Words: Adam Ketterer – Founder
Category(s): Branding, Positioning
Date: 8th October 2025
There’s a dusty old book of Received Marketing Wisdom on a shelf somewhere with a load of lines highlighted by generations of diligent B2B marketers:
“Sell benefits, not features.”
“Don’t be negative in your marketing.”
“You, too, can create a new category.”
Judging by some of the positioning projects we’ve done recently at Beneath, another piece of bad advice has entered the realm of “best practice”. It goes something like this:
“If in doubt, just say you can do it! The more you seem to be great at, the better. And if you’re not great at it, well, everyone expects a little over-claim…”
Over-claim has taken over
Look around and you’ll see B2B brands succumbing to this over-claim temptation everywhere. Software that solves more problems than you knew you had, or ever could have. Small consultancies with deep expertise in a whole economy’s worth of industries. And, of course, a lifetime of overpromise in just a few months of agentic AI hype.
Work in B2B tech too long and you can become desensitised to over-claim. So here’s another way to think about it.
Imagine you need your leaky roof fixed. (You have a few other home renovation jobs you might look at down the line, like a plumbing upgrade and some carpentry work, but those can wait.) You’re making a shortlist of roofing contractors when you come across a builder (let’s call him Bob) who claims to be able to fix literally anything. He even has a catchy jingle for his over-claim.
Can you fix my roof? “Yes, we can!”
Great. Oh, and what about plumbing? “Yes, we can!”
Okay…Your website also says carpentry, and steelwork, and masonr– “Yes, we can!!”
Who do you trust? The specialists, or the guy who says he’s all-powerful and will never fail?
Software buyers want a solution to their problem. They want the best fix for a specific workflow. They don’t want someone who can probably do an okay job at ten other things they don’t need right now.
In SaaS, the over-claiming generalist is a ludicrous proposition when you stop to think about it. But it’s easy to see how and why it happens.
Positioning is painful
Strategy is saying no. That’s why positioning is painful.
If you’ve had a fairly steady flow of customers trickle in through eight different doors (be they product doors, industry doors, use-case doors, whatever), it’s not easy to close six of them – even if that’s the best strategic decision you could make. Trust us, we’ve fought the good fight enough times with our clients and their armies of stakeholders, and we will again.
This is what founders and senior teams struggle with the most. Reducing. Doing less and saying you do less. Additive marketing is way easier, and that’s why websites become a mess of features. It’s why messaging becomes lofty to the point of meaninglessness. A big circus tent under which to corral a parade of claims, each more impressive than the last.
Even category creation, which feels like a rejection of the old, is often just the invention of a new thing no one asked for, revealing itself to be a monstrous software centipede no one in their right mind would deliberately sew together.
So what can you do to break this additive marketing addiction?
Know your limitations and set your limits
There are four things you can do.
First, have a good sense of where you’re going and how you might get there, while being prepared to pivot along the way. A journey with multiple stages may require multiple positioning strategies. Your strategy as a startup might be to dominate one smaller market before you expand into another region or segment or use case or whatever. So the need for less-is-more focus will be greatest in the early years.
(ServiceNow started as a help desk tool for IT service management before expanding, via HR, customer service, and other departments, to become more of a full-enterprise workflow company.)
Second, know your limitations. This one is obvious, and the easiest one for our clients to swallow. Ask yourself, what are you actually really really good at? To the point that, with the right framing, you could be the best in the world?
Then ask yourself, what are you actually not that great at, when you’re completely honest with yourself? What fights would you never win at the highest level?
Draw a line between the We’re-Great-Ats and the We’re-Not-So-Great-Ats, then direct your focus to the Great-Ats. And don’t stop after round one. Keep pushing your teams for honesty and realism. Keep moving that line until what’s left is your true differentiation.
Third, set your limits. This is where it gets harder. Knowing your limitations, you can happily close doors on the opportunities you know deep down you could never win. But setting your limits requires you to restrict yourself even when you believe you could step into this or that market, or that you could add this or that capability or use case to your product. These are the plausible opportunities that could lead to some success but would distract you from the real goal or would dilute your focus on those areas where you could become number one.
(Basecamp’s philosophy is to “forget feature requests” … kind of. They knew what they needed to build because customers would remind them every day. They realised that keeping a list in order to remember every single request that came in was dumb, because the requests you forget deserve to be forgotten.)
Fourth, be brave. You’ll need courage, a bit of ruthlessness and a lot of discipline to make these decisions, act on them, bring everyone else along with you, and stick to the plan.
And yes, you have to explicitly go to market with that narrower focus.
And no, I’m afraid that doesn’t mean you should still entertain non-focus-area opportunities, even if they come to you and it would be rude to turn them down.*
Strategy is saying no. Don’t listen to Bob the Generalist.
“Yes, we can’t!”
“Yes, we won’t!”
Sing that instead.
*As a founder who has struggled with this, I know it’s easy advice to give and hard advice to take, especially when money is tight. Once again, positioning is painful. Sometimes the best thing you can do is break your own rules to stay alive – and then get back on track.