Clarity beats cleverness in enterprise GTM
The best positioning isn't creative. It's obvious. When a buyer understands your product in ten seconds, you win.
There's a tendency in early-stage companies to make positioning more complicated than it needs to be. The product does a lot of things, so the messaging tries to cover all of them. Or the technology is novel, so the explanation emphasises how it's different rather than what it actually does. The result is a pitch that's clever, defensible, and completely unclear.
Enterprise buyers don't have time for clever. They have a problem, a budget, and a list of vendors who claim to solve it. If they can't figure out what you do in ten seconds, they move on. Not because your product is bad, but because understanding it requires work, and they have twenty other things to evaluate.
This is especially true in infrastructure and platform software. The buying process is long. It involves multiple teams. It requires internal consensus. If your positioning is ambiguous, it creates friction at every stage. Engineers don't know how to explain it to their manager. Managers don't know how to explain it to procurement. Procurement doesn't know how to explain it to finance. The deal doesn't die—it just never gets the momentum it needs to move forward.
The best GTM strategies are built on clarity. The product does one thing, and that thing is immediately obvious. When someone asks what you do, the answer is simple, repeatable, and aligned across every conversation. The website says it. The sales team says it. The technical documentation says it. There's no ambiguity.
This doesn't mean the product is simple. A platform can be technically sophisticated and still have clear positioning. The clarity is in how you describe the outcome, not in how you explain the architecture. A CDN speeds up content delivery. A network platform improves latency and reduces transit costs. An infrastructure tool simplifies operations at scale. These are not clever statements. They're obvious. And that's the point.
The mistake is assuming that clarity lacks depth. It doesn't. Clarity is what allows depth to be understood. If a buyer knows what you do, they can ask the next question: how does it work? What's different about your approach? Why should I trust you? But if they don't understand the first layer, they never get to the second.
This also affects how you handle competition. When positioning is unclear, the instinct is to differentiate on features. You list everything your product does that competitors don't. This works in a product comparison, but it fails in the broader market. Because the buyer's first question isn't "what makes you different?" It's "what do you do?" If you answer the second question with a feature list, you've lost clarity.
The other challenge is internal alignment. In a complex sale, multiple people at the vendor need to explain the product. If each of them describes it differently, the customer gets confused. Sales says one thing. Engineering says another. Marketing says a third. None of them are wrong, but the inconsistency creates doubt. If the vendor can't agree on what they do, why should the customer believe them?
Clear positioning forces alignment. It gives everyone the same language. It makes the product easier to sell, easier to explain, and easier to buy. It also makes it easier to say no to opportunities that don't fit, because you know exactly what you're optimising for.
The hardest part is resisting the urge to be comprehensive. When you're building a platform, it's tempting to talk about every capability, every use case, every market you could address. But enterprise buyers don't buy platforms because they do everything. They buy them because they solve a specific problem better than the alternatives.
If your positioning tries to be everything, it ends up being nothing. The buyer walks away without a clear sense of what you do or why it matters. The sales process drags because no one can articulate the value in a way that resonates. And opportunities that should close don't, because there's no shared understanding of what success looks like.
Clarity is a discipline. It requires saying no to possibilities, narrowing focus, and trusting that a sharp message will resonate more than a broad one. It's not about dumbing down the product. It's about making it easy to understand, easy to remember, and easy to champion internally. When a buyer can explain your product to their colleague in one sentence, you've won. Everything else builds from there.