From Bare Strategy

Writing

One idea at a time. New every week.

Featured · Positioning · September 26, 2026 · 9 min read

Why your new positioning didn't change anything (and how to make it stick)

A new positioning usually changes nothing because it gets approved as a document, and a document costs nobody anything. Everyone agrees implementation matters, and April Dunford is right that the whole company has to line up behind it. What's missing is the first uncomfortable, dated, owned change. Porter made the underlying point in 1996. A position with no trade-offs is a straddle. So ship every positioning with a stop list, borrowed from Jim Collins's stop-doing idea and aimed at three places. What the homepage and deck quit saying, which deals sales quits chasing, and which promises come off the roadmap slide. Every line gets one owner and a date inside thirty days. If nothing on the list makes someone in the room uncomfortable, the positioning isn't finished.

positioningpositioning-implementationgtm-strategyb2b-saasmessaging

Read the piece →

Positioning · September 12, 2026 · 8 min read

What to say when a customer says "I'll just build this myself"

When a prospect says they'll just build your product themselves, arguing features loses, because features are the part AI coding tools made cheap. The weekend prototype really does work. What it lacks is Day 2, the infrastructure term for everything that starts once software ships. Broken integrations, security reviews, patches, and the handoff when the builder leaves. Retool's 2026 survey found 35% of teams have already replaced functionality of at least one SaaS tool, so the objection is no longer a bluff. It's also a positioning signal. Most SaaS messaging sells what the product does, which is Day 1, and buries ownership in pricing-page footnotes. Answer the objection with questions about month six, then rewrite the homepage around what it takes to own the thing.

positioningobjection-handlingbuild-vs-buyb2b-saassales-enablement

Positioning · September 5, 2026 · 10 min read

How to Know If Your Messaging Is Actually Working

Silence after a messaging rewrite is not confirmation that it landed. Confused buyers rarely complain, and Gartner's March 2026 survey found that 67% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free experience, so most of them never enter a channel where their confusion could reach you. A message is working when it comes back. Your own language returns from places you didn't put it, first in words, then in behavior, then in revenue. Those three echoes arrive at very different speeds. Words show up in days, behavior shifts over weeks, and revenue takes a full sales cycle or two to read. Checking the revenue tier first is how good messaging gets killed at week four.

positioningmessagingb2b-saasgtm-strategysales-enablement

Positioning · August 29, 2026 · 10 min read

How to handle the "you're too expensive" objection in B2B SaaS

Expensive is a comparative word. When a prospect says your price is too high, they're reporting on a comparison they built weeks before you were in the room, usually against a category floor, a headcount, or the cost of doing nothing. Standard objection handling assumes that comparison is fair, so quantifying ROI only makes you a well-documented version of the wrong thing. Discounting is worse, because it ratifies the comparison and puts your signature on it. The real work happens earlier, in the messaging and on the pricing page, where you decide what your price gets measured against before a buyer picks something for you.

pricingpositioningobjection-handlingb2b-saassales-enablement

Positioning · August 22, 2026 · 9 min read

Why your ICP doesn't predict buyers (and what actually does)

A firmographic ICP tells you which companies are permitted to buy from you. It tells you nothing about which of them is looking right now, and that second question is the one your pipeline is actually asking. Think of it as a gate and a window. The gate is eligibility, stable and knowable from the outside. The window is a dated event inside an account that turned a tolerable problem into a funded one, and it closes on a schedule nobody outside the company sets. Two accounts can match a profile perfectly and convert at completely different rates because only one of them had a reason in the last ninety days. Here is how to name your triggers, watch for them without an intent platform, and audit open pipeline for deals with no date attached.

icpbuying-triggerspositioningb2b-saasgtm-strategy

Competitive Strategy · August 15, 2026 · 10 min read

How to sell against the status quo when you're already the better product

The status quo wins deals it has no business winning. Samuelson and Zeckhauser measured the effect in 1988 and found that an incumbent beats an equally preferred challenger 59 to 41, purely on being the default. In B2B SaaS that default is usually a spreadsheet, a manual process, or a script somebody wrote two years ago, and it carries a price of zero because nobody has ever totaled it. The fix is a second ledger sitting next to your pricing. The total cost of staying puts a monthly number on the buyer's current workaround across four lines. Time drain, error and rework, opportunity cost, and risk exposure. Filled in by the buyer, not by you.

competitive-strategystatus-quo-biasb2b-saassales-enablementswitching-costspositioning

Competitive Strategy · August 8, 2026 · 8 min read

What to say when a prospect calls you "just like [competitor], but worse"

When a prospect says you're just like a competitor but worse, the winning move isn't a better rebuttal. Arguing the comparison ratifies it. Whatever gets named first in a judgment anchors everything after it, so every counterpoint ends up scored on the competitor's rows and phrased in the competitor's vocabulary. Winning that exchange still loses the frame. "Worse" is also rarely about features. It usually stands in for risk, an existing budget line, or a half-remembered opinion from someone's boss. The reset has three moves. Name the comparison out loud, refuse to argue it explicitly, then change what's being compared and hand the prospect a question on the new axis. If you can't state your axis in one sentence without opening a document, the problem is positioning, not objection handling.

competitive-positioningobjection-handlingsales-enablementb2b-saasmessaging

The newsletter

One idea in your inbox, every week.

No sequences, no funnels.

Unsubscribe anytime.