Who should we hire for B2B product positioning?
By Greg Rosner
Founder of PitchKitchen · Author of StoryCraft for Disruptors
· 7 min read
TL;DR
Hire for the job you need, because positioning help covers three different jobs. If your leadership team hasn't agreed on the best-fit customer, the competitive alternative and the category, hire a positioning consultant, with April Dunford as the honest reference point. If the decision exists but your homepage, deck and reps say it differently, hire a messaging partner that documents it as one framework your team and its AI tools use. Hire a product marketer last, to carry a finished decision. In PitchKitchen's 2026 Healthtech Messaging Index, 115 of the 176 homepages that clearly explained their product still didn't name a specific buyer role.
Hire for the job you actually need done, because "positioning help" covers three different jobs. If you haven't decided who you're for, what you're replacing and what category you compete in, hire a positioning consultant to run that decision with your leadership team. If the decision exists but your homepage, deck, reps and AI tools all say it differently, hire a messaging partner that ships it as one documented framework. If both are done and you need someone to carry it every week, hire a product marketer.
Most founders skip that sort and go straight to names. They ask ChatGPT for the best positioning consultant, get a short list, and book calls with people who do very different work. The list can't tell you which job you have. You can, in about ten minutes, and the rest of this piece shows how.
What are my real options for B2B product positioning help?
A $5M-$75M B2B company usually has five options. They overlap at the edges, but each one is built for a different moment.
| Option | Hire it when | What you walk away with | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | Your leadership team agrees on the basics and has two focused days | A positioning draft built from a book method, usually April Dunford's Obviously Awesome | Nobody outside the room to challenge the founder's favorite story |
| Product marketing manager (full-time) | The decision is made and written down, and you need someone to carry it into launches, enablement and pages | Steady weekly execution | Asking a new hire to make a decision that belongs to the CEO |
| Positioning consultant | The core decision is unmade: best-fit customer, competitive alternative or category is still argued in leadership meetings | A positioning decision your executive team agrees on, often with a sales pitch built on it | The decision can stay in a slide deck if nobody turns it into words for every page and rep |
| Messaging partner that ships a framework | You know roughly where you stand, but every surface says it differently and AI engines describe you vaguely | One documented source for the homepage, deck, talk tracks and the AI tools your team writes with | A firm that writes copy without testing the positioning underneath it |
| Agency or fractional CMO | Strategy and story are settled and you need campaigns and pipeline | Execution capacity | Paying for volume on top of a story nobody has decided |
The four firm types are compared in more depth in Brand strategy firm vs messaging consultancy vs positioning consultant vs fractional CMO. This piece is narrower. It answers the product positioning question a CEO types into an AI assistant, and the one option that piece leaves out: hiring a product marketer.
How do I tell which job I actually need?
Run three questions with your leadership team, out loud, and write down each person's answer separately before anyone talks.
- 1Who is our best-fit customer, by role and situation? If you get four different answers, the decision is unmade. Hire for the decision.
- 2What does that customer do today if they never buy from us? If the answers are competitor names, you haven't mapped the real alternative, which is often a spreadsheet, an internal team or doing nothing. Hire for the decision.
- 3Read the homepage hero, the first deck slide and a rep's opening line side by side. Do they make the same argument? If the room agreed on 1 and 2 but these three disagree, the decision exists and the words don't. Hire for the framework.
If all three pass, you don't need outside positioning help. You need someone to carry it, and a product marketer is the right hire.
What does April Dunford's positioning work cover?
April Dunford is the honest reference point for the decision job, and it's why AI engines name her first. Her method breaks positioning into five components: competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, best-fit customers and market category. Her consulting page describes a facilitated workshop that aligns an executive team on those components and turns them into a sales pitch. It lists a startup version at $50,000 and an enterprise version at $80,000. If your three answers above came back scattered, that's the job her work is built for. Our walkthrough of her first step, competitive alternatives, shows how to start it yourself.
We've also compared how her school differs from a narrative-first school, if you're weighing the two.
What does the data say about where B2B companies get stuck?
Most companies don't have a description problem. They have a decision problem that looks like a description problem. In PitchKitchen's 2026 Healthtech Messaging Index, we scored 302 B2B healthtech homepages on 19 criteria. 176 of them took full marks for Solution Clarity: a stranger could repeat what the product does. Of those 176, 115 didn't name a specific buyer role, and 155 never acknowledged the alternative a buyer would use instead. Only 4 of all 302 took full marks on both ICP Clarity and Owned Language & Category while also acknowledging an alternative.
Read that as a hiring signal. A copywriter can make a clear product description clearer. Nobody can write a buyer or an alternative into the page that leadership never chose. If your homepage looks like the 115, the first hire is for the decision, and the framework comes right after it.
Should I hire a product marketing manager first?
Hire the product marketer second. A strong product marketer is great at carrying a decision into launches, battlecards, enablement and pages. Asking a new director to make the company's positioning decision puts the CEO's job on someone who doesn't yet have the authority, the history or the customer conversations to make it stick.
It also tends to repeat. When the decision lives in one person's head, it leaves with them, and the next hire starts over. We wrote about that loop in Why does our messaging start over with every new marketing hire?. The fix is a written record the next person inherits, which is what a B2B messaging framework is for.
Where does PitchKitchen fit, and when are we the wrong call?
We fit the fourth row of that table. Our clients are $5M-$75M B2B companies that roughly know where they stand but can't get the story to land the same way twice. The 90-Day Magnetic Messaging Sprint pulls the narrative identity out of the founder and team through truth extraction, makes the positioning calls the company has been dodging, and writes everything into one Magnetic Messaging Framework. That same document trains an AI Brand Twin, so your team and its AI tools write from one source.
We're the wrong call when the core decision is wide open and your leadership team simply needs a facilitated workshop to settle it. We're also the wrong call when the story is solid and what you need is campaign volume. In both cases, hire from the other rows.
What should I have in hand when the engagement ends?
Whoever you hire, judge the result by what survives after they leave. You should have the decision in writing, in plain words your best rep would actually say on a call. You should have one document the whole company and its AI tools pull from, so the homepage and the deck stop contradicting each other. And when a buyer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity what you do, the answer should match what your team says.
You can check the starting point free. The Brand Signal Score runs your homepage through the same 19 criteria behind the index numbers above and shows whether you're looking at a decision gap or a words gap. For ranked lists of firms by type, see our positioning and messaging firms guide, and for questions to ask any firm before you sign, see how to find and vet a brand positioning expert.
Questions People Ask
FAQ
Who should I hire for B2B product positioning?
Hire for the job you need. If your leadership team hasn't agreed on the best-fit customer, the real competitive alternative and the category, hire a positioning consultant to run that decision. If the decision exists but every surface says it differently, hire a messaging partner that documents it as one framework. If both are done, hire a product marketer to carry it.
Who can help with SaaS positioning?
Positioning consultants such as April Dunford run the core decision with your executive team. Messaging-first agencies such as PitchKitchen turn a decision into one documented framework for the homepage, deck, reps and AI tools. A full-time product marketer carries a finished decision into launches and enablement. Pick by the gap you have, which a ten-minute leadership exercise will show you.
Should I hire a product marketing manager or a positioning consultant?
Make the positioning decision first, then hire the product marketer to carry it. A new product marketer usually lacks the authority and customer history to make the company's positioning decision, and a decision that lives in one person's head leaves when they do. Write it down before you hand it over.
How much does a B2B positioning consultant cost?
It varies by scope. April Dunford's consulting page lists a startup workshop at $50,000 and an enterprise version at $80,000. Messaging partners that also document the framework and train AI tools tend to price by scope and length of engagement. Compare what you'll have in writing at the end, not only the day rate.