why positioning is not a branding exercise for later. It decides whether you are in the room at all, and what you can charge once you are there.
The shortlist forms before the first call
6sense surveyed B2B buyers for its 2025 Buyer Experience Report. On average, buyers were 61% of the way through their purchase before they contacted a seller, and in 79% of cases the buyer, not the seller, made the first contact. Their day-one shortlist had an average of 3.6 vendors, and 95% of deals went to a vendor that was on it from the start.
Gartner adds that 61% of B2B buyers prefer a buying experience without a sales rep. Consumer services follow the same pattern: people compare reviews, websites and recommendations long before they call. Your marketing is doing the selling, or failing to, while you are not in the conversation.
Difference, not discounts, creates pricing power
Kantar’s BrandZ research has tracked brands for over two decades. Its analysis finds that 94% of a brand’s pricing power is explained by how meaningfully different people perceive it to be, and that brands with high pricing power can charge up to twice what low-power brands in the same category charge.
For a service firm the mechanism is simple. When a buyer cannot tell you apart from the alternatives, the only variable left to compare is price. When they can see a specific reason you are the better fit for their situation, price becomes one factor among several.
A quick test. Cover your logo on your homepage and on two competitors’ homepages. If a stranger could not tell which company is which from the words alone, you are not positioned. You are listed.
Most of your market is not buying today
The LinkedIn B2B Institute, working with John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, popularized the “95-5 rule”: at any given time, only about 5% of business buyers are actively in the market for a given service. The other 95% will buy later, and when they do, they start with the names they already know.
This explains two common mistakes. The first is spending everything on capturing today’s small pool of active buyers, which makes every lead expensive and every deal a price fight. The second is assuming that a quiet month means marketing failed, when the real work was building memory for next quarter’s buyers. The long-running IPA research by Les Binet and Peter Field, based mostly on consumer brands, found the strongest results when roughly 60% of effort went to brand building and 40% to short-term activation. The exact split varies by business, but the principle holds: you need both.
How to become the obvious choice
- Choose who you are for. “Small and mid-size businesses” is not a segment. “Family-owned manufacturers in Antioquia with 50 to 200 employees” is. The narrower the definition, the easier it is to be obviously right for it.
- Name the problem you solve better than anyone. Not your list of services: the situation your best clients were in before they hired you, in their words.
- Prove it. Results with numbers, the method you follow, the people who do the work, the standards you meet. Evidence is what separates a claim from a position.
- Say it the same way everywhere. Website, proposals, Google profile, social media and how your team introduces the company. Consistency is what makes a position memorable.
- Stay visible to the 95%. Useful content, events and a steady presence keep you on tomorrow’s shortlist while you sell to today’s buyers.
Weak versus strong positioning
| Weak | Strong |
|---|---|
| “Comprehensive accounting services with a personal touch.” | “Monthly accounting and tax planning for clinics in Bogotá, so owners know their real margin every month.” |
| “Quality remodeling since 2005.” | “Kitchen and bath remodels in Austin finished on the agreed date, with a written schedule before we start.” |
| “Innovative marketing solutions.” | “A strategic marketing team for service firms that brings brand, web, ads and CRM under one plan.” |
A useful template for your own statement: for [specific buyer] who [situation or problem], [your company] is the [category] that [specific result], because [proof]. If you cannot fill the “because” with something verifiable, that is your first project.
Test how clear your message is. The free Bluma assessment scores your one-line description, checks how you compare with two competitors and shows where to start.
Sources
- 6sense, 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report
- Gartner, B2B buyer survey, June 2025
- Kantar, “What if price, not volume, is your biggest growth opportunity?”, 2025
- Kantar BrandZ, “How to make pricing work for your brand,” 2026
- Marketing Week, Weinberg and Lombardo on the 95-5 rule, 2021
- IPA, Binet and Field, “The Long and the Short of It”
