In our work with large B2B tech companies, we keep seeing the same issue. One that doesn’t show up on sales dashboards or in HubSpot workflows. Customer confusion. And it’s killing conversions.
Not confusion about the meeting. Or the sales deck. Confusion about what the business actually sells. What it stands for. How the product range fits together. Why any of it matters to the customer.
If you’re asking your customer to navigate a mess, don’t be surprised when they walk away.
B2B Sales Is Hard Enough Without This
Research shows the average B2B buying decision involves five or more people. More than half of these buying journeys end in no decision at all. Not because the offer wasn’t good enough, but because the buyers couldn’t make sense of what was being sold.
We see this happen time and again for three avoidable reasons:
- The portfolio is a mess.
- The brand has no foundations.
- The value isn’t clear.
1. How a Confused Portfolio Destroys B2B Sales Alignment
When businesses grow fast, especially through acquisition, they tend to bolt new products and brands onto the mothership without thinking about how the customer sees the whole. The result? Disjointed brands. Overlapping propositions. Multiple salespeople in the same meeting, sometimes pitching the same thing in different ways.
Internally, it may all hang together. Externally, it’s chaos.
We call this inside-out bias. It’s when internal logic overrides customer logic. And when this happens, businesses tend to misdiagnose the problem as a communications issue. Cue the new sales deck. Cue the internal training.
But that won’t fix it, because it’s not a comms problem. It’s a brand problem.
2. Why Weak Brand Foundations Sabotage Your Sales Team
If your business can’t say clearly who it is, why it exists, or how it wins, you don’t have a brand. You have noise.
Without solid brand foundations, every team does its own thing. Marketing makes up messaging on the fly. Sales leans on personal preferences. Product teams just shout about features. None of it adds up to anything cohesive, which makes buying harder than it needs to be.
In B2B, where so many brands are half-baked and undefined, doing this work properly gives you an unfair advantage. It sharpens your messaging, aligns your people, and gives your customer a much clearer reason to say yes.
3. When Your Value Proposition Isn't Clear, Customers Walk
Let’s talk about tech. Especially engineering-led tech.
It’s obsessed with features. With long lists of benefits that only make sense to the person who built the product. This often results in what we call laundry list syndrome. Bullet after bullet of technical brilliance, but no clue what any of it means for the customer.
So the burden shifts. The customer has to work out which feature applies to them, how it might help, and what that help is worth. Most don’t bother.
If you can’t express the commercial value of your offer in a way your best-fit customer can grasp, you’re not ready to sell. It’s not about dumbing it down. It’s about digging deeper to uncover what the product really does for people, and telling that story properly.
This Is Brand Work. And It Matters More Than You Think.
We’re often brought in by leadership, not marketing, because the issue shows up in commercial performance. Not enough traction. Sales teams blaming lead quality. Marketing blaming sales. Everyone spinning in circles.
But when we fix the brand - clarify the structure, define the positioning, and articulate the value - things get better. Not overnight, but noticeably. Friction goes down. Customers engage quicker. Sales get simpler. Teams feel more aligned.
It’s hard to get precise attribution (sales teams are rarely keen to show you raw numbers), but the anecdotal feedback is strong. And we’re building case studies that will show what this work really delivers.
Final Word
If you’re struggling to close deals, maybe your sales team isn’t the problem. Maybe the problem is they’ve been sent into the fight with a blunt weapon and asked to land a kill shot. Fix the brand, and you sharpen the blade. Then see what happens.