The altitude problem in B2B positioning and sales narratives

Why buyers now want machinery, not manifestos... and how AI and economic pressure have changed B2B positioning

👋 Hi, I’m James. I write Building Momentum to help you accelerate B2B SaaS growth through product marketing, GTM strategy, sales, and marketing.

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I think something has shifted in the last 12 months.

Positioning, messaging, and sales decks that used to work have started to stall.

The products haven’t changed. The markets haven’t evaporated (even if it feels like they have).

The challenge: most B2B narratives are now too abstract.

Buyers are drowning in logistics and operational reality, while vendors are still trying to sell philosophies and belief systems.

Buyers still want vision… They just can’t afford to buy into a lofty future anymore.

The acceptable altitude of B2B storytelling has cratered. If your positioning, messaging, or sales deck is still flying at 30,000 feet, you’re going to lose them.

The big shift

AI means buyers are done with buying belief systems.

There are tons of reasons for this, from budget pressures and tariffs to the political environment, but AI has the most to answer for.

The explosion and adoption of AI agents — plus the complete wall of sound from every angle — in almost every facet of software is promising outputs and outcomes, not platforms and workflows.

The mental model has shifted almost overnight from “buy a system of record” to “get the result faster,”… at every level, from execs making strategic decisions to bottoms-up shadow IT and PLG plays.

This change now influences all software buying, even outside AI-native tools. Buyers now assume the system should do the thinking, not create more work.

They just want inputs, workflows, and outcomes, and fewer moving parts.

What this means for positioning

Buyers are tired of learning new categories, defining new roles to hire for, or wrapping their heads around new disciplines.

• Selling ambitious, futuristic narratives is an overhead.

• When you sell a “framework,” buyers know they’ll need training.

• When you sell a “new way of thinking,” they hear change management.

• When you try to create a “category,” the buyer knows it’s going to be a tough budget justification battle

In the current climate, lofty, aspirational messaging is a tax that nobody wants to pay.

The acceptable altitude for positioning and messaging - from sales narratives and website copy, to outbound email and your booth messaging - has plummeted.

Buyers want stories closer to the ground, that are closer to execution, closer to their inbox, to their calendar… closer to the mess they’re living day-to-day.

Buying software used to be partly buying an identity:

• Drift sold a chatbot - but buyers could say they were operating conversational marketing

• Hubspot sold emails and content marketing tools - but buyers were at the forefront of inbound marketing.

• At Kayako and Headstart, we created manifestos that defined how we think about the world and resonated strongly with buyers.

• At Remote, we leaned on the ‘talent is everywhere, and opportunities are not’ message: a tall, identity-level belief that created advocates.

That kind of storytelling works when buyers have time, slack, and political cover.

Today, default messaging has shifted toward survival.

Whether your buyer is a CEO, VP, Director, Manager, or just a plain ol’ individual contributor, they don’t want your manifesto. They’re in the weeds, day-in, day-out. They don’t have the time or patience to translate abstract value into concrete outcomes.

They simply want to buy the machinery that’s going to work immediately on Monday.

Where narratives are going wrong

1. They sell philosophy when buyers want machinery

Vision, worldviews, future-facing thought leadership, frameworks are dead - for now!

What buyers want is process, automation, enforcement, decisions, judgement.

At Headstart (a YC company focused on improving diversity in graduate recruiting), I built a beautiful sales narrative about “diversity recruiting”. It had a villain (bias). It had a promised land (equality).

Selling it was tough. It wasn’t wrong - but in every conversation, we had to align with the buyer’s philosophic stance on diversity… and debates don’t close deals.

When we rewrote it to focus on “improve speed and accuracy, and remove bias to hire the next generation of leaders,” close rates doubled.

Same product… different altitude.

2. They try to create fancy new categories

Category creation used to signal market leadership, and now it signals more work and a tough sell internally.

New category = new owner, new budget, new justifications.

Effective positioning is less about creating brand new conceptual landscapes for how to read the market - and more about fitting into the frames buyers already use to make decisions.

3. They promise “systems” instead of outcomes

Systems imply management, effort, risk, adoption challenges.

But buyers increasingly want automation, autopilot, guardrails, defaults… things that operate without supervision.

They don’t want to hire. In fact, they want to reduce team size: so you better be saving at least 2 full-time equivalents in workload.

When your deck says “our system empowers your team to make better decisions,” what they hear is: “You’ll need to train people, manage adoption, and hope they use it right.”

When your deck says “our platform enforces global hiring guardrails automatically,” what they hear is: “I can stop worrying about this, we can reduce the size of our legal team, and we won’t be at risk of non-compliance”.

Relief beats righteousness.

Reframing the Raskin model for this moment

Andy Raskin’s strategic narrative approach - from undeniable truth → monsters → promised land → magic - is still one of the best ways to communicate and sell vision in your customer’s world.

The psychology is sound. Buyers still respond to a shift they recognize, the problem they feel, the destination they want to achieve, and credible ways to get there.

But the way people apply strategic narrative has drifted too far abstract.

They use the ‘change in the world’ story without tying it to a tangible buyer and concrete outcomes.

The result is often narrative that sounds right but floats above reality. Narratives must operate at a lower altitude now.

Positioning should not be at the keynote level. It must be tactical, tangible, and meet buyers where they are.

The undeniable truth

• Ineffective: “The world of work is changing”

• Effective: “The moment a process requires human judgment, it stops being predictable”

The undeniable truth needs to be operationally obvious.

Every buyer knows this. They’ve seen clean workflows collapse when judgment is required, and they know standards slip when enforcement is manual.

If the truth needs explaining, it’s too high-level.

The monster (now)

• Ineffective: Inefficiency. Bias. Performance gaps.

• Effective: Unreviewed changes, ignored inputs, and one-off decisions nobody remembers making.

And monsters need to be expensive. Not in a “10% efficiency loss” way, but in a “we lost a $2M deal because someone sent the wrong deck” way.

Make it visceral. Make it something they dealt with last Tuesday, and need to avoid before it costs them credibility or their job.

The promised land (now)

• Ineffective: A better world. A fairer system. A transformed industry.

• Effective: Nothing slips through. Nothing needs chasing. Nothing surprises you on Monday morning.

Promised land is no longer transformation, it’s relief.

A calm Sunday evening matters more than you think. Buyers want to sleep. They want to stop worrying about what their team might screw up while they’re offline.

The magic (now)

• Ineffective: A framework. A methodology. A system to adopt.

• Effective: Software that catches mistakes before people do.

This is the part where you describe your product and how it works - but not the operating theory behind it. Specificity is magic now.

This also solves sales team insecurity

Something I’ve always noticed is that when positioning is too high-altitude, reps feel a ton of dissonance.

They’re told to pitch vision, but the prospect asks “but how does it actually work?”… and the rep doesn’t have an answer because the narrative didn’t give them the tactical answers they need.

So they panic and end up feature dumping: opening the product to click through every screen. This encourages them to feature dump earlier in the sales process… and this is how your sales team stop selling value and sell features instead.

Narratives that work well at ‘low altitude’ restore confidence because they match the buyer’s reality, they’re defensible, and they feel honest.

“We enforce pricing guardrails automatically,” can be shown and proven.

But when your narrative is “we empower teams to transform decision-making,”… what the hell are they supposed to demo?

The new role of narrative and storytelling?

Your website homepage and sales deck is no longer about connecting to a manifesto, a belief system, or a declaring you’re at the forefront of a clever category name you created.

I don’t think positioning is about inspiring buyers anymore.

Instead, narrative and storytelling is risk reduction. It’s control: a way for the buyer to say “yes” safely.

Storytelling has to connect with the buyers reality, more than ever. We are influencing the narrative that already exists for them - colouring in between the lines, not drawing from scratch.

There’s still plenty of room to be creative. The Bain Elements of B2B Value Pyramid is still useful - connecting your buyer’s reality and motivations to personal and aspirational value still works - but it can’t be fluid and wishy-washy.

Buyers want less to manage, not more to believe in.

They are less patient than ever before. They’re in the trenches of chaos, every day.

Stop flying motivational overhead banners, and instead get down there with them.