Is Your Marketing Automation Amplifying a Foggy Story?
When automated outbound, AI content and SEO all run on schedule but pipeline stays flat, check your positioning before you buy another tool. Fast systems carry whatever story you feed them. If buyers can't see themselves in your message or can't tell why you beat their current option, automation simply spreads that gap to more people, faster.
Why does more automation sometimes make results worse?
Every few years marketing gets a new engine. I've watched email automation, social, marketing automation platforms and now AI agents with signal-based outbound each arrive as the answer. Every one of them was genuinely useful. Every one of them also made a weak message travel farther.
Alex Vacca at Frontal shared that of more than 1,000 failed outbound campaigns his team analyzed, nine in ten were dead before the first email went out. His diagnostic reads from the bottom up. When replies come back saying "not us," the market map is off. That's a positioning problem wearing an outbound costume.
You're the one who has to walk the numbers into the leadership meeting. So the most useful thing I can hand you is a way to check the foundation before you spend another quarter tuning the engine.
What does good positioning do for a buyer?
Joris van Kappen frames positioning as the moment a buyer decides to choose you or walk away. He lays out four steps that all have to hold, each one a sentence in the buyer's head:
Recognition: this is for me.
Relevance: this is my problem.
Differentiation: this is the right approach.
Commitment: I know what I'm saying yes to.
Miss any one and the symptoms show up downstream. Sales starts over-explaining, and marketing starts filling the funnel with people who were never going to buy. No amount of execution repairs a broken decision path.
How can you test your positioning in one afternoon?
Write the sentence
van Kappen offers a formula worth filling in out loud with your team:
For [specific buyer] with [painful problem] who would otherwise choose [real alternative], we are the best option because [clear point of view], so the next step is [clear action].
If writing it starts a debate, he says, that debate is the work.
Ask around the building
Ask sales, product, customer success, your CEO and your newest hire the same question: why would a buyer choose us over the option they'd likely pick instead?
If the answers drift apart, the positioning work is still ahead of you, and that's good news.
Now you know where to start.
Shrink it to 30 seconds
Matthew Agnew, a B2B product marketing leader, makes a case I agree with. When a new idea lands in a meeting, the first job is a 20 to 30 second pitch, well before anyone volunteers to write a blog post or a one-pager.
Check your ICP for awareness
One positioning framework I keep in my notes asks whether your segment definition includes category awareness and category participation. In plain terms: does this buyer know your category exists, and are they already using something like it? Most ICP documents I've read stop at company size and industry. Mine did too, for a long time.
What does this look like in practice?
At Johnson Matthey, our website forms used to send an Outlook email and nothing else. No lead record, no source, no routing. Replacing them with Microsoft Dynamics forms was the easier half of the job. It drove me bananas so I pledged to fix that as part of the Dynamics implementation.
The harder half happened in rooms. Business development, central communications and other teams had to agree on what a qualified lead looked like for our sector, down to geography, product type and production timing. Once I made that agreement exist, the build moved quickly and became the company template for lead capture. One lead that came through that system later represented more than $20M in CRM-attributed pipeline.
The agreement was the strategy and the software held it.
Where do the new tools fit?
I spend real time studying signal stacking, waterfall enrichment and AI agents, and I'm glad they exist. Frontal reports that signal-stacked campaigns reply at 5-18% versus 1-3% for a plain compiled list, using the same copy. That's a real lever.
Pull it.
Just aim it at a story your whole team can repeat.
And for what it's worth, I've rarely nailed positioning on a first draft. The good versions came from sales call recordings and from being willing to be wrong in a meeting.
FAQ
Is positioning the same as messaging?
Positioning is the decision about who you serve and why you win against their likeliest alternative. Messaging is the language that carries that decision to the market. Fix the decision first and the words get much easier.
How often should we revisit positioning?
Revisit it when win rates move, when a new competitor shows up in deals, or when your team's answers start to drift apart. A short internal survey each quarter catches the drift early.
Can AI write our positioning?
AI is a strong sparring partner for drafts and for mining call transcripts for customer language. The final call on who you serve and what you stand for belongs with the people who talk to customers.
Sources
Joris van Kappen, LinkedIn post "Define your positioning: why buyers choose you, or walk away,”
Alex Vacca, Frontal AI, LinkedIn post on the five layers of GTM
Matthew Agnew, LinkedIn post on sequencing product marketing before growth marketing
Want a second set of eyes on your story?
If you're looking at a dashboard full of activity and a thin pipeline, I'd be glad to help you find where the story slips. Bring me your positioning sentence, even a rough one, and I'll tell you honestly where I think a buyer gets lost.
You can see how I work on my About page or send me a note on LinkedIn. Let's talk.