In short
- Positioning is vertical-agnostic: the founders bring the domain knowledge, and the consultant brings the method that turns it into decisions about who you focus on, what you replace and why you win.
- The positioning questions are the same in every market: what the product is, who it is for, what they use today instead, and why you are better than that.
- In our own gallery, 30 homepages from 30 different sectors were scored on the same 7 dimensions, and the same gap led on 15 of them.
- Industry expertise matters for market access (who you know, what a regulator allows). Hire for it there, and still lock the positioning first.
A few days ago a warm intro turned into a polite no within a day. The company was looking for someone with a deep background in their sector, so I was "likely not a fit". It's a fair call from where they sit, and I hear a version of it all the time, from founders in health tech, in industrial AI, in shipping: "you don't know our industry."
They're right, I don't, and that's the part of the work they already own.
Does a positioning consultant need experience in your industry?
No. Positioning is vertical-agnostic: the founders bring the domain knowledge, and the consultant brings the method that turns it into decisions about who you focus on, what you replace and why you win. What you need from the consultant is the method, and the distance to ask the hard questions your team stopped asking.
The founders of an early-stage B2B company know their buyer, their product and their market better than any outsider will in three weeks. Usually that's exactly why they started the company. What they don't have is a way to turn all of that knowledge into a few locked decisions that the website, the sales pitch and the AI tools all run on.
What does positioning actually decide?
Positioning answers four questions: what is the product, who is it for, what is the alternative, and how is the product better than the alternative. That's how I define it when I teach positioning, and it holds in every market I've worked in.
None of them asks for knowledge the founders don't already have. Each one asks for a decision: which segment you focus on first, which alternative you name (a competitor, a spreadsheet, a consultant, doing nothing), which capability you lead with, and which claims you stop making. Those decisions are hard in every industry for the same reasons: every founder sees more segments than they can serve, more value than a homepage can hold, and more competitors than the buyer has ever heard of.
Who brings the domain knowledge into a positioning sprint?
The founders do, and the process is built to get it out of them. In the sprint I run, discovery starts with a questionnaire, competitor research and the client's own material: demos and prospect calls. Then three working sessions with the founders and stakeholders score the segments, pick one, and lock why you win.
The domain knowledge is the input the founders bring. The method is what the consultant brings. A sprint where the consultant supplies both has replaced the founders' knowledge of their buyer with someone else's.
Do positioning problems look different in each industry?
Less than you'd expect. We score early-stage B2B homepages on 7 dimensions of positioning, with a quoted line from the page behind every score. The 30 homepages published so far come from 30 different sectors: nurse scheduling for hospitals, voyage optimization for shipping, satellite soil analytics, restaurant yield management, procurement AI agents, energy management for EV fast charging, and 24 more.
Same rubric, same weights, every one of them. And the weak spot repeats. Specificity and evidence, whether the page backs its claims with something a buyer can check, averages 5.3 out of 10 and is the biggest gap on 15 of the 30 homepages. A nurse scheduling company and a shipping company fail the same way, because the gap is in how the company explains itself, not in what it knows about its market.
Can industry experience get in the way of positioning?
Sometimes, yes. An insider writes in the vocabulary of the people who already know the category, and most early-stage buyers aren't there yet. In practice, the real alternative is usually a spreadsheet, a manual process or an agency, and someone from outside the industry is more likely to ask about it.
The questions that move positioning forward sound naive from the inside: compared to what, who exactly is buying this and what do they use today, and why would they switch this quarter. An outsider can ask them without the answer already in their head.
When does industry expertise matter?
When the work is market access, not positioning. This part is my reading, not a study. If you sell to government agencies, if your claims are regulated (health, finance, insurance), or if your deals move on relationships built over years, then knowing the buyer's world is the job, and you should hire someone who has it: in sales, in partnerships, in regulatory.
That hire still needs something to sell. A well-connected industry expert carrying a pitch that changes with every meeting will open doors to the same confusion. Lock the positioning first, then give it to the people who know the room.
What I've seen across my own work
I've been in marketing for over 20 years, 13 of them building marketing for early-stage B2B startups, and almost none of them shared an industry: drive-thru ordering AI, maritime collision prevention, product management software, immersive brand experiences, mobile customer engagement, connected workforce tools, and many more. In each one, the founders knew their market far better than I did. The part they needed help with was the same every time: choosing one segment, naming the real alternative, and writing it down plainly enough that everyone, and now every AI tool, says the same thing.
So if you're hiring for positioning, ask a different question than "have you worked in our industry?" Ask how they'll get the knowledge out of your team, what method turns it into decisions, and how those decisions get locked. Want to see the method on your own homepage first? Get a free homepage audit: your homepage scored on the same 7 dimensions, with the evidence and the three biggest gaps.
